Withdraw
your
obedience

In a government comprised of pathological liars, each controlled by Mother Alien John Howard, their most successful lie has been the one about "sound economic management".

We've seen time and again their inept or corrupt waste of taxpayers money. One of the most criminal examples is the bloated and unnecessary cost of the "Pacific Solution". Millions have been squandered in the effort to treat asylum seekers with less respect than animals being prepared for slaughter. And it has been done in the name of getting re-elected and appeasing the atavistic fear of a majority whose evolution has yet to pass the grunting stage.

But what they have done to the family payments system is simply obscene. These payments are supposed to help families get by, and they do. They are a wonderful remnant of the just society that Australia used to celebrate.

The introduction of the forward-estimate scheme was both mean and contemptuous. First, it underlies a basic assumption the Illiberal Party makes on citizens deemed unworthy because of poor income. It assumes they are immoral cheats. Little do they know that this is simply projection: they are immoral cheats, so they expect everyone else is too.

In their little toff or would-be-toff hearts, the Illiberal Party regards the majority of Australians, including its low paid supporters, as scum.

Second, it assumes that every one of us had a head for business. We do not. But this is a government for whom business is the be all and end all of life.

The family payments scheme has become a horror story. Forget the forward estimates. The pay at the time of reporting should be the base for the following year's payments, full stop. But no, these anal-retentives, for whom the dark orifice is Oracle, insist on wanking their time away by making life as complicated as possible.

Nearly 700,000 families face impossible repayments. Amanda "The Hun" Vanstone employs the same rigidity towards the reality of this catastrophic situation that Heil Ruddock employs towards the reality of suffering asylum seekers: only the paperwork counts.

In an embarrassing backdown, the government now wants to defer the payments till the end of the year. That would be Christmas time, would it not?

As a letter writer to The Age opines, albeit on another topic, that of Telstra: "The government's share of Telstra's profit is 51 per cent of $3.68 billion, yet Howard and Costello want to sell off the remaining 49 per cent. They must be the two stupidest financial managers in Australia. (Italics mine.) In other words, what have we done to deserve these fools?

You wonder how much the frightened little rodents who support Howard are going to swallow before they realise he has taken them for the ride of their lives. But instead of dropping their corpses off in the woods like his brethren in the Mafia, he has made sure they will endure the same lifetime of shame as those German citizens who lived near the death camps, citizens who knew and accepted. The difference is that the Germans faced execution if they complained. Here, Australians would have to face up to their meanness, their shallow cowardice. And they are not going to do that.

John Howard will swing in the breeze one day--perhaps not literally, but certainly through historical denunciation--for first appealing to the basest instincts of people, and then holding them, through a false pride in refusing to acknowledge their inhumanity, to his contract with evil. They are the same bastards who tried and convicted Lindy Chamberlain from the comfort of their lounge rooms, and their children and their children's children will look at them with the same repugnance that Germans now look upon their collaborating ancestors.

Back / Top

Mutual obligation, Soviet-style, has again reared its ugly head as Howard Government Social Engineers come up with yet another sneaky way to burden their favourite target: the poor, the downtrodden, the huddled masses.

This time it's a proposal for new parents to either attend mandatory baby classes or lose benefits. Larry Anthony, the thickwitted Children and Youth Affairs Minister, said: "You need a licence to catch a fish, you need a licence to own a dog, you need a licence to drive a car. Well, there's no licence to have a child--not that I'm advocating that, that's impossible--but it does demonstrate the point that we have put constraints elsewhere in society."

Remember the Doug Anthony All Stars? It's time for an update.

Busy reducing every other level of education to the point where 19 of 38 publicly funded universities are now accepting dolts as long as they can pay, the government tried to put on a cuddly face with the welfare of new parents uppermost. And if they don't attend? This family values government would simply remove their fortnightly benefits.

A Tandberg cartoon accompanying Darrin Gray's article in The Age, 27/8/02, reads: "Repeat after me...Good parents don't throw their children overboard."

The proposal has apparently sunk without a trace.

Back / Top

Robert Doyle has successfully challenged the hapless Dennis Napthine for leader of Victoria's Illiberal Party.

