Not Happy Jan!

Every morning I open the newspapers, look at the media on line and switch on my radio. And every day I grow more angry. 

Today I’m angry about being continually lectured to by big business and oligarchical elites about what is good for me and what my obviously distorted, selfish  views and opinions are doing to the Australian economy.

When I last looked we were still a democracy – and that means that as a citizen of this country I and any other ‘sectarian interest group (to quote Tony Shepherd, chair of the Commission of Audit) has a right to voice my disgust, discontent and despair about government policy that is destructive of our whole social fabric.

Why is it, a thinking person might ask, that so many groups who are normally quiet and compliant, are suddenly voicing protest and objection to what is seen as a budget that favours the wealthy and business at the expense of the 20% most disadvantaged in our country?

And why am I supposed to be happy that Tony and his mates will take a 12 months wage freeze, and high wage earners will have a temporary levy impost, while pensioners, students, the unemployed, the chronically ill, struggling families, youth and our most disadvantaged will face real, long term and ongoing cuts to their often marginal standard of living  imposed by a draconian and pernicious budget?

Why is it that when ordinary, everyday people try to tell the story of the projected impact on their lives of this policy, they are met with platitudinous weasel words that look at the ‘average’ and ‘big picture’ that we all know does not tell it all? It reeks of meanness and indifference supported by a PM who thinks it’s OK to wink and smirk as he takes a call from a middle aged grandmother who has had to take on telephone sex work to supplement her pension to the tune of around $85 a week .

Why do I have to adopt a presbyterian austerity approach, to suck it up for the good of everyone, when in fact I am being asked to suck it up so that corporate giants can continue to rip out great profits at the expense of the general public, without taking their fair hit?

I’m over Christopher Pine thinking that he can orchestrate the universe to conform with his perverse nihilism (sic  instructing the speaker of the house to raise to her feet to stifle debate), and the vipertude he speaks when describing those who dare voice their disagreement with his views and political opinions. I’m sick of the self-satisfied supercilious smirk that is his trade mark response to anything he disdains, and the assumption that we mere mortals are so far beneath his intellectual standing that we could no more understand what he is saying than dance naked in the streets of Iran. 

Beware of hubris I say.

The fact that a large slab of the general public is in distress at your recent proposals should tell you something – and that something is not that we are stupid, it’s that we are not happy Jan!

Beans in my ears

 In 1964 I recall listening to a song that commenced with the lines:

My mother said not to put beans in my ears.

Pity Tony wasn’t around to learn the lesson as a youngster.

It was originally written to satarise the fact that adults did not listen to children. Its cover in 1996 by Pete Seeger urged LBJ not to put beans in his ears in regard to the Vietnam war and the rising anger of the people. 

I have been left over the past near six months wondering where all the dried beans have gone from the  supermarket and my growing conclusion is that they are bought up by all the politicians who fly in here for parliament.

Increasingly the direct dialogue between the elected and the electorate has closed down as if we had woken from a nightmare into some despotic dystopia.

The current government has decided:

•   there are things they will talk about and things they will not (sic: treatment of refugees seeking      asylum; defence related spending) 
• they can bend and twist the rules to the edge of legality regardless of ethics (When is special access to parliamentarians tied to party membership fees - Oh, isn’t that a political donation?);   
•  their guffaws, misdeeds and corruptions will be glossed over by the mainstream  press;  (Take Christopher Pine’s asides in the house whether words or gestures)
• public servants will be directed not speak in criticism of the policies of the government;
•  that they can they treat the general populous with disdain as though we are just too ignorant to really understand what is going on and have redefined so many words in the lexicon that I am losing count.(When is a levy a tax? What does it mean when Tony says it’s not what he said that is the problem, but what we heard?) I’m sorry Tony but if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then there is no point telling us it is a giraffe. Beware of growing noses and pimples on your tongue.

Through all the angst this is causing me, and just about everyone else I talk to, I have been puzzling about just what is the purpose of government. It seems to me that this mob think it is about money and balancing budgets only. They have forgotten that they have an absolute responsibility to ensure that all people in our society can access a good life in this prosperous country - and that means making policy that ensures fiscal responsibility AND cares for the people. They have forgotten the latter with their mean and despicable imposts on those who can least afford to pay.

