Trick or Treat

Shane driving the Tumbril

G'day Possums,

Well, it's been a fortnight since the Ruling Rabble had its nose bloodied at the  bye-election stoush in Wentworth and, doing what they do best, have scattered off in all directions, each proclaiming "the truth" of their own personal salvation and thereby the world's but really, all in their personal Tricking or Treating they are just doubling-down and digging deeper into the hole to the oblivion they have created for themselves.

Scummo Morrison, Prime Miniature du jour, ever the faithful but insensitive to reality has decided that Tricking a full frontal assault; a tactic that has won him position at other times, was the strategy to employ. Unfortunately a wider public than a pre-selection panel of dubious ken were little impressed with his shilly-shallying over churchmen wanting to have "the right" to sack gay teachers from their schools particularly as it came not long after he offered an apology in parliament to victims of sexual abuse by similar churchmen. Rightly heckled by some of the gathering for his Pentacostalist  hypocrisy in voting against this Royal Commission he had to chagrin and bear it as the RC's originator, Julia Gillard was warmly received by the same congregation and in front of those "xtians" who did most to revile her during her Prime Ministership.

Big Red Gillard having also been presented with her PM portrait had a Treat spending time with parliamentary cleaners and having photographs taken  showing  judgment and grace in only briefly accepting the cynical congratulations of her misogynistic foe, Rabid-the-Hun whom she left like a stranded Goldfish till she was ready for him.

Full moon.

Bronnie Chopper Bishop got her Speakers portrait in parliament house, too…memorialising a life of service to herself and her Ruling Rabble.

Her claims to fame were that she made Kerosene the de rigueur medical treatment for the elderly in nursing homes... which is almost as notable as her overtly biased rulings and throwing only Labor pollies “out of the house” when Speaker!

Chopper’s portrait is rumoured to have bullet-proof glass and to be easily cleaned of spittle.

"We'll go the full course," bellowed Scummo, smugly (...as some wit likened him to the Captain of the Titanic explaining to the passengers that he had only stopped to take on ice...) as more of his crew fell into formation with their Tricks as their life preservers.

Dan, Minister for Everything, Tehan proved he had imbibed Orwell's "1984" by announcing his support of the previous un-education minister, Simple Simon Birmingham's Fatwah of ministerial prerogative in what academics are allowed to research.  Preaching that if it wasn't in "the National Interest" the research wouldn't get a grant and to that end he has instituted a "Ministry of Middle-Class Banality and Truthiness and Relevance."  "We want to make sure that what the academics put forward as part of their research proposals will benefit Australia over the coming years," Mr Tehan said. Research like: "How to Clean Coal for Opera House Sails Advertising", "The Problems Posed by Female Influence in the Liberal Party",  "Ten variations of the Sieg Heil Salute for Young Nationals in The Deep North",  "Are relaxed Gun Laws Just the Shot?" and "Why is, David Loopy, Leyonhjelm?" Research shall be presented in 25 words or less and they shall be no more than two syllables each and in large print without distracting serifs, with explanations and definitions for Senators McDonald, Abetz, Leyonhjelm.... and a picture version, in colour, for The Red Terror, Hanson!

 

Warped View

David, Patterson's Curse, Littleproud  Minister Land-clearing and Sheep Slaughter has provided a perfect demonstration of Ruling Rabble operational tactics by loquaciously reversing the cuts made by his lush  predecessor Barnyard Joyce to live sheep trade operations by  instituting an independent oversight officer who will busily make sure that nothing will change.

 

Warped View 2

Treating, as a result of the Wentworth slaughter, Craig Boozer Laundy and Julia I-Could-Live-On-$40.00-A-Day, Banks have both made offerings to the national discourse.

Boozer has decided that his colleagues are too much in the thrall of geriatric right-wing shock jocks with predilections for London Toilet Trolling and have lost the concept of being a leaders and prefer to be led by the nose to the fringes of relevance.

Their silence was deafening.

