Tony Abbott must be having the greatest dummy spit of all time. Now he is on about employment, or should I say the illusion that there are so many jobs that people are choosing to just not work. The last time I looked it up there were 19 applicants for every available job. I do wish someone in his party would tell him that a return to the top job is not a possibility.

An observation.

“Life is about perception. Not what is but what we perceive it to be.”

By rights I shouldn’t be writing about this. I promised myself some time ago that I wouldn’t give the man any more time with my two finger disability.

But I must. I must. I have to comment on a piece in the Canberra Times by Stephanie Peatling that refers to an interview with Ray Hadley on 2GB.

Before I go on let me point out that more than 650,000 Australians can’t get a job or are finding it difficult to get enough work for their daily requirements. As I say later in this piece the youth unemployment figure is just on 15%.

In the interview the second worst Prime Minister in Australian history offers his views on a number of subjects. Or might I say his suppositories of wisdom.

He says people in regional areas would rather be unemployed than work in jobs such as fruit picking and cleaning. I wonder if anyone has told him that fruit picking is only seasonal and limited to a few weeks. Or that cleaning jobs in small towns are scant.

“We have to wake up to ourselves.”

“This idea that you can be unemployed on benefits in a town where you can’t get fruit pickers…it’s just wrong.”

Some deep thinking in that.

He says the Government intends to make further budget savings from the welfare system and that people need to take any job they can get.

No mention of the rich and privileged paying their share of tax so that the country can afford a decent welfare system.

When he was Employment Minister in 1999 he called the unemployed “job snobs”.

“These might not be the jobs you want to do for the rest of your life but a job is a job…You have to take it, you just have to take it.”

Sounds like there are plenty to go around. Didn’t the Coalition promise to create a couple of million.

“​If people are doing the best they can for themselves and for their families and it is literally impossible for them to find work, fair enough. [But] we were far too ready to put people on the DSP [disability support pension], with bad backs, a bit of depression and so on. These are not permanent conditions.”

I can assure him my lower lumbar condition has been deteriorating for 30 years and is permanent. So is the depression he has caused.

He said he wasn’t seeking a Ministry but…

“The fact is, once you’ve been the PM, you can’t go back to what you were before you were the PM.”

Yes he was the government’s ‘attack dog’ and I don’t see what’s changed. Now he spends much of his time snidely attacking anything so as to get an interview like this.

But I suppose he is right. Once a gutter politician always a gutter politician.

He suggested that the current Senate was much easier to deal with than the one he had to contend with. He added that the person he was partially responsible for putting in goal, Pauline Hanson, was “a partial and honourable exception”.

I think I will let that one go through to the keeper lest the depression deepens.

The interview closed with a final suppository of wisdom when he backed Mr Turnbull’s decision last week to rule out consideration of any form of carbon price which, he said, it would be “a pain in your pocket”.

Well from a politician who has been a constant pain in the arse for too long, I can only add go, please go, and take the stench of your gutter politics with you.

“Let us be the affordable energy superpower of the world.”

So much crap in one interview.

Day to Day Politics: Who gives a shit? Not Tony