Budget Schmudget: Let's have a July election
Budget's are what government's plan to do with our money every year. They are either responsible, irresponsible or somewhere in between. They usually benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. If they are good for business, the rest of us complain. If they are good for the rest of us, business complains. No one is ever happy because no government has ever done the right thing by all the people, including businesses big and small. Finally, budgets are a mind numbing bore.
So Peter Costello's vote buying, visionless, six month budget is almost beside the point. What is important is not this government's management or mismanagement of money, but its weltanschauung, or its image of civilisation and the framework by which it relates to that image.
In the case of the John Howard Government, there is no image, no framework and no relationship.
The Liberal Party and much of the media seem to think people are like Pavlov's dogs. Make them cringe and whimper from consistent abuse and then produce a biscuit and watch them wag their tails with love.
But Australians are not going to bite this biscuit. Slowly but surely we are witnessing the reversal of Neo-Liberalism's misinterpretation of individualism and its offspring, globalisation, towards a society rather than a mere economy
People across the political spectrum are expressing a palpable anger, indeed a rage, at John Howard and the Liberal Party he has taken down Margaret Thatcher's tumbleweed-strewn garden path. Empty of heart, the real motivation for human endeavour, and with but a rudimentary abacus replacing an inquiring mind, Howard represents a withered nadir of human potential.
Surely there is someone with power in the Liberal Party who can penetrate the wax-infested ear of this most unfortunate of PMs to encourage him to go early to the polls in order to relieve the anguish of the people he so blithely dismisses. There can be no benefit in waiting until November or December, other than to prolong the agony. The election must be called for July, and just maybe the self-deluded point-scoring the Coalition thinks it has achieved over twisting Stephen Conroy's honest comment on the possibility of raising taxes may do the trick.
The only honourable alternative is to spill Howard in favour of Peter Costello. Not a wise choice, for he is the treasurer of this mean-spirited government. Unlike backflipping John, Costello is much less likely to compromise. While a remnant of heart beats within his Tory chest -- yes, he may say sorry, yes he is a Republican, yes he has routinely distanced himself from recent policy catastrophes -- Australians would do well to stay clear of this man. Thanks to his brother, the Reverend Tim, the inner tensions he must be suffering over the colossal battle between good and evil are enough to warrant his permanent sidelining.
Indeed the whole government should be sidelined. They stepped over the line between a genuine government and being a mere board of directors long ago. The stench of corruption and/or incompetence permeates every nook and cranny of every office of every minister. To consider which of Howard's henchmen is the more repugnant would be almost impossible. For this is the ugliest government in Australian history. Look at them: John Howard himself, Peter Reith, Michael Wooldridge, Philip Ruddock, Tony Abbott, Richard Alston, David Kemp, Alexander Downer, Daryl Williams, John Fahey, Wilson Tuckey, Bronwyn Bishop, Amanda Vanstone, John Anderson, Nick Minchin, Joe Hockey, John Herron, Jocelyn Newman and all the ones you rarely hear from. Together they are a model Kakistocracy: a government formed by the worst citizens.
We all know the Howard Government is gone. We just need them to go.
Vermont Senator saves world from Dubbya
Vermont, USA, the state that has given the world unaffordable maple syrup and the most beautiful autumn leaves anywhere, has produced a stunner to overshadow our own onion-layered battle between Diamond Joe Gutnick and himself vs the Melbourne Mob (cleanskin division).
Maverick senator James Jeffords has defected from Dubbya's fundamentalist Republican Party to become an Independent who intends to vote with the Democrats on most issues. He is the first Republican ever to do so.
Jeffords said, that "the party of Lincoln" he had grown up with had changed and that it no longer represented moderation, tolerance and fiscal responsibility.
Control of the Senate, through the Senate majority leader, now moves from arch conservative Trent Lott to Democrat Liberal Tom Daschle, a man who has heretofore led the opposition to everything George W. Bush stands for.
What this means is that Son of Star Wars, environmental rape, abandonment of Kyoto protocols, rollback of abortion laws, and the right wing stacking of the Supreme Court will be put on hold, perhaps indefinitely. Bush may have to wait for the Congressional elections in 2002 to win back control. But the betting is that by then, his party will lose even more seats.