I-Could-Live-On-$40.00-A-Day, Banks has decided that the trauma of being bullied by her Ruling Rabble colleagues was so severe that she is considering standing as an independent. Which in other situations might be called masochism. 

If Banks does contest, she will be standing against the woman who engineered her narrow victory with a Chinese language dis-information campaign...

 那會很有趣

 
The Sleep of Reason

Interesting how these two have found their Road to Damascus, redemption as they stare into the abyss...

Hoo-roo Petals,

Shane.

Roll Up, Roll Up, Roll Up…

Shane in King Valley

G’day Possums,

Mrs Wombat and I took a little sojourn to the King Valley so the pics are from there but the dog is for a sculpture so they have nought to do with the content.

Wow, what a fortnight…. the circus is in town!

In topping off his exposition as how his grand project of creating concentration camps for genuine refugees was really a good thing, (as only those who understood knew), the cadaver looking for a corpse, Senator ”Fallujah” Molan positively revelled in his shallow justification of bureaucratic cruelty dressed up as strength on QandA last week.

Around the same time one of the ex Major General’s “finest”, ex SAS captain and now Ruling Rabble member, Handy-Andy Hastie was dumping on his leader Truffles Turdball by telling all and sundry that Chinese born businessman Chau Chak Wing was a threat to our Never-Never Ozland of Pretend Democracy. Handy-Andy, who was investigated and exonerated (cough, cough) for allegedly allowing his troops to sever hands of Afghan dead as trophies (he never inhaled) and who thumbed his nose at the military hierarchy by utilising his uniform in his political advertising may well be suffering a sort of pay-back. It seems a secret report into SAS brutality has been leaked and there are calls for investigations to be widened and also for the findings to be made public. Given Handy-Andy’s exhibited propensity for arrogance this enquiry may have interesting ramifications for his political career.

Feelin' The Serenity, near Moyhu

An implosion of another sort took place too… Noe Notion’s President for Life, The Red Terror, Apoorlin Hamstrung contorted her visage and spat fury at any media she could find after another of her “party” broke ranks and defied her fiats on Ruling Rabble policy. Reprising all the anguish, anger and vileness that historically she is made of The Red Terror presented, perhaps too graphically, a fine illustration of the abject stupidity of some 10-12 % of the electorate. It is interesting to note that Section 44 offender, The Malfunctioning Mal-Addled Roberts famous for his 77 senate votes and marginal grasp of reality has again recently been polluting screens and air-waves with his mindless meanderings and musings almost as if he knew that a dumping was on the cards and that he had “the-sit” for a possible return as scourge of our political life.

Fortunately, a further diminution of the senate’s IQ scale has not, as yet, taken place.

Feelin' The Serenity- King Valley

Demonstrating just why the commercial networks hate the ABC, Chunder Seven put on The Barnyard and Floozie pantomime in a serious attempt at exploiting the “couple’s” newly discovered relevance deprivation syndrome.

At $150,000.00, allegedly for the “grey area” sprog’s education, Barnyard and Floozie individually gave evidence to an inept interviewer as to why our political system in such a parlous state.

Barnyard, with no hint of shame, told that he only went into his section44 bye-election “out of spite” knowing that he would lose his Deputy PM position as soon as his affair was known, and that his fellow Hayseed Party members were “..the absolute scum of the earth.”

For her part, the Floozie showed no interest in the dog’s dinner she was making with this Panto and had nought to say as to how much more talent she brought as media adviser to three ministers, or was paid or whether the affair and its travel were at taxpayer expense….although its existence was perhaps a role model for the insinuation advertised against Barnyard’s potential electoral nemesis, that Tony Windsor was “doing-the-rounds!”

She was certain though, that she was the ‘adult” in the room, contradicting Barnyard when he asserted that he was, thus leaving the viewers with the impression that neither were.

Of course there was no mention of his ministerial disasters: the Murray/Darling, the live sheep trade, and the shifting of the Ag Dept, his fortuitous land purchases , his religious hypocrisy, the expense accounts etc... that could all be left to the ABC to explore... to then be criticised as left-leaning!

