Say “Yes” to More Conceits

In “$23 carbon price, but fewer pay”, it takes two writers, Tom Arup and Michelle Grattan of The Age, to compose this:

the government is expected to reveal its plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from new vehicles, which have been simmering on the backburner for almost a year, since Ms Gillard foreshadowed them in last year’s election campaign.

Labor floated a target to reduce average emissions of new cars, sports utility vehicles and light trucks.  But its targets were denounced as ‘weak’ by Greens deputy leader Christine Milne, who pledged stronger targets.

Plans (or, perhaps, new vehicles), which were foreshadowed, simmer on a back-burner; and weak targets float.  With such marvellously metaphoric writers, running along such tight tropes, and supplying the public with insightful and independent political news and analysis, one may well wonder how the newspapers are losing readers.

Say “Yes” to Tortured Tropes

Not since Sen. Bob Brown referred, many years ago, to “a slowly unfolding kettle of fish” have we heard such a finer exponent of the tortured metaphor as that rug-selling carpetbagger, and sometime school-bully, Mr. Andrew Wilkie MHR.  This week, on the ABC’s “4 Corners”, he opined that the Gillard Government’s implementing pre-commitment technologies on poker machines is:

one of the key issues upon which my support for the Government hinges.

From the same interview, the dippy but poetic parliamentarian explains vividly: 

It wasn’t on the radar.  No senior politician in the Government or the Coalition would go anywhere near an issue like this with a barge-pole.  It’s an absolutely [sic] minefield for one of the big political parties because it is just so hard.*  [...]
The moment I opened my mouth publicly I became a lightning rod.

The highly conductive member concludes:

People will be helped but if for any reason the wheels fall off and these reforms are not realised, so long as I know I’ve given it my very, very best shot, then I’ll be able to live with myself afterwards. 

*  such language, seemingly, is contagious: the reporter, Matthew Carney, explains:  “Julia Gillard was locked into Wilkie’s deal.  If Gillard didn’t make the reforms law by Budget 2012, Andrew Wilkie would pull the pin.”  The pin, no doubt, not of a grenade but of a lock’s hinge.