Thus after only four months of Republican domination of the White House, Senate and House of Representatives -- the first in 50 years -- Dubbya's stranglehold is broken. How fitting for the man who campaigned as a moderate uniter and then, when crowned as the illegitimate president, proceeded to act as a fundamentalist divider.
Is the world looking at a lame duck presidency for the next three years and eight months?
For some of what Jeffers may be saving us from see Gay Alcorn: President Bush goes ballistic.
(Based on an article by Janet Hook (The Age, 25/5/01) and Roy Eccleston (The Oz, 25/5/01.)
Fang Abbott: Cletus without the accent
Like the proverbial washed up pug taking the final blow in an old movie, Tony "Fang" Abbott won't know what hit him come the day after the final election for the Howard government.
Perhaps Fang is really an Umeruhcan, so unable is he to comprehend irony. Perhaps his stint as a boxer loosened his marbles. Indeed, he's always looking this way and that as if he were trying to catch the meaning of what was just said. At times he even makes The Simpson's character, Cletus, the Slack Jawed Yokel, look like pre-selection material.
But while Cletus and Fang share an earnest stupidity, Cletus at least makes us laugh. The same cannot be said for Fang (left).
Like an empty-eyed dog from hell he perseveres with his uni-neuronal tasks as if remote controlled by the Prince of Darkness. While Australia continues to burn from the HIH scandal, with his government steadfastly refusing to call for a Royal Commission, Fang thought he would cleverly sidetrack the nation's outrage by calling for a full judicial inquiry into construction industry corruption.
Switching metaphors yet again, we can see Fang rubbing his hands with the invincible certainty of a little boy whose tummy is full of stolen cookies he just knows mummy will never discover, as he acts on a report a mere two weeks in the making on what amounts to gossip about the beer-and-boilermaker brawls of competing union thugs.
"Look, sir! Look what I've done!" he might have said to his inert boss, the man who destroyed a nation. What glee he must have felt, his little feet dancing from the effort to please, as well as from the satrap's hatred of everyone over whom he has power.
"You'll see, we'll go after the unions and everyone will forget HIH," he enthused, an uncertain smile seeking permanence on some part of his face. Unfortunately, he was greeted by a deafening silence from His Inertness. 'They will, won't they sir?" he pleaded, waiting for a reply.
A minute passed. Then another. Then, another minute. Then ... another minute passed. Then another minute passed. And another. A further minute passed quickly, followed by another minute, when suddenly, a different minute passed, followed by another different minute. And another. And yet another further different minute. A minute passed. Fang glanced at his watch. It was a minute past. This was it. A minute passed. After a moment, another minute passed. Fang waited a minute while a minute passed quickly past. And then, a minute which seemed to last an hour but was only a minute ... passed. *
Having no idea what else to do, Fang continued to stand mutely. Finally, the sound of an elderly man's adolescent, breaking voice rent the air with a squeak: "It's all Andrew Peacock's fault." Fang's head twitched questioningly, like a dog wishing to understand its master, but the roar of emptiness rushed back and the neurasthenic homunculus, enervated even further by his latter-day Rosebud, returned to the state of a marionette at rest. Fang himself crumpled to floor with a clickey-clackey sound, the Prince of Darkness taking ten from boredom.
So. Is the construction industry manned by the pure of heart? Hah! Should their practices be looked into? You bet. But all in the fullness of time. Party political sham indignations aside, lets deal with the crisis at hand. Let's get to the heart of white collar corruption in the big time insurance rackets before dealing with the blue collar variety of the blackjacks-in-a-lunchbox set. Corruption being more fun than sitting in a pew before Pell, no one's going to leave town.
If he is lucky enough to survive the coming devastation, Fang will no doubt act as if nothing happened in his next role as part of the Abbott and Costello team overseeing the demise of yet another party of larval conservatives.
* "A Minute Passed" as transcribed from Monty Python's Previous Record.
HIH: One family's uninvolvement
So John Howard, leader of the Kicking and Screaming Party, has finally called for a Royal Commission into the HIH collapse ... without the slightest conviction, of course. The terms of reference ought to be a hoot. The slightest hedging will cause more of an outcry than if he'd never called for the inquiry in the first place. And he would certainly have done nothing if he could have gotten away with it. His Financial Services Minister, hapless Joe Hockey, still believes it is unimportant. He wonders how a Royal Commission is going to help the people suffering hardships because of the disaster. Tee hee.
