| Australia's Journal of Political Character Assassination | Melbourne, Australia |
SCUM AT THE TOP | Next Issue: 6 Jul 2001 |
| Editor: Harold Hark | Volume 5 Number 11 |
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The Slough of Despond: We're standing in it John Howard wouldn't call a July election, would he? No way. He's not finished degrading this once proud nation beyond all recognition. Besides, even though they put the rest of us to sleep, his narcoleptic comments on commercial radio give him a little thrill. But what good are the next six months going to do for Australia? Even business hates prolonged election campaigns. Who wants to invest in a country whose phoney campaign lasts from February to December, especially when the incumbents are sure to be thrown out? Another reason to be depressed is that, somehow, this is not a foregone conclusion. The Australian Newspoll, published 19 June, says the Coalition is now in the lead. Come again? Who in God's name are they polling? Not only that, but the poll shows John Howard as preferred leader once again. Eh? Evidently the reason for this reconversion are the stats published earlier this month, that we are not in a technical recession. Meanwhile the headlines are starting to pay attention to Heil Ruddock's concentration camps. MP's of both parties visited several camps and were shocked at the conditions. Heil's reaction: They are naïve and suffer from a lack of life experience. John Howard, doing his best to subliminally promote racism, has backed his Minister's condescending conclusion. Are the people surveyed by Newspoll aware that they are backing a government who rejoices in throwing people into hellholes, ostensibly because they failed to register properly, but in reality because they are not white? Are they aware that Australia is gradually being seen as a rival to Radovan Karadzic's Bosnian Serbs? Or do they belong to a third group, that of the apathetic and self-centred? Are the polled further aware that the Howard Government is spending $120 million of their money to fund public relations advertising to promote itself? Have they forgotten the endless string of non-core promises, this being one of the most blatant? Or are they just stupid, or worse, Australian Liberal supporters! When Paul Keating spent $14 million before the 1996 election, John Howard had this to say: "This propaganda blitz will make the electorate feel even more angry. This grubby tactic will backfire on the government. It's time a brake was put on this fraud." Now the so-called propaganda is called promotion. (See Matt Price, The Australian 20/6/01.) And what about a recent Herald Sun poll claiming that almost everybody feels worse off under the GST. Has Newspoll's demographic not heard of the GST? Or do they belong to that privileged group who are actually benefiting from it. But these are not the only reasons to be depressed. A firm believer that a fully functioning civilisation (the Western version, anyway) is based on the availability of 2 ply, non-scented, 300 sheet toilet paper rolls for no more than 50 cents, I must now come to the conclusion that we are indeed in serious decline. Coles, who for several years has supplied this basic item, has pulled them from their shelves. The best on offer at the local supermarkets any more are 280 sheet rolls, and most are scented. In my opinion, people who are prepared to spend gobs of money on scented rolls of toilet paper are the same people who think that squirting deodorant on their unwashed armpits is solving the problem of B.O. In short, the reduction of sheets in toilet paper rolls is symptomatic of a civilisation in decline. I may have lost you on that one, but I know you share my depression when it comes to petrol prices. I've done my sums and Oz Family Hark are paying $50 a month more for petrol than last year. That's $600 a year that we can no longer use to help pay the bills and school fees, forget about weekend holidays. Speaking of which, brings up the most profound cause for my depression. See, the wife has a conference in Holland in a few months time and then one in England. We were going to fly to Paris and make a six week working holiday of it, taking our daughter abroad for the first time. But when faced with John W. Howard's dollar and George W. Bush's existence, the world no longer seems the inviting place it once was. In fact, we are so depressed at the lack of capital to fund this working adventure that we can't be bothered to get up from our chairs to go to the local bottle shop for a cheap bubbly to temporarily relieve the heaviness with a little alcohol induced hilarity. We'll just be reminded upon waking that we are still depressed. I mean, if we're paying over $50 a month more for petrol here, how much is it going to cost in Europe, notoriously higher than anywhere in the world? Well, we'll just have to take public transport. But, checking the internet, Eurorail passes now cost more than twice as much as they did just a few years ago. To tell the truth, we're far too depressed to phone the airline to book the tickets and pack the bags to put in the taxi to drive to the airport to board the plane to fly to the country that Jacques built. We probably won't go. And that thought is the most depressing of all. So here we are, basking in the decline John Howard has set himself so assiduously to achieving since 1996. Except for