“How did that error work out, Ross?”, asks the Manager.
“We fixed it”, I say.
“It’s fixed?”
“Yes. We fixed it. We’re fixers. We fix things”, I say, giving myself a fit of the giggles.
“What?”, asks the Manager.
“Never mind”, I say.
This mob wouldn’t know if Groucho Marx were up them sideways with a feather duster. They’d probably think “The Dead Parrot Sketch” was a customer service training video and take notes.
He says he was not, and then continues that the only thing he has been active in is getting on with the job of government and addressing those issues that are of real concern to the Australian people today, which is jobs and the economy, and the mess we’re in, and the previous Labor Government this and the previous Labor Government that, and so forth.
After one particularly mind-numbing stream of incoherent babble, I mutter “Jesus Christ”, hit the mute button on the remote and decide this would be a good time to go have a shower and get ready for work.
We don’t need a double dissolution.
We need a double-barreled shotgun to blow these twaddle-peddling bullshit artists into political oblivion, and start advertising in Seek for replacements.
Essential: Ability to communicate complex issues in clear, direct language to a broad spectrum of stakeholders without resort to jargon, clichés, witless one-liners repeated ad nauseum at every available opportunity in a day, PowerPoint presentations, and incomprehensible, incoherent bullshit of no substance whatsoever.
Essential: A high degree of literacy and demonstrable numeracy, coupled with the ability to speak with authority, weight and gravitas over a wide variety of often weighty subjects of national import, to be informed with intelligent argument either for or against an issue, and to be prepared with peer-reviewed facts supported by clear evidence to advance that argument.
Do you feel lethargic, irritable, worn down, fed up, chewed up, spat out, and occasionally overwhelmed by the barely restrained impulse to throw fistfuls of your own poo at the television, drop your radio off a fifty-storey balcony and slowly drive your dog insane by constantly shouting the words “bone” and “walk” at it every couple minutes?
Welcome to the ranks of The Disappointed, their numbers are legion and growing larger by the minute, by the syllable.
Have you read all those articles, the ones that detail the various ways and whys in which people have come to be disillusioned with politics as it is today? Have you read the polls, and looked at the demographics, of how this group or that group just couldn’t be bothered anymore, and don’t pay much attention, it’s no longer even about them, so why waste precious time? Have you heard our politicians, when asked of this, reply that “Yes, they need to engage more with voters, and put more effort into selling their message”, which essentially means they need to find other ways to pull a few fast ones and hope nobody’s paying too much attention? Have you read or watched or listened to the aging hipsters of yesteryear (Richard Neville comes instantly to mind) bemoan the apathy and self-absorption of today’s young folk, they’re not out on the streets anymore, waving placards, marching, standing up for their beliefs, rousing choruses of “Kumbayah” echoing through the streets of our cities, people are throwing themselves in front of bulldozers, and handing out flowers to the PIGS, MAN, like FUCK, you know, … ?
And do you, after all this, ask yourself, “Who can fucking blame them? Why the fuck would any sane human being involve themselves with this shit?”
“… we don’t seem to quite be able to take in the growing realisation that we actually are being governed by idiots and fools, or that this actually has real-world consequences.
We finish the week with a Prime Minister who has lost his bundle and is making policy and political calls that go beyond reckless in an increasingly panicked and desperate attempt to save himself; a government that has not just utterly lost its way but its authority; and important policy debates left either as smouldering wrecks or unprosecuted.”
And …
“It’s not just that voters don’t like Tony Abbott any more, or are angry about broken promises, they see the government as incapable of doing its job competently.
This is a particularly devastating assessment for a conservative government. The phrase the Coalition used before the last election was that voters needed to put “the adults back in charge”.”
With “adults” like these in charge, today’s young folk have sensibly decided to keep the fuck out of the way.
Today’s “young folk” are not apathetic and self-absorbed, ignorant or lazy as so many “old folk” would have us believe. With their lives before them, with hopes, dreams and ambitions, a world to live in and to experience, theirs are not hearts and minds drawn to the gas-belching swamp of contemporary Australian politics, where self-interest truly lies, where go the sad and the old, the rich and the privileged, driven by pure greed, by power alone, and by a cruel and punishing ideology which would have us all be slaves under their command, under their rule, and be thankful to them for it.
Why, you can be somewhat less than whole in either body or in mind, or both, and this government will let you work for a whole 99 cents an hour, how about that, aren’t you lucky, you lucky, lucky thing, you?