Like Swiss Family Robinson and Finn Family Moomintroll, Oz Family Hark wouldn't know an insurance policy from a tree house or a snow cave. Well, almost. To tell the truth, we haven't yet had the guts to dig out our compulsory car insurance policy. Be our luck it's HIH affiliated. Like a lot of folks we always seem to zig when we should have zagged.
(I know I have. Maybe it was the chronic dysentery I endured some years ago that brought on the mind-snapping delusion that the large and colourful biscuit tins full of Nepali rupees I had painstakingly acquired could be easily exchanged when I arrived back in India. Several months of scarfing heavily sugared water buffalo yogurt in Kathmandu (brought on by those triple-papered, tobacco laced cones of hoohah) had done nothing for my business acumen, because I was laughed out of every black market money changing bazaar from Patna to Delhi. "Nepali rupees? They are worth less than the excrement of our chaiwallah. Please, do not make us chortle with exceeding mirth!" was the inevitably jocular reply.)
The only item we have insured is the family car, and that's because we have to. House contents? We tried it for a year when we were flush with Aussie rupees, but then Jeff Kennett was elected, and the extra cash went to paying the suddenly doubled car registrations.
Sadly, we are a one income family. (Yes, folks, HH is a bludger. Hasn't earned so much as one Nepali rupee in untold years.) Thus, like Monty Python's Yorkshiremen, we can only dream of having the benefits that double income families or cunning Liberal Party sympathisers, with their worship of the work ethic, have in spades.
Ambulance Service membership? When the shameful acts of Heil Ruddock and/or Fang Abbott finally give me that heart attack or stroke, I'm afraid I'll have to be transported to the hospital in said family car.
Private Health insurance? When I get to that third world public hospital, I'm afraid I'll have to live on a trolley in the corridor until the second heart attack or stroke hits from a terminal bout of rage at successive government cut backs.
We don't have a hell of a lot to lose, but others do. The collapse of HIH is a good example of the sucker-oriented attitude of the insurance racket in general. Did I say "racket"? Indeed I did. Many years before the rupee wrangle, I answered a newspaper ad from an insurance company. They needed self-starting, go-getting, can-do young people who wanted to earn thousands every month. I attended the three hour training session and found myself on the set of "Glengarry Glen Ross" (a film about the venal world of real estate salesmen). At the first coffee break I fled in the name of the father, the son and the holy ghost, or so it seemed, for such was my desire to escape from evil that it achieved Biblical proportions. In fact, my escape was in the name of all that can be said to be positive about the human race.
This and similar encounters with capitalism's back-brained assault on the unwary, led to a life in which I attempted to play The Fool, with limited success. Marriage, however, caught me on the back foot. Suddenly, that which I had eschewed -- possessions, a permanent roof, responsibility -- became the order of the day. Like The Fool I thought it would be a snap. In reality, my lovely wife has been forced to become a heroine.
Thus, having lived mostly outside the okey-doke of modern life's cash-sapping luxuries thanks to me, we can wake up every morning with the full knowledge that the coronary won't occur because we are about to lose everything owing to an insurer who was too busy having a good time with our pathetic monthly payments to honour the contract.
Unless we have a motor car accident.
The morals of this story are: 1) Marry a man whose head is in the clouds (or up his arse, as has often been brought to my attention) at your own risk; 2) Stuff the insurance rackets and take life as it comes; 4) Join the Liberal Party and earn thousands every month!
NB: Item 3) Get a job, I felt to be ruinous to the flowing prose of the above paragraph. The heroine, as usual, thinks otherwise.
New job ops for paedophiles in Tassie
Tasmania's Risdon Prison is back in the news again after only a few weeks. You may have seen the Four Corners report (7/5/01) on the "failing prison where criminals are mixed with the mentally ill, in which punishment descends to neglect, where the vulnerable are placed among the dangerous, and where too many lives have been lost."
Now Tassie Attorney General Peter Patmore is vigorously defending the right of prison officials to randomly strip search children to prevent prisoners getting drugs. When asked whether this contravened the international rights of the child, Patmore reiterated several times that the visitors had the right to refuse the strip and leave the prison. Just in case we thought Labor politicians couldn't possibly be as evil as Tories, Patmore went on to describe in detail the process in which an 11-month-old baby was divested of its swaddling clothes, hopefully soiled.
