Hanging by a Thread...

G'day Possums,

Ever wanted to know what the Last Days of Pompeii or the Roman Empire were like, or the manic reality of the Berlin Bunker?

Well... we're in it.

The current Ruling Rabble have cunningly, I think given real form to Little Johnnies rather  ill-defined 80's notion of  "relaxed and comfortable".

What was then seen as a nostalgic hankering for the 50's of Ming Menzies  but was in fact an artful illusion of the brutalism inherent in Joh Bjelke-Peterson's paternalistic arrogance of "Don't you worry about that....," a place where the Ruling Rabble could be left free to plunder the nation's wealth for their own and donors benefit and then convince enough of us it was really for our benefit.

With a then recognizable and stable future, the nation's "problems" not being excessive and solvable, with the criminality not being made too obvious, it worked for them.

Since Little Johnnie had lost his seat and taking their cue from "The Tea Party" of right-wing Republicans in America because they were intellectually moribund and suffering policy stagnation, "culture wars", union and ABC bashing, personal vilification and wholesale negativity became the apparatus by which they would implement the corporate world's wish-list via the IPA's 100 point plan and they did so with what appeared all the arrogant confidence in the rightness of their "plan".

Except conditions had changed and as things went belly-up, their confidence was seen more clearly as that of the trickster.

Thinking that Rabid-the-Hun had got-away-with bludgeoning the carbon pricing scheme for their allies in the coal and gas business they then suffered a setback when their promise not to touch medibank was shown to be a lie  and the mess they made of the NBN to satisfy the business interests of The Ugly American was greeted with the derision it so amply deserved.

They were widely being seen as incredibly incompetent but as they still had the support of most of the press their hubris led them to overdo their parliamentary entitlements, a $30,000.00 airfare there, a "chopper- ride" here, booze bills, fornicating with staff, lying about nationality, forgetting the niceties of public disclosure of "gifts"  and pecuniary interests, and attending sports events at public expense happened all too frequently.

People may have thought that Hawke was a narcissist  but he was regarded well because he demonstrated that he really loved his country... this Ruling Rabble has, en masse, only shown concern for themselves and their own well-being .......there's nary a one you could point to and say, they love Australia.

In the midst of IPA promoted climate-denialism and the treasonous actions of Barnyard Joyce and others with the Murray-Darling disaster, the farce of spending millions on pointless Cook cruises and statues and private ventures on the Barrier Reef, there's the madness of an hysterical dream playing out as Scummo, Prime Miniature de Jour, happy-claps his way to oblivion and idiotically nominates an ex Labor President for a very, very marginal seat whilst hypocritically telling the real candidate that bullying will get you nowhere.. mate.... which is precisely the way this faux xtian got his.

Relaxed and comfortable yet?  This is what a perceived truth is in reality.

As the end draws near for this miserable cabal there are still those who haven't understood their reality as Shadd-uppa-ya-Face O' Dwyer has and is shirking her duty and deserting, like Senator Hume: "The coalition has done more to progress the causes of women in the last five years than I think, any govt, in the last 40 ...."

Really? Like opposing female parliamentary quotas,  cutting penalty rates, diminishing maternity leave, buggering the NDIS ...this woman would be more at home in the bunker in Berlin in May '45.

The lies just get bigger and bigger and bigger.

It is all hanging by a thread. Will there be anything salvageable from the wasteland this corrupt rubbish has made for their corporate managers?

Hoo-roo, Petals

Shane 

Portrait 1

G'day Possums,

Back in the 60's German Historian Joachim Fest published his literary portraits titled "The Face of The Third Reich," an important work analysing not only the main protagonistsof the Nazi plan but the functionaries, wives and mothers and the intellectuals who supported this regime and I thought it timely given the recent dog-whistling of the far right and its tacit approval of neo-nazi "demonstrations" to pen a few myself. 

This portrait came from an earlier blog entry from 2016 when I was commenting on works from the Archibald Prize being exhibited in Ballarat with the Title "The Art of Lifting and Leaning"  which came from juxtaposition of the over life-size and cunningly adjacent portraits of Annie Smithers and Josh Frydenberg.  

Smithers is the chef/owner of du Fermier restaurant just up the road from our burrow, in Trentham; and in admirably succinct and honest utterance declared to artist Daniel Butterworth that,  "...the bottom line for her was that all her hard work ends up down the toilet." 

Camillo De Luca: "Polymath"

But no such profundity from Frydenberg. Smugly comfortable, depicted as artfully dishevelled in blue-tied banality, Camillo De Luca's portrait aims in its materials of charcoal and wood with copper frame to indicate this  faux Treasurer's ministerial position of that time, Resources and Energy with a white halo apparently symbolising his outstanding achievements.