“We know that without honesty there is no trust and without trust there is no fairness and without fairness civil society cannot long survive.” (Tony Abbott, “Battlelines” 2009)
The young, the elderly, the working poor, the unemployed, the ill, the man in the far-flung rural area who has to drive three hundred miles in agonising pain to have an abscessed tooth ripped out and then three hundred miles back with a mouth full of bloody cotton swabs will not engage in a politic that regards them, that is forever telling them how wrong they all are, what a blight, a burden, an affront to economic efficacy, an affront to the ideal buffed and bronzed all-around true blue Larrikin Aussie Aryan descended from the long dead warrior heroes of Gallipoli they seem so desirous of.
This is a government whose sole purpose so far since taking office, whose central message it would seem, is to be forever telling the rest of us how completely shit we all are.
There’s nothing to engage with, or in. Nothing.
Absolutely fuck all.
When Independent Senator Nick Xenophon recently described Education Minister Christopher Pyne’s antics this week over higher education reform as “student politics”, he pretty much summed up the tenor of the entire government, a Playschool government whose host is irrevocably stupid, a clown, and whose cast members are mere “students of politics” who keep failing their exams, over and over and over, because they insist on scribbling crude penis doodles on their papers, and they keep running off to the toilet blocks with a Playboy magazine stuffed up their shirts, and a couple fags in their pockets for the afterwank.
We do realise we are being governed by “idiots and fools”, as Laura Tingle writes, and we realised it way before she or her media colleagues did. We did not ask for it. We certainly did nothing to deserve it. We wish it had not happened.
Our Prime Minister is an idiot.
We can not stoop to his level of idiocy by engaging with it. We must bide our time, and when our time comes, we must throw this mob out.
I try to avoid using phrases like “worst government ever”, but in this case, they may or may not be the worst, but they are certainly the dumbest mob of motherfuckers I’ve experienced in my lifetime.
PS – As I was writing this, news came through that former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser had died this morning. Your assignment this week is to compare and contrast the former Prime Minister with the current incumbent. This will comprise 50% of your final assessment.
Here is Paul Keating’s statement on the death of Mr. Fraser …
“The death of Malcolm Fraser underwrites a great loss to Australia.
Notwithstanding a controversial Prime Ministership, in later years he harboured one abiding and important idea about Australia – its need and its right to be a strategically independent country.
He detested what he saw as our strategic subservience to the United States and our willingness to be easily led from the path of a truly independent foreign policy.
His public life also enshrined other important principles: no truck with race or colour and no tolerance for whispered notions of exclusivity tinged by race.
I always thought Malcolm would be around a lot longer. I must say, I wished he had been.”
Papers with penis doodles on them will not be accepted.
Excuse the paucity in posts of late, but I have been paying little attention to matters of national import.
Are there any?
Are they dire?
I have come to understand the Federal Government has a Defence Minister and that his name is David Johnston.
It is a name I was most unfamiliar with, and I could not put a face to it, as I was quite unaware as to whether Mr. Johnston had ever made a statement addressing matters in his portfolio during his time in government. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention at the time, or maybe I thought that was Scott Morrison’s job. Scott Morrison often seems to think so.
Anyway, Mr. Johnston said something stupid recently, and found himself in the shit.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott leapt to Johnston’s defence, insisting he said nothing stupid, he’s not in the shit, and everything’s just so.
This is silly.
No one is listening to this shit anymore.
For the political tragics, for those whose job it is to write and comment on or analyse such matters, or those who make it their job, there are rich pickings to be had from the current crop of dunces in this government, although much of it, most of it defies any intelligent analysis, but all of it, the columns, the commentary, the criticism, pretty much all of it, amounts to the same thing, said over and over and over again.
This government is shit.
I don’t need thirty fucking columns by thirty different people inside the space of a week telling me what is, and always has been, plainly self-evident from the get-go to anybody willing to pay even the slightest bit of attention, and that is –
Tony Abbott is a lying cunt, and Tony Abbott has always been a lying cunt, and has spent pretty much his entire time in politics lying through his fucking teeth every time he opens his fucking mouth …
And so it goes.
Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull may be willing to make a tit of himself on national television twisting Abbott’s “no cuts to the ABC” comments every which way, but nobody, least of all himself, buys it.
