We don’t have a Willy Wonka and a Candy Man. We have a wonky Prime Minister and a straw man Treasurer…
Willy Wonka promised a marvellous experience when visitors came to his chocolate factory. As in the movie and book, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the children learnt important life lessons according to the state of their hearts.
The Candy Man song (the best version of the song has to be Sammy Davis Jnr’s) promised that he could take a sunrise, sprinkle it in dew, cover it in chocolate, and give a miracle or two. Given how often the song has been played, performed, and recorded, it must have struck a chord of simple happiness in many people.
Sadly, our Prime Minister and Treasurer speak as if they are chocolate and candy tsars but deliver everything except good lessons and noble candy.
Willy Wonka knew what was on the hearts and minds of the people around him. He especially understood what was important to the thinking of the contestants who won special time in his chocolate factory. Wonka thus knew how to shape the experience of each young person to help them grow up. Those experiences were not always comfortable, but they were life-changing. The young person with the most open heart, and who related to others well, was rewarded with more opportunity and responsibility.
Our Prime Minister seems to have ‘anti-Wonka’ features built into him, judging by his main efforts so far in office. He has repeatedly demonstrated that he does not know the hearts and minds of the majority of Australians. His regular failure of understanding the details of what he proposes has been embarrassing. Likewise, his deafness to the difficulties of a constitutional insertion supporting just one group of Australians was baffling, because we never did find out why he did not listen.
Similarly, our Prime Minister does not understand what families are talking about at night – the price of electricity, the cost of housing, and their money not being able to buy as much as it used to (yes, inflation). Albanese repeats the one-liners given to him by his Energy Minister with increasing passion and sometimes with visible impatience. He projects a false confidence draped in a fantasy wrapping that communicates, ‘I am a nice guy, believe me, agree with me, and follow me.’
The Prime Minister has never presented a coherent rationale on the economy, government spending, energy supply for industry, or why he will not hold a true and binding commission into the Covid actions of our parliaments. Premiers closed the institutions that provide the mechanism for our democratic processes, but that seems not to be important enough for his concern.
Complementing our wonky Prime Minister is the straw man Treasurer. He agrees with the team acting like elves and Easter Bunnies in chasing small price changes in supermarkets while systematically making hiring options and investment opportunities structurally difficult. He cannot help people grow into more innovation and independence. Instead, he uses his spending to increase dependence on the care industries and increase the public service vote.
Hard work, independence, and merit-based rewards seem to be nowhere in his lolly shop. The pretend candy-man has no sunshine to offer, has no real flavour to share, and has no real miracles to present. Instead of wonder-based outcomes, his socialist capitalism (a label that is an oxymoron of titanic proportion) communicates the colour grey. His presentations come via ongoing rehearsed grins and persistent reassurances that all is good – really, things are getting so much better. In the face of the weekly costs of living, expensive rent and persistent higher repayments, the Treasurer’s ‘getting better’ must be referring to his assured increased salary and retirement pension – not ours.
Even this week he has been blaming the war ‘over there’ for inflation. Apparently, inflation has nothing to do with increased energy prices that erode the value of the money in our pockets. That is why it must also have nothing to do with the cost of electricity for us at home and at the shops where we go to buy our weekly fare. Inflation also must not have anything to do with the rising cost of labour contributing to the costs of goods and services. Nor must it be related to brazenly anti-productivity measures that he and his colleagues insist we need in order to keep us safer and more responsible as a society.
And for both of our Prime Minister and Treasurer, they claim that only they know how to fix the immigration problems feeding the break-down of social cohesion. Only they also know, in their socialist bubble, how to moderate the housing shortage leading to the morally untenable prices of buying a residence in our once fairer land.
From our wonky Prime Minister, we hear an invitation for a life of respect and wonder. Instead, we experience increasing modes of secrecy and control. From our Treasurer, we hear the invitation for a remade economics that will increase our desire for his candy. Instead, we experience the taste of straw in our mouths via the gaps in our pockets.
Maybe it’s time to watch the real Willy Wonka and to listen to Sammy sing his song again, and then thank God that we are experiencing good creativity once more, and not the false ‘happy clappy’ version that increasing swirls to our homes from Canberra.