It is gratifying to report that the Chunder 7 Panto “bombed.”

Feelin' The Serenity, Bonnie Doon

Then in senate estimates up popped the clown from the south Vichy Abetz who language mangled an attempt to have a DFAT mandarin agree with his assertion that Xtianity is the most persecuted religion on earth. The mandarin treated Vichy with requisite kindness by not pointing out that historically, Vichy’s family “has form” in the religious persecution stakes and that 65% of the population ignoring religion is not a measure of persecution but simply sanity preservation.

It seems that Vichy’s distraction might be either a preemptive “sounding” for the results of the enquiry into religious “freedoms” which will soon be announced or a cover for his colleague The Harpy Cash whom the AFP are taking an interest in but either way, anything this Ruling Rabble indicates an interest in, is doomed!

Feelin' The Serenity, Bonnie Doon2

Playing the Pipe Organ in the back row of this circus were the Neo-Feudalists of The-Coot’s-With-Queer-Ideas-From-a-Parallel-Universe, aka the IPA. Fronted in one instance by the overly loquacious but vacuous, Simon The Simple Breheny and in the other by Bunter Berg, these intellectually pre-adolescent libertarians babbled along in the background that denying donors to university courses selecting their own paths and lecturers, a denial of free speech and that taxing the rich was akin to the oppression of racism.

They did!

Full, as usual, of straw-man arguments, these contraversialists of limited depth have also been banging the drum louder on the selling off of the one serious news source, the ABC.

How do they fit into a democratic state...like Quisling did in Norway!

Hoo-roo petals,

Shane

Feelin' The Serenity, Nillacootie

All at Sea.

Shane w/ Mt Gambier stone

G'day Possums,

goodness, it's been a silent month….but as the pic testify's, work was afoot.

What started as "…let's replace the carpet," progressed to.... "Well, I could re-align that wall upstairs…take that door around the corner… and what if…..?

And, so it went:  new doors,  ditch architraves and re-introduce stone., necessitating a trip to Mt Gambier to purchase more….. and although Mt Gambier might not be the centre of the universe, their Sorrento Café could well be… excellent food, affable staff and good service .. it's more than a café.  Breakfast to dinner.

Lower a ceiling, and do an almost full re-paint….re-line new walls with limed ply and re-discover what the place was about when originally designed. 

Exciting… and debilitating in a dirty, dusty space.

There was a time when Shane Wombat got a little depressed throwing away so much photographic and drawing history (mostly repeated stuff)  and storing more, till he felt he had no existence or space to live in that he knew at all.

But eventually it was, bar some minor little bits, done!

 All of which meant that a break was necessary and with a significant anniversary due..  it was off to Apollo Bay for a couple of days to re-calibrate, celebrate, relax and where the images and the current political malaise seemed to coincide.

Selfie Absorption.

Acting as a simpering apologist for a failed would-be governing body, today Fiction's Frydenberg's whole speech at the National Press Club was, without him being aware of it, a damning critique of the so-called "free market" and an expose' of the ludicrousness of a fragmented privatised energy market over which any government has little control: particularly this incompetent and divided cabal of a ruling rabble.

In a pathetic attempt to blame all and sundry for the disintegrating power system other than their own ideological ineptitude in recognizing the future, he recalled the tired old shibboleths of …blame labor …. blame their carbon tax… even though it would still have traction economically.

Poor Fictions… it's hard to understand that he really, really  believes the bullshit he coughs up!

 

Detritus.

The Red Terror of the Deep North, Appalling Hanson, managed to depress her low standing even further by targeting the winning Indian air-pistol competitors at the Commonwealth Games and calling them  Muslims…. they were all Hindi… and then jibing along the lines of:  "No wonder they won, shooting is a lot of what they do…..", to cement her stupidity. 
The limited intelligence from Ipswich then decided that there had been too much indigenous activity in the opening ceremony, which was to her feeble understanding, "outrageous" and besides,  "I'm indigenous, too!" she flatulated.