the top five per cent, no one can really afford to enjoy the fruits of their labour any more. In reaction, people are thinking of nothing else but their hip pocket. So the issues that make for a proud country -- compassion for the poor and the summarily sacked, reconciliation with Aborigines, a life-saving environment policy, education for all instead of just the privileged, hell, you name it -- are completely sidelined. Look around you. Community services have been cut to the bone. In fact, there is no "community" any more. Programs like Safety Houses and Neighbourhood Watch are all but dead. No one has time to volunteer. No one cares. Margaret Thatcher's anti-social individualism of the fittest has conquered. As a result, few are listening. Journalists are preaching to a converted who are too busy or numbed to act. Little blips like SCATT are just pissing in the wind. They are making absolutely no difference. And the deaf ears all this paid and unpaid comment is falling on are shaking with solipsistic dread over the future John Howard has taken from them. They are retreating behind locked doors and digging in for a very nasty time, indeed. Thanks to the plague of rapacious capitalism that appears to be eating the soul of the world, I can't help but think that a recession sounds good compared with the full scale depression that just may be around the corner. The unfettered mania of the free market has led economies to the bursting point, ready, like huge pus-filled carbuncles, to explode into ugly chaos. Corporations are collapsing, small businesses are going bankrupt, workers are routinely being sacked without the respect and entitlements fought for over hundreds of years, and governments are becoming little more than corporate boards of directors for whom ethics, as Pru Goward says, have no place in decisions on who shall have or have not. As it decomposes into a putrefied corpse of black-hearted filth, the Howard Government, whose greatest lie was that it would govern "for all of us", is reaching new lows as the Prime Minister blindly backs one wrongdoing MP after another. Bronwyn Bishop's legendary incompetence is now compounded by her being caught stacking retirement home review boards with cronies, and the venom of Michael "The Viper" Wooldridge towards the AMA and Karen Phelps is getting positively toxic. Like wild man "Fang" Abbott, Wooldridge has lost it completely in his unbridled hatred of everyone with a soul. Is this the kind of government those surveyed by the latest Newspoll want to see perpetuated? The only positive note is that Newspoll almost always gets it wrong. Heil Ruddock: The voice of pure evil You wonder when some journalist is finally going to let go and tell this disgraceful runt just what an evil disgrace he is, and how he so supremely typifies the Australian Liberal Party as hijacked by John Howard. The concentration camps (aka detention centres) are rarely out of the news these days. And even though Mr and Mrs Un-Australian apparently couldn't give a rat's arse, the media is starting to take notice. As well as a swag of bipartisan MP's who made up the 12 member Human Rights Sub-committee that recently toured the major facilities. Their visits have produced a report, the third this year to criticise the camps, labelled "naïve" by the Minister from Hell. Although the MP's, many of whom have visited refugee camps around the world, were shocked by the physical impact of the centre's high fences, double gates, razor and barbed wire, and claimed that prisons were far better places to be, the Minister has encouraged them to get more life experience before they dare to open their mouths again. "The report comes from a group of people who have not put in the hard yards," says Heil, whose face, becoming more and more shrouded by the darkness of his soul, is beginning to resemble a lifeless character out of Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury. I doubt there has been a politician in Australian history who has so lowered the standards of civilised life. Admittedly, he would have flourished under the despotic regimes of Milosevic, Ceaucescu, Mao, Hitler and Stalin, but this is Australia! Does he genuinely hate these people? Or is he just put out because they didn't follow procedure! Let's hope it's the former, because the latter certifies him as utterly insane. For a report on the Federal MPs visit, see Behind the wire by Michael Gordon. Or check it out at The Age Little Lord Downer: Lofty toff puffed after gruelling 12-day tennis tour The fish net stockings Bill Leak loves to put on mimp-faced Alexander Downer actually flatter the politician whose bloated decadence has become so pronounced we can no longer expect him to start mincing and prancing in Parliament like an Oscar Wilde without brains or talent. (Nevertheless, Labor MPs would do well to simply laugh at him every time he rises to speak.) We are sure Leak does not mean to impugn homosexuals, nor do we. Raging queens are most often hilarious. Only the most diehard of homophobes could have remained straight-faced during "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert." Downer is no raging queen. His effeteness is not sexual, coming as it should from the time-honoured descent into wealthy debauchery. No, it's more like an exaggerated dimension of the wheezing degeneration of soul inherent in conceited privilege. Viewers of the "7 