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| Running around like a chicken-less Head | |
The thought of Geoff (The Bruiser) Clark naked is not a pleasant one, but
it was an difficult image to dispell when a leftie magistrate reappointed
him as head of ATSIC - ruling
that the government of
the day had no right to suspend him from the position of ATSIC chairman, since
the action was discriminatory. Geoff
displayed even more sneer than usual when he proclaimed
I'm the chairman of ATSIC. You better believe it.
No problem there - except that ATSIC effectively no longer exists. He may
have donned his old clothes, but the Emperor is butt naked. The Bruiser further
insisted that he was going to 'revive ATSIC'. Huh? With whose money? Both
sides of politics have said that they will disband the organization, so not
even an electoral victory of the True Believers will save
him. The days of squandering nearly a billion dollars a year are over. This kind of denial is, of course, not unknown in the grubby and frequently
farcical world of politics. Joh Bjelke Peterson
refused to resign his position as Queensland Premier, and had to proclaim that
'the National Party is no longer the party that I led in parliament', to save
face [ie - he was still the leader, but everyone was in a different party]. Mikhail Gorbachev went the same way - insisting that he was the leader of
the Union of Soviet Socialist People's Paradise Republics long after the USSR no longer existed. And all over the world, crackpots claim to be the rightful heirs to
monarchies that no longer exist, as those around them giggle silently into
their drinks. It's not just Geoff's organization that has ceased to exist - the entire
ATSIC culture is on the
verge of extinction. The world has simply moved on, and no-one cares. In that
sense he does truly represent the Aboriginal protest
movement.
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