Former Victorian Premier Dennis Napthine is told by a random stranger “the bullshit just keeps coming”, and so it does, they keep shoveling it on, we just learn to hold our noses, and walk on by.
No one is listening to this bullshit anymore.
“Spin, as an art, has totally jumped the shark. It’s so overdone, it’s dead. It’s self-parody. Low comedy. Kitsch. For years, as the country and political parties have grown more polarized, we’ve been moving the goal posts of spin-surdity. The farther Republicans and Democrats drifted apart, the more the spin-meisters followed and stretched their rhetoric beyond any recognizable reality. The more wacked-out the rhetoric got, the fewer people listened. Now we’ve gotten the point where even some spin-doctors think that there’s not much point any more. “I think everyone’s kind of caught on to it,” says James Carville, who, once upon a time, was to political spin what Picasso was to rearranged anatomy. “Everybody, the journalists, everybody sees through it.”” Politico, November 2014
When Foreign Minister Julie Bishop“chides” US President Barack Obama for his comments on climate change and its impact on the Great Barrier Reef, and insists “We have demonstrated world’s best practice … to ensure the Great Barrier Reef is preserved for generations to come”, nobody’s buying it because it’s bullshit and everybody knows it …
“Professor Terry Hughes, who is the director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, says there’s an extraordinary disconnect between the government’s position and what scientists across the globe are saying.
Prof Hughes said he couldn’t explain why Ms Bishop’s views were so far removed from the science.
“I think you’ll have to ask her that,” he told AAP.
Government support for the development of the vast Carmichael coal mine in the Galilee basin is also inconsistent with reef protection, he said.
“(The mine) will have a Co2 footprint that’s three times larger than New Zealand’s if it goes ahead,” he said.”
Bishop, like all of Abbott’s timid others, speaks with, and only with, Her Masters Voice, and he speaks for His, and his Masters are a troupe of medieval fools, dumb cunts with money, and not an ounce of common sense between them.
No one is listening to this bullshit anymore.
There is simply too much of it.
Did Bishop and Co honestly think, during the Brisbane G20, that they would be able to insist, or even have the gall to suggest, the President of the United States refrain from any mention of climate change (among other topics) during his address to students, that he would simply acquiesce to such a thing? Nod his nappy head with a “Yowser, masser” and play along like a good little nigger, just so as not to upset the white folk in charge?
Fuck off, you stupid little bastards.
All this and so much more is way too much of nothing to be bothering with.
Which gives rise to a dilemma of sorts.
No matter which way you spin it, no matter how many words you may use, no matter what argument you may mount, and how carefully you may mount it, no matter the detail, the logic, it is simply not possible anymore to attach any substance, any significance to anything anyone in this government has to say about any fucking thing because all of it, from all of them, is fucking nonsense.
“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country” – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
I understand some have said that the government lacks “narrative” or has yet to find “narrative”, but the narrative, to my mind, seems perfectly clear –
“Frankly, you need a mighty lot of unfairness before most people notice. But this one had it all. Make young people wait six months for the dole? Sure. Cut the indexation of the age pension? Sure. Charge people $7 to visit the doctor, and more if they get tests, regardless of how poor they are? Sure.
Charge people up to $42.70 per prescription? Sure. Lumber uni students with hugely increased HECS debts that grow in real terms even when they’re earning less than $50,000 a year? Sure.” – Ross Gittins, Sydney Morning Herald, November 30, 2014
They want to rape you, kill you, spurt on your corpse, make your skin a lampshade, expect a round of applause for their efforts at making all these tough decisions, and then, just when you think they’re done, they decide to skullfuck your dog and make your cat into a slipper.
What’s not to like?
After a year of achieving little else but pissing the potential votes of whole demographics of people up against the wall in pursuit of God-Only-Knows-What-The-Fuck, we can now say, with safety and certainty in our hearts, and our minds set firm, that anything said by Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison, Eric Abetz, Joe Hockey, Christopher Pyne, Greg Hunt, Peter Dutton, Julie Bishop, Malcolm Turnbull in the past, present, and the future, can all be dismissed as total bollocks.
No one is listening to this bullshit anymore, boys.
We may be inclined to forgive people for occasionally fucking it up, for screwing the pooch, but when they start beating the pup to death with a fucking mallet and rolling in the viscera, it’s time to look away. For something a little more edifying. For something a little more substantial.
