Allow me to discrimonstrate

I wrote a little while ago that the Brumby Government had started to stink up the place quite a bit, and so it was not much of a surprise that they got booted out.
I also wrote that I didn't exactly have high hopes for Baillieu.
Well, he's only been in power for a few months, but things are already looking very dicey with this Victorian Government.
Exhibit B (this was Exhibit A): Rachel Ball, director of policy and campaigns at the Human Rights Law Resource Centre, recently wrote in "Baillieu promised a fairer Victoria, but it looks like the opposite" that the State Government has stated it will scrap measures in Victoria's Equal Opportunity Act that are designed to actively promote equality, including stripping powers from the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, and also "expand the ''permanent exceptions'' that give religious groups and entities - including those that provide public services using public money - a free licence to discriminate against de facto couples, gays, lesbians and single mums, among others."
Why do they even need to go there? Aren't there more pressing concerns than allowing men in dresses to discriminate against single mothers on the basis of "a book of stories inscribed by an itinerant Middle Eastern shepherd many millennia ago" (with thanks to The Onion for that quote*).
I think the philosophy of this commenter ("Embe") had a simple eloquence: "I say, take away all tax payer funding from these organisations and then they can discriminate to their intolerant hearts content. If they take our secular money they should follow our secular inclusive rules."
Hear, hear, Mr Embe.
And boo, hiss, Mr Baillieu. My kickboot is getting itchy. I think it wants to connect with your behind region...
* Perhaps I'm being facetious, since the Bible "deals with all kinds of germane topics, from what meats one should not eat due to mankind's lack of refrigeration technology to the pre-Iron Age accounts of territorial disputes affecting a certain area of the Fertile Crescent."

All Liars are Liars

I hate to say "I hate to say I told you so", but: 'Madden attended meeting over Hotel Windsor sham'
I told you I hate to say I hate to say I told you so.

Battlefield Essendon

I read an article yesterday about my old friend Madden the Clown and Roddie Doyle attending the opening of a new Church of Scientology building in Essendon. Apparently, Madden is quoted as saying: ''You have set the standard for the community with your restoration of this building and with your social programs - an example for others to follow''.
He's such a character!
But I loved this quote further down:

"The church was founded by science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, who declared that the galactic dictator Xenu dumped millions of corpses in volcanoes on Earth 75 million years ago and blew them up with 17 hydrogen bombs. The souls, or ''thetans'', of the dead were contaminated and in turn contaminated humans, who can be cleansed only by Scientology."

It reminded me of a ranty book review I'd started a while ago after reading the hilarious-for-all-wrong-reasons Battlefield Earth a while ago. I actually read it for scientific purposes - to see whether this Lafayette Ronald Hubbard guy was for real, or more like a misunderstood Sacha Baron Cohen creation, like Borat. Y'know - just saying lots of crazy shit and seeing if anyone picked up that he was joking.
I'd always seen his books around (I had even accepted free entry to the "L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition" in Hollywood once when backpacking and thus very poor), and so when the opportunity arose to borrow Battlefield Earth from the library, I took it.
For those of you who don't know it (a) good on you, and (b) it's about an alien race that enslaves humanity in year 3000, and the fight against them (particularly by the "hero" - Jonnie Goodboy Tyler. Yes, that's the name he went with).
I was predictably shocked and stunned by what I read.
At the sheer badness of it.
For one thing, the language he uses is laughable. The bad guys, called "Psychlos", eat “goo-food”, breathe “breathe-gas”, and drink “kerbango”.
Points for imagination: zero.
Another example of extraordinary writing can be found right at the beginning, on page 4, when one of the Psychlos insults another saying ”You’re as crazy as a nebula of crap.”
Can I remind everyone that this was written AFTER Star Wars had come out?
The following paragraph from page 414 was so terrible, I just had to write it down - it's word for word, no typos:

“Chrissie had been spotted by the Scots, and the news earlier rumored to that effect was now confirmed as she went about helping the parson collect wounded Scots on a flatbed that had been gotten running.”