 

Uneasy Lies the Head...

Great uncle Otto's boy, Vichy Abetz has joined a with few others of similarly limited imagination, Cap'n Catlic Andrews, Rabid-the-Hun, Barnyard Joyce and Craig, Crackers Kelly to form the frivolously called Monash Forum.

Geese and Scavengers

 Named after General Sir John Monash of WW1 fame and later a significant consolidator of disparate private electricity companies to create the successful and profitably large employer, the  State Electricity Commission of Victoria….........until ex-premier and fellow ruling rabble Neanderthal Bovver-Boy, Foot-in-Mouth Kennett privatised it and sold it to the Malaysian Government and buggered supply and distribution costs to all Victorians.

 

...nuff said!

Vichy obviously wasn't told either, that Monash was a Jew;  one of those his great Uncle Otto sent from France in 1944 to the Nazi gas-ovens; and Barnyard also doesn't ken that Monash created wealth for the state: not, as he has done with the Murray/Darling and the Pesticides Authority of Dept of Agriculture, destroyed things.

Rabid-the-Hun demonstrated his commitment to this pathetic cabal by organizing a bike ride circling back to the future, past a coal fired power station demonstrating C19th technology.

As for Cap'n Catlic and Crackers? Their unreported silence was appreciated by all.

 

Mrs Wombat and a pastiche of J. Bishop.

Barnyard, whilst waiting for his mistress' and his assumed progeny to be born attempted to appear relevant by firing blanks at the Prime Miniature for equalling  Rabid-the-Hun's record of losing 30 consecutive polls (… the ruling rabble's 60th, btw) and hypocritically calling on Truffles to be "honourable" and stand down if things hadn't improved by xmas.

It was not announced where he had found that word or whether he actually understood its meaning before it curdled in his mouth.

 

ruling rabble policy setting.

Truffles, sadly found some solace in his miserable poll results in that most of his ruling rabble fellow travellers didn't want another leadership spill and would seem to want to see him "in situ" till his next electoral evisceration or Madame Guillotine beckons… whichever comes first.

I'm hoping for the latter and have begun buying yarn.

Cheers Petals,

Shane.

and then there was Rachel B....and her indefatigable dog..... 

and the Otways... lovely place...

Yes.. err, No... well perhaps they're framed.

Shane framed

G'day Possums,

it's been an "ART" week: with a visit to Geelong Regional Gallery to peruse the "Archibald" finalists follow by a visit to the NGV Potter Centre to have a look at Del Kathryn Barton's big show.

Variously described as whimsical, romantic, sexual, cathartic ,sensuous, exuberant and seductive, DKB's is a big show with big works which really do whack you around a bit.

 With a wall full of flying eyes and framed graffiti faced by large psycho-sexual renderings (are they paintings?) which in their "dottiness" resemble indigenous techniques it was difficult to clearly gain a focus in this large scale cornucopia of colour and bits and things.

An extremely intense video excoriating car sales techniques was followed by some large priapic sculptural flowerings and drawings of genitalia and I left, feeling that I didn't want to know THAT much about someone's personal obsessions.

Gustav Klimt had came to mind but days later the nagging background thought of that day revealed itself. It was the illustrations in a book by Ernst Kris that I had read many years ago: "Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art".

Around the corner in the Ian Potter were works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders of a simpler verve and self-deprecating humour. Gary Namponan's "Camp Dogs" were a joy in their most basic carving and renditions of canine personality as was "We Know Where You Eat (Koala) by Pitcha Makin Fellaz, Ballarat, Victoria.

The Archie at Geelong was a much more traditional affair and the funniest, (to me) was the portrait of the retiring principal of Sydney Grammar "painted" by mosaic, each little tile made by an individual student of the school body which brought to mind Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall ",  hardly the attribution probably sought.