“Twenty years ago, during a long, leisurely lunch conversation about the Liberals and their history, John Howard expressed the view that the party no longer attracted the sort of people it once had. He spoke frankly – at the time, his chances of a comeback looked close to zero – and I pressed him on the issue.
These people, he suggested, wanted something rather than wanting to offer something. It was a big difference.” Norman Abjorensen, Inside Story, November 2014
There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of articles and comment and criticism available, of blogs and tweets and Facebook posts, of lengthy essays and features, profiles and analysis out there to be had about this current Abbott government, and all of them now seem to be saying the exact same thing.
This government is shit.
There is your headline for the next twenty-four months.
This government is shit.
And no one is listening anymore.
As for myself, I’m going to have to find some new things to scribble about next year, because these people are too stupid for time.
We keep putting Dickheads in charge of things that are far too important to be left to Dickheads, and then we express shock and surprise, outrage and anger, that the person whom we’ve always suspected to be a Dickhead turns out to be a far bigger and far more dangerous Dickhead than we ever could’ve imagined.
Fancy that.
Politicians, Captains of Industry, Business Leaders, Corporate Directors, People with Money, the lot of them Dickheads with dead eyes and soft, milky jowls, their fat necks bulge up and over their stiff and starched white collared business shirts like so many baby hippo’s straining to break free from the womb. They comb their hair just so, like all Dickheads do, they like blue ties and dark suits, and they speak in Dickheaderese, a language only they understand, but with which they choose to flog and berate and nag and whine and whinge at the rest of us, we Non-Dickheads, of whom they do not approve, they do not approve of us at all, because there are times when we disagree, we object, we protest, we resist their reproaches, we argue, and they can’t have that, they won’t, because they are The Dickheads and they are in charge, and that is just as the world should be.
Dickheads speak in broad, sweeping generalisations about things they know nothing of, and have no experience in whatsoever, and they are not inclined to pay attention to those who do know things, because those people are not Dickheads, and if they are not Dickheads, but happen to be in charge of something, they will very soon find themselves out of charge and right royally fucked over …
“What this means applied to the Australian example is this: what is informing the policy agenda of Abbott’s government is not expertise, experience or research based on comparative modeling. It is not considered opinion, nor consultation with stakeholders. It is not practicality, not economics, not populism (as the post-budget polls clearly show). It is an ideological agenda to punish the poor for being poor, the sick for being sick, addicts for being addicts, and those who who are not rich but wish to learn for having ambitions above their station.
And the Coalition will pursue this agenda exactly as far as the Australian people allow them to get away with it.”
Dickheads dream Very Big Dreams.
Very Big Dreams of Very Big Arenas and Stadiums and Cities filled with the clamour and love of legions of adoring hordes too numerous to count, slogans are chanted and fists are raised in salutations of adulation, flags are flying and banners with strange and unusual symbols on them hang proudly from the balconies of public buildings in the Kapitol, and there are stalls selling eintopf and kasespatle and sauerbraten and brezel and, for die Kleinen, as much schwarzwalder kirschtorte as they can eat, badges and streamers and confetti, and pamphlets praising the multiple virtues of these Dickheads Who Are In Charge of Very Important Things, pamphlets written by these very same Dickheads, for only a Dickhead knows what a Dickhead knows, and only these Dickheads know what is best.
NEIL MITCHELLRadio 3AW Melbourne: Are penalty rates still part of the issue here? I know there’s a review, but do you think penalty rates need to be seriously reviewed?
PRIME MINISTER Tony Abbott: Well,again, that’s a matter for the Commission, as it should be, Neil, but one of the real problems we’ve got at the moment is that if you want to keep your café or restaurant open on a Sunday or on a public holiday, it’s very expensive. I don’t know what things were like last Easter in Melbourne, but last Easter in Sydney, it was very hard to get a cup of coffee outside well known tourist destinations and I think that’s a pity.”
Awwwwww, poor Dickhead.
Dickheads do complain a lot. The richer, or more powerful the Dickhead, the more they complain. Mostly about Non-Dickheads …
Non-Dickheads don’t work hard enough. Non-Dickheads want to be paid when they do work, but the Dickheads in Charge complain that Non-Dickheads are paid too much, even that they expect to be paid at all, which is appalling when you really think about it.
That they want to be paid, that is.
“Layin’ it down here, Boss!”. “Pickin’ it up here, Boss!”.