And of course, it contains the propaganda. The following describes a doctor operating on a Psychlo brain:

“MacKendrick saw their reaction. “Nothing new in this. Just electrical impulses approximating brain commands. Some man-scientist did this maybe thirteen hundred years ago and thought he’d found the secret of all thought and made up a cult about it called ‘psychology’. Forgotten now. It wasn’t the secret of thought; it was just the mechanics of bodies. They started with frogs. I’m cataloging this body’s communication channels, that’s all.””

Relevance? Zero.
It even gets some shameless self-congratulatory delusion in there, stating towards the end that after the humans won, one of the characters “wrote a book: The Jonnie Goodboy Tyler I knew, or The Conqueror of Psychlo, Pride of the Scottish Nation. It was not as good as this book, for it was intended for semiliterate people” (page 1049 - yes, that's one THOUSAND and forty nine pages of this!)
In fact, it appears El Ronnie was particularly adept at the self-congratulation. According to his bio (in the book, though I should point out there's a possibility it's not factually correct...or worse) he was "in addition to a writer (with a career spanning more than half a century of intense literary achievement and creative influence), an explorer, ethnologist, mariner and pilot, filmmaker and photographer, philosopher and educator, composer and musician. He broke his first bronc and became the blood brother of a Blackfeet Indian medicine man by age six. In 1927, when he was 16, he traveled to a still remote Asia…"
Ahhhh! I can't do this any more, so I'll just let him finish off, with his preface to the so-called "book":

“To show that science fiction is not science fiction because of a particular kind of plot, this novel contains practically every type of story there is – detective, spy, adventure, western, love, air war, you name it. All except fantasy; there is none of that. The term “science” also includes economics and sociology and medicine where these are related to material things. So they’re in here, too.
“In writing for magazines, the editors (because of magazine format) force one to write to exact lengths. I was always able to do that – it is kind of a knack. But this time I decided not to cut everything out and to just roll her as she rolled, so long as the pace kept up. So I may have wound up writing the biggest sf novel ever in terms of length. The experts – and there are lots of them to do so – can verify whether this is so…
“And as an old pro I assure that it is pure science fiction. No fantasy. Right on the rails of the genre. Science is for people. And so is science fiction.”
“Ready?
“Stand by.
“Blast off!”

And now you want to read it.

Trail blazing trial grazing

A quick mini-rant:
In response to the new Victorian Government's decision to allow cattle back into Alpine National Parks to graze as part of a "scientific trial"*, Libby Rumpff**, of the University of Melbourne's School of Botany, stated:
"The only fact that this trial can discover is that cows eat grass."
That's scientific comedy gold.
* Seems similar to Japanese whaling "scientific trials", which are scientifically determining whether stabbing whales kills them, and whether dead whales are more edible than live whales. The results so far appear inconclusive.
** Notice how I didn't make any scientific comedy gold comments about the word "Rumpff"? That's because I'm a grown-up.

Things I've learned in the past week or so...

(Or how I learned to stop writing long blog posts and just get this stuff out there, short-stuff Twitter-style)

A few things I've learnt this week:

• Alberto Cheatador got nailed (and I got to see Lance many, many times up close and personal at the Tour Down Under -BAM!)
  
• Apparently I'm to blame for Angus and Julia and Stone getting the No.1 spot in the Hottest 100, even though I did not and would not vote for them (my No.1 song of the year was "Tighten Up" by the Black Keys, but I consistently have my thumb off the pulse of what the general public like, as evidenced by my failure to watch a single episode of Masterchef, combined with my constant ability to watch shows that get cancelled or placed at weird times or on weird stations (Community, 30 Rock, even Buffy), plus predicting that no-one liked John Howard or (heaven forbid) that Peter Costello would be better than Howard...and so forth. Come to think of it, my inability to see eye-to-eye with the public-at-large could be why I rant...)
  
• Ricky Gervais is an hilarious atheist
• Douchebaggery
• Privatising our public transport has meant we've paid a billion dollars for worse service (but of course if you read this blog, and the fact you just read that previous sentence indicates you do, you already know that)
• By putting the maintenance of the surplus above climate change reform (and, indeed, common sense, by taxing people a small amount for a lot of grief), Julia Gillard really doesn't know what she's doing there.