Thus, if you're the kind of model citizen who hates drugs (and who just happens to be a paedophile -- but aren't most model citizens?), you'll be packing your bags for Tasmania to work at Risdon prison. There you can thrill to no end of nubile young maidens -- or boys, if you prefer -- who've come to see daddy or mummy in stir. With State Government approval you can take the little darlings into a private room and strip search them to your heart's content. Just recently a premium 12-year-old girl was forced to disrobe and squat for the benefit of her prison guard. Gee, it's just like the good old days in Bosnia and just about everywhere in German occupied Europe.
We don't know if the prison supplies digital camera photographers for instant uploading to the Internet, or what the breathless guard did to the young girl, but you can bet all orifices were probed ... well, just a little, for the prison doesn't want a scandal on its hands, now does it?
And say, it sure beats idly knocking the old baton against your palms while deciding who to beat up at Woomera or Port Hedland, eh? Then again they actually rape the kids there.
Funny they never thought to strip search the prisoners after family visits. But where's the fun in that?
Gutnick v. The Mob (cleanskin division)
Joseph Gutnick, president and so-called saviour of the Melbourne Football Club, has taken on Melbourne's establishment and lost. He resigned shortly before the club's director's moved to dump him.
Joe wanted a trio of lead-souled heavies to depart from the footy board forthwith: Vice Presidents Bill Guest (who was only to happy to give the club away during the merger with Hawthorn fiasco), and Crown Casino Godfather Ian Johnson, along with Jeff Kennett's former state treasurer Alan Stockdale. You just have to admire the feisty Prez's chutzpah.
Stockdale, the man who led the way for John Howard to trash a nation by trashing the state for Jeff Kennett, has complained about Little Joe's autocratic style. Funny, he didn't seem to mind Big Jeff's death-grip on power. Stockers also said it isn't healthy to have a board that won't question the president on occasion. Funny, he never seemed to mind Jeff's contempt for consultation.
We all know, of course, that racism is not the issue here, and that Joseph Gutnick would by now have full access to the Melbourne Club. and women too.
Melburnians (and anyone interested in Aussie Rules) must have a hard time figuring Gutnick out. He is a mining magnate who hates the big end of town. He sank millions into the racist policies of Israel's Bibi Netanyahu, aiding and abetting the strife that threatens to break out in a Middle East war. Yet he has recently backed the Australian Labor Party in the upcoming election because he rightly sees the conservatives as golems run amuck.
In trying to understand Gutnick, his pro-Israeli settlement position must be looked at from the point of view of his ultra-Orthodox Zionism. It is entirely exclusive (blinkered, actually) and appears to disregard Palestinian rights altogether. It would seem to be based on the hubris of the "chosen", of one tribe regarding themselves as superior by edict of "God" over another. If we don't make this allowance for Joseph Gutnick's religious fanaticism, unpalatable as it may be, then he sounds like a schizoid nutter.
Israeli-Palestinian machinations aside, the majority of Christian establishment Demon supporters must regularly break out in a spontaneous reworking of the old hymn, "What a friend we have in not-Jesus-but-Joseph" (sung at a fast clip). Because Joe is ironically a kind of Jesus to the club. He is credited with pledging $2.7m to insure the club's existence after the failed merger with Hawthorn.
In fact, Diamond Joe did not save the Melbourne Football Club. That honour goes to Hawthorn's members, who voted against the merger. But Joe's dough gave the cowardly Demons a breather. That he still owes some $300,000 of the pledge some see as his reason for resigning. This is no doubt what the Establishment would do; it doesn't fit Joe's world view.
Made of finer stuff, Hawthorn's members preferred to sink or swim on their own. And the rest of the team's supporters, including yours truly, Harold Hawk, did jubilate uproariously upon that noble decision and, several years later did champion banners made for the Demons accidental placing in the 2000 Grand Final, to wit: "You wouldn't be here but for us."
In the end we all have to admire Joe's courage for stepping in and giving some heart to his beloved club, cowardly though its members are ... or have I already said that? It was yet another facet of this complicated, passionate man's attitude to life. Grey Establishment types such as Stockdale and Ron Walker no doubt gave a fleeting thought to injecting some of their despair-ridding cash to the club, but only Diamond Joe stood up.
