..but Sir, the dog ate my homework....

G'day Petals,

it's been I think a watershed week of major events .. none of which auger well for Oz's future.... a future where corruption, bribery and lying will be endemic and the rule of law will only be for those administering it.

Pics are the backyard on a frosty morning.

A chink in the armour of democracy has now widened with the most incompetent health minister (voted by doctors) in 25 years and now a lying, cruel, devious and fascist non-immigration minister, Dodo Dutton being handed a single department to oversee the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, the Australian Border Force and the policy functions of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection. Dodo will have the power to overturn tribunal decisions he doesn't like (which is a lot) and if anything needs investigation he will do it.

What could go wrong with that?  Consider: he thinks refugee advocates should be jailed and he's also not one to back away from incarcerating Australian citizens, too?  A tradition, you might say with ruling rabble immigration ministers going back to Mandy "Il Patrone" Vanstone who cost the taxpayer $4.5 Millions with her wrongful treatment of Vivian Solon and Cornelia Rau.

Bookshelves Brandis was nearly in tears at the "presser" announcing this "super ministry" folly, as he has had his areas of incompetence diminished, losing oversight of our spies at ASIO and the AFP; and unable to really explain why something not broken needs fixing, Prime Miniature, Truffles Turdball re-iterated his cunning survival philosophy of keeping friends close and his enemies much closer by giving Dodo enough rope to eventually hang himself.

The subtext of this is that "Immigration" is now called "Border Protection"  and fear of the Outside and Other, now has it's own department called "Homeland Security".

Orwell would love it and Kafka would appreciate its participants.

A FOI search for the documentation of the $30.000,000.00 "gift" to Foxtel,  allegedly for the promotion of women's sport has found that no documentation exists. Yep, Nought, Nada, zip, Ingen, Puudub, Hi, Aucun, gornit, Ninguna, Egyik sem, Keiner, Nessuna, Dim!

Fi-fi Fifield, the Minister, irresponsible, has refused to be interviewed on the interesting topic of the judicious and transparent use of public money and  also, 1/ Why was it given to a private Ugly-American-Murdoch media body? 2/ What if any were the particular obligations attached to the gift? 3/ Why wasn't it put out to tender? 4/ Why was the cash-strapped ABC not given the taxpayer's money? And finally, 5/ where was Arfah, Da Spv Sinodinas and his brown paper bag when all this was taking place?

Bribery and corruption?

Ahh.... it's what the ruling rabble seem to do best and just about the only thing we can rely on them for!

But gifts to Foxtel are small beer when you can rip-off the public to the tune of $13 Billion.

It is strongly alleged that two major cotton growers are being aided and abetted by the ruling rabble State Government of  NSW and its bureaucrats to steal environmental water in the Murray-Darling basin. We say alleged but there was nothing alleged in the phone message of one bureaucrat's phone call to a lobbyist telling him that he could provide "de-badged" government documents on sensitive water decisions and nothing alleged about the film of high powered pumps working over a river with low levels or the film of a couple of the protagonists attempting to bullshit their way out of their carving up crown land for their private use.

Barnyard Joyce, minister allegedly responsible ( and this is a REAL allegation, that he's a responsible minister) went into hiding and pushed out his deputy to obfuscate a response. But to be fair to Barnyard, he did have a bit on his plate, with his boof-headed side-kick, Matty Mumbles Canavan resigning from cabinet for discovering his dual citizenship.

Notice: not resigning from parliament like the two Greens who recently found a similar fault in their senate candidature status (and pettily and roundly castigated by Truffles as "being sloppy") but only from cabinet where he explained that, in lieu of blaming Labor for his situation, it was his mother's fault!  ( She may have voted Labor back in the 70's) When she decided to become an Italian and signed him up too...and didn't, at age 25, tell him!

Anyone outside Oz, reading the above:  all this is absolutely true!

Our ruling rabble is the most corrupt, venal, hypocritical cabal of neer-do-wells ever to pretend to govern this country, having systematically torn up the social contract, been regressive in dealing with refugees, women, environment, education, indigenous people, and human rights and now they further lower standards of parliamentary behaviour. They are the pits these IPA lickspittles!

Poor fellah, my country.

hoo-roo Possums,

Shane

The mirror's cracked and things are askew...

 

It's Time.

G'day Petals,

most of today's pics are from areas around the route of the present southern sections of the  "Tour de France," The Tarn and Aveyron, taken some four years ago.

Border Farce Commissioner, Roaming Quisling is on leave, being investigated for possibly being a very naughty boy.

Not for the fact that Border Farce incorrectly sent 2 Australian citizens to Christmas Island or that they stuffed up the raid on Victoria, or that journalists personal details were leaked or that the "darknet" is selling Medicare details and police ID online... but into his personal behaviour...Dodo Dutton, allegedly Immigration Minister was a Queensland cop too, so... "nuffin-to-see-'ere?"

As one wit noted, "Brothers-in-Harm?"

Shades of Mandy "Il-Patrone" Vanstone's  appalling ministerial history ... malevolent echoes of the wrongful imprisonment of Cornelia Rau and Vivian Solon. Ms Solon, also an Australian citizen, was wrongly deported to the Philippines in 2001 because immigration officials believed she was an illegal immigrant.

She was later compensated to the tune of $4.5 million.

