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| More!? More!? |
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>> However, with minimum wages, welfare and Soviet health and education systems,
>> these new arrivals would probably find themselves in an unemployment quagmire,
>> with others chipping in, resentfully, for their health, education and basic
>> subsistence. The real problem (from the point of view of Australians) is welfare, and
socialist-style health and education for the new arrivals. Minimum wages are
not so much of a problem - if the new arrivals couldn't get a job at the
minimum wage (hard to do when you can't even read the 'Highly Flammable - No
Smoking' sign), then they would go hungry until they decided to return to their
own lower-wage countries where they could actually get a job making childrens
toys or whatever. >> Get rid of the government control (which requires being able to quarantine each
>> nation state from the other) and the argument against "open" migration starts
>> to look somewhat wobbly, in my opinion. Agreed, it's having these people step off the boat and put their hands
straight into my pocket that really gets me. Of course there is still the crime issue ...
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| The Killer Whale - Sinking her teeth into people smuggling | |
Most overseas visitors to Australia regard it as a pretty clean place. Garbage
gets picked up, and moved to somewhere out of site and, for most of us, out of
mind. The burden on the taxpayer may be quite high, but at least there is
little unwanted garbage in the streets. And those of us who thought that Amanda (Killer Whale) Vanstone had bitten off
more than she could chew in her new role as Immigration Minister can relax. She
seems to have taken this trend to heart in removing Australia's latest unwanted
arrivals - some 14 Turkish Kurds who landed on retrospectively-excised Melville
Island. These people have now, she claims, been removed to Indonesia. Australia, for many years regarded as the world's human garbage dump, the place
to send the unhealthy human offcuts, the surplus of humanity, the
trouble-makers and those who didn't want to fit in with their local
communities or those simply determined to cause trouble, is over. Australia
it seems, well known for being a net-importer of economic goods, is now going
to be a net-exporter of economic bads - refugees. But it would be very naive to think this hasn't come at a price. Why has
Indonesia, outraged in 2001 at the mere suggestion that 430 rescued Tampees
should be returned to whence they came, suddenly quietly accepted the return of
14 transitees? Well, the odd bribe going in the direction of Indonesian
officials might have something to do with it. Indonesia has been paid to take
them back, and the question on everyone's lips is 'how much?' Naively it might seem that paying Indonesia more than it would have cost to
process them here would be a bad idea, but Killer Whale (unlike most fat chicks) understands the
principle of delayed gratification (giving up something for the short term for
a greater long term benefit). Having 14 angry Kurds running around Indonesia
asking the people smugglers for their money back is a lot better than having
them running around Australia demanding welfare. And with Australia now a full regional sheriff, maybe we could deputize them
with full anti-terror powers before they ask for a refund. That would sort out
the people smugglers once and for all.
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| Out! | |
Pauline's little stint in Her Majesty's Hotel came to an end as her lawyer
finally made a good move. She and fellow One Nationite David Etteridge walked
free from goal this afternoon as their convictions were overturned on appeal. As usual, everyone had their own barrow to push after the decision. Tony
(punch-drunk) Abbot claimed that the outcome proved the legal system worked -
easy for him to say - he didn't spent 10 weeks in prison. The most disgraceful comment came from Chief Justice Paul de
Jersey, the judge who ordered Pauline's release, who said
if they both had experienced trial counsel throughout the process it would have been faster
In other words, she didn't get a flash enough lawyer, so what did she expect? The underlying message is quite clear - if you don't give enough money to the legal
fraternity, don't expect justice. To top it off, Jersey also declared that this " further illustration of the
need for a properly resourced, highly talented, top level team of
prosecutors". Funny - they already have all the resources they need to
convict innocent people, how much more skill does Jersey think they need? Notions like natural justice don't seem to matter much in the Australian legal
system. In fact this whole fiasco has demonstrated that, in reality, the
Australian legal system is not much different to that in any corrupt third
world country: it's all about money, and who you give it to. As for Pauline herself, everyone's wondering whether she will go back into
politics, or settle quietly into public obscurity. Maybe this miscarriage of
justice will give birth to a new political career?
