Speaking in parliament on Thursday, treasurer Scott Morrison held aloft a large lump of coal and made the funniest joke he’ll ever think of in his life.
“Mr Speaker, this is coal. Don’t be afraid! Don’t be scared! It won’t hurt you.” Morrison yelled at the opposition as his colleagues jeered and hooted behind him. It was a comedic performance on-par with the guy at an open-mic night who opens with a joke about women shopping, but the people in charge of running the world’s twelfth-largest economy couldn’t get enough.
Before launching into a tirade about how coal is the future of Australia’s energy security, Morrison handed the dirty black lump to deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce, who waved it around excitedly like a kid with a glowstick. It was an embarrassing and deeply depressing spectacle, but only surprising if you’re new to the glorified sandpit that is question time or Australian politics in general.
Leaving aside the frightening implications of the fact that some of the country’s most powerful people can find endless entertainment from waving a rock around, there are reasons why young Australians can’t share in the mirth, besides Morrison’s weak comedy chops.
We need no introduction to the breezy contempt in which the current government holds us. It’s not like there’s any shortage of evidence for it. We can see it in the breathtakingly patronising calls for young people to “get a job” while the government presides over some of the highest youth unemployment rates in 15 years. Or in the suck-it-up responses to the country’s chronic and worsening housing affordability crisis.
Or in the constant, slow-burn war against the welfare state: the reaping of fake debt from poor people, the ongoing cuts to university funding, the imposition of humiliating, draining conditions and waiting periods to access basic services like Newstart even as Liberal politicians fight tooth and nail to preserve their lifetime travel bonuses.
As if they’re not satisfied with making our present lives a misery, Morrison and co are doing their best to kneecap my generation’s future as well. Malcolm Turnbull’s government is almost as proudly negligent on the growing existential question of climate change as Tony Abbott’s was. Morrison’s little Punch and Judy show came as Australia’s eastern states braced for a heatwave of unusual length and severity, at the end of a summer that is already – stop me if you’ve heard this one before – the hottest on record.
Today is my 26th birthday. According to current life-expectancy projections, I have about 55 years left – more than enough time to see what a world heated three degrees centigrade past 1950 levels looks like.
On the plus side, being forced to live in holes burrowed into the earth like they do in Coober Pedy will solve the housing crisis nicely. Still, I can’t say I’m overly thrilled at the prospect of living in a world where tens of millions of displaced Bangladeshis fleeing their flooded country are turned back to drown in the Indian Ocean by Australian frigates. Or where deaths from heat stress – which already kills more Australians than all other types of natural hazards put together – reaches epidemic levels each summer. I genuinely wonder if having kids in a world like that is a good idea.
Morrison’s performance in question time on Thursday will sit up there with the iconic photo of Liberal ministers gleefully embracing after voting to abolish the carbon tax in 2014 – another scene of blind, naked obscenity for people my age. Not because such scenes are degrading to our politics, or because they’re funded by taxpayer’s money, or because they’re just plain stupid.
They’re signs that the small opportunity we had to avoid a more brutal, cruel, frightening world is passing by, if it hasn’t already – tossed away by this government and the nihilistic cabal of lobbyists, financiers and industry heavyweights it answers to, all so their laughter can mask the deafening buzz of their own inadequacy.
It is enormously galling that my life, and the lives of the people I care about, are held and crushed in the hands of people as proudly mediocre and ignorant as Morrison and Joyce. They, and the rest of the sneering brats on the government front bench, will most likely not have to live with the consequences of their own laziness and brute stupidity. I will.
I am sick of waiting for these soggy, self-satisfied old men to squirrel enough taxpayer money away to retire in luxury on. I’m tired of our growing rage and despair being fuel for their smug attempts at comedy.
This stopped being a joke a long time ago. At some point, young Australians are going to have to really start fighting the war the government has started.
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