Andrew Bonneau's  Ayako Saito was a serene, renaissance influenced piece which seemed to repay his "direct and patient observation" and Jessica Ashton's querulously amused self portrait exposing her state at juggling so many roles, hence her daughter's tutu around her neck, as Ashton contemplates her second pregnancy as well. Both are beautifully painted, one fine, the other looser, a'la Fragonard, and very controlled.

Anh Do's wet-in-wet bravura rendition of Jack Charles is a fine penetrating work placing his subject front and centre in all his complexity and with a witty little piece of collage making reference to Judas in amongst the globules of paint.

Exhibiting in Canberra this week was more of the ruling rabbles hypocrisy writ large. The dinosaur rump of the rabble, putrid at having lost the marriage equality survey decided that it was up to them to not only organize its slowed and amended passage but to also find problems with religious freedoms where none actually exist. Screaming "Freedom, Freedom, Free to be a bigoted discriminator" Vichy Abetz, Bestiality Bernardi, Horse-shite Corman and the other minority Neanderthals also failed at this when the Senate, 42/12 voted to pass the Equality Bill and summarily rejected their "amendments." 

Unable to have a sitting and passage through the house of Reps because Truffles funked a confrontation with his rural carbuncle over banks and a poor showing in the Deep North election he refused to have the reps sit..... Ah, democracy.

Better news was then apoplectically announced that they had something big on Halal Sam Dastyari being naughty with the Chinese. Re-hashing his policy difference with his leader Willie Shortstuff and leaking from, no-one knows where, the advice Halal Sam gave, "talk-outside-they-might-be-listening," to the character, who in all likelihood would be more than aware of our spooks methodology, all of which had Bookshelves Brandarse happily ranting, raving and verily frothing at the mouth when, exhibiting a double back flip with pike and somersault, Truffles got Halal off the menu and announced a Royal Commission into the Banks just like he said he didn't want to!

"It will be a short RC but comprehensive.." said the vacillating Truffles,".. just like the banks want....not an analysis of capitalism but with the terms of reference set as  they mailed me yesterday."

Truffles has a full plate; two by-elections both seemingly going, not well, The Harpy Cash under fire...again, Bennelong going feral, more pollies coming out as dual citizens and ineligible to sit in parliament and the bush-pigs from the Nationals after Truffles ... no wonder it's called the killing season!

Hoo-roo petals,

Shane.

From the Sublime to ....

Shane the Concert-Goer

G'day Possums,

Mrs Wombat and I were gifted concert tickets for Richard Tognetti's Australian Chamber Orchestra performance last night.

What a cracking lot of musos.. bouncing around, working off each other with impeccable timing and making things heard many times before, alive and refreshing in a programme including....

Olli Mustonen's Nonet No2, a sonorous lyrical piece  repeatedly asking the same question till dancing to a resolution...

Beethoven's Grosse Fugue, Op.113  just, WOW! Wholly contemporary music composed in 1825 ....

Shostakovich's Prelude and Scherzo, Op.11 edgily Soviet constructivist but  emotional and full of drama...

and

P.I.Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence, Op 70 happily transposing Russian folk idiom to a sunnier clime with a cracking finish.

A glorious night of superbly played music, thank you, Wombat gels!

 

Well that was the sublime... now to our ridiculous ruling rabble;  that mongrel cabal that a/ : "...couldn't get a root in a brothel", and b/: "couldn't sell a meat tray in a Pub raffle" which is showing increasing signs that the "Kangaroos are loose in the top paddock".

Where to start with this hysterically funny (if it wasn't so serious for the nation) week of own goals, mis-steps and plain poor administration.

In the week when the very last cars were manufactured in Australia, the Ruling Rabble who obliterated these thousands of jobs (when there is one position for every seventeen unemployed) and who might well have been advised to keep their heads down and look competent for once doing nothing, decided to announce after 5 years of allegedly being in charge that they now had what could pass for, in a darkened room, an energy policy.

