the [Westpac- Melbourne Institute Leading] Index last took a dip during the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, but then recovered shortly thereafter. However, despite the LNP’s claims to be economic masters, since they took office in September 2013, the Index has been steadily trending downwards to its current record low. [Progressive Conversation blog, 23 April 2016]
Not a jot of cosmic humility, religious or otherwise, is detectable in anything I have read or heard Abbott write or say. He doesn’t speak in these terms, even obliquely; I wonder if he fears death. It’s this, I think, that people find weirdest about him: how can you trust the judgement of a man so utterly immune to the animating psychic horrors of the human condition? As the woman from the focus group pointed out, everything he says is tainted, even his experience of something as quotidian as the weather. Abbott contains an absence, a conspicuous and upsetting lack, and as long as he hangs around Australian politics, he’s going to make us all stare straight into the void. [Freelance journalist Eleanor Robertson writing in The Monthly, 28 April 2016]
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