That last bullet point of learning is very disappointing. I (and an entire country, besides) have given her a chance, but it's just getting worse. The right-wing crazies were already howling for her blood, but the progressives don't seem too keen on what she's been doing either.
Some bold decisions need to be made - the flooding we've seen this year is likely to become a frequent occurrence (as early as next week apparently, with some cyclones bearing down on a Queensland that must be full to the brim with homosexuals, assuming you're into the whole Wrath Of God thing), and we've already seen other evidence of extreme weather events with not just the bushfires in Victoria, but events all over the world. Ian Lowe, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, has some good suggestions in his article "Drowning in a hothouse", mostly to do with acknowledging there's a problem and putting a price on carbon pronto, as well as investing in public transport, phasing out multibillion-dollar subsidies of fossil fuel production and use, and investing in clean energy. Y'know, obvious stuff. Also, I'm no engineer, but I also wonder if there shouldn't be some kind of huge nation-building program undertaken to divert water that would otherwise cause flooding through the Great Dividing Range and into the Murray-Darling river system - #twobirdsonestone. Twitter-style!
Plus the ongoing debacle that is the resource rent tax (or the "Some minerals extraction tax", or "Oil-and-coal-companies-can-you-lend-me-a-fiver-scheme", or whatever it's going to end up as) really sticks in my ... anyone? Anyone? "Craw" - That's right - its sticks in my motherlovin' craw. To add insult to injury about our Government's limp-wristed approach to this issue, an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, Peter Christoff, decided to rub our noses in it a bit (with good intentions), telling us that:

"Mesmerised by the short-term benefits of successive mineral booms and shackled to their revenue flows, Australian governments have become both increasingly reluctant and increasingly politically terrified to regulate the pace of exploitation of these resources or to seek their full worth. And because returns to the state have been spent immediately, governments have become addicted to the income stream and unable to slow the exploitation of resources that have no future, such as coal and, eventually, gas, if we are to take climate change seriously.
We have been told over and again that this development path was the only choice for Australia, which doesn't have the public capital base to invest in exploration and exploitation of its non-renewable natural resources.
Strange, then, that a small nation such as Norway - population 5 million - should have had the capacity to do so. Stranger still that Norway could use revenue from its oil and gas windfall to establish a national fund that is now a major investor in economic development both in Norway and overseas, guaranteeing a revenue stream to fund the very robust Norwegian welfare state - its health, transport, public housing, and social security system."

Ahhh, jeez. I'm just gonna go to the Big Day Out and watch the Black Keys, to calm my nerves.

Speaking of which, here's that favourite song of mine from last year:

What's that? The Black Keys have cancelled their Australian tour?
Motherfuck!
All right, I'll just watch Ricky Gervais being funny again:

The Decline and Fall of the State Labor Government's Empire

Well - it's over.
For the ALP's Victorian Government, that is. Wa-hey!!
And I hate to say "I told you so" but ...
Actually, I think I enjoy saying it. What I really hate saying is "I hate to say "I told you so"" (because I have to say it so often, you see...)
Anyhoo - I told you so! Here, and here and here. And also here quite forcefully. Plus I already mentioned here.
I was half-way through another post railing against the Government that I was going to call "On the Nose" (an enormously witty reference to the former Victorian slogan "On the Move") but they went and got themselves kicked out before I could finish it.
The surprising thing for me was not the result, but the fact that everyone else seemed surprised about the result. I thought I was alone in predicting the Labor Government would go down this election, but to be fair, a few other commentators (or "professional journalists", if you want to get accurate about it) also recognised the danger signs, like Paul Austin of The Age back in February ("Labor's tide begins to turn") and David Rood in March, after the Altona by-election ("The Sorry Factor").
I'm not saying I'm jumping for joy about it - I'm just being self-congratulatory for picking it.
One of my biggest sore points was the Hotel Windsor debacle, which involved the leak of a plan by the Minister for Clowning - Justin Madden - and/or his staff to have a sham consultation into the development of the hotel, followed up with an immediate approval of the project after the leak, and a refusal to allow any of his staff to testify at the subsequent inquiry. As stated in the article "Arrogant executive should be brought to heel in Windsor case":

"DEFIANCE of the law by the government is one of the most serious things that can occur in any democracy. It is a breach of the rule of law, the most fundamental value on which our constitutional arrangements are based. It is precisely this sort of dangerous defiance that the Victorian government is engaged in with its refusal to co-operate with a parliamentary inquiry into the Hotel Windsor planning processes - and it is doing so under the cover of a bogus "parliamentary convention".
"The time has come for the Victorian Legislative Council, the upper house of the Parliament, to take severe action against the executive and to establish the point once and for all that the Parliament's legitimate role must be accepted."

