The snakes shed their losing skin

Quick post-election round up, and what a skin shedding for the snakes in Canberra has it been.

First up, WorkChoices:

Former workplace relations minister Joe Hockey has come out and said that the WorkChoices legislation went too far and should have been amended prior to the election.

"The problem with WorkChoices was we just went too deep, it was a mistake" - Link

Nice backtrack, but you were prepared to implement them as they stood if you had won the election Joe? You were running for parliament on a platform that you secretly believed was deeply flawed? Hypocritical bastard.

Next up, Aboriginal reconciliation;

Malcolm Turnbull has come out and said that Howard should have apologised to the stolen generation.

"Clearly we should have said sorry then… Unquestionably that was an error I'd say, about a friend, John Howard.” - Link

I’m sure it’s the same on both sides of our politically-centre two-party system, but it does serve as a reminder just how untrustworthy these bastards are. I could easily imagine, in the wake of a Labor defeat, a newly freed Garrett saying he disagreed with the Tassie pulp mill and tried to council Rudd about it. Toe the party line, until it has been proven to fail, then say you believed in the opposite, but were unable to express it.

I trust them as far as I could throw them, which, given the new slimmer Labor team, has just increased a good two feet.

Ding Dong the Witch is Dead!

Well, what a bloody weekend eh? The Howard regime finally falls, and in the most humiliating way possible. I’m betting there is a very regretful little man in Sydney right now asking himself why he didn’t retire twelve months ago.

For the record, a recap on the main outcomes:

• Kevin Rudd is in with a 6% swing towards Labor. I refuse to use a certain natural-event related word to describe the victory out of respect to Mike Rann and his 2006 Rannslide.
• Howard looks very likely to lose his own seat of Bennelong, showing quite clearly that you can never take anything for granted in politics.
  
• Costello has won his seat but has announced he will not run for leadership.
• Malcolm ‘moneybags’ Turnbull has put his hand up to be the next leader of the Liberal party.
• The greens got a good result in the Senate, although it is not clear if they will have enough seats to hold the balance of power.
  

No more arrogant little Johnny, smug little Peter, bruising little Tony and rosy-cheeked little Alex. Now we’ve got smarty-pants Kevin and whiney Julia running the show. Will things be any different? Who knows and who cares at this stage, I’m too busy dancing on the grave of the Howard government.

Politicians Gone Wild

It’s heating up. Two and a half days until we vote and things are getting crazy.

First up, children overboard, for real this time. Right on queue, a boat full of asylum seekers arrives off the coast of WA in a leaky boat. Some of them apparently fell into the water, although it is unclear at this stage the extract number of children who were thrown overboard by negligent, Australian-job-taking terrorists.

Link “The Royal Australian Navy has rescued 16 people, including 10 children, from a sinking boat off the north-west coast of Western Australia.”

This is perfect… for the Labor party. It gives them every opportunity to bring up the opportunism that the Liberals utilised back in 2001 to help them win the election.

Next up, the husband of the Liberal candidate for the marginal seat of Lindsay has been caught distributing fake Labor party leaflets espousing over the top Muslim sympathies and solidarity for the Bali bombers. Classic dirty tricks.

Link “The Liberal Party has expelled two members and notified the Electoral Commission of an incident involving election campaign workers distributing material it says is false and offensive.”

It’s early days for this last story but on the face of it it look pretty bad. My ultra cynical side even half-heartedly suggests it was a Labor stunt. Tony Jones on Lateline was just asking some interesting questions about how the Labor party found out about it. Realistically, it was most likely done by stupidly loyal idiots and not condoned by anyone higher up in the Liberal party than the janitor, but it’s still going to play badly.

Stories like these are sure to capture the imagination of the media and detract from the Howard government’s last minute election message. I reckon it will be a sleepless night at the Liberal party campaign headquarters tonight.

Lateline is such a fucker for the pollies. The minders have been up since 5:30am preparing for a big day of campaign commitments, they’ve fought off eleven interviews and five press conferences and are pretty well bushed by 8pm. Then a scandal breaks. Back in the good old days you’d have until the next morning to get the story straight, but now Tony Jones is calling trying to get a statement and suddenly you need to sober up a scriptwriter and slap a tie on a weary pollie at half past ten at night.

Still, I reckon we should have bi-annual elections. I love this shit.

Democratic Democrats for Democracy

Ok, here are a couple of cheap shots at those champions of democracy who refuse sell their beliefs out to the major parties and dare to dream of an almost certainly impossible senate position.

First up, Senator On-Line. link

These guys are one of the larger of the smaller parties. Their platform is pretty interesting. If one of them gets in, then each time they vote on a bill there will be an online poll on their website and the senator will vote in accordance with the result. Senator On-Line, get it?

