Apology

It is interesting to note how many commentators are picking up on the PM saying  "Sorry" for the interest rate rises.

Though both the PM and Abbott yesterday said that saying "Sorry" is not to be taken as an apology. (see some commentary from Julia Gillard here). Gillard rightly accuses them of playing with words.

But we shouldn't be surprised, after years of it,  to find that Howard is confused about what sorry means. He almost seems to wet himself at the possibility of mouthing these words, so you could have bowled me over with a mushy orange when I heard the taboo words pass his lips.

It is such a stubborn, narrow and old-fashioned, old-man thing. It looks like never being able to admit that you have been involved in something that didn't quite work out.

It is this I think the electorate hates. In the end it reflects a failure to receive criticsm, which is a recipe for disaster. well electoral disaster any way.

By way of an aside if we look back a dozen or so decades when writers were in the habit of writing what were styled  apologias. As indeed the pictured handsome academic J H Newman did, they were not apologising at all for their lives. They were explaining. I think that apology needs to be understand as a key dynamic in explaining what is going on, and politicians should explain.  

I don't think Howard does this. He excuses himself...it's the former Labor Government, it's the generations before us, it's the world economy.... and the electorate is fobbed off not with explanation but buck-passing.

What we want, or I do any way, is not buck passing but accountability.  Vision not opportunism, and apologia not excuse.E