Tony Abbott-haters can’t cope with reality

The Australian ^ | 3rd February 2015 | Nick Cater

[naturalman1975]

THE challenge of conquering Labor’s mountain of debt would have defeated a less tenacious prime minister by now. To do so weighed down by your predecessors’ other unwelcome legacy — a deficit of trust in the entire political class — requires strength of will rarely seen in modern politics.

.....

Here are just a few of the Abbott government’s accomplishments, in no particular order:

• Electricity bills have fallen by 10 per cent, the biggest drop ever recorded.

• Jobs have been created four times faster than in the period before Abbott came to power and the economy is growing at 2.7 per cent.

• Peak debt has been sliced by $150 billion.

• People are still dying to come to Australia but no longer die on the way.

• The live cattle trade is running again and the price of cattle has gone through the roof; ditto sheep and dairy cows.

• The free trade agreement with Japan has cut the price of Mazdas, Subarus and Toyotas by up to $1000.

• Roads are being built and fuel, despite the return of petrol excise indexation, is cheaper in real terms that it has been since 1998.

One could go on, but the Abbott-haters have made up their minds....

.....

Abbott’s detractors also appear to be suffering from reactive devaluation, the tendency to dismiss a proposal because your adversary thought of it first: paid parental leave, for example.

In fact, Abbott could be forgiven for thinking that his hostile band of tweeting, Facebooking, column-writing critics are a pretty screwed-up bunch. Yet their influence is insidious. They run in a pack and tweet in flocks, creating what social psychologists describe as an availability cascade — a self-reinforcing process by which an idea gains plausibility through repetition.

[naturalman1975]

My apologies because this article is behind a paywall, but I have done my best to excerpt the most relevant parts.

[Gay State Conservative]

Sounds like Abbott is in a similar situation to Cameron in Britain.Both were left huge deficits/debt by leftist governments and then they're slammed for taking the tough measures to fix it.It's my understanding that Cameron's likely to lose a close election in a few months.

[naturalman1975]

That is part of it - but there is also a simple irrationality about the left wing hatred of Tony Abbott.

I've said it before - but really the best illustration of this I can see is they set up webpages on Facebook with names like "Tony Abbott - Worst Prime Minister Ever" the day he was elected, and from that point they have been sending out image after image with quotes out of context, and sometimes even completely made up quotes and statements all over social media.

They claim he's a misogynist and a racist without providing any evidence for these claims (he's neither) - and when challenged, just say that everybody knows it, because they've created an echo chamber in which they only hear and feed on each others prejudice.

And this has given cover to the Labor opposition when in defiance of previous tradition and convention they've used their numbers in the Senate to block large sections of the budget that the government campaigned on - by convention, while an opposition can certainly block legislation, they don't block things that the government has a mandate for - that they specifically campaigned on. Labor has torn up that convention - and they're getting away with it, because of the idea that "Tony Abbott is pure evil and must be stopped by any means" that the left wing nutcases have created.

The Liberals release accurate figures showing the true size of the deficit was billions more than Labor claimed - and this gets spinned into "Tony Abbott has added billions to the deficit." He announces that he won't proceed with billions of dollars Labor promised (knowing they would lose the election and would never have to deliver) to put into education and health - and it gets spun as "Abbott cuts billions from education and health" even though the budget for both is actually still going up - just not going up by the levels that Labor cynically promised.

Add to that a few genuine issues - he promised not to cut the ABC the night before the election, and is in fact cutting it (not by much but it is a cut and therefore a broken promise) - and a significant change to Medicare funding that he didn't campaign on - and is significant enough that the voters should have been told (it's a good idea, but it should have been in the manifesto)...

[alloysteel]

This sounds and has an effect much like the “Bush Derangement Syndrome” so prevalent in the territory once known as “the United State of America”, in which so much absolute nonsense was bandied about, that the gossip became the alternate reality, and everything was “Bush’s fault”, an opinion which became entrenched even among those who thought George W. Bush was far better than the Current Occupant of the White Hut.

A rush to judgment, even before the end of Bush’ term, led to some exaggerated and highly irrelevant responses to something that was not even a problem.