“Eat Your Peas” Government is a euphemism for the Nanny State, for the government which assumes that the great bulk of citizens are simply too childlike or stupid to be able to be trusted to make their own decisions about… well… anything. William Safire famously referred to 1988 Democrat presidential candidate Michael Dukakis as an Eat Your Peas politician for being such a scold, and the term stuck.
An Eat Your Peas government feels that instead of sticking to looking after the basics (establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense… everybody sing now!) and letting us work out much of the rest as we – reasonable consenting adults that most of us are – see fit, they need to micromanage our lives down to the amount of salt our ketchup is allowed to have and the kinds of windows we can put in our houses… and [insert your favourite nanny-state law here]. You get the drift.
From the start I’ve considered both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard to be Eat Your Peas politicians – hectoring, nannying, scolding neo-wowsers determined to make us all healthy wealthy and wise in spite of our own dumb selves… but today, Julia went there.
She really, really went there.
In explaining why she still feels righteously compelled to foist her wildly unpopular carbon tax on an increasingly unhappy citizenry, and what she thinks is behind the majority’s lack of support for it, she explained:
“It’s the equivalent of saying ‘eat your vegetables’, I suppose.”
Oh, dear. “Eat your vegetables.” Just sit down, shut up, and eat your goddamn vegetables. Got it?
If our media weren’t so in the bag for Labor, the term “Eat Your Veggies” would stick to Gillard for posterity the way “Eat Your Peas” stuck to Dukakis.
What are the chances?
UPDATE [12 July 2011]: Obama apparently just went there too…
“It’s not going to get easier, it’s going to get harder. So we might as well do it now; pull off the Band-Aid, eat our peas.”
Since Comrade Julia’s use of that line, her approval rating has dropped to just 28% and Labor’s primary vote has fallen to just 27%. I wonder if American voters will take to Obama’s use of the line any more kindly than Aussie voters took to Julia’s?
I’m half-convinced that whoever is feeding our pollies these stupid lines must be an undercover VRWC operative.
Heh.
The Tizona Group 
June 28, 2011, 9:27 pm at 9:27 pm
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2011/06/michelle-obama-tells-african-audience-i-love-french-fries-but-eat-your-vegetables/
Cheers
June 28, 2011, 10:18 pm at 10:18 pm
SNAP! Exactly.
June 28, 2011, 11:45 pm at 11:45 pm
To kick off the nanny state laws, I’ll start with the so called “hoon law”.
Look if some twat is tearing through a school zone (40 kph for the non Aussies) at twice the speed limit, he deserves a flogging. And I know more than a few ‘hoons’ who would do just that if you did it past their kids school. I’ve even seen some **** on a bike nearly take the arm off a crossing guard.
But if I want to head out to an industrial area on a quiet sunday arvo and cook off an old set of tyres, I really dont see what the big deal is.
Long story short, it should go back to the cops discretion.
My two cents.
June 29, 2011, 1:30 am at 1:30 am
Julia talks like she’s a kindergarten teacher, soooooooooo sloooooooowly, like she thinks we’re all stupid little children, I think she thought that “eat your vegetables” line was extacly what she needed to get thru to us “dummies”, She was probably so proud of that analogy, probably doesn’t know any normal people, so she wouldn’t know how school marm like it would sound to us.
But the MSM will give her a pass for it, first they barracked for Mark Latham, then they barracked for Kevin Rudd, now it’s Julia Gillard they see it their job to “serve and protect” whoever the chosen Labor leader of the day is.
All the out of touch elites in the left media and left pollies probably think that was a great line anyway, or at least won’t laugh at it publicly.
I hate this, imagine if JOHN HOWARD had said something like that, the comedians and the ABC would be all over him!
June 29, 2011, 12:08 pm at 12:08 pm
That’s the whole point Julia does think we are stupid, and that we should just do as we are told, and don’t ask questions, and above all stop THINKING for ourselves.
Very condescending is this woman, along with her mates in the Greens.
June 29, 2011, 4:58 pm at 4:58 pm
Yeah. She talks the same way I do (sans bogan) to a grade four ESL class.
🙄
July 12, 2011, 9:40 am at 9:40 am
[…] The fact that Obama actually said it is revealing and the whole tone of his speech, that the American people are too stupid and need parental government, really does seal the fate of the Scold-In-Chief. Incidentally, the link goes to Australia, where they are experiencing the same issues with their Lea… […]
July 12, 2011, 10:15 am at 10:15 am
Hahaha. I can’t believe Obama actually went there too. (see update)
I’m half-convinced that whoever is feeding our pollies these stupid lines must be an undercover VRWC operative.
July 12, 2011, 1:13 pm at 1:13 pm
Your blog has been added to our blogroll. I don’t know your players, like Julia Gizzard, but it sounds like we’re up to our necks in the same struggle against the same statist control freaks and idealogues.
July 12, 2011, 1:24 pm at 1:24 pm
Thanks for that! Comrade Julia is our current Prime Minister, leading a Labor-Green coalition (both Lefitist parties); our conservatives are called Liberals (as in, classical liberals) and are led by one Tony Abbott. You’ll pick it up. Or not – it’s all good 🙂
And there’s American stuff here too – besides me being a dual US/AUS citizen, a couple of our other group blog authors are Seppos and we all tend to take notice of what’s happening in America anyway.
I’ll go add you on to our blog roll as well. One of these days one of us definitely need to get in there and do some housekeeping… sigh.
By the way, if you look at our latest, you’ll see that even our tradies (tradespeople, miners, etc) have turned on Our Julia. I expect it’ll be the way with Obama and American blue collar workers sooner or later as well. Just as Australia’s “new” Labor Party bears almost no resemblance to the old version, so it seems the “new” Progressive Democrats are not a patch on the older version.
July 12, 2011, 1:35 pm at 1:35 pm
Sorry for being so Amero-centric and don’t know your PM, as we have our hands full trying to keep our own careening car on the road, but I love the Australians. You are one of our true allies and we are an ally of yours. Nevermind President DipShit. We’ll dispense with him in short order. And you’ll dump yours as well.
Funny how the Eat your Peas line has allowed us to find one another.
I love happy endings.
But it’s great to do a web handshake and we’ve made friends over it.
Life is funny that way.
By the way. I love that Trade Tools ad. I’ll post that up first thing in the morning. It’s half eleven and I need to go to bed.
July 12, 2011, 1:39 pm at 1:39 pm
And thanks to the time diff, it’s Tuesday afternoon here… so you see, the sun never sets on the VRWC Empire! Have a good night; your Antipodean allies have your backs 😉
July 12, 2011, 11:14 pm at 11:14 pm
[…] morning that Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s administration is already known as the “Eat Your Peas Government”, thanks, in no small part, to her infamous utterance last month: …Yesterday she insisted the […]