So - their lack of respect for democracy stuck in my craw somewhat.
Plus there was all that stuff they ignored or tried to hide about public transport (and myki), and smart meters, and the desal plant and the Port Phillip Bay dredging and BAD PLANNING and...
You get the idea.
It's unlikely that Baillieu will be able to fix many if any of these problems. But a democratically elected Government that fails to abide by the central tenets of democracy deserves to get democratically kicked in the ar$e.
Baillieu - you're next in the cross-hairs on my boot. Get to work.

Madden-ing

Last week, the Honourable Justin Madden, Minister of Planning for Victoria, wrote an article in The Age "Opposition to a bigger Melbourne smacks of cultural snobbery", in which he railed against cultural elites, claiming only he had the knowledge and power to determine what was right for Melbourne.

I took umbrage, as did many others including Michael Leunig, and wrote him the following:

"Dear Mr Madden

I recently read your article "Opposition to a bigger Melbourne smacks of cultural snobbery" and thought that, since you basically represent the people of Victoria when it comes to planning issues, you might like to hear my diatribe in response to your own diatribe.

First, apart from the standard (and lame and lazy) tactic of accusing anyone who disagrees with them of being a latte-sipping, champagne*-swilling "cultural snob" (presumably because said antagonist might have a University degree and some intelligence), since when did the childhood experiences of one politician suffice for a justification of Government policy?

You also state that "Planning policy should be about the aspirations of individual Victorians." Really? I aspire to have an iPhone - is the Victorian Department of Transport going to help me out with that?

Instead, shouldn't planning policy be about ensuring that the city of Melbourne, indeed - the State of Victoria, operates in the best way for Victorians as a whole, irrespective of individual aspirations?

An idea I've been trying to put forward for a while - and I'm pretty sure I stole it from someone else, so I know I'm not the only one - is that the Government should start putting money into our regional cities, like Ireland apparently did with cities like Galway. The fact is, Melbourne is sprawling - it's a-sprawling! - and the planning answer shouldn't be "newly arrived people should have a choice to live on the city fringes". By all means, provide more services to the city fringes, but someone has to draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough. In fact, someone did do that: your Government, with the "Melbourne 2030" planning boundaries your Government now wants to get rid of.

The Government should realise that it is unsustainable to simply let more and more people move into Melbourne's surrounding countryside. In particular, where are these people going to get their water? And no-one has been fooled into thinking that removing Connex will fix the public transport system.

An obvious alternative is to invest in Victoria's regional cities - especially ones that can be self-sustaining. I'm thinking here of cities or towns on or near the coast, which can get their own water supply going. Since you also seem fond of making policy decisions on the basis of looking at a map, an ideal candidate would appear to be Wonthaggi. Assuming the Government's other bad policy of installing an enormous desalination plant near Wonthaggi gets up, Wonthaggi will have a great water supply right next door. Rather than burning more coal to pipe that water to Melbourne, how much easier and more efficient to pipe it to Wonthaggi a few kilometres down the road? Get some jobs and infrastructure going down there, and similar places, and you've got yourself a sustainable and popular planning policy."

I forgot to mention to Justin that, while he may have his Airport West experience to identify with the proletariat, my great-grandfather, from a mining family in the area, was killed in a drunken fight outside a pub in Wonthaggi. That's cred.

But for now, I'm thirsty, so I'm going to get myself a latte.

* Since it's now illegal to refer to any sparkling wine as "champagne" unless it comes from that particular region in France, I reckon we should start calling our sparkling "shampain". Different as. Spread the word.