Rather unfortunate acronym though. SOL, just like their chances of getting up on Saturday, equates to Shit Outta Luck.

Now I know that us Aussies like a bit of the old hunting and fishing now and again, but has your passion for killing animals every driven you to run for parliament? It must have for some, becase we have not one, but three animal-slaughter related parties on the ballot.

The Fishing Party, the Australian Shooters Party and the Australian Fishing and Lifestyle Party.

Seems there is a bit of rivalry between the three because the AF&LP went and stole the Fishing Party’s website http://www.fishingparty.com.au. The other got relegated to http://www.thefishingparty.info which contains the hilarious link ‘Do you want to be a candidate – enquire’. Not do you want to join the party, but do you want to be a candidate? The Exclusive Brethren this ain't.

Then there’s the Secular Party of Australia with the intriguing slogan ‘Freedom from Religion’. They’ve teamed up with Australia’s own Dr Death, euthanasia advocate Philip Nitschke. Actively campaigning for the death of your supporting voters is an interesting platform to run under. I wonder how often they have to, um, declutter their mailing lists.

Climate change has prompted a couple of new parties. The Conservatives for Climate and Environment party (finally a conservative voice on an issue that requires immediate and unprecedented action) and the Climate Change Coalition which features as a candidate Triple J's Dr Karl (as distinct from TV's Dr Karl, who I'm sure could probably win a lower house seat).

The award for the cheapest website goes to the Non-Custodial Parents Party. Nothing wins my vote faster than MS Word generated, lime green web page complete with unrelated flashing banner ads. Link.

The award for trying to get into the Senate on the back of a Mel Gibson film was a tie between the What Woman Want party and the Mad Max party. Ok, one of those I made up.

Naming seems to be a real problem with these minor parties. With the possible exception of the Socialist Equality Party, they’re all supporters of democracy, yet they still insist in adding that to the name.

This results in the confusing collection of the Liberty & Democracy Party, the Christian Democratic Party, the Democratic Labor Party and of course the Australian Democrats, who I reckon got there first.

And last but not least is Pauline’s United Australia Party. She's at it again. Bless her hate-filled little heart.

McBain IV – Balance of Power

Can you feel it in the air? It’s 5 days until the election, and I’d be lying here if said I'm not as giddy as a six year old counting the sleeps until Christmas. What kind of a leadership are we going to wake up to next Sunday morning?

To say things are not looking good for Johnny is quite an understatement. Consistent polls have the Coalition at a ten point deficit in the two party preferred stats.

The ABC’s site has a cool House of Reps calculator that lets you see what the results would be based on various swings. It also lets you enter in the results of polls taken lately. Using the latest AC Neilsen poll from last Wednesday we see a solid win for Labor, 87 to 61.

What is interesting is that the polling results have been essentially stable for the last five weeks of the election campaign. Pretty much everyone is predicting a Labor win, but that is only half the story, because, as I found out this afternoon, we actually have two houses of parliament, and apparently the other one is where all the action is going to happen.

Quick refresher on the Senate:

• The Upper House of parliament, as opposed to the House of Representatives which controls who forms government.
  
• Senators have a 6 year term, and the election coming up is only for half the Senate positions (6 each state and 2 for ACT, NT).
• State based representation not proportional to population. Which means Tassie’s 400,000 get the same number of senators as NSW’s 6.8 million.
  
• The new senators elected Saturday don’t enter parliament until July next year, except for the NT and ACT ones for some reason.
  
• It’s the big white form with more boxes than a Sudoku puzzle on it.

What was interesting/heartbreaking about the last election was that the Coalition gained control of not only the lower house, but the senate as well. Our lovely and ludicrously complicated democratic system is essentially designed to have a ruling party in the lower house and an oppositional force in the upper house to provide the checks and balances needed for the smooth running of our little southern utopia.

Howard, to his credit, managed to get control of both houses and as such was able to slam through any legislation he pleased. What the Greens and Demos are trying to do this election is to pry back that control and restore the ‘balance of power’. They are doing this by joining forces by way of a mutual preference deal to try and ensure they all don’t have to go and get jobs next July.

It sounds good, but looking at the polls and the current state of the Senate it doesn’t look very likely that the Democrats are going to have much of a showing, especially because all of their team are out at the Senate changeover in July next year (meaning of course that if they win nothing they are finished as a party). There does seem to be significant support for the Greens what with the world about to end due to environmental destruction, but they still only stand to get three or four seats. Depending on how things turn out though, that could be the magic number that will increase the calls from the Lodge significantly over the next few years.