Dickheads don’t like old people, because old people get sick and cost money. Dickheads don’t like young people, because young people just lay about all day doing nothing and asking for government handouts. Dickheads don’t like people with disabilities because they’re embarrassing. Sometimes they have deformities, or they look funny, or they make noises. They just gum up the gene pool, and the Dickheads would prefer it if somebody could simply Glen-20 the whole lot of them into oblivion or something, so they wouldn’t keep wasting the taxpayers money on wheelchairs and crutches and respirators and drool buckets.
From “The New Statesman”, Alan B’stard (Rik Mayall) …
“We hear an awful lot of leftie whingeing about NHS waiting lists. Well the answer’s simple. Shut down the health service. Result? No more waiting lists. You see, in the good old days, you were poor, you got ill and you died. And yet these days people seem to think they’ve got some sort of God-given right to be cured. And what is the result of this sloppy socialist thinking? More poor people. In contrast, my policies would eradicate poor people, thereby eliminating poverty. And they say that we Conservatives have no heart”.
Dickheads “believe in things”, so much simpler and convenient than actually knowing a thing. You don’t have to do any work.
Dickheads have spent their entire lives concocting “theories” on how we should live, and these “theories” are called ”ideologies”, which is to say, they are “systems of belief”, not to be confused with “Systems of Romance”, a fine album from the late 1970’s by the John Foxx led Ultravox, before Midge Ure came along with all the puffy shirt shit and fucked it all up.
Dickheads worship money and any Dickhead who has money is a good Dickhead by Dickhead standards, and should be listened to and paid all due and diligent deference and respect, because having money, oodles of it, means you know everything there is to know about everything and you should be put in charge of things. Very important things. Immediately.
Yet all across the country, hundreds of thousands of voices are now being raised in shock and surprise, anger and outrage, that so many Dickheads are in charge of so many things, and they seem to be murderously intent on fucking them all up and the rest of us with it, and there is simply nothing we can do about it.
“Of course, Mr Abbott is perfectly free to assert that a skeleton government, unionless workplaces, reduced public services, cuts in welfare, cuts in wages, and a minimally taxed business sector is a recipe for a fair and decent society, but we all know that that is rubbish.
How do we know?
Because we have a 40-year experiment in precisely the sort of policies he is now pursuing and we can check the outcome. That experiment is called the United States, and it is one the least equal developed nations on earth, decaying from the middle (class) out.
So we know how the story ends.
And yet this is where we are heading, mere months into the first term of an Abbott government. We are, as a nation, being transformed from a society into an economy.”
You cannot argue with a Dickhead.
You cannot reason with a Dickhead.
The Dickheads are in Charge.
And we put them there.
Who are the Dickheads now?
This post contains 1,340 words. 44 of them are Dickheads.
“The federal government’s top business adviser has criticised the cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the school funding reforms, slammed wages as too high and industrial relations as being too rigid, and urged the government to push the envelope in order to “repair” the economy.
In a fiery speech on Monday night, Maurice Newman, the head of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, lamented as “hasty” Tony Abbott’s pre-election promises to quarantine such areas as health and defence from budget cuts and suggested the Prime Minister “disturb the comfort zones of many’’ to pay down debt and cut the deficit as soon as possible …
… “There’s no point in beating around the bush, worthy though the causes may be, in the circumstances, it was reckless.’’ He stopped short of suggesting the Coalition abolish the policies …
… Mr Newman echoed the concerns of his peers that the cost of business was too high. He singled out over-regulation, anti-competitive practices and wages, noting that Australia’s minimum wage was well above that in the US, Canada , Europe and New Zealand. This was compounded by the IR laws.”
November 12, 2013
“The Coalition government is distancing itself from controversial comments by Prime Minister Tony Abbott‘s top business adviser, who said that wages were too high and the government could not afford education and disability funding promises.
Education minister Christopher Pyne said he did not think the government shared the views expressed on Monday night by Mr Abbott’s handpicked adviser, the former ABC chairman Maurice Newman…
…Asked whether he agreed that wages were too high, Mr Pyne told ABC radio that Mr Newman’s job was to “give frank and fearless advice to the government” but it did not mean that the government would always agree with him…
…”That’s what it is, it’s advice,” Mr Pyne said. “It doesn’t mean that the government will always take it”
“Australia will be quite different in a few years’ time because a Coalition rather than a Labor government has been calling the shots, and calling them with a preference for freedom,” he said.
