Tony Abbott is the ultimate Incompetent Boss
Most of us, at some point, have worked for an Incompetent Boss, and suffered for their incompetence. But who suffers when the incompetent boss is in charge of an entire country?
Some of the responses to last week’s devastating photos of the drowned Syrian refugees wash up on a beach in Turkey were truly wonderful.
Melbournians, rather than complain about the inconvenience of a train strike, happily took the day off work and thousands of them donated the train fare to a Syrian refugee assistance fund.
There are Light The Dark rallies happening all over the country, not just in memory of the tragic deaths of innocent people, but also to make our government aware that their xenophobic rhetoric is not working.
State Premiers in NSW, SA, Tasmania and Victoria, stepped up and made it clear that they want Australia to do more for Syrian refugees and that they are prepared to give tangible support to people seeking asylum.
Trainloads of refugees arriving at Munich were met by smiling, waving crowds, bringing sweets for children and a message of welcome for adults.
Angela Merkel gave the world an inspiring example of leading with compassion and responsibility in her response, an example Australia particularly could learn from.
Tony Abbott, on the other hand, demonstrated yet again his single minded track of divisive attack politics. It is incomprehensible that he could look at a photo of a dead child washed up on a beach and see only another excuse to push his Stop The Boats slogan. And yet…
If you want to stop the deaths, if you want to stop the drownings you have got to stop the boats.
We saw yesterday on our screens a very sad, poignant image of children tragically dead at sea in illegal migration
I realised as I watched the various news outlets reporting Abbott’s remarks about the Syrian crisis over the weekend, what he reminds me of. Incompetent Bosses.
In years gone by I’ve worked for people like him, I think we all have. People promoted beyond their abilities because of connections or politicking. The ones who flounder in their roles and try desperately to divert attention from their inadequacies by focussing obsessively on details that don’t matter, or unworkable irrelevant projects because that’s all they can manage. They can’t or won’t see the big picture because they don’t know how to deal with it. They are afraid of real leadership because underneath the surface bravado, they know they don’t have the ability to do the job they’ve been given. Rather than admit to that and ask for help, or hire people who can do the things they can’t, they hide their fear from themselves and others by avoiding the demands of a job they can’t do and focus only on the small details they think they can manage.
In many ways politics is like any other business. People start at entry level positions and work their way up; sometimes you get a star recruit come in at high levels and make changes that ruffle feathers of all the long term employees, but most of the time, big business shuffle the top level roles amongst each other. And all too often, the people who end up in charge are not there because they have ability greater than their colleagues, but because the knew the right people, had the right contacts or were simply in the right place at the right time. When those people are given a job they can’t actually do, everyone suffers.
Abbott is the ultimate Incompetent Boss. He doesn’t know how to deal with the real functions of his role – to manage the truly monumental issues currently facing the Australian economy and the deal with the complexities of foreign relationships on the global stage – so he hides from them through increasingly obsessive focus on death cults and political enemies.
And as the need for him to act on the things he doesn’t know how to deal with grows, his fearful obsessions overwhelm him more and more. Until we get to the point where a dead child is something he can only see through the filter of the Stop The Boats rhetoric. And not only does this seem rational to him, he cannot comprehend how it could seem utterly irrational to anyone else.
The danger to the entire country is that his fear of his own inadequacy can only grow as the problems facing us are left to fester. All the tricks of Incompetent Bosses everywhere come into play: increased aggression, bullying, empire building, ridding himself of people who implicitly or explicitly draw attention to the things he doesn’t want to see, fulsome reporting of irrelevancies and increasingly irrational hostility towards any perceived opposition.
Any business in the grip of an incompetent boss suffers, the employees, the shareholders, partner businesses and suppliers all pay the price for inadequate leadership.
When the business is an entire country and the incompetent boss is the Prime Minister, millions of people suffer. And there’s really only one solution.
The problem then is that you have to find someone else to take over. How do you find someone who has the ability to not only do the job properly, but to undo all the damage done by the tenure of fear and inadequacy?
And how much more difficult is that when you have only one other alternative?