Australian POLITICS

NOTES & QUERIES

One month under the crushing iron heel of socialism, how has your life changed?

Personally, what I’ve most enjoyed is the freedom to watch the TV news without wanting to roar in rage or throw things at the blameless screen.

No more fat car salesmen posing for cheesy shots, no more ABC stooges plumbing the depths of fatuity as they try to defend the indefensible, no more well-padded hosts preaching the ‘privatization-is-good’ mantra, no more brown children in cages.

It’s not so much what we’re seeing these days as what we are no longer forced to see. And that has made all the difference!

• In an idle moment leading up to the May 22 poll, your scribe penned a to-do list for Albo & his cohorts to follow. (Things we’d like to see happen.) Biloela was #1, followed in short order by an end to the Indue card, legislation for a Federal ICAC, and the idiots of the whole submarine mess.
• Three out of four ain’t bad. That poor Tamil family has been put through hell, quite needlessly, just so that Morrison & Dutton could show their more rabid supporters how tough they are. A country may have strong borders without inflicting gratuitous cruelty. Australia has overnight become a slightly better place to live.
• A sizeable crew of obviously dangerous nutters has now left center stage, hopefully never to return. No more will we have to endure the vicious mutterings of Erica Betz, Tim Wilson, George Christensen, Amanda Stoker, Christian Porter, Josh Freudenberg, Craig Kelly, Andrew Laming, and probably a few more I’ve chosen to forget. This should not lead to complacency, as football coaches have been saying since time immemorial. There’s no shortage of one-trick ponies in blue ties whose sole reason for being in government is to transfer public monies into private pockets we just haven’t learned their names yet.
• The Ghost of Gough continues to haunt this fledgling Labor administration, as it has done with every ALP government since the ’70s. Progress, if it is made at all, will be made gradually. Australians generally resist change, and we’re appalled at too much change too quickly. Of central concern to this battered leftie is the number of Labor MPs who list negatively-geared investment properties among their assets. Political life in this country is one long struggle between those who own property and those who would like to. It puzzles me how you can claim to represent the battlers when you’re part of the real estate scam that keeps wage-earners in perpetual poverty. What manner of socialists aspires to be a landlord?
• There’s nothing Albo & the Labor Party can do to save Julian Assange, so it might be better to give up the hand-wringing before we wind up saying something we might regret. Colonies have no business telling their colonial masters how to defend what they perceive to be their interests. Assange was a dead man walking from the moment the world witnessed that dreadful footage of a bunch of white-shirted men being chopped into hamburgers by 50-caliber machine guns bullets, presumably for the unpardonable crime of Loitering While Muslim. Most of us have long suspected the US of such crimes against civilians in foreign lands, but seeing it PROVED was another matter. Many Americans, otherwise quite reasonable & moderate in their views, want the Wikileaks founder punished for showing their country in a bad light. There is absolutely no political upside for Biden if he tries to intervene, and I doubt the US Constitution would allow him to in any case; there’s a world of outrage from all sides if Assange is somehow allowed to walk free. Rien a fair. *Peter Dutton is Opposition leader faute de mieux. The Libs put him in there because it was his turn, and because many of the more likely candidates (Porter, Freudenberg, Tudge) seem to have fallen by the wayside. They tried out both Alexander Downer & Brendan Nelson back in the ’90s, in much the same way & for the same reasons. Where are they now? The storied ex-copper won’t be there by 2025. Not even the most delusional conservative thinks people will vote for a man who frankly terrifies many. The next 1000 days of the Labor government will be intriguing to watch and may at least make a start on giving us back our national sense of decency. A cur like Dutton has no real part to play in any of this. It might be -2 in your backyard, as it is in mine, but the best thing about this and all subsequent weekends is NO MORE CURRIES! Enjoy, folks! 😁