“I am confident that the BCA will continue to tell the government what it should do: repeal the carbon tax, repeal the mining tax, cut red tape and get the budget back under control,” he said.
“Even more importantly, I hope that the BCA will campaign against everyone who is trying to stop the government from putting that good advice into practice.
“The government’s job is to make it easier for our good businesses to do their best,” he said.
“Certainly, when I look at a business audience, any business audience, I don’t see people who exploit workers, rip off customers and damage the environment.”
Let the disenfranchisement of the proletariat begin.
I’m very confused. People are speaking of things they’ve not spoken of before. Threatening things. People are speaking of things they say they’ve not spoken of, but if they have, they’ve spoken words misheard, and then they GO SPEAK THEM ALL OVER AGAIN.
People are holding up photographs of people holding photographs with PEOPLE HOLDING PHOTOGRAPHS IN THEM …
People are speaking of treason. Of treachery. Of betrayal. Collusion with enemies, a foul conspiracy of dunces threatening our national security that could send us off to war with little brown savages on distant and primitive isles.
People do a thing, and then a couple years later, other people come along and undo that thing, and then they go and do it the VERY SAME WAY AGAIN.
When I wish to learn about a thing, I will seek out the teachings of those who have not only learnt that thing, but made it their career, perhaps their entire life’s work.
By communicating their teachings via whatever medium they offer and I choose to engage with, I may be informed on that thing, but it does not make me an expert on it.
It makes me a layman, or layperson if you want to be fussy, and I may have a few thoughts and theories of my own about this thing that I have learnt, but these are not expert thoughts and theories, just random interpretations of random bits of information rolling about my mind like little woody tumbleweeds stuck with beetle dung.
I am an expert in my own field of work, having done it for roughly 35 years now*, so if somebody who has not done this type of work tries to tell me how to do it and according to what rules, I will not so politely tell them to shut up and go fuck themselves with 40 sticks, maybe even a mallet.
This is not arrogance. It is confidence. I know what I am doing and how to do it.
I’d want to after 35 years.
Which leads me to this …
I am fed up to the bloody back teeth with stupid people talking nonsense about things they know nothing of.
I am fed up to the bloody back teeth being expected to admit the nonsense these stupid people are talking is not in fact stupid, but an alternative opinion or approach, and they have every right to talk this nonsense because freedom of speech leftie intellectual elitist oppression..
Which leads me to this …
Christopher Pyne has a Bachelor of Laws, was once President of Adelaide University Liberal Club, a research assistant to Senator Amanda Vanstone, President of the South Australian Young Liberals, and began practising as a solicitor in 1991. He was Shadow Education minister for 5 years. During this time, he asked only 3 questions in parliament, developed no education policy, and was expelled from Parliament a record 26 times for being “unruly”.
Why is he a “Federal Education Minister”?
Because fuckedifiknow.
Christopher Pyne is an elite repository of a very special kind of stupid. I mean this in the most literal sense. That his is an uninvolved, uncomplicated and base intelligence, frozen in adolescence and improbable ideologies, moved to childish taunts and giggles at fart noises, convinced he possesses talents he does not, and intent upon unleashing those “talents” as he, and only he sees fit in areas he has no experience in, or knowledge of whatsoever.
We get this…
“The federal education minister says he is too busy to sit down with an expert panel and have its needs-based school funding model explained to him.”
Then this …
“I am the national Education Minister, there needs to be a national model that is fair to all states and territories and that is equitable to students and that is what we will achieve.””
Then this …
“The Abbott government has performed another U-turn on school funding, indicating it will substantially retain Labor’s Gonski-inspired model over the next four years.
Pyne, who last week said the Labor model was “unimplementable” and flagged the development of a new model to apply after next year, now says the Coalition has “no plan to alter the way that the model will be delivered in the signatory states into the future”.”
The man is a complete fucking idiot.
I have no qualms in encouraging the career aspirations of eager little fellas like Christopher, but if you want to be an astronaut, you can’t just whack a suit on and jump into a rocketship and off to Mars without putting an awful lot of work into it first, and knowing a whole bunch of things about space and planets and science and facts and shit.
