Letter From Australia (About Victimhood, Grievance, and Entitlement)

"The Force is Strong in This One"

A politician in Australia has been caught out with her snout in the trough.  But because it's all to do with a PC cause, there is "nothing to see here.  Move along."  Nonetheless, voters have taken umbrage.

Here's a way to test your capacity for self-delusion.  If your child is too ill to go to school today, do you take her on a business trip at the taxpayer’s expense? A moral bind surely, even if it is within the so-called company rules.  But if you’re a warrior for Single Motherhood, that excuses everything.

You can attend, with a sick child in tow, an overnight jaunt to see a few whales and shuck oysters because you are simply doing your job.  In other words, tick, another problem solved in the tyranny of life known as Single Motherhood.  That is, of course, if you’re blindly entitled like the Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young.

The Senator has this week been condemned nationwide for using a reported $3874.24 of taxpayers’ money to go whale watching with her daughter Kora last September in the Great Australian Bight.  Hanson-Young says she didn’t have an option and therefore had to take her unwell 11-year-old along on the trip to discuss BP’s plans to drill for oil in the marine reserve.  [Daily Telegraph]

 If anyone dare criticize this snout-in-trough behaviour, the good senator will face them down with masterful guilt manipulation.  How dare anyone persecute a single mother such as her!

Hanson-Young decided to fight fire with fire, telling Sky News: “Well the truth is... that I didn’t have a choice at the time.  “And you always weight up these things in terms of balance between the commitments of your job as a senator or indeed the demands on myself as a parent and a mum.  So of course I don’t regret it.  What I regret is the idea that there’s some grumpy old white men who have been deciding what is best for my family in the last 24 hours and I tell you what — I’m not going to be lectured to by some grumpy old men about how to be a mother or indeed what is best for my family.”

“There can’t be a family-friendly parliament and no provision for family travel. You can’t have it both ways,” Hanson-Young sniffed.  She also told one radio interviewer: “I think parents across the state can’t just take the day off work because their kid’s sick. Lots of parents know that.”

Then there’s the sanctimonious tweet she posted: “Shock horror! Woman can be mum & politician at same time.”  Thus the Single Motherhood card was comprehensively played.

There are thousands upon thousands of single mums who work and yet manage to arrange their family circumstances without expecting their employers will give them special treatment.  But a deep sense of entitlement pervades far too many politicians.  Once the snout gets in the trough, it stays there.  It's what they call a "stuck pig".

They would be our masters, not our servants.  As George Orwell put it, they think are more equal than anyone else.