As opposed to the relatively simple House of Reps, the Senate is bloody difficult to predict. The polls don’t seem to delve into the differences in voter's votes between the House and the Senate. If we take it as a given that K-Rudd is going to get in, then we have a few possibilities:

• ALP control: Rudd-slide, workchoices is out quicker than you can say unfair dismissal.
• Lib-Nat control: The ALP won’t get their IR changes through and, according to Julia Gillard Labor will force a Double-Dissolution rather than modify them.
• Green with BoP: Interesting stuff. IR will go though. Australia will get tough on Climate Change and 20,000 lumberjacks in Tassie are out on their arse.
• Family First with BoP: God help us. I’m moving to New Zealand.

Of course those are not the only options. As can be seen by the bed sheet sized ballot paper, it seems like everyone with three mates and a website is running for a senate spot. I’ll have a look at some of the democratic nut-balls in the next post.

Australian Public Servants – Promoted to their level of incompetence

Hi all, I've been a bit busy lately and have been neglecting the blog. So here is a quick run down of everything that is wrong with Australia this week.

Fury after intervention workers 'dig toilet on ceremonial sacred site' - Link

“A gang of five intervention workers arrived in the area, nearly 600 kilometres south-east of Darwin, late last month, and were told by council staff to use toilet and shower facilities at a nearby training centre. … Instead the group dug a long-drop toilet in the middle of the most important ceremonial ground in the region.”

God, if this doesn’t perfectly and hilariously sum up the Intervention, if not the last hundred years of Government involvement in Aboriginal Australia. An ostensibly humanitarian effort to help our black cousins turns out to highlight the complete lack of understanding of their culture and does more harm than good. Here's a radical idea; how about we work with the people we are trying to help instead of treating them like morons who would eat their own children if we didn’t air drop them meat pies?

Brisbane man 'locked up for five years' by Immigration Dept - Link

Lateline last night broke the story of this poor bastard Tony Tran who was locked up in detention for five years (five years!) due to yet another fuck-up by the immigration department. While he was locked up his wife buggered off to Korea with their son, then returned to drop off the kid. The authorities then tried to farm the kid off as an orphan to the South Koreans, despite Tony screaming through the razor wire that he was desperate to be with his son and was, in fact, not here illegally.

How many more stories do we need to hear before we take action on the heartless culture that currently prevails in our immigration system? We treat people like criminals and terrorists instead of human beings and this bias seems to prevent the department even entertaining the thought that they could be in the wrong. The result? Story after story of the absolute criminal treatment of these people.

Case dropped against 'terrorism trainee' - Link

“A Sydney judge has described as "grossly improper and unlawful" the conduct of two ASIO officers who interviewed a former medical student accused of training with a terrorist organisation.”

In the wake of the Haneef fuck-up comes another case of ASIO and the AFP tripping over their own wiretaps to try and convict someone with their shiny new terrorism laws.

Just like Haneef, based on the bloke’s activity he seemed entirely worthy of a bit of ASIO attention, but I think these guys are ducking into to the Drug Squad evidence room a little too often because they completely jumped the gun and went Gestapo on his arse. They essentially kidnapped him and threatened the guy with all sorts of crap before charging him with offences that were immediately thrown out of court.

These are the clowns we just gave a whole lot more power to? More power, incidentally, that includes clauses like being unable to tell anyone if you are picked up and questioned by ASIO (potentially for days), including the media, who would be legally prevented from reporting it anyway. All in the name of protecting us from a largely fictional terrorism threat that these wankers have zero chance of finding out about anyway. Go fear politics.

Why do we put up with this repeated incompetence from our government bodies? It’s all about the prevailing culture of the departments, and that culture is driven from the top down. The Government gets tough on an issue then puts pressure on the departments to get results. The departments act hastily to please the Government and produce the type fuck-up mentioned above.

If only the negligent, ignorant and racist treatment of people in Australia put upward pressure on inflation. Then maybe more people would give a shit.

Alcohol, the drug of the nation

Alcohol really does play a significant role in Australia’s culture. No more prominently than on this very day, Melbourne Cup day: the race that stops a nation, or more accurately, the race that give Australians an excuse to hit the turps during a workday.

What prompted the following examination of our boozy marriage with fermented plant matter was a story I heard this morning on the ABC.

“The country's peak alcohol-awareness group is using the Melbourne Cup to release its election policy, saying the day is proof Australians drink too much.”

I think it’s a little unfair to use today as the measuring point for Australia’s drinking habits. That’s like collecting stats on Valentine's Day and concluding that Australian’s spend $146 Billion annually on flowers and plush toy bears. But the fact remains; we like a drink.