If Christopher wants to pass his exams, he needs to pull his tightly-coiffed head out his tidy little arse and start paying attention to the grown-ups in this world, or he’ll find himself not just spending a whole heap of time in the naughty corner, but getting his head repeatedly dunked into the dunnies by the senior boys at break until he learns to fucking well behave.
I know what I know. I have values and I have convictions, and I know what I know, and I know what is right, and if it’s right for me, that’s all I need.
I don’t want your difference.
We have very good people in charge of very important things, and they do these things on our behalf, and our benefit, and for the welfare of this country, its future, its security and safety, and I think we should shut up and learn how to behave and just let them get on with their jobs.
The government is in charge, and it’s in charge because we put them there – to be the government and govern and tell us what to damn well do.
That’s its job. To tell us what to do, and how to do it, and how much to do it for, and for how long, and why and for who.
Bear with me a moment as I crudely scrape the bottom of a few barrels …
… Is there any truth in the rumour that schlock-jock Alan Jones is a bitter, sad, woman-hating old fool who trolls public toilets desperately seeking sympathy blowjobs from dark, handsome strangers who’ll simultaneously fist him with a metal-studded glove?
Probably not, but let’s just put it out there and see what happens, shall we?
Is there any truth in the rumour that Christopher “Mincing Poodle” Pyne has a two centimetre micro-penis and the only way he can get it up is by shoving it into a vacuum cleaner nozzle while he watches his wife diddle herself with a fourteen-inch black dildo?
Probably not, but let’s just put it out there and see what happens, shall we?
Is there any truth in the rumour that Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott regularly scours whorehouses in whatever town or city he happens to be in at the time, and will pay double for a root if he doesn’t have to use a condom and triple if he can urinate on the girl of his choice while spanking her with a badminton paddle?
Probably not, but let’s just put it out there and see what happens, shall we?
Is there any truth in the rumour that radio broadcaster Howard Sattler is an addle-brained, juvenile fuckwit with the imagination and emotional intelligence and maturity of a three-month old child?
… And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where we find ourselves today.
Where public discourse about matters of politics has become primarily concerned, obsessed, with body parts, bodily functions, private relationships, gossip, innuendo, smear and rumour.
It’s all the news that’s fit to print, or to broadcast, and that’s as deep as it goes.
It’s cheap, it’s tawdry, it’s a circus in a toilet without a tent, and the big finale is a fart-lighting contest between its participants.
It’s not scraping the bottom of the barrel, so much as living under it.
… This wasn’t a rowdy debate where everyone was talking over one another. This wasn’t someone feeling so passionately about a subject he just had to break in to be heard. And this was not a case of one or two interruptions. This was interrupting, cutting off, and shouting down Kate Ellis pretty much every time she dared open her mouth, in a manner that couldn’t have been more efficient and systematic if Tanner, Pyne and Akerman had got together beforehand and plotted the course of the evening out on a spreadsheet. This was Akerman preventing Ellis getting her point out simply by repeating the word “shadecloths” four or five times, as if that was a counter-argument that would shoot her down; or later on, breaking in to an answer she was giving on education in order to kindly tell her to go and talk to Margie Abbott. This was Ellis attempting to answer an audience member’s question but being drowned out by Pyne and Tanner starting up a conversation about Downton Abbey as if she wasn’t even there. And this was Pyne in particular (and this is pretty much his lifelong form line) talking over the top of the minister every single time she looked like getting near speaking her piece. It was a horrible display by three men who, according to all reports, claim to be grown adults of fully-functioning intellectual faculties. But in the presence of a federal minister whose views on a range of issues are actually quite important to the country, but who happened to be a woman, they could not find it within themselves to grow the hell up and act like decent human beings. And, what’s more, host Tony Jones seemed quite happy to let them stomp all over the discussion like a pack of St Bernards tracking mud over a carpet …
… Bear in mind, again, this is a minister. Not just a woman who wandered in off the streets, but an accomplished, elected representative, in a position of considerable responsibility with significant influence on our government. Patronised and shut down like a schoolgirl answering back to the principal. It was, to put quite mildly, revolting.
I saw a couple minutes of this behaviour last night whilst flipping channels, and that was all I needed to see.
Indeed, having received notification their services were no longer required, and they should fend for themselves for twenty-eight days, perhaps forage for wild mushrooms in yonder fields, or toast pine cones over an open fire in an oil barrel, our hardy workers immediately returned their attentions to far more important matters, grave matters of state and civilisation with dire implications for us all before they were so rudely interrupted.