Stating the obvious

So, Connex is no longer in control of out trains, having lost the contract. Whoop-dee-doo, exclamation point.
Don't get me wrong - Connex was lame as, and had to go. But, as many people have been pointing out, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, ad latin, Melbourne's public transport won't be fixed by simply replacing the operator. The Victorian Government is the one really at fault, and those involved will no doubt be hoping that the Victorian public will (a) think they are improving things, rather than (b) punish them at the ballot box.
Fat chance.
It's (b) time.
As RMIT transport academic Paul Mees was reported to have said, the operators were not the problem: "While Connex and Yarra Trams will be no loss, replacing them while leaving the system of privatisation intact will change nothing..."
"The real problem is . . . that nobody is in overall charge of our rail system; nobody is accountable for its performance. Changing the brand name on the sides of the trains and trams won't fix any of these problems."
The sound-biteable Mr Mees is actually a critic of privatisation, bless him, and that's where the problem really lies, but as I've said before - the Government wants to be a step removed from running the public transport system, so they have their "plausible deniability", unquote (I know I already unquoted, I do what I want).
Even worse, although it's common knowledge that the Victorian Government LOVES roads and HATES trains, I had no idea that the Department of Transport, to trick people into thinking that it is independent and objective, simply makes shit up so that rail looks almost as expensive as roads.
If any of you political hacks actually involved in this decepticonation are reading this, just to confirm your own suspicions of self-loathing, you suck SO hard.

I was going to start on the Government's failure on the water stuff, but I'm tired.
Oh, so tired.
Newsflash: Government sucks on water stuff. More to come.

World's most liveable city(s)

I love Melbourne (even though it is called "Melbourne" and not "Batmania" as originally proposed). But it's getting too big - it's one of the largest cities in the world by land area, with an urban sprawl to rival Los Angeles. The transport system is breaking down, we're syphoning off water from rural Victoria at a time when they need it more than we do, and more and more bogans are bashing each other, and others, in the city.
It's unsustainable, a view reiterated by Sally Capp, the chief executive of the Committee for Melbourne, in an article in The Age today: "The Australian dream of how we live is due for a revamp". The "Melbourne@5 million" plan she talks about, which proposes six new centres for Melbourne, in addition to the CBD, being Frankston, Dandenong, Ringwood, Box Hill North, Broadmeadows and Footscray, is a good start (especially if they support it with a train line running around between those areas as well). But it still involves building up Melbourne even more.
A while ago, I read of an idea to emulate Ireland's plan to focus on building up its regional cities, such as Galway and Waterford, rather than just Dublin. While this idea is unlikely to find a lot of support amongst Victoria's Melbourne-centric politicians, it makes a huge amount of sense. It seems Australia is unique in having a few huge cities spread out across a continent the size of Europe or the US, and then lots of tiny unresourced ones.
SO I'm putting it out there, sycophantic yes-men and faceless bureaucrats: it's time to focus on building up the rest of Victoria (people respond well to being called "sycophantic yes-men and faceless bureaucrats", don't they?). I'm thinking towns like Warrnambool, Wonthaggi and Wodonga, as well as towns that don't start with "W": like Sale, Portland, maybe Lakes Entrance. Put money into these towns and provide opportunities for work (particularly Government work). More jobs and infrastructure equals more people attracted to those areas equals less people in Melbourne equals less clogged roads and less need for water and energy equals something-something. It'll be better for everyone.
That said, I don't plan on leaving Melbourne, but then again I drink lattes and live in the inner city.
PS When I originally typed in the heading for this post, I accidentally wrote "World's moist liveable city(s)" and it made me snigger immaturely.

Back on the rant-wagon

All right, the longer I put this off, the more likely I will release the considerable energy locked up in my atoms in the form of some kind of explosion.
First up, here's a little missive I recently sent to one of our representative geese in the Senate.