Tossing aside two years work and the advice of the Chief Scientist and instead approving the month old new panel of "experts" who effectively said, Coal is OK, gas is good, Pumped Hydro (even though twenty years away) is lovely.. and re-newables ..eerrr... well I suppose we could have sixpence worth of those too, but forget a clean energy target!

Gushing with pride at their momentous achievement of a Final Solution, Environment and Energy mal-administrator, Fictions Frydenberg and Prime Miniature Truffles fanfared their brillance telling all that by 2020 we might save 50cents a day on our electricity bills now that they, in their heads had the energy market sorted.

Unfortunately it has been announced that banks are now going to pull funding from renewables as Truffles' "fix" creates market uncertainty and eventually this will mean higher not lower prices.

Defending himself against criticisms that the "...finshed earlier in 2016..." National Broadband Network he converted from fibre-optic to copper lines between two tin cans was a dud, Truffles said that in hindsight Labor had made a mistake in even thinking that Australia needed such a service when carrier pigeons were almost as efficient and The Ugly American Murdoch was happy his Foxtel cable had less competition.

The Happy-Clapper Pretend Treasurer who spouts more bullshit than the Werribee sewage farm, Scummo Morriscum agrees with the productivity commission and thinks that education and health are fragmented...and to fix them, doctors and teachers should be payed by their results. Well, well...I wonder who did that fragmentation of these public systems in the first place and will further privatising them provide a solution...?? Oh, come in spinner!!

In the Vindictive Stakes (it is the racing season, after all) two candidates stand out. Michaelia The Harpy, Cash and Uncle Otto's great nephew, Eric Vichy Abetz.

Both these stables are concerned that activist filly, "Get-Up" is streets ahead of them in pace and tactics and wish to handicap this brazen filly, nobbling it's popularity with the betting public before the odds of them winning their respective saddles become any longer.

Devising a carnival of their own The Harpy (whose voice has all the mellifluousness of a thousand Sulphur Crested Cockatoos at sundown in Summer) and Vichy (who loves uniforms and thuggery) invited the Australian Federal Police to visit the Australian Workers Union offices simultaneously in both Sydney and Melbourne to peruse a form guide as to how much money the AWU bet on Get-Up and also on the opposition leader and outsider, Willie Shortstuff some 10 or 11 years ago.

Waiting to film the arrival of AFP stewards to read the form guide were the media. Now, as this carnival was supposed to be an in-house nobbling, the media being there before the wallopers sort of gave the game away, particularly as the form guide in question had already been handed to a Royal Commission years ago and its tote had added up.

So was this a replay of the AFP raid on Senator Conroy's (Labor) home for the supposed leaked track tactics material of the dud NBN back in March or was it a replay of "Ute-Gate" that got Truffles such a scratching in 2009 when his ride, Godwin Grech was found to be unsound?

The track suddenly became heavy when in parliament The Harpy was asked 5 times did she or who in her stable leaked the carnival event to the media. She denied riding that day. Unfortunately one of the media blew "starters' on her by naming a senior jockey in her stable. The Harpy demurred saying she knew as much about that as she did about not putting her fourth new  million dollar +house on the parliamentary register.

The senior jockey has been banned (he was retiring any way... how convenient) but the owner so far, only mildly chagrined and the AFP Stewards: who knows what they think of being such obvious tools for such a rabble?

The Westminster Stakes will no longer be held in Australia till a new season perhaps, puts better talent and stayers on the track.

Hoo-roo Petals,

Shane.

PS: The effort to nobble Get-Up has resulted in thousands more joining its fan club and as many tens of thousands of dollars more in its kitty.

Rape and Pillage

G'day Possums,

Mrs Wombat and I went on a little amble t'other day.  

After staying with friends near Benalla we meandered up to Chiltern and on to Goulburn, perusing The Big Merino "Rambo", a magnificently haughty specimen and then diverted to the Illawarra Highway, travelling through a very colonial Englishness of Exeter with its delightfully understated 1895 Art Nouveau St Aidens Anglican church, to Sutton Forest and then on to Kiama.