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| Shooting Star | |
Many people would regard becoming Prime Minister as the pinnacle of a
successful career. It's a bit hard to move up from there, and even a move
sideways (like becoming Prime Minister of a different country) can be pretty
tricky. Little Johnny, however is full of big surprises. Having been written
off as a Prime Ministerial impossibility several times during his
not-so-meteoric rise, he now faces a further promotion before his long
anticipated retirement. Johnny is no longer a deputy sheriff - he's now the
real thing. Dubya, the drawling Texan cowboy who brought you Gulf Wars II, the man who
brought down Saddam (though didn't manage to him to justice), the anchorman for
the axes of evil, and the bane of the UN yes-men pronounced that Johnny was a
clever man who had married well (unlike Tony), and that Australia was a full
sheriff. And isn't Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed furious! No such
accolades for the tantrum-throwing, venomous, outraged Jew-bashing Islamic
Caucasian-hater, and he was ropeable. In fairness though, he didn't actually
say that Australia was a terrorist state - he said that Australia would be
perceived as a terrorist state. That is, he plays the same game as
Australia's ABC, insisting that
millions of people have these opinions without actually expressing them
himself. Mahathir is about to retire, and at least expected to go out as Little Johnny's
equal. No amount of wishing was going to get him that star though. He might
have been leader longer than Johnny, and might have overseen a greater average
economic growth, but he's still just the retiring leader of a squalid, corrupt,
poverty-stricken religious cesspool. And his efforts to lock Australia out of
Asian trade are quietly crumbling as Thailand agrees to a bilateral free-trade
agreement with Australia, and others seem likely to follow. The bilateral free-trade agreements are upsetting others too. Bureaucrats
attempting to negotiate global free trade agreements suggest that
bilateral agreements undermine globalization because
they (by definition) discriminate against all countries who are not part of
them. True enough, but what they miss is the fact that eventually there will be
so many ('inefficient') bilateral trade agreements between countries, that
global trade agreements will be just a more efficient way to manage (or not to
manage) the same thing. Global free trade won't seem that scary when you
already have bilateral free-trade agreements with half the countries in the
world. As long as petty bureaucrats don't stuff it up, it'll just happen. The
anti-globalization protesters will wake up one day, and it will be done -
particularly as oversleeping is so easy when you're on the dole. With Dubya about to arrive Australia (presumably to pin
the star on Johnny's chest), Johnny has recalled parliament. Nothing like
rubbing leftist noses in it, and the little waste of tax-payers money is no
worse than any other. The fact that the Greens are going to drag some family
members of Guantanamo bay inmates along (complete with trademark orange
overalls) is just part of the show. But none of that will dull the twinkle in Johnny's eye. After all - he's the
sheriff. And that star is just what he needs to go out in a blaze of glory.
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| "Shape up or ship out" | |
The squishy left is up
in arms over Bob (go-back-to-where-you-came-from) Carr's comments about an
ethnic shooting in Greenacre. It started off as a run-of-the-mill ethnic mass shooting in Sydney's
south-western suburbs. Most of Australians don't really
care about such shootings - as long as they can avoid getting caught in the
cross-fire. Nor is it the kind of thing the left makes much a fuss about,
unless it's to pop up to point out that 'disadvantaged' groups are more likely
to be victims of crime and then quickly slither
away before anyone can point out that such groups are also more likely to be
perpetrators of crime. But Bob Carr had to go and stir up the multicultural hornets
nest by daring to point out the ethnic connection, and said they should
.. obey the law in Australia, or ship out of Australia. We're not going to see,
step-by-step, our civilization dragged back to medieval standards of revenge
cycles. Bob (eyes on Canberra) Carr is following the first rule of sound
leadership: work out what most people are thinking, and say it before they do. Of course the left hopped about looking for a political opportunity
too. Keysar (champion of tolerance) Trad excelled himself by insisting that
there was no connection between the three killings in six separate shootings,
only to be contradicted almost immediately by the NSW Police Minister. Keysar
also claimed that Bob's comments had hurt the Lebanese Community which was
'struggling to recover from the vicious gang rapes in the Bankstown area in
2001'. Anyone listening to Keysar would think that those vicious gang rapes were perpetrated against
the Lebanese Community by outsiders. In fact it was perpetrated by
members of the Lebanese Community against outsiders. Meanwhile the police are still trying to work out whether to investigate
this as a family feud or part of a ethnic gang war. Apparently it's getting
hard to tell the difference.