Dear Senator Fielding
Regarding your recent opposition to the Government’s alcopops tax increase, I need to ask you a question: Are you serious? Actually, since I’m from Victoria and you theoretically represent Victoria, I need to ask another one: Are you for real?!?
I thought you and your Christian Brothers were all for reducing excessive alcohol consumption, particularly in relation to our youth. These sugary drinks are now expected to drop in price by $2 each, which can only encourage increased consumption.
Although it may not have gone as far as you would like, the Government’s tax increase was basically good policy (in light of the existing taxation of alcohol, anyway). Apart from directly targeting these types of drinks, it was actually fixing up a discrepancy between the taxation of full spirits and these spirit-based drinks. Plus there were the extra measures added after negotiations with the Greens and Nick Xenophon (who I think is your one-eyebrowed baby). It was what is known as a no-brainer.
Demanding that all alcohol advertising be removed from sporting broadcasts, seemingly on a whim, from nowhere, MAY be good policy. But that needs to looked at carefully. Policy on the run is never good.
In addition, do I need to point out that the Government got many, many more votes than you? Of course, the fact that the ALP’s preferences got you in IS pretty funny, isn’t it?
Unfortunately, you’re also looking a little bit funny, now, too. Bit of a joke, you know? It's not just me; see, for example, "Imbalance of power" in The Age on 22 March and "Lower alcopops levy lets us drink to a simpler tax system" in The Australian on 26 March (if you don't read that one, you were referred to as a "goose"). This petulant foot-stamping has probably done your cause more harm than good.
We could also blame the Opposition who voted against the measure en masse for apparently no reason, but you’ve become the scapegoat in this charade. People like a scapegoat.
Anyway, um, best of luck.
Regards
Riley

Ahhhh. I feels good to rant again.
By the way, if you also would like to contact this gentleman - go for it: senator.fielding@aph.gov.au
Now, what else has been happening?

I don't want to say "I told ya so". But I just can't help myself.

A quick mini-rant: a while ago, I suggested that the State Labor Governments around Australia could be in trouble, especially that of my home state of Victoria.
Well, it looks like others are now adding to the chorus: Brumby and his crew face testing times.
Plus the NSW Labor Government is looking even more dodgy than usual, and their latest mini-budget is, with all due respect, an absolute shocker. As Ross Gittins recently said in the Sydney Morning Herald:

"THIS mini-budget is a sham. It purports to be about responding to the severe downturn in the NSW economy, but will in fact make things worse."

Assuming they all go down in the next set of elections, well, let's just say it couldn't happen to nicer clowns...

Government by the people, for the investors

Public transport in my fair city is a mess. So a recent report of an Eminent Dude saying that the rail operator, Connex, “should be sacked and management of Melbourne's suburban trains brought back into public hands” was music to my ears.

Hear, hear, Eminent Dude!

Unfortunately, there’s little likelihood that our so-called Government will act on this very sage advice.

Why? I think it’s because Governments generally have realised that, if they outsource problem areas to the private sector (no doubt for a premium), they can set up a buffer between themselves and the public.

Take…I don’t know…public transport, for example.

Public transport was privatised in Melbourne a while ago, ostensibly to increase competition and, thereby, increase efficiency and decrease cost (of course, this reasoning effectively went the way of the dodo long ago – there is now one train provider (Connex) and one tram provider (Yarra Trams)). Unless you live opposite a train station and a tram stop, I doubt there’s much competition going on. Plus you should probably move.

Anyway, despite the fact the original benefits put forward in favour of privatisation seem to have evaporated, privatised public transport remains.

But here’s the thing: when people complain about the operation of public transport these days, they complain to, or about, the private operators.

The Government can even join in!

It has effectively sidestepped a potentially damaging electoral issue.

Prisons are another one. What the hell is a Government doing outsourcing the process of the punishment of crime to the private sector?!? And then I remembered some of the scandals which can occur with jails, including prison escapes (sorry: Prison Breaks), corruption, mistreatment of prisoners, or even the opposite: prisoners getting it too good.

Again, the Government can blame the private operator if any of these things happen, but it’s ‘not their fault’. There’s no votes in prisons, so get rid of them.

What I’m saying is: our Government has no balls.

PS Prisoners get it too good.

Mega Rant

All right. I’ve had a bunch of rants building up inside me, and if I don’t let them loose on the unsuspecting world, it could get messy. Bits of rant everywhere.

So, here’s a quick run-through of things that have stuck in my craw in varying degrees recently.