The Big Merino "Rambo"

We  returned via the M1, taking in the beautiful Pacific coast with its multiple secluded inlets and dramatic landscapes south of Narooma, the beautiful country of Tilba Tilba conversing there with some of the delightful and self proclaimed notorious, "Tilba Tappers" to an excellent lunch at the Tathra  wharf.

Back into Victoria, Cape Conran and the Snowy River estuary at Orbost were highlights and after a stay in Bairnsdale, returned to the home burrow.

 Snowy River estuary at Orbost

So why the title, Rape and Pillage following such a visually stunning trip?

Well, the pillage could in some fashion be explained by the road-kill carnage seen in this 1400 km trip: 22 Wombat, 2 Echidna and dozens of Wallaby and Kangaroo carcasses littering the road side, particularly in the NSW region. The rape? There was a small cove/beach near Kiama that had once been full of shell middens until the arrival of the colonists who denuded the area of its flora, built a wharf to transport stone quarried further inland to Sydney and generally laid waste to an Indigenous culture of a beautifully balanced environment, food sources and shelter material. This experience was sadly, seen repeated a number of times in other places.

Turingal Point, near Tathra

Reflecting on this, it seems that our "national culture" was "set" back in the 1790's.

We have a lamentable world record for the extinction of mammals, we are still (in Deep North, Queensland) clear felling/stripping bush for cattle farms, over-logging marginal forest with endangered species (in The Tardis State of Victoria) and polluting bays and rivers nation-wide with run-off from roads, farm fertilizers, and coal mines and sewage.

Tathra Wharf

Water theft by large irrigation companies is aided and abetted by our apology of a deputy prime minister / water minister the New Zealander, Barnyard Joyce and today I listened to the faux environment minister, Fictions Frydenberg, prevaricating on re-newable energy in order to kow-tow to fossil fuel companies and abnegate responsibility for the nation's gas supply and allow "fracking" to destroy more farmland and pollute the water table in the worlds driest continent instead of developing a viable and sustainable energy policy.

Unfortunately I didn't vote for Santos, AGL, Alinta or Ergon et al, to run this country, so I don't know why this present Ruling Rabble thinks that sucking from the taxpayer teat qualifies them to not lead the nation but blithely follow multi-national business' profit plans to the country's environmental, economic detriment and eventual demise.

Kiama

Interestingly, during the trip, similar attitudes popped up in conversation with other travellers or locals... none of them happy with the manner in which this place is being allegedly governed. I would have expected in rural towns more conservative attitudes to be expressed but the opposite was the case. It was the same with shop-keepers as it was with the person on the street. Once, during a picnic lunch at Holbrook in a conversation with a Adelaide couple, a person nearby joined in to agree politically, with what we were saying, so it seems that our famed reticence not to publicly and openly discuss politics is being eroded by the sheer continuing incompetence of the Ruling Rabble and its ad hoc administration. Even a middle class couple from Victoria's Blue Ribbon bay-side opined that we're no longer in a good place and were thoughtfully amused at my fantasy suggestion of the woman converting the tip of her walking pole into an elimination device of the corrupt Reboxetine Robb who has "Quislinged" the nation to the Chinese.

Murulan

Great Uncle Otto's boy, Eric, Vichy Abetz has again provided ample evidence not only of the Ruling Rabble's abject hypocrisy but also their legislative confusion: a front-runner of the push to have section 18C wiped from the statute books as he thought it limited free speech, Vichy has called for the banning of some Septic-Tank Rapper singing an "equal love" rap song at the NRL Grand Final entertainment. It seems that personal religious kant and the divisiveness of deeply ingrained homophobia trumps policy.... and community!

No wonder people will publicly query the proficiency, stability and veracity of this rabble or for that matter given the constant ranting of failed Ruling Rabble prime miniature, Rabid-the-Hun, its sanity, too.
Hoo-roo, Petals,

Shane.

St Aidens, Exeter, NSW