On 24 June 2000, Gort Slypesunder reported in these pages:

Speaking of envy, that deadly sin thrives nowhere better than in the Australian Liberal Party. There is always someone a notch up for a Liberal to be envious of. After all their political philosophy is based on it. But that's limited, one-issue (wealth creation) folk, for you. Robert Doyle, the Liberal who used to envy Jeff Kennett's suits for their proximity to the Great Helmsman, is about to charge Dennis Napthine, Jeff's bootlicking numero uno, for opposition leader. Well, apart from the fact that Doyle is in his 40's and talks with the voice of an oily but earnest adolescent, he can't help but be more interesting than Nappy. Speaking of talking, that's one of his problems. He never shuts up.

During Kennett's Second Reich, Doyle was the Illiberal talking head on a weekly segment of Terry Laidler's ABC Melbourne Drive show. I forget who the Labor head was. But Doyle's earnestly engaged, fulsome, pep-talking-cheerleader, exclusive-school command of the English language often had me sounding like an exasperated Jewish mother from the Bronx: "So shaaddapp already!"

He has a way of driving listeners to distraction with his schoolmaster pedantry. He's the kind of bloke who will corner you at a party, in a hallway, in the toilets, and rabbit on with extreme sincerity about whatever subject is up. There will be no topic under the sun he cannot discuss for hours on end. The trouble is, every subject is reduced to its application to Illiberal Party policy. You always know where he's going. And this, my friends, makes for a very boring encounter.

Nevertheless, the political scene in Victoria will now be considerably more upbeat. Instead of the dorky carping of Napthine, the spineless yes man for Portland, we shall be overwhelmed by Mr Yakkity-Yak v the dorky leader of the Labor Party, Steve Bracks. It is just possible that Napthine's prediction, just after the last election, that the current Bracks Government will be a one-term wonder, will come true. Certainly Bracks has been a big disappointment, though any government was better than Der Jeff's.

Speaking of low-ratings, radio presenter Kennett, he came out swinging against Doyle before the spill for disloyalty. Not only does Doyle represent his arch-enemies in the Costello-Kroger camp, but, I suspect, Kennett dislikes Doyle because Doyle reminds him of himself. In contrast, Kennett was a big fan of Napthine because the hapless vet was so weak that Jeff always looked good in comparison. "This is what you get for ousting me," he was effectively saying after his resignation from politics: "A dork."

After two weeks as leader, Doyle has yet to shut up. Rumour has it that he even talks in his sleep.

Back / Top

Come the first of September and most Australians will proclaim the arrival of Spring. If you try to tell them that Spring actually starts on the vernal equinox, usually the 22nd of that month, they will dismiss you as a believer in astrology, or a hippie, or a communist, depending on how indoctrinated they are by the Fifties Family Values of John Howard.

I don't know when this arbitrary date was established, or by whom, but--and correct me if I'm wrong--Australia may be the only country in the world to have adopted such a childish view of its place in the universe. It was probably some businessman who thought the first of the month was easy to remember for the people who would flock into his store for the seasonal sale.

Surely the subject was brought up in school? Perhaps not, as so many people remain ignorant of it.

For the record, Spring and Autumn are the equinoxes, or the two days of the year when night and day are about the same length. The sun is crossing the equator and is equidistant from the North and South Poles. In the Southern Hemisphere, they occur on September 22 and March 20 respectively. The seasons are reversed in the Northern hemisphere.

Summer and Winter are the Solstices. These are the days when the sun is the farthest south and north, resulting in the longest and shortest period of sunlight, respectively. They occur on December 22 and June 21 in the Southern Hemisphere, and are reversed in the Northern hemisphere.

These events are caused by the relationship of the earth to the sun, not by an arbitrary date to help adults make childish sense of the universe.

Many nations celebrate these changes of season. By doing so they remain in tune with the universe and its relation to the planet they live on.

Not so Australia. Our unthinking acceptance of the simpleton's view that every season begins on the first of a given month may have a lot to say about our evolution as a nation of solipsists. It may be the iceberg tip of a national wilful ignorance, the reduced worldview of a big island of reverse savages who live with gadgets but have no relation to the world around them. If we never pause to consider our mortality on but one of many planets in an infinite universe, then what chance do we have of comprehending the reality of the person next to us? Especially if they are not family.

The further removed strangers are from one's limited concept of the universe as home and hearth, the more alien they become. And when their skin is different, look out!

We do not think, therefore they do not count.

