SCUM AT THE TOP

• Gosper and Laws: Unctuosity ²
• Privateers Dehydrate Vics
• Coalition: the Real Pornographers
• Post-It to Philip Ruddock: It's Humanity, Stupid!
• Wrong John Howard
• Family Values and Fascism
• A Nong in the Bush is Worth None in the Hand
• A Family Affair
• Will Little Johnny Put His Finger in the Dyke?

Boolean Baloney: Gosper NEAR Laws

IOC titan, Kevan Gosper, has apparently been cleared of wrongdoing over a family holiday in Salt Lake City. That's good news for the would-be Samaranch, and to celebrate his commitment to ethics he went on the John Laws radio show to talk about it.

Top

Privateers - On the Move in Victoria

Residents of Victoria have come to expect disruptions in the supply of gas and electricity (with water due as an issue directly). After all, the previous Kennett Government sold them all to a mob of privateers. Nothing is owned by the state any more; the private sector has it all. Besides running these essential services for profit and to hell with the consumer, they also have another agenda. Get rid of the unions.

The current dispute at Yallourn is just another confrontation between masters and servants. The trouble Thursday was the temperature. It hit 40 degrees Centigrade (104 Fahrenheit). A regulatory body we the chumps have never heard of before, the National Electricity Market Management Company (NEMMCO) seems to be in charge of our welfare. So what did they do? They rotated unannounced power cut offs of one to two hours to most districts in the state. Intersection lights went off everywhere, and too bad if you were sweating it out on a dialysis machine. Better luck next lifetime.

With a house full of unmoving fans, there was nothing for yours truly to do but repair to the back verandah to listen to Terry Laidler on the Y2K radio...it came in handy after all.

Laidler, who can be irritating at times for reasons beyond the scope of this article, is nothing if not well informed. He is probably a small "l" Liberal, but there never used to be anything wrong with that. At any rate, he laid into the spokesman for NEMMCO, intimating that in the year 2000 there was really no excuse for penalising domestic users of electricity in such an abrupt and arbitrary manner. Laidler's idea was that industry should go first. But that is not the way of privatisation. Big Biz will enjoy continued service, while the rest of us, small business and domestic users, are, let's face it, expendable. They've got us by the curlies on gas, electricity, water, petrol, you name it.

John Thwaites, acting Labor Premier, came on line and did little better. Sounding like an amateur member of the Coalition, he tried to explain away the dispute between management and the unions at Yallourn, the power station that supplies 20 per cent of Victoria's electricity, and which has been idle for 24 days. Caught between a rock and a hard place, he was unable to say what we all know, that the Yallourn Energy management is using the power cuts to make the unions out to be villains. Jeff Kennett would have had no such ethical reluctance. He would have directly blamed the unions.

Callers suggested as much, by a vast majority. This was the way of privatisation, they said. NEMMCO was indeed acting on behalf of the Yallourn bosses to put people against the unions. Laidler suggested a test case in court on the grounds that this was potentially a death sentence for infants, the elderly, and anyone on life support systems.

And then there is Toorak hair salon operator, Lillian Frank, speaking for Larvals everywhere. "I'm very angry," she said. "It's not the money, it's the inconvenience to the people. Thank God hospitals have generators...This wouldn't have happened under Mr Kennett."

You're absolutely right, Lillian. Under Kennett we lost our gas for two weeks, not two hours.

You know you are living in a potential third world country, ably run by corporations for their own interests alone, when this kind of shit happens. You've always expected power outages in places like Delhi; now you can expect them here.

Top

The Real Pornographers

Congratulations to Teenager.com.au for relocating their porn site to the US. As an adult, HH doesn't mind porn in the least, especially a site such as this one. Teenager.com.au would have to rate in the low to middle range of "offensive" porn sites. With little effort the innocent punter could find him or her self in far worse territory.

It would seem then, that Teenager.com has been arbitrarily chosen for a takedown notice. A spokesman for the site said it took them about 30 minutes to relocate to the US, proving the absurdity of the censorship legislation.

The ABA is not known for its wisdom or effectiveness, but to be held to ridicule as they are now is shameful. I suppose for those who work there though, a job is a job. That of course is an attitude shared by scabs and everyday people who did the dirty work for the Nazis.

In fact, the Real Pornographers are the censorious scum in Canberra who lie and disenfranchise in the name of mutual obligation, family values, and other neat slogans to camouflage their hatred of humanity

Here for your information is the takedown page from Teenage.com.au

• A web site operated by Telechat Pty Ltd fell victim to the new Internet Censorship laws on 18th Jan 2000 when the Australian Broadcasting Authority issued takedown notices for four pages of one of its websites, www.teenager.com.au.
• The interim take down notice was addressed to the registered owner of the IP addresses on which the web site resided. Once the take down notices were received the entire website was relocated to the United States.

