| A Squiz at Australia's | Melbourne, Australia |
SCUM AT THE TOP | 12 March 1999 |
| Editor: Harold Hark | Volume 1 Number 4 |
Hard to tell here who the maggot is, Justice Terrence "My Fair Lady" 'Iggins or Abbott & Costello or all three, but we certainly know who was gagged: Bob Ellis, Random House, all other publishers and writers in Australia, and anyone else who dares to ruffle the feathers of the vultures in power. Channel 7's The Big News and The Late Report have already received a rumoured call from the PM or his spokesgoons, the kind of call outspoken people routinely received in Stalin's Soviet Union, and receive everyday from governments in would-be emulation. That 'Iggins's finding is obscene goes without saying. But that he found, not for the 33 words themselves, but for the inference that the woman in question was not chaste beggars the belief of mature people everywhere. Ellis referred to 1933 for similar views, but 'iggins himself chose the 19th century as his blessed era, setting up a class division in which the plaintiffs were akin to the "membership of the Anglican synod," and the rest of us were rabble frequenting an "East End ale house." This is the Australia John Howard would have us return to. And like John Howard, Justice 'Iggins is a man who lives in a half-formed, one-dimensional bubble of picture book morality whose authority is the Dick and Jane version of the Bible. His decision smacks of cultural and religious fundamentalism. Where 'Iggins awarded the plaintiffs money, his counterparts in Afghanistan, the Taliban, would have cut off the hands of the defendants. His finding reeks like a bus station toilet in the heart of darkness; he is utterly full of shit, and freedom of creative expression will be smeared with it from now on. By the way, did you happen to catch Peter Costello's feigned gravity during his little trudge from the courthouse to the bank? Bad actor, model Christian. HOLD THE PHOTOCOPIER: Throughout the land, people leapt to their feet and cheered upon hearing that Australia's No 1 litigant, Jeff Kennett, had lost his court case against The Australian. The cheers turned to hoarse ecstasy when it was learned he would have to pay $100,000 in court costs out of his own pocket. HH The Transmogrification of Saint Gough To Feral Snoot Oh, dear, the bubble has once and for all burst. The Hallowed One has confirmed the suspicion of each and every one of us that there are simply no politicians worthy of worship. One by one they are eventually reduced to our size by their own indiscretions, FoI, unauthorised biographers, or the memoirs of their wives. We long ago lost Churchill, if only for his tactically unnecessary bombing of Dresden. JFK took a few decades to uncover, but he will largely be remembered as a grinning boob who crossed the Dons. And now Gough Whitlam has fed his great stature to the dingos through a catty defence of the indefensible. His outbursto di troppo at Laurie Brereton for the latter's attempt to clarify what we've known all along but wished to overlook: the Whitlam government's dicey position on East Timor, couldn't have been more distasteful. But in terms of the maligned hero that Gough has always been for so many of us, the most unforgivable part of his tirade was his toff-like qualification of Brereton as unfit to criticise by virtue of being "ill-educated." Whatever the eventual truth of Whitlam's personal action or inaction on the subject, his apoplectic repudiation puts him in a new light. About 25 watts worth. The fact is, our position on Timor has already joined the debit side of Australian history alongside Aboriginal genocide (and, when that didn't work, the theft of their children). Of course, Australia is not alone among nations in forming devolutionary policies, and, nationalistically speaking, Whitlam's positives far outweigh the negatives; what kind of a backwater would we have been without him! Then again, I suppose that is a selfish interpretation, in view of the tens of thousands of Timor dead who never got to take advantage of anything remotely like free education because our government didn't make an effort to stop their slaughter. Oh, well, we still love you, Gough. Only, don't die for a couple of years, or at least until we get over this. HH WHERE'S ME TABLETS! Jeff and John think NIMBYS should stand aside and let their neighbourhoods be used for the good of the economy. John's on a snit about Avalon folks wanting to keep their beaches hoon-free. Likewise Jeff couldn't understand why Werribee residents were up in arms about his beloved chemical dump being moved to their backyard. And he certainly wasn't about to have Albert Park residents and their complaints about wrecked homes and ear splitting noise interfere with his asinine Grand Prix. But it's safe to say that Jeff and John, NIMBYS of the first order, get to go home to peace and tranquillity. They understand that when the hard day's slog is over, there is no place like the safe refuge of home. GS Rorting A Liberal Party Virtue We've seen how The Squidgereen modified his code of conduct to suit his ministers inability to tell right from wrong. Now we have Jeff Kennett modifying his guidelines for Government credit cards (under cover of darkness, to be sure) so that proceedings can now be taken only if the misuse is "intentional". Based on past exemplary behaviour, we have no doubt that when questioned, the future alleged misuser will honestly admit that he or she intentionally used the card for the private purchase of that coveted flying pig. No? Rob Hulls says, "It seems the only action the Government has taken in relation to continued credit card abuse is to change the guidelines to fit the abuse." GS "You do not need to be a rocket scientist or an economist to understand that if you put up the wage rate of an 18-year old by $130 a week a lot of employers are going to say we cannot afford that sort of cost in employing and giving a young person a job." Hang on, is Peter Reith comparing rocket scientists with economists? That's like comparing Einstein with Homer Simpson! But seriously, when "youth wages" first became Scripture, one of the first noticeable effects were public library books being filed anyoldplace. And then all those kids behind the counter neither knew nor cared about the product(s) they were selling. Hell, just take the slave wages and run, seems to be the prevailing attitude of the young employed, who are certainly not going to be able to afford the used car and a studio apartment that their elders, the ones touting these slave wages, enjoyed. (Though, by being forced to remain at home, they do have money for binges and dope.) Since then, employers have been able to increase their profit margins at the expense of these expendable employees. And what has been lost, in the broader sense of employer-employee relations has been the concept of loyalty. Screw the employee, screw the employer. The point is, what is the point? To paraphrase Freud, "what do Econo-rats want?" My guess is that beyond the latest fanatical adherence to a sphincter-squeezing method of amassing phantom profit, they have no idea. GS John Elliott: The Evil Face Of Business Make no mistake, John Elliott is an icon for Liberal Party drys. After all, he's the one that got away on a technicality. It cost him, but with his gift of intimidation, no one was game to pursue the issue any further. So when he speaks, he speaks for all Coalition scammers who see the Australian people as pawns in their dreams of being a big shot like him. He must have been pissed when he told all at the ICA luncheon, too pissed to realise the media was there preserving just what he and the Coalition think of us. "A very stupid race of people," he said, just as Jeff Kennett once called us "victims," and John Howard, referred to us as a "mob." Much of what Elliott said was plain gibberish. While noting that Howard was a "shade boring," he said in the next breath that "the Liberal Party always reaches its zenith when it has a Victorian as prime minister." Was that the drink talking, or did he get ahead of himself concerning Jeff Kennett. But his foremost message was that the only thing that matters is the economy, and not "absolutely unimportant issues, the republic, Aborigines [a forgotten people], and drugs." Typical of the blinkered business community, he believes an "economy" resides in a vacuum, without a head, body or heart. People are no more than programmed customers who respond to advertising robotically. Ironically, if, we "stupid voters" hadn't always "voted from the hip pocket," Elliott's coalition would never have risen to the top. GS A new AgePoll reports that Jeff Kennett is the most popular leader in Australia. At a mere 51 years of age, Der Jeff has only to throw his hat in the ring and John Elliott's "stupid voters" will give him their blessing. And when Kennett becomes PM, the party will truly be over. The great Aussie expatriation of the sixties will pale in comparison to the scramble for airfares to intellectual freedom. GS |
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