| A Squiz at Australia's | Melbourne, Australia |
SCUM AT THE TOP | 26 February 1999 |
| Editor: Harold Hark | Volume 1 Number 2 |
A regular occurrence these days is the long chat with strangers while waiting in the queue at "Which Bank?". Soon we'll be old friends, as it is surprising how many topics you can cover in the regulation twenty-five minutes it takes to get to the teller. One wag likened it to waiting in bread queues in pre-revolutionary Russia or France. Only here we were just trying to get our own money. We all tittered uneasily. Another said that while half of the queue might have voted for John Howard and the other half for Kim Beazley, one hundred per cent of us hated the banks. "What?" said a lady of dry wit, "you haven't taken the advice of last year's corporate whiz who said we should be congratulating the banks on their efficient cost savings?" We all laughed heartily. One man, who was eating his lunch--"I always bring a sandwich on bank day"--noted that if only he had taken Jeff Kennett's advice, that the highest goal in life should be the operation of a business enterprise, he could have joined the Business Only queue and been out in ten minutes. We looked wistfully at those elite members of the business community who had only just arrived and would be long gone before we moved much further. Oddly, they seemed uncomfortable with our collective gaze. As we neared the sacred destination, we all agreed it was pointless to vent our anger at the poor tellers, that strange breed of survivors whose daily application of psychological armour must take great courage. After depositing a cheque, which may or may not take five working days to clear, depending on criteria that no teller can adequately explain, I wished my new found mates and the newcomers behind them God Speed. On the way out I stopped at the quaintly named Customer Service desk to offer the helpful suggestion that perhaps vending machines selling newspapers could be placed at the beginning of the queue for those not wishing to take part in discussions of the coming revolution. "Not a bad idea," said the sheepish young man behind the counter, as I strolled out the door to glorious sunshine and another week of freedom. HH Business: It's Bad Name Gets Worse If you are an Optus Vision subscriber who has chosen not to allow direct debiting, you will have noticed a $2 non-direct debit fee on each of your monthly bills. As a professional, your minimum bank balance is likely higher than we penurious sloggers here at PPF headquarters, and you may have agreed to have the money removed. On the other hand, you may have had an objection to this practice in principle and declined the "service". Either way, you must be wondering at the legality of this charge. It assumes the subscriber has either a credit card with an open limit or a limit that has not been reached, or a bank balance that never knows the dreaded near-debit experience. It is safe to say that a great many Australians fall into this category. These are the same people for whom television is a major source of entertainment. In effect, they are being penalised, discriminated against, for their poverty. The matter has been brought to the attention of the Office of Fair Trading. HH WHERE'S ME TABLETS! After a Hard Day of With a mirror placed at the edge of his desk to help him gaze upon that consummate sneer, Herr Reith arbeits mit der frenzy of a Brunhilde (oops, that would be Little Lord Downer). Using paper and quill--it's the 19 century for him!--he writes satrapishly to his provisional master, John Winston Reagan (oops ... or maybe not!). His pre-Christmas mission: make next Christmas really bad for all those--ugh! --working class slugs out there in Servantland. "First off," he commences, "anyone unemployed six months or more must work for below-award wages and conditions without legal rights against unfair dismissal. Next, reduce their dole as encouragement to find the jobs that aren't there, and give employers who still have jobs to offer subsidies for taking the scum on. Finally, if the bludgers don't commit suicide and actually find a job, then we can stack the IRC with our buddies in the Productivity Commission, Treasury and Reserve Bank to kick their fucking heads in when they start whingeing about needing more money!" After writing the above, Herr Reith fell back in a lickspittle's swoon, and went on to have the best Christmas of his life. GS Everyone receiving this fount of invective will have expelled a morceau of barf upon learning of John Howard's revised guidelines for ministerial conduct. Il est con, ce mec! you exclaimed in a foreign tongue, wishing you were there. For now the Honourable Rorters can, with a wink and a nod, transfer their shares across the family barby table while passing the beetroot. Incroyable! Little Winston has learned a few things from his mentor, Jeff Kennett. Both take criticism of their dubious methods and outcomes as the product of envy and jealousy. Like Nike and its slavery-based empire, Jeff says Just Do It, the outrage is always short-lived. But the following is pure Howard: "I don't think you will ever get rid of argument in this area unless you have Parliament full of people who have never owned an asset, who have never sought to be successful in business, who have never shown any kind of independent, entrepreneurial imagination." Hold on, Juanito, that is exactly the Parliament we want! GS Brendan Nicholson, The Age: "The Victorian Government has handed out only $10 million of up to $100 million promised by John Howard on election day as compensation for the Esso gas explosion." (italics ours.) Evidently Canberra has thus far given $50 million, but Spring St wants to use the other $40 million to upgrade the gas supply network. You'll recall how, from the comfort of his lodgings in WA, Lord Jeff sneered at Victorians for whingeing about cold showers during the two week shut down last year. It follows that the small business whingers among them can expect nought but cold comfort from their losses. GS It seems Mal Colston is too sick to stand trial for fraud, but not to sick to cast his vote on the GST. Jeesh! They don't come any more scurrilous, do they? Who is left to sell out? Labor, the Liberals, Queenslanders, the country, they've all been accounted for. If he lives long enough, the only question is, who will his vote be an act of revenge against? GS David Barnett (along with his wife, poor old Prue Goward) has the dubious distinction of writing the biggest bomb of a political biography in Australian history. This is hardly surprising since it was about John Howard, the man no thinking person gives a shit about. While the biography largely consisted of Barnett's sycophantic notions of Little Johnny's visions for Australia while at the bowser of destiny, it also earned an award for the least accurate. It was simply Barnett's fictional account of a dullard much like himself. Instead of slithering off to obscurity like someone with the remnants of pride, Barnett has stuck around long enough to be rewarded with a taxpayer-funded appointment to the board of the National Museum of Australia. As Gervaise Greene, in The Age, points out, his only qualification for "running a museum designed to show off Aboriginal art and culture has been a long series of articles highly critical of the so-called Aboriginal industry." The appointment came directly from the Prime Minister's office. GS Victoria's self-replicating alien horde of drooling MBA's may be stunned by the genital-tensing promise of big bucks, but for the rest of us the Claytons prize of the 2006 Commonwealth Games is a big groan. On ya, Jeffrey, for nothing. New Zealand, the Belgium of the Southern Hemisphere, has altered that stigma considerably by saying no to the folly of hosting an unequal colonial contest between have and have not nations. They left it to dumb shit Victoria, whose greedy, grasping premier is like an amphetamine-head at the roulette wheel in everyone's back pocket. GS Boris Yeltsin has raised himself from a bout of delirium tremens to warn The Hardon of the Western World to keep his "willie off Kosovo". The old sod went on to say, "The Great National Ruin of Russia refuses to condone any interference with the ethnic cleansing of Albanians by the Great National Ruin of Serbia. If the West so much as throws one Molotov Condom, I'll double that arms deal to the Great National Ruin of Iraq!" This mighty verbal effort buckled the silver haired disco dancer's knees. On the way back down, he pleaded, "Aw c'mon, Saddam 'n' Slobodan are all I've got left!" GS(Ed. note: Submitted by SCATT'S foreign correspondent, Jerzy Wiçiçiwiç.) DR SCREAM, THE DENTIST AWARD: Economic forecaster, BIS Shrapnel User Pays Today, |
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