1. Won't somebody think of the children?!?!?

Recently, here in the Wonderful Land of Oz, a lesbian couple tried to sue their doctor after their IVF treatment resulted in twins, not the one child like God intended that lesbians should have when using science to conceive. Of course, they ‘love’ their children equally, they just think the doctor should pay $398,000 for raising them – it’s such an inconvenience, you know?

Unfortunately, they lost. I mean, if they can’t successfully sue their IVF doctor, who are the rest of us gonna sue? Who’s going to pay for raising our children?

It’s just got to be like totally someone else’s fault.

Oh yeah, and this just in from the future: ‘Kids overjoyed to discover lesbian parents ‘cherished’ them whilst suing IVF doctor’.

Because we all know that, one day, they will find out.

Whilst on the topic of unworthy parents, here’s a little snippet from Lawrence Money (the guy I kinda bagged a few posts ago about his views on the Jesus T-shirt kid): Apply here for kids

This one talks to me on many levels:

“You want to breed? Then fill out a form, have a psychological screening, show you at least have the basic wherewithal to finance their upbringing, education. Are you mentally and emotionally fit for one of the most demanding tasks on this overpopulated planet? What's your family background like? Have you the slightest hope of giving your offspring the basic essentials of love, time, physical and spiritual nourishment. Or are you just going to let them run around like two-legged strays, accidental bonking by-products who bring in a bit of handy government moolah.”

But he’s right, no politician would or could ever go down this path.

Meddling kids…

2. Lockout, Schmockout

The Victorian Government recently implemented one of their dumb ideas and, due to an increase in violence in Melbourne, tried to enforce a bar lockout in the CBD – basically a policy that you can’t get into a venue after 2am, even if you were in there before. Apart from the flawed policy being successfully challenged by some venues, meaning it doesn’t apply to everyone (so drunken yobs only get locked out of some venues), it looks like the Government also knew it was flawed policy: Brumby warned of lockout risk. Plus, anecdotal evidence suggests it’s likely to lead to more violence, thanks to heaps of drunken yobs getting locked out of places at the same time, and then wandering the streets looking for cabbies to bash. Nice one.

3. Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to pay for

A wag of my finger to the Canadian city of London, Ontario, which has halted sales of bottled water at all of its municipal facilities and instead plans to replace them with water fountains: Canadian city bans sales of bottled water. A representative of Coca-Cola, a real victim of this policy since it sells bottled water under the label Dasani, stated: "It's hard to bring your kitchen sink with you" While I have no idea what this means, he went on to say "To us, it's a matter of choice and a matter of personal preference."

That’s right, if you want to pay a stupid amount of money for something that’s free, and which produces 150 times more greenhouse gases to distribute than tap water, you shouldn’t have that choice taken away from you in municipal facilities, whether or not you have brought your kitchen sink with you.

4. Let he who has not judged get down to some serious judging

Just read an article by a travel writer, giving advice on the ‘types’ of people you might run into whilst indulging in a bit of group travel: On tour, hell is other people

She sounds like such fun, I’m just itching to book some kind of group tour just in case she’s going, too (she seems to do them a lot, so my chances are good)!! Her ability to categorise people and put them down with witty rejoinders like “To counter this time-sensitive soul, simply ask if he is in a hurry” (guffaw) will add so much to my experience! With luck, she might even categorise ME! Plus, I want to hang with her and play Twister.

Nah but seriously you’re all right.

5. Un-rant

And just so I don’t look like a total knob, here are some people I recently discovered I like:

• Leslie Cannold, with a very reasoned article about men and their propensity to get all uppity about abortion
• Joe Biden, potential vice presidential running mate with my man Barack. Biden’s almost a Jedi name, I can go with that…
• Julia Nunes, whom I just discovered on the YouTube. Her ukulele cover of Weezer’s Keep Fishin’ is the biz-ness…*

* I mainly put this on my ranty blog because then I don’t have to remember these links. Yeah, blogs have got it goin’ on for forgetful MoFos like my good self.

