To An Election. Now.

IT’S whatever time it was, getting on for six o’clock or so, and the young lady bringing drinks announces that Rudd has quit. Well the reaction amongst those present is universal, and it isn’t an immediate siding with one or other of the case studies in abnormal psychology wishing to lead the nation.

“Election would be better,”  said the Lorikeet, whose son had joined us for a drink. He stopped talking about the day at work to read some headlines from his mobile. The Professor raised a toast.

“To an election. Now!”

The members at the adjoining knot of chairs and table hear the call and do not need to be invited. One mutters something about "scum" -- no worse a description than Labor's leaders are flinging at each other -- and they raise their glasses too.

An election. Now. It's the only remedy.

The Flatware Revolution

OF ALL the milestones in the rise of Western civilisation the most overlooked is the arrival of the fork. Until those Medici fashionplates took up the implement, dinner in Italian households must have been very messy affairs, what with all that pasta and sauce. From Italy forks spread to France and thereafter to England, but not in time to save Henry VIII from his reputation for oafishness at the table. Where forks were adopted, the pattern never varied: progress accelerated, democracy gained ground, free speech and property rights prospered. The blessings of the fork are obvious. While various monarchs have put away their queens, none since the implement’s adoption has resolved a vexatious marriage with the assistance of an axe.

Today in Australia we would do well to contemplate the noble fork, especially its relevance to scraping clean the squalor laid upon the nation’s plate by this appalling government and the habitual liar who, for the moment, leads it. Those Italians of old found that forks kept their tunics clean and so they might do something similar for us.

Stick a fork in ‘em, we sometimes say, they’re done – and Gillard’s lot are most definitely overcooked. Or think of a larger tool, the brandished pitchfork of the peasant in revolt.

In other parts of the world it has been ribbons and colours that expressed popular movements' disgust with diseased regimes – the Yellow Revolution in the Philippines, orange in the Ukraine and rose in Georgia. But Australia isn’t that sort of place. We are a bit more sedate and rather docile, which is the reason so few speed-trap end up on the wrong end of a shotgun, as they do in the United States, where citizens are less inclined to accept being supervised like children. And there is the other problem of finding just the right translucent shade of Harpic blue, the appropriate agent for flushing this stinking mob and cleaning up its stains.

A dining fork peeking above the breast pocket of a gentleman’s suit jacket, a daintier cake fork for the ladies – what better symbol to represent the need for an election. We should be taping them to car aerials, printing them on T-shirts, displaying their images on posters in front windows.

This is a government of no legitimacy and less goodwill. It is populated by rogues, protected by a compromised Speaker and sees its first priority as protecting a brothel-creeper in the House and, outside it, a young man who might put to rest suspicions of inciting a race riot if only he would come out of hiding. The Gillard gaggle has no moral authority because it lacks both decency and, as the polls continue to demonstrate, the electorate’s trust. Australia needs an election as poison demands an emetic.

So take up your forks, citizens, and drive home the point with a smile: Rudd and Gillard can wave their knives, but it can only be an election that determines who is genuinely fit to lead.

Drowning The Ants

JUST BEYOND the Billabong’s back door, down the stairs and past the barbecue, there is a spot that would be perfect for a lemon tree, as that is where, when alcohol has been consumed, the Professor sometimes gives the ants reason to believe their little world is ending beneath a body-temperature deluge high in uric acid. It is a cultural thing and to be cherished, a testament to the Judeo-Christian heritage. A good Buddhist shrinks from inflicting such suffering, the Confucian sees it as disrespecting the garden's ancestral planters and an animist is unlikely to unzip at all, apt to be gripped by reverence and reverie at the sight of all that secret ant business being enacted down below. As for your Musselman, the Prophet’s prohibition on alcohol means that, upon sober reflection, indoor plumbing is to be used and celebrated as another example of Allah’s beneficence in guiding the faithful to our infidel wonderland of flushable creature comforts.

Still, there is inspiration for those culturally attuned to absorb it, as few things more closely resemble the current political situation than the spectacle of agitated and baffled bullants dashing about in their sodden circles. Somewhere deep below the nest’s mounded entrance sits the queen, dry for the moment and relatively safe. Picture her, if you will, with a longish nose and hair of the Bozo hue. She is isolated and dependent for her cues and information on messengers bringing word of the saturating disaster above. Here you might imagine a six-legged Bruce Hawker (especially by the second or third bottle) relaying the grim tidings to his leader. Not to worry, he will advise at last, your soldier ants are on the attack, little nippers at the ready.

And so they are, fierce in their bafflement as the flood grows ever worse. If ants carried notebooks and took unquestioning stenography, the most determined to protect and serve would bear names like Michelle and Peter. Such ardent defenders see the current panic as evidence only of the attacker’s “negativity”, not of the nest’s many vulnerabilities.  It is a scent trail to be laid at every opportunity, augmented as the flood grows worse with comforting counsel that  the mission is not flawed, only the way its goals are being sold.

But still the panic spreads, so much so that even Bob, the genial old drone, is getting agitated. He never bit nor was seen to be riled, but now he is irritable and fighting mad,  snapping his green pincers at all sundry, especially that big cockroach Rupert. Bob has had an easy life, required to do little more than seed his peculiar notions and bask in the acclaim as the queen brings them into being. Now that he is being blamed and quizzed and called upon for explanations, well, he does not like it one bit.

It is an inspiration to see the ants in such a state. Until an election is called and the queen is flooded out for good, it will have to do. Now, where’s that corkscrew? Another bottle beckons.