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| And only 35 years late! | |
The chests of China's communist leaders swelled with pride today as China
joined the space race by blasting one of their own into orbit for the first
time. Clearly they regard their first launching of a manned vehicle, 'Chenzau'
into space as a giant propaganda coup - a feat after all which many more
'advanced nations' have not achieved. Presumably no-one told the Chinese that the space race is over. The winner may
be still in dispute, but they are doing this some 34 years after the US (a
country with less than a quarter of their population) landed a man on the moon.
Most Chinese may still live in poverty and squalor (the cost of having a
government who can only stay in power by keeping them ignorant), but having 1.3
billion Chinese to steal from made raising the money just that little bit
easier. Even more embarrassing for every self-respecting Chinese is the fact that it is
not even their own technology doing it. Their communist sister country, Russia,
sold them the technology in a bargain basement post-communist bankruptcy
fire-sale. The Chinese have done a great job of painting out the Russian
markings on the side and replacing with their own. Clearly the Chinese didn't put two and two together. The only reason the
Russians put the technology up for sale is because they lost the cold-war
against the running imperialist American dogs. Why do the Chinese think that
buying the same technology decades later will help them do so? The answer is that this is for internal consumption. The voices of dissent will
be quietened just that little bit by force-feeding the collectivist instincts
of the population. The Chinese did the same thing with the atomic bomb - a whole
generation of Chinese proudly boasted about developing atomic technology. A
strange thing to do considering it was just done by copying the Americans. Now,
in the 21st century it's space travel. So all of China is holding its collective breath to see if their first
'taikonaut' survives the vacuum of space. And the rest of the world thinks it's
much ado about nothing.
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| The original | |
Some readers unfortunate enough to have small children who insist on the
television being on in mealtimes may have had the added misfortune this evening
of catching Teen Idol - a mass-somatic 'talent' show somewhere between reality
TV and a canned musical. This evening, the little collective of wannabees were singing the INXS
classic "New Sensation". Most of them would be too young to remember INXS
front-man Michael Hutchence sing that song, but if any of them caught the
video-clip, they might have the good grace to hang their heads in shame at
their own performances. Their problem is not so much their lack of talent (though that doesn't seem
to be in great supply), but with the system in which they are working. They
have some kind of weakest link elimination system (the details are not worth
investigating), in which the poorest performer gets the chop in each round. Every soldier who has had the misfortune to become a POW knows the best
strategy to handle this kind of situation: become the gray man. Don't stand
out. Don't make yourself interesting. Don't draw attention to yourself. And most
of all, don't make mistakes! And that's exactly what the Teen Idols do on the show: try desperately to
avoid making mistakes. The result? Self conscious teenagers trying to say on
key, make the right moves, and not miss anything. Some of the audience might have seen Hutchence's performances, but he
didn't care if he made mistakes or not. As a result he may have made some, but
no one noticed in the dynamic and charismatic stage performance that became
INXS. He wasn't being judged by a committee who were about to eliminate him at
a wrong turn. On stage he was his own person, doing what he wanted to,
achieving his own goals, and doing it as wanted to in the way that satisfied
him. The average yobbo singing in the shower would be more entertaining than
these Gray-Idols, desperately trying to be uncharismatic, avoiding standing out
and following the best strategy for surviving in a group by keeping their heads
down. Not one of them is willing to go out on a limb, and do something really
interesting or display real energy because they have seen what happened to
their peers who stood out - they got the chop. Of course when Hutchence wasn't achieving his goals any more and his
popularity began to wane, he hung himself naked on the door of a Sydney Hotel
room, leaving his daughter to be raised by terminal leftie no-hoper Bob
(band-aid) Geldoff. Maybe the Gray-Idols are best off following their collective script, and
then just getting on with their lives.