Up" series will remember the haughty little boy who, at seven years of age, was so clearly able to dismiss all classes but his own. Contempt for the wretched of the earth literally curled his lips. He grew up to occupy a position similar to that of Alexander Downer's. One in which a condescending phrase like "busted arse countries" -- meant to provoke rabbit-toothed mirth among wealthy peers -- comes with the greatest of ease. And so it is with the greatest revulsion that we read of the vengeance Little Lord Downer has wreaked upon Australia's ambassador to Chile, John Campbell. You see, the hapless dignitary failed to ensure VIP treatment for the Little Lord's entourage, forcing our Minister to lower himself to -- gasp! -- hail a taxi. So stressed was he by this slight that during a ministerial conference the following day, Australia's Representative slipped out for a game of tennis, leaving it to a livery-clad footman to explain to the irritating journalist class that tennis was so very important for building contacts. When it was pointed out that his tennis partner was a staff member, the footman bristled: "It was a packed program and if you are going to make an issue out of one hour, it is hard to see what the issue is." Of course it is. Australian Liberals are immune to the hoi polloi's lowly point of view. Stating that "heads would roll" at the time, LLD now denies that Campbell's sacking was anything more than a routine departmental review over general performance issues. Well, just a half year to go and then the lot of them can be relieved of their stress. After falling like dominoes from Australian Liberal's love of mindless greed, those corporations still around can always employ them to pull perfumed hankies from their sleeves as board members. The beat thuds on 1: Kicking the poor We wrote earlier (Oz to be a penal colony for the poor) of the low-income families who faced Federal Government bills of up to $1000 towards the end of this year because they had failed to correctly estimate their taxable incomes for the financial year beginning July 2000. That figure has been adjusted. It now reads up to $2600. According to Bill Birnbauer (The Age 12/6/01): "Previously, the payment was calculated on a family's fortnightly income. But changes introduced with the GST compensation package last July meant families were paid the allowance based on their estimate of the coming year's income. The benefit is aimed at single-income families or families with one main earner." Thus if the child of a single-parent, or the spouse of the primary breadwinner were to get a job, thus altering the estimate, any earnings over specified amounts would face repayment of benefits. A Centrelink employee, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of Howard Government reprisals, said there would be no amnesty or moratorium. Family and Community Services Minister Amanda 'The Hun" Vanstone was quick to intone the totalitarian mantra: "Taxpayers expect people to be paid what they are entitled to but not a cent more." Unless, of course, it is pay rises for MP's like herself. The beat thuds on 2: Gifts for the poor Mean little MP David Kemp is still holding out on funds for Victorian schoolchildren. Yes, the benefactor of the privileged wants the State government to insure that stickers are placed on new school books identifying them as Howard Government gifts, or else up to $1 million worth of new school books will not be funded. But wait, there's more. Unless Howard Government ministers are invited to pontificate during opening ceremonies of toilet blocks and the like, some $2.5 million in school building funds are also to be withheld. This rift has been going on for nearly two years. It represents a new low in Howard Government hubris and invites comparisons with regimes like that of Ceaucescu in Romania. Meanwhile funding for front page advertisers such as Wesley College continues without any strings attached. Australian Liberal MP's love to snuggle up every night with their stuffed Uncle Joe's and dream of new ways to implement his sterling examples of government control. In the news again is the Howard Government's Stalinesque cutting of funds to non-government organisations, beginning in 1997, that speak out against it. Ah yes, the fear of retribution. Knowing that organisations like the Doctors Reform Society or the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations or the Australian Pensioners and Superannuants Federation or the Public Health Association live in fear of saying the wrong thing must give Coalition supporters wet dreams every night of their mean little lives. Sez Con Costa of DRS: "I don't think I've ever seen it this bad. You go to a conference and a lot of groups will say, 'I'm sorry, we'd love to talk about that but we've got federal funding to think about.'" Sez the rep of a large business organisation: "There are some real haters in this Government, with a tendency to play the person rather than the issue, and they do not forget." Sez Pieta Laut of PHA: The Government "simply does not want to hear any alternative voice and then it wonders why it is out of touch." Sez Amanda "The Hun" Vanstone: "The Government only wants notice of press statements in advance and has no right of veto over what groups say." Nevertheless the above organisations have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding because they dared to speak out. Said John Howard in 1995: "Unlike Labor, we will not play favourites ... nor will we victimise those groups in the community who do not support us politically." All this supports HH's hypothesis that while Chinese and Soviet communism were founded on left wing ideals, they swiftly devolved to right wing dictatorships. Mao and Josef Stalin were as right wing as it gets. Kalejs and Pinochet: Age should not protect them What good are laws if the rich, the powerful, and the evil can evade them? On one side of the Pacific Ocean, in Chile, the 85 year-old former dictator General Augusto Pinochet has dodged an order to submit to fingerprinting and mug shots by checking into a hospital complaining of high blood pressure. His doctors claim he has diabetes, recurrent vascular problems and mild dementia. On Australia's side, suspected war criminal Konrad Kalejs was judged by a "young" magistrate (as Stuart Rintoul, The Age 30/5/01, chose to describe her) to be extraditable to Latvia. The Latvian offences brought against him are one count of genocide and one count of war crimes. Kalejs' legal team leapt to their feet, claiming they would appeal all the way to the high court, if necessary. Well, that's what they are paid to do. By the way, just who is paying their bills? While the magistrate's hour long summation was described by Rintoul as "unemotional", the lawyers on the other hand, evoked every emotion in the book. "Mr Kalejs will soon turn 88. He has dementia. He is blind and nearly deaf. He has cancer. He cannot walk unaided. Most significantly, he cannot follow what is happening. He cannot remember the past." The poor old duffers. Of course the survivors of Pinochet's reign of terror and Nazi atrocities may be suffering the same maladies, but somehow we are not meant to feel the same emotions for them. We are meant to feel sorry for the perpetrators, the ones who have thus far escaped justice. Former Victorian Premier, Jeff Kennett, even went so far as to say we should close the books and leave them alone. A case of forward thinking on Jeff's part? We are happy to pursue sex criminals, regardless of advanced age, decades after they committed their crimes against children. Yet somehow, there is a reluctance to pursue those accused of participating in the mass murder of thousands. Of course, Kalejs must be presumed innocent until proven guilty, but there is obviously enough evidence to send him to trial in Latvia. Why, then, is there so much resistance in doing so? Who is funding his legal team? Surely, not Kalejs himself. Legal aid? Of course, that's it! A further by-the-way: Why is Australia regarded as a safe haven for war criminals? Perhaps it's because we do not have laws against genocide. That's right, genocide is not against the law in Australia. The Democrats have tried repeatedly to put a bill before Parliament, but both sides have consistently shoved it aside. Echelon: Wet dream of the Right The American National Security Agency's fave wank, Echelon, is being challenged by a report commissioned by the European Parliament. They've been after Echelon for years, but now they're making it official. Besides invasions of privacy, they claim Echelon is guilty of industrial espionage. A good example of Echelon's capability as reported on The World Today, and which we herewith extrapolate upon, is a conversation such as this: Two mothers on the phone, one describing the school play her child was in as a bomb. We know what she meant, but the goggle-eyed wanker at Echelon headquarters stops playing with himself long enough to hit the button to the FBI, which does an instant background check on both women, finds them to be slightly left because they are fans of The Simpsons, and considers a raid. Using Waco as their model, they fire bomb both dwellings, taking out a couple of city blocks as well, but what the hell. Echelon, which has the ability to monitor millions of e-mails, faxes and telephone calls around the world, has a list of suspect words which it responds to. The list is huge, so click Echelon words here if you want to see them. Everything you do every day is somewhere on that list. For other articles on Echelon see Volume 4 Number 5, or just type the word in Google. Moulin Rouge: Sophomore soporific I don't know about you, but Baz Luhrman's "Strictly Ballroom" gave me the willies. I felt as if I were peeking into a cedar lined box of keepsakes containing unnaturally preserved miniature dolls owned by an old woman whose hair has grown long and stringy, and upon whose chenille covered bed, tucked away in some bayou of insanity, lay dozens of stuffed childhood animals, all seeking to anthropomorphise into Chucky. The dolls and/or stuffed animals came alive in Ballroom. There were moments when I thought I would howl from the sheer horror as the animated mannequins cavorted. They seemed to exist in not only another time, but a time outside the bounds of any reality shared by sane, inquiring people. Like Christian fundamentalists on LSD, they jerked and twirled as if they were evil, grinning marionettes with grotesquely painted rosy cheeks. "Moulin Rouge" is nowhere near as weird, but I had to ask myself -- I think it was during the interminable singing scene atop the elephant: how can such a flashy, bedazzling film be so ... so boring, so unimaginative? Granted, the first 20 minutes were a hoot. Zany cinematic