A holdover from the days when Australians in the media tried to sound British, David Flint is the darling of smarmy atavists who wish it were still so.
When Flint was head of the Press Council he seemed to be forever defending freedom of the press while selectively adjudicating against it. He also backed an international code of press ethics which many considered would have the opposite effect. Indeed, the countries pressing for it were those who feared too much reporting of internal strife. Instead of leaving the Press Council for obscurity as a board member of one of Australia's legalised Mafioso corporations, he popped up (at John Howard's request) as the chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Authority.
Shortly after his appointment, Flint found himself chairing the Cash for Comments inquiry into the payola John Laws was getting from the banks to spruik their cause.
So what did ethics-free Dave do? He proceeded to avail himself of a spot on the very same John Laws' show to push the monarchist line in the referendum and respond to comments made about him by Bob Hawke.
Conflict of interest? He wouldn't know a conflict of interest from a bucket of shit.
Rather than facing a damning legal battle he was sure to lose, Flint finally stepped down. But like every reversal his current employer, John Howard, has had to make, Flint did so kicking and screaming.
Now he's stepped forward to take up the baton from the Howard Government's earlier attempts to kill the cross-media ownership laws. Flint actually believes the free market should determine ownership. When Kerry Packer said "it would amuse me to own Fairfax," he did so with the same privileged arrogance that Flint routinely exhibits.
As the head of Australia's radio and television regulator, Flint has blatantly misrepresented a recent report from Bond University's Centre for New Media Research and Education, commissioned by the ABA itself, to claim that the "greatest influence on media is not media owners, nor ratings or circulation" but journalists themselves. In fact, nowhere in the report is this substantiated. Polling of journalists and the community rated media owners and big business as having the greatest influence.
A web site called Dinkum Aussies quaintly refers to Flint as a man "known for his probity and integrity". But nothing could be further from the truth. He is the dummy for Australia's ventriloquist media barons.
Where's Me Tablets!
by Gort Slypesunder
• Word has it that upon their demise in the next election, Liberal Party politicians who don't accept lucrative positions on corporate boards will join forces to form a new political party, tentatively named Louis XVI R Us. Plans are already under way to bless the new party with the traditional Lyons Forum prayer meeting in which poor people, specially selected for their frail appearance, will be sacrificed to snarling, leopard-skin adorned ferals, Peter Reith and Tony Abbott, while other members pay idle or scant attention, except to exchange witty couplets on the pathetic struggles over there somewhere in the corner. Appetites whetted, the XVIers will proceed to the inaugural Versailles Day ball, where each can cross-dress up as their favourite historical toff.
• Rudy Giuliani announces he is divorcing his wife on TV before actually telling her. Newt Gingrich served divorce papers on his wife the day after she had a stroke. Only in America? And only in the Republican party.
• The HIH demise is a gold mine for "haitch" sayers. If only someone would let Dubbya in on this, Australia's last remaining export, the word would take off like humiliation TV all over Umeruhca. It would then follow that those of us who pronounce "h" as a letter instead of a word, would gradually come to say "haitch". Just like the Umeruhcans.
• St Vinnies calls the GST "the worst curse on the poor in 100 years." Aside from the ABC, the papers seem to have neglected this somewhat important appraisal.
• Poor Umeruhca. The Supreme Court, that conservative-infested highest body of the world's greatest rogue state, has followed it's decision to award the presidency to the election's loser by outlawing the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. Can't you just see them making their decisions? After the ritual morning circle jerk, followed as always by a smokefest of illegal Cuban cigars, they don their robes for yet another screening of Reefer Madness to which they all raise fists of indignation while intoning the name of Jeezus-uh Christ-uh, the hapless stand up comedian lookalike whose message they've never understood.
• A new film, The Mummy Returns, has nothing on The Australian economics editor Alan Woods, who rises from his crypt on a regular basis to push the desiccated ideological line of boardroom antisocialism. "To thrive, capitalism needs room to breathe," (The Oz, 15/5/01) is no exception, but the subheading, "The idea of corporate social responsibility poses a threat to free enterprise," sounds like a good first draft to a mantra for Margaret Thatcher's society-free barrens.
• Big Brother. Finally all those conservative prigs who have no life outside of doing all they can to maintain whatever status quo befalls them, have something to live for! A luscious babe taking a shower with her undies on! That's about as good as it gets for these pale replicas of a human being.