But Mandy "Il Patrone" still gets to regularly proselytise her right wing political banalities on TV, radio and in the press.

 

The Devil, Death and Eve, Moissac.

Without any irony, a Brit  right-wing think-tank, the Policy Exchange, awarded Truffles Turdball their "Disraeli Prize"  for "...maintaining Australia’s non-discriminatory immigration program..."

Hmmm... that's gotta be up there in relevance to the environmental award to Ozone Hole Hunt!

Chairman of the Ruling Rabble's Climate and Energy Committee, Craig, Kok-Up Kelly announced that renewable energy costs will kill old people because they will not be able to afford to heat themselves this winter. "People will die".. he said, and should have added that, "...their deaths will have nothing to do with our cutting  the pensioners energy supplement," which was put in place by Labor to compensate for the carbon tax.

 

Church, Oradour-sur-Glane

In a moment of genuine humour, failed politician and ex prime-miniature, Tony Rabid-the-Hun, Abbott said after his latest fantastical and egotistical outburst to a small band supporters in what looked to be a beer-hall  that: “The last thing I want to do is be difficult.”

Dominatrix, Bloody Idiot Credlin was in furious support of her best client agreeing; and as the Madam of allegedly the best political brothel in Canberra, also provided sorely needed relief to host, Blot-on-the-Landscape, Bolt by describing (accurately for once), the Ruling Rabble as: “little men with soft, soft backbones, no ticker, no heart and no soul”..... and I don't really think she meant their souls!

Irritated by this dissension taking HIS coal powered limelight in denying climate change and that renewables actually work, Fictions Frydenberg plopped in to observe that Rabid's chewing on Truffles is only going to result in Willy Shortstuff coming out the other end first!

Geez... always blaming Labor!

 

Oradour-sur-Glane

On a positive note, Philip Morris in losing its case has been billed the full cost ( $25 -50 Millions) of their appeal against the plain packaging legislation brought in by then health minister in the Gillard Government, Nicola Roxon which, since implementation, has resulted in dramatic falls in smoker uptake particularly amongst the young and teenagers.

St Cecile's, Albi

Another "own goal" costing business "bigly" by Le Jongleur Roskam's IPA who arguing against the public health interest pushed this appeal.  Geez... they're really bright these Coots-With-Queer-Ideas-From-a-Parallel-Universe: with friends like that, who'd need enemies?

Hoo-roo, Possums

Shane

Mother and Young.

It tolls for thee....

Shane Wincing

G'day Petals,

A  Ms York, Liarbril delegate has said, "....would assume that special needs people would naturally gravitate towards Labor and I know that that's not true" telling the party's federal council that how-to-vote pamphlets should continue to be distributed at polling booths for people with low IQ's, as "they don't all vote Labor". Speaking against a motion to stop the distribution of how-to-vote material at electoral booths, she also said it was important to keep the papers with photographs "for elderly people, for people with low IQ, they don't all vote Labor".

 Proving once again that there's nothing like a misplaced sense of entitlement and superiority to accurately define ones attitude to society and that conservatives are not very bright.

Oohh.. a ruling rabble minion feeling the heat of impending climate doom?

Don Harwin, the energy minister of the NSW Coalition government, has made a dramatic departure from the bulk of his state and federal colleagues by declaring that it was time to move on from the notion of “baseload” power as essential to the reliability of the future grid and underlined the huge gap between right-wing "moderates" looking to embrace new technologies and the Ultra-right conservative Dinosaurs locked into servitude to the fossil fuel lobby and the C19th.

Chair, empty.

This was particularly interesting as his neighbour and federal colleague  in Warringah, Tony, Rabid-the-Hun, Abbott who, acutely feeling a lack of limelight, relevance and that his "mission" of returning Australia to the Dark Ages was incomplete, began yet another tilt at again becoming the worst Prime Minister Australia has ever had.

Lashing out at all around him and delivering his nihilistic "Manifesto" from a sheltered IPA (The Coots-With-Queer-Ideas-From-a-Parallel-Universe) workshop in the Deep North, Rabid declared in a Nayaa-Na, Na-Na, Yaaa moment that not only would he "outlast" his nemesis Truffles Turdball, but also build a new coal-fired power station, make housing more affordable by cutting immigration, ban wind farms, get rid of the clean energy target and build a fleet of nuclear submarines, thereby earning the approval of our biggest Miner, Gina R and other assorted quislings of the dim-witted far right.

His cognitive dissonance is such that he was actually bagging policy he himself had in the past, wrought  and that he courageously (in a "Yes Minister" sense) repeated his Red Peril, Hanson-Lite fantasy agenda at another right-wing think tank, the Cabal of Interminable Stupidity which only served to highlight the Trump-esque delusions of grandeur that are now afflicting Rabid and his cohort of self-serving nation wreckers. His accurate comment that there "....was a pall of despondency over the nation" blithely missed the irony that he, his ruling rabble Liarbril Party, their right-wing think tanks and the Ugly American Murdoch's media are the real cause of the despondency of a nation which is now going backward in every way and at an alarming rate.

Fresh from monstering the Victorian High Court and getting away with it, we now have these far right troglodytes vehemently resisting  any policy response which is socially benign. They will not be satisfied until there is full deregulation and privatisation of all services and that the new feudal system is fully in place.

Do you hear a bell tolling?

Hoo-roo, Possums

Shane