The cigar toting, $50 000 Washington dinner for 60 treasurer needs to get his head out of his dark nether regions and walk in the shoes of  some of the people who live so close to the bone from week to week that a $7 co-payment for a trip to the doctor is a choice between eating today or not. This is just cruel policy. And as for suggesting that $7 is no more than two middies of beer or a quarter a pack of cigarettes- that’s just arrogant elitism that suggests all people who are in lesser circumstances than him are there by their own choice and just need a good kick up the bum. 

I note the inclusion of funds for school chaplains in the budget. I have to say, if being schooled in a religious faith delivers the bunch of arrogant, hubristic, oligarchs that are currently in charge, that’s reason enough to eliminate it from the curriculum.

Do I sound angry? You bet I am!

The song I quoted to start this post has an additional line that says: 

You can’t hear the teacher with beans in your ears.

I’m the teacher Tony. Get some cotton buds!

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No ART WORK this week - just too depressed and flaberghasted by government machinations!

Beam me up Scotty

I’m not really a believer in reincarnation, but if I did I would want to come back with better financial and economic nous – oh, and an additional 4 inches so that my height and weight were finally a match.

And, I have to confer that I have not yet received my copy of the national Commission of Audit so that I can write with true authority about the proposal that a select group of business interests are suggesting for our future as a nation. So I am for the moment dependent on the intelligence I can gain from vicarious sources on which to form an opinion. I was tempted to say the intelligence I can get from the local press, but I pulled myself up!

I know Joe Hockey says this is not the budget, but I can’t help but think that the current government has turned on its head the adage: under promise and over deliver.  We have had nothing but daily leaks, tweets, squeaks and psssts about all the possible/likely/expected/anticipated/proposed/ manoeuvres that this government will adopt to create a budget that they can claim will pull us out of a seemingly manufactured crisis.

If you look at what international economists are saying, Australia is in an excellent position. Sure, we need to be secure for the future, but what appears to be happening is scaremongering to prepare us for the bitter pill that Joe will no doubt be delivering to us all in the near future. And  why?  Because having campaigned on the basis that  there was a financial crisis there is an imperative to create one.

I’m appalled at Tony Shepherd’s comments in response to the audit report,  that public servants, many of whom stand to lose their jobs, should not think in terms of my job, but think in terms of my country. Spoken like a true bean counter and every chief financial officer and treasury official I have ever encountered.  I’m sorry, but that’s a bit like telling a homeless person not to worry about sleeping out in the freezing cold with no food because on average people across Australia are in a warm bed and have just had a good lamb roast.  

From my high school economics there are two things you have to do in a budget:

1. Secure an income

2. Spend within your means.

Now, as a country there are a number of ways to secure an income and one of those is to put an appropriate level of tax onto the profits derived by companies from resources that belong to us all – especially those that come out of the ground. I concede there is a need for incentives to invest and make a profit, but there is also an ethical need to return to the country appropriate profits from the minerals and wealth that is being raped from it.

You can also increase you income by reducing spending – not on social welfare and community services, but on needless or badly thought out activity like: buying orange boats to tow back legitimate refugees; purchasing large and expensive fighter planes when drones are probably the way of the future;  ditching the whole notion of paid parental leave; scrapping the counselling hand out to engaged couples;  abandoning the repeal of sensible legislation and the costs that come with it and its associated inquiries; travelling to sporting events and weddings on parliamentary allowances; restricting access to parliamentarians pensions until age 70…. Need I go on?

 Instead what is being bandied about attacks our very livelihood and future. All because Joe Hockey thinks we have been in an age of entitlement. Well, Joe, let me tell you. I have worked for 45 years, making a contribution to our society through my taxes and effort. If in my latter years I need to be supported through health care and services, then I think I have more than paid my dues.

I suspect that come budget night we will have been so battered by the worst case scenarios that whatever is handed down will be received with: At least it could have been worse.

But I’m sorry. That’s just not good enough. 

And don’t get me started on when a levy is not a tax – oh, of course, I remember I have to use the core promise argument.

I have a confession.

Yesterday I was polled!

Question: Does that mean I will have to change the name of my blog?

  

Answer: No.  I just have to insert some UWS’s (Understood Abbot Words).

Just like he said: We will stop (telling you about) the boats

My blog will now say:   Nobody polls me (about the particular matters I wish to comment on at this point in time)

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Art Work of the week

I've been knitting beanies for Beaniefest in Alice Springs. One of my friends suggests that if Joe makes me work until I am 70, that this can be my new job. That will get me less than $7 a hour, before tax and before GST.   Do you reckon I can live on that Joe?