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| How much rejection can you take? | |
Most Westerner
meat-eaters are in denial about their true carnivorous nature, and like to
disguise the dead animals they eat. Meat is generally purchased and served in a
way as to disguise where it came from. For most squeamish Westerners, the sight
of a dead animal on the plate looking up at them as they eat it is a sure
appetizer killer. Further, the killing of the animal happens out of site, in
slaughterhouses which most people never visit or even have to acknowledge
outside of mad-cow scares or salmonella outbreaks. Every housewife knows that
lamb chops spontaneously appear on the back shelf of Safeway or Coles. Not so for all cultures though. Chewing an eyeball is a special treat for some,
and others insist on the pleasure of cutting the animal's throat facing Mecca
before serving it up for dinner. So 57,000 of the world's dumbest animals at a time get to enjoy a tropical
sea-voyage off to the Middle
East before meal-time on board the Cormo Express. Except that the latest herd didn't get accepted ostensibly due to scabby
mouth disease. The real reason is hard to call - maybe some corrupt petty Saudi bureaucrat didn't
get his bribe and decided to teach the company a lesson, maybe it's payback for
Australia's involvement in the war (as Warren Truss claims), or maybe the sheep
are actually sick. But the result is clear - the sheep have been sailing around
the Persian Gulf unable to find people who want to eat them. Surely the
cruelest cut of all. And everyone has an opinion. In spite of the fact that the animals are not
in Australia and are not owned by Australians, hasn't stopped
people expecting the Australian government to do something
about it. The notion that what goes on outside Australia is really not the
business of the Australian government hasn't caught on, but interfering in the
affairs of the Middle-East is something the government seems pretty keen on
recently. So the fate of the sheep? The government were planning on landing them in
Iraq, but when plans for that
full scale invasion failed, the return-to-sender option was pretty much all
that was left. History rarely repeats, but it does rhyme. In 1939, after sailing around
the world and being rejected by every country, the Jewish passengers on the
St. Louis landed land back where they started, and faced mass slaughter.
50,000 sheep now face the same fate. Hmm, maybe Israel would like to take them?
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| Parliament House | |
Johnny waited until Simon (16%) Crean was in Jakarta before announcing a
big reshuffle in the front benches, indicating that this was the line-up for the
coming election. Kay (weakest-link) Patterson gets dumped from Health because Johnny doesn't
want to have to do the job himself. She was obviously total ineffectual in the
last round of bickering health negotiations with the states but in her new role
in 'Families', she can wring her hands and say 'what about the little
children?' a lot. Little Johnny wants to wind down gracefully to his
retirement, and needs a hard hitter for the next round. So he's rung the bell
and moved Tony (punch-drunk) Abbott into the health portfolio. Phil (cash-for-visas) Ruddock moves into Attorney General. Maybe he'll be
able to do something about all the judges who try to deal themselves back into
the law-making game when it comes to immigration hearings. He's replaced by Amanda (Queen-of-compassion) Vandstone, who waddles into
Immigration and Indigenous Affairs. She is aggressive and generally answers
questions by making the questioner look stupid - a useful skill when taking
criticism over sinking children and cash-for-visas. Richard (still-no-digital-TV) Alston is calling it a day and quitting
politics. His main contribution to politics is making a total fiasco of digital
TV and helping to retain Australia's entrenched media-baron oligopoly. His
'promotional' efforts have delayed digital TV in this country for about a
decade, and having realized that no amount of slithering self-justification or
government money could make this incompetence look like a success, he's decided
to take his parliamentary pension and run. And Wilson (Iron-bar) Tuckey might think about running too, after being
dumped as territory minister for his little ministerial indiscretions. Trying
to use your ministerial powers to influence legal action against your
