THE relentless Jo Nova has a post on Victoria's extraordinarily large and preposterously expensive desalination plant, which will add some $300 every year to the water bills of individual home owners until around 2036 or so. Apart from serving as a reminder that the same people now quoting the Doha junketeers should never be heeded, it is also an invitation to consider the sweetheart deals and waste of public monies which characterised the Bracks and Brumby years -- a profligacy any conservative premier worth his rising salinity levels would have pounded and pounded and pounded again as a reminder to voters that Labor cannot be allowed a return to the government benches.
Victoria does not have a conservative Premier, unfortunately; we have One Term Ted instead, so all the hay to be made from his predecessors' maladministration is left unscythed. With barely two years until the next election there is still time to pack Baillieu off to London, the Labor Party or some other congenial environment where fecklessness, a lack of core beliefs, and the absolute absence of backbone are appreciated. There is a lot of time and many quiet moments over a slow summer for the disaffected to discuss things likes coups, so perhaps the new year will see an end to the man before he sees an end to his own government. One lives in hope.
If (when?) we do get a new Premier, the first briefing paper he or she should read is this HR Nichols Society examination of the desalination plant and the wink-wink, we're-all-mates-here terms under which it was constructed. Here are some samples:
The consortium AquaSure made up of Degremont, Macquarie Capital and Thiess was the winning bidder with construction of the desalination plant to commence in late 2009. John Holland was the losing short-listed bidder. There were six other tenderers. John Holland’s price was lower than TD-JV... I know of one worker who receives $3,200 per week in cash. This includes the $700 LAFA (living away from home allowance) which is tax free but is after pay-tax and before super and other add on’s which would probably bring the package to about $250,000 per annum. So my best estimate is that most workers at the plant would receive between $200,000 and $300,000 per annum by the time they receive their redundancy payments. There is provision for overtime at the rate of time and a half for the first two hours and double time thereafter. Supervisors on site are now being paid in excess of $1,500 per day. Union delegates are paid at the top pay rates by TD-JV plus the LAFHA but are not required to do any work.... ...[management] knew when a stop work meeting would be taking place as the workers brought their boats on the back of trailers to work that day. So much for the ‘bona fides and positive relationships between the parties.
There is more of the same in the HR Nichols paper and every word is worth reading. Also worth the effort would be a quick google to find the name and contact details of your local or nearest Liberal MLA. Give them a call and insist that Ted has to go. It might just help to transform those backbench mutterings into a party room spill.
A NOTE ARRIVED last night from a reader, let us call him Mr
Spring Street, who took exception to this little blog’s eroded faith in
Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu’s intent or capacity to achieve, well, anything
worthwhile. It seems that politics is a team sport and, even if your side’s captain
has no idea to which end his squad should be kicking, those in the grandstand to
the right of the oval have an obligation to shut up, wave the team colours and barrack
for him anyway. A nice note, by no means abusive, it was in its way quite
flattering. It is nice to know that one’s thoughts are taken seriously enough to
be read, even if that consideration is but an overture to their summary
rejection.
Then again, perhaps the correspondent had a point – for such was
the thought which figured in the nightly examination of conscience as a weary
Bunyip drifted off to sleep. Perhaps, to quote a recent example, Baillieu
cannot be held entirely accountable for failing to respond with leadership and the bold stroke to the chaos that strangled Melbourne’s roads when the Burnley
and Domain tunnels were shut down, just in time for yesterday's morning traffic
peak.
But that’s the thing about One Term Ted, lovely bloke and
consummate gentleman that he is. One makes half a decision not to harp on his
deficiencies and the very next morning there it is, another example of what he
isn’t doing! This morning it is an
opinion column in The Walking Dead by a dancer called Jerril Rechter, now CEO of
Victoria Health, who has made the recent and shocking murder of Jill Meagher her
excuse to lament the low nature of all men, not the rather more narrow
demographic of Labor-appointed judges and magistrates who turn loose career
criminals and then shield their culpability behind the sub judice laws.
Late-night TV viewers, who cop more than their share of tax-deductible public
service announcements, will be familiar with Rechter’s schtick, which is of a
kind. Those who retire early will get the drift from the clip below:
See, if the Great
Bunyip hangs a pair of testicles (or even one) on the muscle-bound amalgam of idiocy
and thuggery that is your senior feminist’s conception of a typical male, that
carrier of the XY curse is a latent rapist by biology’s definition. Just water
the seed of violence with a little beer and an angry pistil will spring forth
to rear and twitch in the direction of any and every woman observed to be walking unaccompanied on a darkened
street. Years ago, when feminism was first in flower, the Parkville Asylum and
surrounding suburbs were plastered periodically with signs that captured the
mindset in five short words, “All Men Are Potential Rapists”. The message is a
little more polished these days, but the sentiment, bolstered by some very
dubious statistics, remains unchanged. Here
is Rechter’s gist:
Sunday's
peace march in Brunswick went beyond a community's outpouring of grief; it was
also a show of solidarity for a woman's right to feel safe, no matter where she
is. It was heartening to see so many men take part.