 

 

Knitting a one eyed view

I have been out of action for the past week fighting off the flu and recovering from eye surgery. I’ve been accused of being a one eyed leftie Collingwood supporter, but I have to say that being a Libran that is a hard act to juggle. I think I am unfairly accused – passionate: yes; myopic: not from where I  am looking. 

The upshot of my acquired afflictions has been a return to the knitting needles and binging on Season two of House of Cards.

The first activity has taken inspiration from the forthcoming Beaniefest in Alice Springs, the yarn bombing being prepared to commemorate the anniversary of the release of the Beatles Yellow Submarine, and a friend request for a tea cosy to accompanying their travels around the country. As a result I now have: a ‘ To the moon and back’ beanie and a ‘blast off’ tea cosy; the plans to knit a yellow submarine; and knitted caravan to go on top of the grey nomad teapot.

The second activity of living in Kevin Spacey’s world as the American Vice-President  may in fact be clouding my judgement about Barry O’Farrell and the 1959 Grange caper.  If Barry had watched the series he would have known that politics is duplicitous, cut throat, treacherous, deceitful, dishonest and unfaithful. He would know you can trust no one, you must be enormously narcissistic and ambitious and prepared to mow down anyone in your way regardless of the consequences. Even if it comes to literally throwing someone under a train. 

So, given that lens (and I have a new one thanks to the cataract surgery), there are a few questions that I still can’t fathom:

• Why would Barry be so adamant that he had never received a bottle of Grange, that he would remember it if he had, and that it just didn’t exist – especially when it appears he had been asked about it by a journalist some weeks ago?

• Why not say: I was asked about this a few weeks ago, I have conferred with my wife and my staff and none of us can recall such a gift. If I did receive it in those hectic first days in office then I have obviously forgotten about it?

• If he knew in advance that there was a question about a bottle of Grange, why didn’t Barry just call his mate Nick and ask him whether he had indeed sent such a gift if Barry couldn’t recall it himself?

• Did Barry think that his mate would not provide the handwritten note of thanks to ICAC?

• Why did Barry not record the Grange on the gift register

• Do new Premiers get so many congratulations gifts that they forget what they got?

Tony has been quick to defend his good, honest bloke, state colleague in a gesture that reminds me of the protests made by many bosses in the early days of the NSW Royal Commission into accusations of child abuse by teachers and child care workers.

If Barry O’ Farrell has some medical condition that results in memory loss then I feel sorry for him . But what comes across is an arrogant, self assured, definitive denial one day, and the next an: oops sorry, I forgot, and you obviously have a piece of paper with my signature on it.

Sorry…it just doesn’t add up. 

Or have I been watching too much HBO?

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PS.  Kevin Spacey was born in 1959 too…spooky!

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Art Work of the Week

That caravan I was talking about above

Righteous indignation

I’ve been contemplating why it is so long between blog posts, but I think I have figured it out.

Over the first one hundred days of the current Australian Government there has  something every day that has me in an outrage. I circle newspaper comments with big red loops, grind my pencil under words that nark, draw devil horns and moustaches over seemingly innocuous portraits and send for the thesaurus to find more vituperative words to describe my antipathy. 

There is so much to be infuriated about that I despair I will sever the TV antennae, shred my daily newspaper before I read it, and block all current affairs access on my phone.  I am at risk of becoming a hermit, but I loathe sackcloth and dirt, and really couldn’t grow a post menopausal beard to speak of even if I wished.

I’ve had it with:

·         Inhumane refugee policy

r    Orange lifeboats

·         Lack of transparency

·         Lack of information

·         Cuts to everything

·         Demonising of workers

·         Destruction of the environment

·         Debunking of science, and

·         The general tendency to mendacity and deceit  that tells us we have had it too good and now we need a little Presbyterian austerity, or Catholic penance.

So, I’m taking a well earned emotional break away. I’m off to Rutherglen for a bloody good slurp of the best vintages I can find. 

If I fall of my bike enroute, then someone cover me in righteous indignation and let me sleep it off.

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 ART WORK OF THE WEEK

Nothing is quite like it seems

Detail: Fruit flies.  Acrylic on Canvas