I speak, of course, of the Machiavellian machinations and manipulations of one Craig Thomson, the “Member” for Dobell, this silky, smooth-faced midget sot of Chaucerian debauchery and his alleged adventures with random, luridly painted harlots and tarts.
Well may “whole families lie slaughtered in Syria”, but a bullet through a child’s head is but a mere trifle compared to the all-out assault on our nations’ increasingly fragile pillar of democracy, our entire social order teetering as it is on the brink of collapse into an orgy of barbarism, rape, sodomy, cannibalism; where women abort their babies for popular entertainment, hurling broken and bloodied little corpses about basketball courts to the encouraging cheers of drugged and drunken spectators, and wild-eyed, red-faced men stagger through our public thoroughfares and squares gripped by lustful fevres, openly pleasuring themselves with exotic creams and balms and engaging in spastic acts of congress with unsuspecting domestic animals.
Oh, Death!
And over and across this horrid spectacle of an Inferno promised and an Inferno now fulfilled is cast the rictus grin of this Grand Wizard of unfiltered darkness and pure, duplicitous evil, Craig Thomson.
Well may “5.5 million lie dead in the Democratic Republic of Congo”, but what is this of import when compared to the debased and dissolute degeneracy that infects our every waking moment now, that rots our souls, that simples our minds, that soils the better natures of our nations’ people, and sends our more intrepid defenders of democratic process fleeing in panicked haste and horror from our formerly hallowed halls of government when confronted by such outrageous monstrosity?
…
…
In all seriousness however, if any measure of “seriousness” could be thought applicable to the state of politics in this country right now, wouldn’t you just like to grab a few of our so-called “honourable members” of parliament by the back of the neck and slam their fucking heads into a wall for an hour or two?
Christopher Pyne, Opposition Education Spokesman: “The Government is throwing money at education through things like school halls and laptop computers, that’s where the extra spending has come. What they haven’t done is focused on what really matters, which is traditional methods of teaching” (my italics).
I do not know what this means.
I work for a publisher, a book publisher. Most of what we do is for the secondary and tertiary education markets.
I’m not in any way involved in the content or the marketing or production of what we publish, I’m more “middle-middle-meh management” over there in the corner, adding things up and such.
Around the middle of the last decade, a secondary school textbook would typically comprise a hardcopy book and a CD-Rom that was either stuck on the cover or one of the inside flaps.
I haven’t seen a CD-Rom in years.
What happens now, I believe, is that the high-school student goes to a website, and then types in an address, and then types in a registration code or whatnot to log-in, and the student does all this via a computer, a not unusual device to encounter in this day of modern marvels not powered by steam, think modern refrigeration and the bagless vacuum cleaner or the fax. The student will then have access to all manner of educational material and exercises, interactive this-and-that, links to here-and-there, resources to explore and studies to study, and all of this is accompanied by a book made of paper as well. With words and pictures in it.
This is how the kiddies learn their “readin’, writin’, ‘n’ ‘rithmatic” nowadays.
Yes, this is “how our children is learnin’”.
Once they’re done with learnin’ ‘emselves how to make chicken scratches on ruled sheets of paper with pens and pencils, write their names, add some, and wipe their arses and wash their hands, they set about other subjects, more complex things requiring substantially more complex thought, and in the learnin’ of all this confoundin’ complexity, tools need to be employed on a regular basis, tools that can only be employed on a computer, one of which each and every school student needs in order to be (at least) a half-clever bastard of some worth.
This is how we work now. How we learn. How we do business. How we find stuff out. How we communicate.
Computers. Computing things. Giving us answers to questions.
It is the “traditional method of teaching”.
Not sitting about in a dusty recreation of a classroom from 1964, on a too-small rickety wooden chair at a too-small rickety wooden desk with a hole for an inkwell, a frayed and ratty textbook from 1954 in front of you. “Read chapters 15 and 16 and keep quiet”, says teacher, and you look down at the textbook and some student from two generations before you has scribbled penis’s across the photograph of African tribesmen on page 137.
Back in the days, those glory days, when children lived out their sweetly innocent and uncomplicated lives in a Ginger Meggs world, making billy-carts from orange crates on weekends, back in those days of “traditional methods of teaching”, when you took your own saucepans to the local Chinese for takeaway and milk came in fucking bottles.
SMELLY TONGUES 