The march was also a reflection of how more and more men now understand that
they are instrumental in preventing violence against women.
They can stand up for equality, they can refuse to turn a blind eye to a mate's
disrespectful behaviour, sexist joke, or thinly veiled threat hidden behind a
distasteful remark at the pub, work, or on the footy field. It has to stop.
These are the conditions that breed violence and harm women.
Get the picture?
Poor Jill Meagher is dead because Bill asks Bob if he has heard the one about
the lesbian who jumped from the Eureka Tower and landed on a parking meter.
Rechter is banging the same gong the left always whacks when a specific outrage
generates headlines: Don’t look at the actual incident, never that. Instead,
direct the debate and public focus to the general theme. There are more grants
to be garnered by this means and, best of all, the broadest of broad-brush approaches
precludes any standard by which the campaign’s success might be judged. In this
instance, making blanket generalisations about all men, not just rapists paroled in defiance of decency and common sense, is both meme and gravy train.
It would be nice to
think Baillieu appreciates this tactic and that he has some notion of how many
Labor holdovers, like Ms Rechter, he has retained in his state’s public
service, where they continue to operate as if the 2010 election never happened.
They are biding their time, cashing their cheques and waiting for the day when
the rightful, righteous party takes charge once again at the top end of
Bourke Street.
Meanwhile, Victoria's
judicial system remains an arrogant, slow, self-absorbed, crony-infested, immensely expensive citadel of incompetence populated by jurists who regard social engineering, not the public’s protection, as
their primary brief.
The Billabong’s
overnight correspondent opined that Victoria is not Queensland, and how a
southern-state version of Campbell Newman would be rejected by the electorate.
Be that as it may, we might as well have a Labor government in the Garden State
if the existing one is capable of nothing more than operating revenue cameras
and covering the mortgages of its embedded enemies.
UPDATE: Those who
bristle at the ad featured in the video above might appreciate this:
Don't dare laugh or Rechter will be seeking to have you charged as an accomplice in Jill Meagher's murder.
SOME things are sacred, like the public’s right to visit and
patronise shops and public facilities, although those atop at least two of our
local democracy’s purported pillars do not seem to believe as much. A couple of
months ago, Magistrate Simon Garnett, another of the former Brumby government’s
testaments to the career opportunities in hackery, ruled that a rowdy,
aggressive, anti-Semitic mob congregating regularly outside a Jewish-owned
store represents neither an attempt to dissuade customers from entering nor a
bid to silence its cash registers. This made some people very happy, as a good
smiting of the
Zionist entity and its Victoria Police puppets always will.
That Premier Baillieu has driven no appeal against Garnett’s
ruling, simply
asking the police to mull such a move even though the mob invades private
property every time the Jew-baiting instinct needs assuaging, serves as a further
reminder why he is known around Spring Street these days as One Term Ted.
Perhaps thinking of fresh ways to slug decent citizens with speed-camera fines
leaves too little time to contemplate the defence of property rights and principle.
One Term would not want to be mistaken for a conservative, after all, for such
a reputation might encourage hopes that he will winkle out the Labor holdovers
white-anting his government’s policies from inside the public service, stop handing
grants and prizes to leftist luvvies or remove the cordon sanitaire of gatekeepers
and courtiers he has allowed to isolate him from his own ministers.
And One Term isn’t the only thing being isolated. Down
Queenscliff way, there is both a lovely golf course (where an in-form Bunyip
once shot a very respectable 89 and this
hole, twice birdied, is a particular favourite) and an adjoining island where a
breathless report some months ago in The Age led readers to believe all
manner of racist and imperialist mischief was being hatched by SAS trainees and
operatives.
Your typical ratbag doesn’t need much encouragement to become
a greater public nuisance, so the thin gruel of the Age’s report was enough to
sustain former Occupists on their
journey down the Geelong Road. They are now back and in strength, blocking
access to both the SAS base on Swan Island and, as collateral damage, to
the golf course as well, which will be closed to the public for at least a
week.
This is the way things work in Victoria these days. A
spineless Premier appoints a police commissioner whose specialty is running
shakedown cameras, and whose supervision of the 3kph-over-the-limit counting
house leaves no time to deal sternly with actual lawbreakers. So we end up with
an
illegally blockaded poultry plant, a CFMEU
siege of the CBD and, now, a public golf course the public cannot use.
Two years remain until the next state election. Are no
members of the parliamentary Liberal Party prepared to challenge One Term? Is
there no one who fails to comprehend that it will be back to the opposition
benches if he is allowed to remain?
UPDATE: We can only imagine what closed-door humiliations were visited on this poor copper, who made the grave mistake of telling the truth about ethnic crime statistics. He makes amends below, never really denying there is a problem with youthful African miscreants, but apologising profusely for having allowed that fact to leak out.
