It’s Almost As If Causing Offence Is A Deliberate Distraction From The Government’s Climate Crimes

By Situation Theatre 13/11/2019

No government could be so morally bankrupt and pathetic as to throw a dead cat on the table in the middle of a national emergency, could they?

Granted, the chances on any given day of Barnaby Joyce, Michael McCormack, Peter Dutton, Scott Morrison or a few dozen other Coaliton MPs making cruel, inhumane, insensitive, foolish comments by accident are pretty high.

These people aren’t exactly Rhodes scholars, although somehow the PM who mistook an onion for an apple was.

But at a certain point you’ve got to ask yourself, why do we always hear these “gaffes”, “slip-ups”, and “oopsies” happen when the Government is most under pressure?

Could these serial offences, whether they be Barnaby Joyce bringing up the voting intentions of bushfire victims, Michael McCormack pointing the finger at : “woke capital-city greenies” who are “raving lunatics”, Peter Dutton opening his mouth, or Scott Morrison sensitively accounting for the feelings of traumatised refugees by calling them rapists, murderers and paedophiles, be part of a notorious conservative strategy used whenever the heat is on?

Yes, yes they could.

We know for a fact that in lieu of any policies or principles beyond what’s best for billionaires, the Coalition has been using the ‘dead cat manoeuvre’ for years.

The evil genius behind this art of distraction is Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby, variously described on a niche information website called “Wikipedia” as a “master of the dark political arts”, “the Wizard of Oz”, and “the Australian Karl Rove”. In 2002, he was called “one of the most powerful and influential figures in the nation”.

He was appointed Federal Director of the Liberal Party in 1997 and oversaw the election victories of 1996, 1998, 2001, and 2004. Forming the consulting firm Crosby Textor Group in 2002, he then inflicted tactics that would make Machiaevelli blush on the UK electorate, winning mayoral elections in 2008 and 2012, and national elections in 2015 and 2017.

He’s a classy fellow, the man behind such benign Tory slogans as “It's Not Racist to Impose Limits on Immigration” and “How Would You Feel if a Bloke on Early Release Attacked Your Daughter?”. He’s also the man behind the linking of 2016 London mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan to terrorist organisations.

Lest you form a negative impression of the fellow, at least he didn’t work on behalf of a major international cigarette company to ensure thousands of people would continue smoking to the point of lung cancer. Except for when he lobbied against the introduction of plain packaging on behalf of Phillip Morris International. Give him a break though, he did stand up on behalf of private healthcare providers to those crooks at the NHS.

He’s the man we have to thank not only for the Coalition’s infuriating wedge politics which has set this country back decades, but also everyone’s favourite kind of whistling, dog-whistling. But let’s focus on his most diabolical invention, the “dead cat maneouvre”.

Crosby guided Boris Johnson to two victories in London mayoral elections, and it’s Johnson himself who uncharacteristically sums up the concept quite well:

“There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant. The key point, says my Australian friend, is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”

You may have noticed that by now, President Trump has committed cat genocide so many times US citizens have been forced into keeping sewer rats as pets.

And the Coalition is not far behind.

We know that now is not the time to talk about the primary cause of the worst drought and bushfire crises the nation has ever seen (hint – it’s not The Greens).

It is of course the time to cynically deploy an age-old conservative strategy to offend half the electorate and distract them from applying the blowtorch to the Coalition for decades of environmental sabotage.

So next time you see a dead cat thrown on the table, name it as such, and crack on with the case for the Government’s guilt not merely for gross negligence, but for ecocide and crimes against humanity.