children is considered in bad taste by many, and even Teflon Johnny got a bit
stinky when that one hit the fan. Iron-bar's departure is a sad blow for the liberals who used his
appointment to demonstrate their disdain of Canberra. What better way to annoy
Canberra's politically correct population than to appoint someone famous
for bashing an Aborigine with an iron bar? Of course it wasn't all bad for the Canberrans - most Canberrans fondly
remember the time that Iron-bar strutted up to a suburban Canberra house in
front of the TV cameras and demanded that the occupant remove the swastika he
had painted on his own garage door. Tuckey and the Canberra Collective found
common ground that day - a deep-seated passion for preventing individualism and
free speech. Free speech, of course, is discouraged in the nation's capital
unless The Collective agrees with the speaker. And Sweet-16%-Simon? After gloating that (unlike Little Johnny) he managed
to tee-up a meeting with Megawati (i-hate-Australians) Sukarnoputri, got
stood up. She canceled the meeting! She doesn't care if the ALP would suck up
to the Indonesians more than the Liberals or not - they ain't gonna win. Her
domestic political interests are better served by being seen to snub yet another
Australian politician. Simon, Simon, you've just been outmaneuvered again.
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| Maddog | |
With ALP policies in short supply, it falls to the intellectual elite to
keep the ideas rolling to promote a 'progressive' socialist economy, and Mark
(Maddog) Latham has risen to the call. Accordingly, he has come out with a
policy: ownership incentive. Admitting that 'Marx got it wrong', Maddog
says that the key to breaking the poverty cycle is acquisition of capital, and
that this can be broken by ownership incentive schemes - having the government
'contribution match' for assets. Details are sketchy, but the pilot scheme would involve 150 people and give
them 3 years to save 1500 dollars, and if they made the target, the government
(that means you, dear tax-payer) would put in an equal amount. It's not clear how the 150 lucky people will be chosen. Friends and family
perhaps? Or some kind of weird Big-Brotherish Australia-wide lottery taken from
the electoral rolls? Would the eligible participants include all Australians,
or would it be means tested? If it were means tested, would the test be on
income or assets? If it were income based, then many
of the participants would already have assets - and so what would be the point?
If it were assets based, then this would effectively mean refusing
someone on a lower income because they were able to save. What is the justice
in refusing to give money to someone on a lower income just because they manage
their money better? It's also not clear what 'savings' means. If maxing out the credit cards on
the last day and putting the cash-advance into the bank qualifies as 'saving',
then the pilot study is bound to be a success! Likewise if holding off on buying a home (and putting the money into the
bank instead of using it to pay off a mortgage) qualifies as 'saving' then the
study will be equally successful. Not so successful though for the taxpayer, who has to pay for this idiocy. Maddog hasn't said how much the taxpayer would pay for such a scheme, but he's
determined not to be a small target going into the next election. He's pretty
well assured of that - even his fellow ALP members are embarrassed by this
proposal. Many idiotic government policies can be polished up to look successful ('if
they only had a little more funding'). This one cannot. It is a
fluffy-dog policy. It sounds good, and uses attractive rhetoric, but as soon as
a concrete proposal emerges, it will be cut away to reveal nothing but fluff. Ownership incentive cannot be created through theft. The best form of ownership
incentive is to let people keep their own money without stealing it through
taxes, regulation and compulsory acquisition. Maddog will have to let this one die a quiet death, or allow his credibility as
shadow treasurer suffer a serious blow. This is just the kind of boost Peter
(Smirky) Costello needs to survive Little Johnny's retirement after the next
election.
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>> Please Sir, I want some more
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| Feedback/Forum |
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- ANON -- Anonymous Coward 2011-12-02
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