After Saturday’s election traditional Labor supporters might well be asking ‘where did it all go wrong’!  They won’t have to look far.  It went wrong because the spivs now running the Labor Party took them for granted.

Labor MPs with a working class background and a working class record are now an endangered species.  They are regarded as blue-collar rednecks by inner-city spivs who have hijacked their traditional workers party.  Geoff Corrigan got it right when he told them they were living in a parallel universe.

Labor spivs don’t have a clue about the difficulties working class people face with rising electricity bills.  They don’t give a damn about the daily nightmare of the M5, obsolete trains or inadequate bus services.  They don’t have to because the Sussex Street spivs reckoned that Westies would always vote for them. (more…)

‘There will be no tax on carbon under the Government I lead’ droned Julia Gillard during the election campaign. 

Most Australians regarded this as an unequivocal statement.   After all, Julia had form on the issue.  She had convinced Kevin Rudd to drop his plans for an emissions trading scheme – then knifed him.

Julia did not leave any wriggle room when she made, and repeated, the statement that there would be no carbon tax. She left the Opposition high and dry.  Any prospect of a carbon tax was dead in the water under her leadership.

Last week she laughed off that unequivocal statement and announced a carbon tax.  The opposition, the media and voters were genuinely shocked at her breathtaking hypocricy.  Was this the real Julia, fake Julia, or a JuLIAR? (more…)

Children are now being used as the thin edge of the wedge in the debate over illegal immigration.  Nobody would argue that children should be held in detention.  Nor should they be separated from their parents.  The proponents of the debate will therefore argue that illegal immigrants with children should not be held in detention.

People smugglers will then adjust their sales pitch to encourage illegal immigrants to load children on leaky boats as a means of bypassing detention centres and going straight into motels.

The first shot in this million dollar propaganda campaign involved the flying of bodies from the Christmas Island boat tragedy to Sydney for burial. This tragedy would never have happened if Labor had not opened up our borders to people smugglers. (more…)

As the sun set on the last decade of the old millennium the world was gripped with anxiety about the potential catastrophe of a computer virus dubbed the ‘millennium bug’. Doomsayers predicted that on the stroke of midnight in 1999 the systems that make our world tick would crash with devastating results.  Governments, multi-national corporations and commercial enterprises spent a fortune to survive the expected systems crash.

As the clock ticked over to herald in the new millennium global celebrations erupted on an unprecedented scale. And when the fireworks stopped the world kept ticking.  The millennium bug was a hoax. But it was a lucrative hoax for computer geeks who pcketed a fortune fixing a problem that didn’t exist!

Doomsayers in the first decade of the new millennium replaced the bug with something just as nebulous – global warming.  The world was melting. Ice caps were disappearing. Oceans were rising. Deserts expanding.  The world would be ravaged by drought.  And it was all because of the global capitalist system and people and their animals farting too much.  (more…)

There is a sad irony in the tragic loss of life on Christmas Island (so named because it was discovered on Christmas Day in 1643) so close to our Christmas festive season.  We cannot begin to imagine the despair of people so desperate to escape the fear and desolation of their respective homeland that they are willing to risk their lives in search of a new beginning in a far off land.  The Christmas Island tragedy is a sober reminder that they are not boat people, illegal immigrants or asylum seekers – they are fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, boys and girls with the same fears, doubts, dreams and aspirations that we all have.

Sadly, they are unfortunate victims of war, terror, poverty, persecution and religious fanaticism.  It is impossible for us to understand the desperation of their plight from the comforts of our surrounds here in the lucky country.

The tragedy is a wake-up call for the Federal Government to stop the bloody boats!  And the only effective way to do this is to remove the incentives for people smugglers to run the gauntlet of treacherous oceans in unseaworthy boats.  John Howard did it and Julia Gillard could do it if she had the gumption to reopen the offshore detention centre at Nauru. (more…)

Certain things paint an indelible image in your mind. One happened to me lately when my mother in law told me that whilst doing meals on wheels in winter there was always a place you could find pensioners, in bed. This was not because of an infirmity but because they could not afford the price of the power to stay warm outside bed. How completely self indulgent and pathetic we have become that in our zealous desire to single-handedly cool the planet we have pandered to those who can afford the power bill over those less fortunate to avoid privation. How pathetic we are that South Korea, using our coal, can provide power cheaper to their citizens after an 8,300 km sea voyage than we can with power stations in our own coal fields. (more…)

Predictions of change from leaders of their time often prove to be wide of the mark.

In 1899, Charles H. Duell, Director of the United States Patent Office urged President McKinley to abolish the office because, he maintained, that ‘everything that can be invented, has been invented.”

In 1927, Harry M. Warner of Warner Brothers Pictures said, “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”

In 1958, Thomas J. Watson, Head of IBM said, “I think there is a world market for about five computers.”

In 1987, Prime Minister Bob Hawke said, “No Australian child will live in poverty by 1990.”

In 2007, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Global Warming was “the greatest moral issue of our time”. 

In 2010, Prime Minister Julia Gillard predicted that if we replace a communications monopoly with a communications monopoly we will get faster download speeds – all we have to do is spend thousands of million of dollars that we don’t have to create a new monopoly we don’t need. (more…)

For most Australians there are three certainties in life – taxes, debt and death.

Two of these are inevitable – the other is a matter of choice.

The level of personal debt in Australia indicates that more and more are choosing to live the dream now and pay later.  Why save when it is so easy to borrow?  Why wait to buy a McMansion when we can have one now?  Why buy a second hand car when, for only a few extra dollars a week, we can get one off the showroom floor? Why wait for a new gadget when we can whack it on the credit card and have it now?

Why? Because we can. That’s why. (more…)

Only the naive would ever argue against the proposition that local government should be a politically free zone.  The statement itself is a contradiction in terms because our Constitution provides for a three tiered government structure – Federal, State and Local.

Politics is defined as the theory and practice of government. It defines the interrelationships between the people, groups, or organizations in a particular area of life especially insofar as they involve power and influence or conflict.

Debate about politics in local government is often intertwined with arguments about whether we are over-governed.  Some argue that State and Local Governments should be abolished and replaced by a system of regional governments.  All have pros and cons but I would argue that the closer government is to the communities they have to serve the more effective they will be. (more…)