Just what these achievements were or are I couldn't think then, and can't now which perhaps, is why as a large work, it seems so small.

Frydenberg, belongs to the Ruling Rabble which is systematically destroying the country's economy and degrading its social contract so effectively that we are becoming a pariah nation. This "rising star" of the Liarbril Party is painted on two sheets of plywood making a square which suitably approximates his ineffable dullness and by being split down the middle it asserts a closer truth of his real aspirations than the artist probably intended. 

Trees, Alice Springs

The rawness of the ply was to signify a work in progress though I think it more roughly indicative of the conceptual abyss and policy vacuum that Frydenberg's rabble are forcing Australia into. That De Luca considers him a Polymath is more cynical than I can bear. This is a person of achievements: utterly minimal. A public functionary flaccidly supporting  the most nasty, brutish, right-wing rabble of faux xtians this land has ever seen including those ex-IPA members who even advocate dismembering the arts and halting any funding; who mutely condones anyone offering frank advice being attacked, sacked or publicly denigrated and on hearing evidence of the only actions of excellence practised by  the Ruling Rabble: their near collective criminality of rorting their entitlements, lets the sounds glide by unheard.

That's pretty much what I wrote then..... and see little reason nearly three years on, to alter it. 

Hoo-roo Petals,

Shane.

Trees, Alice Springs

On Being Lower Than a Snake's Belly.....

Shane burning Trash

G'day Petals,

Well, aren't the chickens coming home to roost for the Ruling Rabble's morally bankrupt country cousins?

First, we were entertained (?) at the very end of 2018 by the would-be "Sugar Daddy",  Andy of the Broad church using taxpayer funds to entertain himself with a younger woman in Honkers and seemingly forgetting to pay the "entertainer", then we had unconfirmed news that Barnyard Joyce was apparently trying to re-populate the outback all by himself whilst fronting a live export meeting with his ex staffer and new son to the tune of $6000.00 of taxpayer's money. Hot on Barnyard's heels came the rumour that he who should remain un-named because he has little to be proud of of, has ignored ones of Truffle's final diktats that staff were not for bedding nor wives for insulting and is allegedly "having it off" with one of his staff. 
And it goes without saying that all three were against SSM,  extolling family virtues and "traditional  marraige"....what hypocrites!

Unintended satire for the Sydney-sider

And now to top it all off, ex Noe Notion ring-in (19 votes) and ex Katter's Kapers loudmouth, Farter  the Fascist, Anning has had the gall to bill the taxpayer $2800 for his flight back from attending a neo-Nazi farce at St. Kilda with 100 other feeble minded thugs and racists. 

Hoping to gain more than the 19 votes a few deluded Deep North peasants awarded him at the last election as a Noe Notion candidate, Farter the Fascist  seems happy to employ any tactic to have his name in front of the public no matter what the context.

A very muted response from Scummo, Prime Miniature du Jour who twisted "multi-cultural" to "migrant" in his pathetic statement and followed with abysmally little comment from any other pollie of conservative bent should give warning that the ground work is being laid for an out and out racist, fear-mongering campaign in the forthcoming election. Hate speech is becoming with this Rabble, acceptable...or as their IPA managers would term it, "Freedom of Speech."  

Their recently appointed political lackey of a Race Discrimination Commissioner, Chin Tan says there's no place in Australia for the "apparent racist" rally organised by the tawdrey members of the far right. There was nothing "apparent " about it!

 All the symbolism of Nazism was fully employed and according to some of the Antifastas, condoned by many of the police there.

Little Johnny the War-Mongering hypocrite won the "Tampa" election on the back of a xenophobic racist refugee scare campaign and it lseems that neo-nazi slogans have become acceptable to this increasingly hard right-wing Ruling Rabble.

All bling.

Fear, dissension and the sowing of confusion is grist to the mill of these incompetent representatives. 

Unable to govern for lack of policy but able to rort the system for their own benefit and with little notice taken of their thieving by the MSM, Australia is reaching a very dark place particularly when the only large and balanced media, The ABC under constant attack and becoming increasingly muted in its coverage of events as a result of politically motivated funding cuts, constant carping criticism for not being right-wing enough to suit this Ruling Rabble and its acolytes and inundated with The Ugly American, Murdoch's mouthpieces.

Cheek by Jowl in Docklands

The culture of this place has changed  and I believe not for the better.

Hoo-roo, Possums,

Shane.