energy and digital wizardry produced lots of laughs, especially when Kylie Minogue appeared as the absinthe fairy. Hopes, indeed, were high. But then, here came Nicole Kidman down the well used rope-or-whatever from the ceiling singing the old MM song. From that point I felt trapped in Luhrman's reprise of that very alien world where people sing songs into each other's faces. At one point someone's mobile phone went off a few rows behind me; I almost cheered for the distraction. I fear this film marks Nicole Kidman's decline as an actress. From "Deep Calm" to this? I felt embarrassed for her. The girl can't dance, she's not very funny, and, as for singing, I hope we are not seeing a new trend in famous actresses trying to make hit songs. God knows, Gwyneth Paltrow's recent effort is enough to make you head for the hills where Telstra maintenance men are never known to roam. Admittedly, Kidman summoned her talent towards the end of the film, trying to give substance to Luhrman's shallow portrayal of love's sweet tragedy. I just hope she's not left with nightmares from being so close for so long to Ewan McGregor's whimpering gob. As for McGregor's writer, I found myself praying for the Duke's assassin to shoot the snivelling wanker. Men who shed too many tears in films are a turn off, don't ask me why. For the rest of the cast, John Leguizamo as Toulouse Lautrec was a caricature totally off the mark, Jacek Koman's narcoleptic Argentinian looked like a Latin serial killer, and Richard Roxburgh's Duke has been done to death by Hollywood. Only Jim Broadbent as Zidler managed to engage, even though his was the umpteenth caricature of the harried entrepreneur. (Personally, I would rather not be reminded of S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall!) Luhrman and Craig Pearce supplied us with nothing less than a high school drama class attempt at dialogue. The use of everyone else's song lyrics to fill in the gaps was clever at best, as was the choreography, which at worst, was like amateur hour on the set of "Father Knows Best". One positive for those who worried that Luhrman would make a mess of the real Moulin Rouge and the decades surrounding its fame: it's so far removed that the French couldn't possibly take umbrage. Any more than they would at George W. Bush eating a croissant for the first time, which is probably yet to happen. Someone should check Luhrman's DNA to make sure he's not an alien. His take on life appears to be gleaned from the odd radio signal picked up in a far away galaxy. Forget all those film critic apologists trying to pass off his vision as "tongue in cheek"; if he is indeed an earthling, then this bloke lives in the madwoman's keepsake box. THUS SPAKE SARA THURSTER Where's Me Tablets! • "Girt by sea" rules! Every national anthem has at least one phrase that cricks the neck from shuddering double takes, but Australia may have the poll topper with girtie. Eccentric and obscure, it is a word that begs for attention and often, in the case of philistines, ridicule. But there is great poetry in the phrase "girt by sea," though it may belong to a bygone era. I say leave it, cherish it and by all means have fun with it. For example, when Jeff Kennett spoke at a posh girls school and encouraged them to have babies to help populate what many of us thought would soon be renamed Gippsland, I used it with glee: "Following the closure of 370 state (plebeian) schools in Victoria, we can see that Lord Jeffrey Kennett is intent on having his beloved girt-by-sea populated with none but the offspring of girls from the finest families and the best schools." See Schoolgirls to spread their legs "for all of us" • Memo to Herr Ruddock: The more life experience you have, the easier it is to feel compassion for the unfortunate lives routinely degraded by the larval efficiencies of pure evil. • Too bad working Australians don't have the social cohesion to go on a general strike until all workers sacked without entitlements are paid their due. This eternal unawareness of community strength in the endurance of short term pain for long term gain has been a triumph for business and religion -- and humanity's downfall -- since the beginning of time. • We finally have a world leader dumber than Romania's Nicolai Ceaucescu. None other than George W. Bush. Too bad Dubbya is head of the most powerful nation on earth instead of a country best known for it's folk music. In case Australians should begin to feel superior, just remember that our leader, John W. Howard, shares the same middle initial. • My heart bleeds for T2 mums and dads. They should have known better than to fall for Non-Core Magoo's American-style sales pitch, but the shareholder fantasy of an easy buck at the expense of everything they were brought up to believe in is hard to resist. • Pru Goward, frontrunner to fill the shoes of the Right Wing Phillip Adams at Jonathan Shier's ABC, has just confirmed her credentials as the right choice by proclaiming the Mad Thatcher as the world's greatest female role model. "I think the greatest role model in the world is obviously the longest-serving British prime minister," said the former head of the Status of Women. Pru would still hold the job, but for John Howard's view that women don't have much status. And say, speaking of women, isn't Margaret Thatcher a genetic male? |
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