A Crew To Make You Vomit

WE KNOW they are incompetent, and the closed ranks around Craig Thomson demonstrate a stomach-turning tolerance for the reeking stink of the walking dead, but those deficiencies in the Gillard government are easy enough to understand. When a mob of congenital campus politicians is promoted above its experience and aptitude, as happened late in 2007, it is only natural its members will bring with them the postures and abstractions they perfected in student union dust-ups over the need to proclaim Parkville and similar precincts sustainable, gay-friendly nuclear-free zones.

As for tolerating the presence on the backbench of the throbbing member for Dobell while simultaneously having Fair Work's lickspittles stall any and all inquiries, well that is has been matter of sheer survival. Starving men have been known to eat their own excrement, and a knife-edge government facing a famine of votes was never going to spit out Thomson, no matter how reluctant his colleagues might be to leave him within unsupervised sniffing distance of a daughter’s bicycle seat. When this mob is swept away, it may even be possible after a period of years  to enjoy a good laugh at our current PM’s crew, just  as we all do now at Jim Cairns, his absurdist economics and the deceits that surrounded the burlesque fling with Juni Morosi.

But there is one thing decent people will find much harder to forgive or forget, even when time has softened memories: this government’s sleaze and smears. There was a race riot at the Lobby restaurant on Australia Day because some genius thought there were votes to be gained by stirring one up. And today, more of the anything-to-win same. With the help of Channel Ten and a strategic leak, commandant of the Australian Defence Force Academy Bruce Kafer's good name is once again being sullied. The brush this time is a snatch lifted from the unedited report into the ADFA Skype scandal. 

Now isn’t that just the remarkable coincidence! Channel Ten broadcast the first allegations against Kafer, and today we see it is Channel Ten once again spreading the toxic word. A pair of Ten reporters won a Walkley award for reports that, as we now know, were wrong in element and whole, so the current preference for echoing the original allegations, however feebly, was entirely predictable. It is certainly easier than admitting their Scoop Of The Year trophy was undeserved.

But what of a government that operates this way? Is there no standard of decency it will not violate in the name of cheap advantage? A rhetorical question, obviously.

We have had some low, rum sorts in Canberra over the past century or so, but none can match this polyglot of sleaze which purports to be a government. Unlike cabinet comrade Craig Emerson, Defence Minister Stephen Smith is not known to have slept with our PM, but he has certainly been infected with all the strains of shamelessness that characterise her career, especially the sly use of the knife.

Smith’s office, the obvious source of the latest leak, could put the matter to rest by releasing the final, edited report on the Skype affair. It is the investigation taxpayers funded and whose findings we all have a moral right to examine. But Smith sits on it, his handmaidens in the press add to the calumnies, and where the nation needs adults we get circus clowns.

There is only one remedy, one way to flush the filth.

An election. Now!

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.

Election Now!

A PRIME MINISTERIAL staffer incites a race riot. No ifs, ands or buts, that is that happened -- regardless of how many unnamed intermediaries and cut-outs were required to relay to the tent embassy's ferals word of Tony Abbott's presence at The Lobby restaurant. Young Mr Hodges has now been tossed overboard, and the lickspittle media is busying itself with trying to obscure the simple, ugly truth that his phone call was entirely in keeping with this rancid government's strategy of smearing the Opposition leader by any means necessary.

Why wouldn't a young buck in the PM's office pick up the signals and run with them? Hey, a quick call to a contact, a bit of misquoting and, Presto!, lovely footage on the nightly news of demonstrators demanding Abbott's head. See, Australia, even blackfellas hate him too.

If the scheme had gone as planned, does anyone doubt Hodges would have let it be known that he had engineered the coup? Of course not. He would have been sliming his little secret straight into our PM's ear.

But the scheme foundered, as all this government's projects do, on the rock of its endemic incompetence. Forget managing the economy, drowning illegal aliens or burying billions in the NBN's trenches. Gillard's crew cannot even spread a little malicious gossip without it coming back to bite them.

Now it is true that gossip and lies are integral parts of the political process, much as decent folk might dislike them. But gossip aimed at pitting white against black, at adding fuel to the fire that yesterday saw the flag of every Australian burned on the steps on Parliament! Anyone who sees that strategy as a means to a political end, or any partisan attempting to justify it, such people are beneath contempt.

We need an election and we need it now.

A NOTE OF GRATITUDE to visiting troll Numbers, who pointed out a typo. It is good know he is useful for something other than to be mocked