What’s good for the goose…

A little while ago, I was involved with www.thinkliar.com, a website dedicated to highlighting the...how should I put this...non-core truths perpetrated by John Winston Howard, with the catchy catchphrase 'Think John Howard. Think Liar.'(1)
Set up in 2003, the website was obviously an unqualified success, with John Howard and his Liberal-National coalition romping it in at the election in 2004, winning both houses of Parliament for the first time in over 20 years. It was a success, that is, assuming the purpose of highlighting the slippery nature of John Howard was to get him re-elected. Which, on further reflection, was not our intention.
Maybe the website was a slow-burner, since Little Johnny lost the 2007 election in spectacular fashion. If the website (and domain name) still existed, I would like to take some credit.
Nonetheless! What I'm saying is, whether or not I was personally responsible, I was glad to see the end of Howard.
And now his successor, Kevin Rudd, seems…pretty good. We’ll see. But now that we have the Labor Party governing at the federal level, it looks like his State Labor counterparts might not be so lucky at the next election.
And this is what I was trying to get at.
Australians generally like having a balance in politics – we don’t want any one person or party having too much power. This is another theory for why, after Howard won both the Senate and House of Representatives in 2004, and abused the power, he convincingly lost the election a little over 3 years later (the other theory being the influence of thinkliar.com).
Now with a Federal Labor Government, I think a lot of people, myself included, won’t be so reliant on having Labor State Governments, and I think their situation is looking more and more precarious. NSW has been a basket-case for a while, now, and that affair with apparent corruption in Wollongong can’t help (though the fact that the Opposition in NSW is a complete rabble may help the ALP for some time). Tasmania has also now joined in with a recent fiasco, which can’t help matters: Shredded note brings down Tasmania's Deputy Premier.
And though the Victorian ALP seems strong, I’m not so sure. Below is some of my recent correspondence sent to John Brumby, Gavin Jennings and Peter Garrett in relation to, primarily, the channel deepening project in Port Philip Bay (sent on 5 February 2008):

Dear sirs
I am writing to give you fair warning of what I think may happen at the next State election.
I have been voting (2) Labor a long time (and was actually quite active in trying to get rid of John Howard), but even I am tempted to vote AGAINST Labor at the next State election.
In doing so, I would be voting for the same reasons I wanted to get rid of the Coalition federally, and Jeff Kennett in Victoria. Both of those Governments became arrogant in office, did not consult with the community, and seemed to be making deals that were not for the benefit of the majority of Australians/Victorians (John Howard also had a problem with being honest with anyone, and in my opinion was pretty ordinary economically, but that's for another day).
These accusations could also be made about the Victorian Government today. There is a hell of a lot of dissatisfaction out there, and even though the election is quite a long way away, there is a possibility that your Government will be voted out for the growing raft of poor environmental decisions it appears to be making.
I urge you (and Mr Garrett) to reconsider these issues of vital importance to our environment - there is still time to make new plans, to hold your heads high and take on board the criticisms of the electorate.
We don't really care how much power the Port of Melbourne thinks it needs, or how much profit Connex wants. We do care about our bay and the Yarra, about traffic congestion, about increasing pollution, about spoiling natural areas like the Gippsland Coast.
To us, the public, it seems there are good alternatives to these problems - start developing Western Port NOW, invest in adequate rail infrastructure (for both passengers and freight) even if it means a trade-off with less investment in roads for a while (I know how much governments love roads), encourage all homes to install water tanks (or even provide them free - I've heard this would be cheaper and better than building the desalination plant), get alternative energy sources up and running straight away.
Some bold initiatives like these would re-invigorate support for your Government. To be honest, off the top of my head, I can't think of anything bold that the Labor Government has done since attaining office.
If, however, these ideas are not feasible, then tell us why. Engage with the public. That is what democracy is all about.
Don't make me vote Liberal. I really don't want to. But for the sake of our democracy, I may have to.
Yours faithfully
Riley Jones

You heard it hear first. And you heard it here second.
Let the betting begin.

PS Yes, the title is saying that John Howard is a goose.

(1) A line based on the classic 'Think Squirrels. Think Nuts.' from The Office (apparently): “What does a squirrel do in the summer? It buries nuts. Why? Cos then in winter time he's got something to eat and he won't die. So, collecting nuts in the summer is worthwhile work. Every task you do at work think, would a squirrel do that? Think squirrels. Think nuts.”
(2) Or at least preferencing…