These are just some idle thoughts. But if you continue to believe that Spring starts on September First (or that Autumn starts on that date if you're in the Northern Hemisphere), then you will likely believe anything. And the freedoms you presently enjoy will have been earned by someone else, someone who does not believe everything they have been told.

Back / Top

In this government of fools, it is hard to decide who is the most dangerous:

Alexander Downer, with his rabble rousing description of Simon Crean as a mouthpiece for Saddam Hussein, after the Opposition leader merely called for calm in Downer's hysterical war rhetoric.

Tony Abbott for acting like a Catholic Mullah in his attempt to socially engineer all of us to fit his ultra conservative take on virtue and morality.

Peter Costello for taking everyone for an idiot by announcing that a privatised Telstra would remain in Australian hands...as if it mattered!

Heil Ruddock for inciting racism and fear through his obsessively selective immigration policy.

But the gong has to go to John Howard for acting as the unlikely Alien Mother (make that Grandmother: he acts more like a old woman with each passing day), whose ideological offspring have murdered the fair go.

Back / Top

Faced with a 7-0 High Court ruling that 7600 cases heard before the Refugee Review Tribunal may have "lacked procedural fairness", possibly resulting in the return and incarceration or death of legitimate refugees to their country of origin, what is the government's knee-jerk response at having, perhaps, been caught out?

Attorney-General and acting Immigration Minister Daryl Williams said, "Unfortunately it appears that these judgments will ultimately result in increased formality, increased bureaucracy, increased legality and potentially increased periods of detention for protection visa applicants as they seek to exploit these decisions in the courts."

This is the same mean-spiritedness, albeit to a lesser degree, that the Nazis exhibited toward detainees in their concentration camps in the closing days of the WWII. Faced with certain defeat, the Nazis chose to kill as many as they could, instead of simply letting them live.

Back / Top

The Sunday Herald Sun is to be congratulated for publishing the article by Tony Rindfleisch (11/8/02) on the heartbreaking saga of the Sa'ad family in their epic fifteen year journey from Iraq to Australia. Theirs is the stuff of legend and they are but one family out of thousands.

My reason for congratulating the newspaper is that it must have taken courage to present the real face of these people when a majority of Australians continue to swallow the con job presented by the Howard Government that they are subhuman or otherwise undeserving of our pity and compassion.

Sooner or later, the reality of this government's evil dissemination of lies about people fleeing torture will be seen by most of this majority. When that happens, and it will happen, John Howard and his henchmen and women will be forever known as the most ignominious band of heartless philistines ever to have wielded power in this once and future proud nation.

Back / Top

"If we're honest, most of us would accept that a bad boss is a little like a bad father or a bad husband. Notwithstanding all of his faults you find he tends to do more good than harm. He might be a bad boss but at least he's employing someone..."
Tony Abbott

It may led Non-Core Magoo, but last week Sluggo Abbott layed out the brittle core of the Illiberal party's philosophy. With his Moses and bad boss/father/husband comments, he revealed the wizened heart of this patriarchal, neo-Feudal band of political mercenaries.

Greg Combet, secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, suggested that Abbott has "a very strange sort of morality." But there is no morality in Abbott. These are the random, almost head-injured, remarks of an amoral airhead whose frontal lobes are dwarfed by the doziest Cocker Spaniel (apologies to the breed whose chief attribute is unconditional love).

Combet continued, 'What he's saying is that it might be all right if an employer is a sexual harasser. That it might be all right if an employer steals entitlements." Because, hey, the mob needs a whipmaster and if Boss Tweed is kind of off, well we'll just have to lump it.

Allowed free rein by his "boss," the repulsive suburban solicitor who clawed his way to the top by virtue of an assiduously aggressive character flaw beloved of plutocrats everywhere: that of total disregard for the working class, Sluggo says and does what he wants.

He is an unflushed toilet of verbal diarrhea (unlike Harold Hark), perhaps the most irresponsible politician in the history of Australian politics. You would think this was a totalitarian, one party state the way this "Workplace Relations" Minister constantly vilifies workers while boosting employers. He is in fact the Minister for Employers who acts against employees at every move. Jenny Macklin, Labor employment spokeswoman, hit the nail on the head: "According to Mr Abbott, workers should be grateful for their jobs under any circumstances and at any cost."

This should sink Sluggo Abbott, if not within the party, within the electorate. The party might believe his condescending bullshit, but surely no one else will.

