In the 1944 film Gaslight, Ingrid Bergmans character is driven mad by her husband, who toys with her perception of reality by secretly dimming their homes gas lights at random. When the wife remarks on the strangeness of the flickering lamps, her husband tells her she is imagining things. He is so firm, and so convincing in his denials, that she thinks shes cracking up. Since then the term gaslighting has become a byword for messing with a persons head, manipulating their reality so brazenly that you send them utterly spare. Ordinarily the gas lighter only has one gas lightee. But Education Minister Christopher Pyne - a man who could power entire streets full of lamps, gas or otherwise, using the sole energy source of his ego - appears to be attempting the trick on a much larger scale. Pyne is gaslighting the entire Australian population. His array of positions on the Gonski education reforms is so dazzling it hurts the eyes. During the election campaign, keen to neutralise the issue of education funding, he told voters that the Gonski model (and the Commonwealth cash attached to it) had no greater fan than the Coalition. In this respect, the pre-election Tony Abbott said, Liberal and Labor were on a unity ticket. But once the poll results were in, the flames started to quiver, ever so slightly. First, Pyne said the Howard government funding model - the one the Gonski review sought to overturn because it was broken - was actually a good starting point. Wait, hang on a minute ... A day later, the minister crisply told ABC radio that he had never said the government would adopt the Howard funding model. So I dont know where youve got that idea from, he said, with not a trace element of shame. But you just ... Before the election, Pyne said: You can vote Liberal or Labor and youll get exactly the same amount of funding for your school. But then the Prime Minister gave a confusing interview on Sunday, saying the Coalition had never said each school would get the same funding, only that the quantum of funding would be the same. But thats not exactly what ... We are going to keep the promise that we made, not the promise that some people thought that we made, the Prime Minister clarified. At this point, the lights were switching on and off so rapidly that some educational experts actually began to fit. But it seems someone, somewhere had made a mistake, because on Monday the Prime Minister and his audacious minister announced that, actually, the original (Labor-created) funding model would be substantially honoured. The trouble is that Pyne confuses so convincingly. He pinballs out policy backflips so quickly that even the most ordered of brains are boggled within minutes. And the very audacity of his ability to say one thing, and then its opposite, and then its opposite again, is so taxing on the senses its enough to send you hiding under the bedclothes. Its enough to drive you mad.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Dec 2013 21:13:46 +0000
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