  A chronology of events follows:

• 18th Jan 2000: Interim Takedown notice received via email from ABA.
• 18th Jan 2000: Web site removed from Australian server and disabled.
• 19th Jan 2000: Web site relocated to US based server and reactivated.
• 20th Jan 2000: Hardcopy notices received from ABA.
• 20th Jan 2000: Email sent to ABA requesting confirmation from ABA that they were happy that the notices had been complied with.
• 27th Jan 2000: Email copies of Final Takedown Notices received from ABA.
• To this date (27th Jan 2000) the ABA have refused to confirm that they are satisfied the notices have been complied with.

Top

Corner Turned On Refugees Thanks To Michael Asims, Hero Of The Year

The xenophobia exhibited by right wing talkback scum is music (ie, jaunty tunes played on a Hammond Organ) to the ears of the Federal Government, itself a grab bag of in-closet white supremacists. So far so good for them. But a lead article in The Age (2 Feb 00) may have changed all that. Jason Koutsoukis reports:

"At first, Michael Asims watched the drama from his office in the Christmas Island casino: hundreds of refugees clamouring to get off a boat anchored offshore.

"Then his conscience took over. 'In moments like this you feel so much compassion, you just have to run to help,' he said.

"The first dinghy he met was carrying six women, several holding young babies. 'One of them just looked at me. She was desperate, and she was carrying this young baby. When I took the baby from her arms, the relief was so great.

"'The baby just froze in my arms. No crying, almost not breathing and all the women were looking at me. I just turned around and waded in to shore.

"'When the mother got to the shore she couldn't take him for a minute, she was so relieved.'"

The article goes on to say that 41 year old Asims, the island's casino resort manager--a job description not usually included among candidates for hero of the year award--spent five hours wading in the bay, unloading the refugees. They came from Iran and Iraq, 206 mostly well dressed men, 36 women and six children. Anyone given to reflection would know that the men have left their families behind to avoid the hardship, and that the women and children must have been truly desperate: heroes all.

So what will Philip Ruddock and Lawsies breakfast alcoholics have to say about them? Will they continue to bitch about queue jumpers? The question is, wouldn't they? In a country of a measly18 million inhabitants, there is surely room for people escaping repressive governments; who knows, if the Larvals stay in power much longer, we may have to start escaping ourselves. (The Sixties saw Aussies leaving in droves, albeit for non-threatening, cultural reasons.) Is this another statement in hyperbolic overdrive from HH? Leave us not forget that people only flee their native countries for reasons of economic or religio-cultural oppression. These people once enjoyed rewarding lives, regardless of their income levels. They may even have been better off than you or I. With the repressove lunacies of Saddam and the Ayatollahs, however, their lives were reduced to cringing servitude (John Howard, eat your heart out). Look cross-eyed at Saddam, even if you're his brother, and you're dead. Iran's religious fundamentalism permits about point-one per cent of the liberal freedoms we enjoy in Australia. It would take the Larvals a long, long time to reduce us to that living hell.

These people are genuine refugees. Only the wilfully mean would conclude that the hardships they have gone through to get here could have originated from greed or the desire to better themselves at the expense of a host nation. It is the same narrow thinking that loves to attack single mothers and welfare cheats, all negligible per cent of them.

One of the lasting indictments on the Howard Government is its willingness to listen to such rabble. Howard himself is little more than a One Nation supporter, and, lest we forget, Pauline Hanson was a Larval to begin with.

Top

A Week Is A Long Time For Wrong John Howard

John Howard really believes that because he won two elections, Australians either like or respect him. Wrong John. In 1996 we got rid of Paul Keating. At your re-election you got less than half the vote and only won by throwing corporate donations into the marginal seats to fool the chumps. Australians who can put two thoughts together to form a third are having to eat your incompetent stupidity. So let's see what you got up to this week.

Top

Federation Address: A Coalition of Family Values and Fascist Ideals

Taking himself oh-so-seriously, Wrong John Howard has "instructed" Arbeit Macht Frei Minister, Peter Reith, "to identify 'remaining obstacles' to family friendly work arrangements." Does this mean installing creches in all workplaces? Reducing the overload of work endured by salary earners, like from 50-plus hours a week to the good old days--pre economic rationalism--of 40? Raising wages?

