Catallaxy Files

Bob Ellis in Unleashed

Another is the Prime Minister’s avowed belief in free trade. Though it drives dairy farmers to suicide (as Bob Katter correctly yelped) and props up child slavery in South-East Asia and encourages Tasmanians to stop growing apples and to sell their family farms to red Chinese corporations and though (as Bob Katter correctly screeched) no other country actually practises it, and though no Australian actually believes in it, it nonetheless soothes and solaces some sad souls to murmur from time to time a prayerful affirmation of it, as the Prime Minister did last week in a public response to Katter that lost his vote. For though it’s an international disaster that kills tens of thousands of children a week it’s appropriate to speak well of it, to call it the only way of doing things. And though protectionism worked well for 5,000 years this, though currently disastrous, is clearly the only way forward. We’re moving forward with free trade, repeat after me. It kills more people than Asian flu but we’re moving forward with it, march in step there.

I am a fan of Bob Ellis’s writings. I have enjoyed most of his political books though have been embarrassed for him over his attempts to write about economics. Following his stuff on Unleashed over the past few months, I feared he was losing his touch. But today he is back in form.

I still disagree with much of what Ellis writes, but he writes it so well that he has to be admired. And this piece is not too far wrong in his explanations of much of the dopiness that the government is displaying and in his advice to Gillard. I am not sure she has to get married, though, and expelling Kamahl as a Tamil overstayer is not the best idea Ellis has ever had.

Still, Ellis in entertaining and, for one on the left, quite insightful.