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Last updated on August 9th, 2017 at 10:45 am
The Age’s Traceee Hutchison gets frantic about houses, promises, and … bananas:
There is something about the Howard wave that seems to have sent the entire country into some kind of mystical hypnosis, like we’ve all been swept up in a mad euphoria about how tremendously well things are travelling in the lucky country at the moment – despite a truckload of core promises being jettisoned, the awful problem with bananas and predictions that half of us are about to lose the family home.
The awful problem with bananas is that not many of them are available at present. Let’s all kill ourselves. Half of us kicked out of our homes? Yeah, right. Core promises jettisoned? List ‘em, Traceee.
It might all be well to smirk, Treasurer-style, but does anyone else have a slightly uneasy feeling of having read about this kind of phenomenon back in high school?
Perhaps it is time to reintroduce another school-day favourite from Howard’s favourite decade, the 1950s.
Its the duck and cover game. Just like those well-intentioned instructional videos designed to protect us from the harm of a nuclear bomb, when you see a Howard wave coming you duck under the nearest table and cover your eyes. Duck and cover. It might be our only hope.
One: “Its” requires an apostrophe. Two: those “well-intentioned instructional videos” were actually films. Three: as Professor Barney indicates, “duck and cover” subjects were required to cover their heads, not their eyes. Four: those instructional films weren’t widely shown in Australia during the 1950s; Traceee imagines we were part of the US. Great fact-checking, Age.