Of course not. Using the avuncular doublespeak of the times, he wants to combine economic liberalism and social conservatism to produce "a competitive, market-based economy and a compassionate society." Hello, John: these concepts are mutually exclusive. But then he knows that. OR DOES HE? He doesn't folks. He has no bloody idea.

More to the point he wants kiddies to attend school from 9 to 5. Well, it would eliminate his government's requirement to contribute to child-care funding, not that it is doing much now. And it would get the littlies ready for a lifetime of 60-hour workweeks at 40-hour pay. Sounds just like Howard's idea of a "social compact."

Trouble is, teachers, who love their jobs, would be forced to live a normal life. At 5 p.m. they would pack up just like well-paid executives. And no more working at home or at night or on weekends, or coming back to school at night for meetings, parent information sessions or interviews, no more weekend sport or concert practice, no more post-school curriculum meetings, no more after-school preparation or corrections.

Will problems arise from this "modernisation" of school life? Wrong John can always "instruct" somebody to form a new bureaucracy to handle them. After all, bureaucracies flourish when right wing "small governments" get power. The new pencil pushers can work out how to care for the children who get dropped off from 7:30 am so their parents can get to work, and who will be on hand from 5 pm onwards. And they can hire someone to supervise students during class time when teachers must write reports, do homewok preparation, corrections and all above stuff they used to do on their own time. Sounds like fun, John. Think of the new jobs you'll be creating. (These ideas culled from Deirdre Wilmot of Edmonton, Qld, The Australian Letters To The Editor, 1 Feb 00.)

The rest of the Federation address consisted of Howard's mind-numbing platitudes on tax reform, promising it would not be hampered by "transitional issues" like tampons and a million other "transitionals" that will hit the fan imminently.

And, oh yes, the sale of Telstra. Stewart Fist, in his "Crossroads" article, 'Boiling frogs don't feel the heat" (The Australian IT 26 Jan 00) has an interesting comment:

"...if the Australian Government is totally irresponsible and allows Telstra to buy OzEmail and then swap its directory publishing business for a large chunk of Fairfax, this event will certainly shape the Internet, telecommunications and the media for some time into the future.

"The Government will also create a situation where it must sell the remaining 51 per cent of public shares in Telstra or be charged with holding improper influence over a newspaper group for party-political reasons.

"But is this part of a plan? Do I believe in conspiracy theories? Of course not. No good journalist ever gives conspiracy claims a second thought. I'm sure Peter Reith was as surprised as we all were when trouble broke out on the wharves, and journalists universally accept the sincerity of those tobacco executives who declared that nicotine wasn't addictive."

Top

Into the Bush Went the Shrinking Nong

As number one ticket holder in the Larval Party, Our PM duly treated folks in the bush as country bumpkins: promise them anything then stick it to 'em. His lower lip quivering with false sincerity, he "instructed" somebody to look into procedures for the implementation of a program to stop ripping the guts out of regional services.

Having gotten the bumpkin bit out of the way, he got on to his main reason for the little junket: the sale of Telstra. Well, how else is he going to achieve his noble ambition of reversing the trend he started four years ago?

Top

It's All in the Family

Indeed, Our PM's older brother, Stanley, is Chairman of National Textiles, the company who sobbed to its over 300 workers that they should forego wage increases to help the company get out of difficulty--and then sacked them without entitlements, and with barely a hope of receiving 65 percent of the redundancy payments and outstanding leave owed to them. But not before the company's directors concurrently shared an extra $103,000 in pay. Others received grandiose sums as well. Stanley received a measly $50,000, which he claims is "the lowest fee I receive as a chairman of any company." Typical of his kind, Stanley has gone through a series of companies--mostly without success--the way a child goes through icy poles. Photographs show him with the haunted look of a man who has contributed nothing to the evolution of the human race, not unlike his little brother. And that other species, shareholders, don't like him much either.

Top

It's Up to John to Stem the Flow

David Vos, the former head of the committee that recommended the Howard Government tax tampons, has said he has no objection to them being GST-free.

Opposition health spokeswoman, Jenny Macklin promptly said, "If the chair of the committee that sorted through all these issues says he has no problem, then this government must make them GST-free. There's only one person standing in the way now and that's John Howard."

But will Little Johnny have the nerve to do so before February 25, the day of national action by millions of tampon toting women? Quite possibly, because Mr Never-Ever has been here before. The man who always means the opposite of what he says has flipped and flopped so many times that we have all grown blasé about anything he says. Come to think of it, he has such a torporous way of speaking that we tend to drift off to sleep as well.

Top    Next Issue