Based on an article by Sophie Douez and Kerry Taylor, The Age 2/7/02)

(Hold the Press! See Mickey Rourke to play Abbott in new film bio)

Back / Top

Umeruhca, the land of the free enterprising entrepreneur, where until a few months ago nicotine-laced lollipops were sold over the counter by nine out of ten leading pharmacists, has just celebrated its 4th of July. The makers of NicoWater (water-laced with nicotine), "the refreshing break to the smoking habit," were planning to quench the thirst of millions of party-goers when the FDA ruled it illegal at the last minute.

Needless to say, the entire country was cordoned off.

The White House refused to hand Osama a victory by cancelling the celebrations. Instead they handed the enemies of the empire a victory by installing 16km of fencing around the National Mall in Washington, 5km of fencing to enclose the visitor's area at Mt Rushmore, banning all commercial and private flights over the Statue of Liberty, Rushmore, the Seattle Space Needle and the Gateway Arch in St Louis, and banning the docking of all boats with 45m of festivities wherever a river was involved, and on and on.

Most Umeruhcans spent the day watching videos of "I Love Lucy" in resurrected bomb shelters and cellars dug beneath their homes. The patented laid-back zeal associated with most Umeruhcans (brought on by a determination to act as if they were stoked on phenobarbital in combination with a lifetime of chemical-induced frenzy from their butylated food products) produced a wave of anti-terrorist dugouts so deep that some were threatening to pop through the ground floor of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

The latest gee whizzery from the National Security Agency, that of assigning a colour code to the nation's terrorist threat status, produced the colour yellow shortly before the big day. Yellow means authorities have to coordinate security plans and increase surveillance at certain locations. Orange, which could have been invoked on the day itself, would have required the involvement of the armed forces and restricted access to public events. A serious matter, indeed.

Umeruhcans were praying to Gawd that heliotrope, the colour assigned to Armageddon, would not invoked. They knew that the axis of evil, Big Dubbya, Dick "The Werewolf" Cheney and Jesus H. Ashcroft, would then retire to the bunker they've modelled on Saddam's successful maze for an evening of prayer and mutual masturbation while the country burned.

In the event, nothing much happened apart from the usual random shootings and aerial show disasters.

Back / Top

As a Macintosh user, I was late getting on to Napster; it took them well over a year to include us minority folk. But within a few months I had nearly a gigabyte of precious music. Music that I couldn't otherwise have obtained.

I should say here that the amount of CDs this family buys are the same now as they were during the Napster months and before. Getting free stuff did not change our buying habits.

The songs I downloaded are mostly unavailable these days, on any medium; especially in Australia. Songs popular while I was bumming around in France and Holland; field recordings of blues singers from the 1930s I once owned; the song that was popular when I first fell in love; songs my parents were mad about that I detested but were somehow important to listen to again.

Incredibly, all but a few were out there on the computers of Napster's vast subscriber base. And getting them was fast. Within seconds a list of who had what was up on the screen. A click and a few minutes (occasionally longer) and that long lost song from a movie not seen for umpteen years was playing. In a single night, one audio Madeline after another would revive memories I'd forgotten I had.

Of course I went bananas on new stuff too. Obscure dance/trance mp3's heard over Internet radio were almost immediately summoned forth on Napster: Paul van Dyk, Dave Ralph, stuff like that. Where in Melbourne was I going to find them?

Then the "copyright Nazis" (as Graeme Philipson calls them) got wise and pulled the plug. The RIAA took everybody to court and Napster eventually filed bankruptcy. Democracy has never been good for business.

What's this, you say, what about the hard earned money performers deserve? As Philipson says, "Not many performing artists make any significant money from the sale of recorded music. The profits go to a few big stars and, of course, the record companies." Same with writers. Unless you become a Jean Auel, you had better have a day job.

Napster helped people to discover new artists they would otherwise have never heard of. Believe me, I would buy Paul van Dyke's CDs if I could.

Not long after Napster croaked, my hard drive failed and I lost everything. Nearly a year later, I still feel an intense sense of loss. These were songs I'll never find again. Sure, I crank up LimeWire every once in awhile, but the success rate is hardly worth the bother. And it seems every other file sharer comes with spyware.

In short, Vale Napster, it was bliss while it lasted.

For an article on the future of downloadable music and videos, read Graeme Philipson's Moguls raise the stakes for copyright monopoly

Back / Top