In the world comparisons though we’re nothing to write home about. Up there in the world rankings but by no means in the heavy weight division. Topping the list is Luxembourg, followed by Ireland and Hungary. Those drunkards beat us by almost 50% at times. Also interesting is that our consumption rate is almost identical now to what it was back in the 1960’s.

But when you look at alcohol as just another drug that gets people high, it really is staggering how integrated it is into our society. From where I’m sitting now there are five Bottle Shops within walking distance. Admittedly this is not a fair representation because I moved into this unit based primarily on that vary statistic, but basically, no matter where you live in Australia you don’t have to stagger too far to get soused.

In the common use of the phrase, shut up linguistic Nazis, it begs the question, why is alcohol so accepted when we so vigorously oppose other forms of intoxicaticants? Alcohol is a dangerous and addictive mind altering substance that can causes many social, physical and mental harms. The only difference between it and the many drugs that we systematically vilify is that we’re used to grog and are really quite good at using it.

You might think that I am advocating the legalisation of illegal drugs here, but I’m not. I’m not because we’re not used to those drugs and flooding a society with a drug it’s not used to will most certainly lead to widespread problems. What I do believe is that if you included the social and cultural history that comes along with our alcohol use, you could substitute it with any drug you liked and achieve similar results.

That’s the difference. If a society has a well establish cultural history with a substance then it self regulates the drug’s use and limits the harm. The effects of introducing a substance into a society that has little to no experience with its use can be seen in the problems that Heroin and Ice are causing in our society, and the destruction that Alcohol is causing in Aboriginal Australia.

This drug or that drug is not inherent evil itself, it’s just that we are shit at taking it. For all but the most recently synthesised drugs out there I bet you could find a society somewhere around the world that has been using it for centuries without problems any greater than the ones we have with alcohol.

This is why the so-called ‘tough on drugs’ campaigns inevitably fail. The particular drug de jour is demonised as being the nastiest we have ever faced and is accompanied by all manner of scary facts telling you that one hit/sniff/touch of it will destroy your brain and kill your sister. This, combined with the verifiable fact that most kids our there will try pretty much any drug they can get their hands on, leads to ignorant users trying, and dying from, a drug no more dangerous than good old alcohol.

This is why I like the policy the Greens have developed regarding illegal drugs. While not advocating the legalisation of said drugs, they push a policy of harm minimisation.

“a harm minimisation approach is the best way to reduce the negative effects of drug use and drug regulation.”

“information and education programs should be available to enable informed debate about the effects of all drugs, including prescription, non-prescription, legal and illegal drugs.”

I think this recognises the point I was making above that there is nothing inherently evil about any particular drug; it’s just that we don’t have the knowledge or social base to use it safely. A rational and informed approach to drug use, including alcohol, is the only hope we have of reducing the harm they cause to users and the wider community.

Cheers.

SBS warns that the following post contains coarse language and juvenile themes

Whether we like it or not, religion has influenced and continues to influence almost all aspects of our lives. Our government and judicial system has an English-Christian base; our major holidays celebrate the actions of a fictional holy figure; our suburbs are littered with beautifully designed churches, many, for some reason, covered with imagery of a man being tortured to death.

For those of us who do not believe in an imaginary friend in the sky, the problem is that we continually find ourselves referencing religious themes and icons. No more so than in that most beloved pastime of Australians, swearing.

Jesus Christ, Fucking Hell, For Christ’s sake, and my personal favourite, Jesus Titty Fucking.

Almost all the best ones out there have a religious base. I realise that swearing relies heavily on shock value, and at certain times in history the act of blasphemy was about as shocking as it got without taking your pants off, but still, is it possible to drop the religion in our swears?

The easy answer is just to replace Jesus Christ, God and Hell with fuck, shit and another word that rhymes with Rex Hunt. That works of course, but I think it’s a cheap solution. I think we can be more creative here.

I’ve heard a few sad ones from the militant evolutionists out there along the lines of ‘For the Love of Darwin’ and ‘For Dawkins’s Sake’. But these seem forced, and to me have little chance of catching on.

Another option is to drop the JC bias and invite all the other religions to the table of blue. Try and drown out the Christian influence.

For Allah’s sake? By the many arms of Vishnu? Voodoo Fuck?

Meh. Maybe we should be stick with the shock value base and create our dirty words from the taboos of the day.

Paedophile Pete! Fucking Kiddie Fiddler! Nice ring to those. I think we’re on to something.

But as much as it pains me to say it, I don’t have all the answers here, so I’d like to open the floor. Got any contenders for the secular curse words of the future?