Reflection: ANZAC Day 2013

Fiona Uncategorized

Some people may remember Malcolm B Duncan, a regular contributor to Margo Kingston’s first venture into the 5th estate, Webdiary. A barrister, a curmudgeon, a good friend, Malcolm died, far too young, in January 2011. He was also, on the right day, a good poet.

He wrote this poem in honour of his grandfather Alan Lord, a veteran of World War II.

I hope that some of you find it as moving – and as honest about the futility of war – as I do.

Sparrow’s Fart

Lest they forget
They huddle numb
In tiny pools of light
As those whom now they
Commemorate
Did once around
Fag end’s glow
Gather for warmth
(at least of spirit)
Brashly boisterous
In a diff’rent pre-dawn hush,
Wave-slapped, kit-jingled,
Gravid with fear.

Then,

Guns roared and lit them on
To landing.

What cruel star fates their nation
Ever to light upon the wrong cove?

Why remember disaster?

Death is not glory
Nor error truth

But now in the circles’ glow
Annual lit from town to town
Last posts quaver
For the ordinary heroes
We don’t forget
Still for whom
We keep the fag-ends burning.

554 thoughts on “Reflection: ANZAC Day 2013”

  2. leonetwo

    This tweet by Rob Oakeshott

    the glass-jaw bullies at 2GB are now requesting I remove the email exchange with them from my facebook site, due to, “privacy reasons”…

  3. On twitter

    Will Abbott and his #slushfund take #clivepalmer to court to deregister his party #auspol

  6. victoria
    Just saw that. And this –

    Robert Oakeshott MP ‏@OakeyMP 4m
    There is a difference between Alan Jones and Ray Hadley at 2GB. At least Alan Jones had the courage to stand for Parliament.

    I can’t see the emails on Rob’s Facebook page, but the link is still there on his website. Perhaps the dunderheads at 2GB haven’t realised that yet.

  8. I don’t suppose there’s any chance Clive could get his Titanic II finished early so he could set off on its maiden voyage around the beginning of September…..nah, wishful thinking.

  9. You all may have been witnessing the goings on over at Poll Bludger, but I just had a look at their witterings on Twitter.

    Apparently, if King Kevin had been installed already, he would have been wiping the floor with Tony Abbott by now.

    That would be the same Kevin Rudd that Tony Abbott has already wiped the floor with himself?

    Or, the same Kevin Rudd, who, when the Liberal Propaganda Machine in the media turned the heat up on him, after Tony Abbott assumed the leadership of the Coalition, melted under the first real pressure he had had to face since being elected?

    Or, maybe it’s that guy who can’t even fight a successful battle for the leadership of his own party, not once, but three times?

    Oh yes, I know him. That’s Kevin O’Lemon.

  10. When Clive Palmer first developed his taste for politics some three years ago he was gunning for Wayne Swan, Kevin Rudd and their mining tax. Has he thought through how his United Australia Party is likely to help Wayne Swan, Julia Gillard and their version of the mining tax?

    Wayne Swan did not declare this war
    It was Clive Palmer crying poor
    On Lateline some three years ago
    When Kevin Rudd was all aglow,
    Insisting miners pay more tax.
    That night Clive said he’d get the axe;
    Promised a miners’ revolution
    To bring about Rudd’s execution.

    So it was. Twiggy and Gina
    Came charging into the arena.
    They roused the citizens of Perth
    To claim states’ rights to sell their earth.
    Well known Aussie mining magnates,
    Victorious, this band of mates,
    Then refused negotiations
    And Gillard’s terms with corporations.

    Billionaires on the back of trucks
    Got Tony Abbott thinking, “Shucks!
    We’ll have a nationwide revolt!
    Bring carbon pricing to a halt!”
    But somehow his People’s Rising,
    Urged on by his catastrophizing,
    Flopped. It did not eventuate
    He’d get what he thought his ‘due’ estate.

    Abbott couldn’t make the distance,
    So Clive now has to lead resistance.
    The manpower of a footie team,
    Plus ‘National Treasure’ title, seem
    To enlarge him, make him bigger,
    Into a massive public figure.
    Ally Twiggy gets his jollies
    In Canberra, nagging pollies.

    It wasn’t hard to find a part
    Ideally played by Ms Rinehart.
    In charge of all their propaganda,
    She made sure their memoranda
    Were written up, had wide report
    In her media outlets newly bought.
    That’s when Swannie sounded the alarm!
    “Oz beware! Our democracy could come to harm!”

    http://polliepomes.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/starting-wars-is-not-swans-way/

    My illustrations to this pome and the accompanying post included one of Gina on the back of a truck which at the time was reproduced all over the net with relevant posts. It seems to have disappeared and I cannot retrace it. Can anyone help?

  11. the glass-jaw bullies at 2GB are now requesting I remove the email exchange with them from my facebook site, due to, “privacy reasons”…

    I thought the Glass Jaw Bullies(love it! 😀 ), were Crusaders for ‘Free Speech’?

  12. In the UK ‘George’ seems to be under serious attack and ‘Dave’ seems to have disappeared.

  14. patriciawa,
    Fiona is in Canberra atm attending to her father’s funeral arrangements. So I’ll try and get some pics for you. 🙂

  17. victoria

    [The usual suspects are carrying on about the usual topic]

    I’m stirring them along – it’s fun!

  20. C@tmomma

    Just to let you know I’ll be around from about 5pm your time to help with the raffle, Goin’ out bakson

  21. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-04-26/gillard-urges-nt-to-turn-off-grog-tap-with-bdr/4652748

    PM pushes NT to reinstate Banned Drinker Register
    By Ruby Jones
    Updated 1 hour 12 minutes ago

    Prime Minister Julia Gillard says she will be stepping up pressure on the Northern Territory Government to tackle alcohol problems.

    Leaked data from the Alice Springs Hospital shows the proportion of emergency patients presenting with alcohol-related problems doubled in the five months after the Banned Drinker Register (BDR) was scrapped.

    Ms Gillard, who is in Darwin, says the scrapping of the BDR by the Country Liberals Government was a retrograde step.

  22. You guys are too cruel! 🙂

    I do love reading the posts here at the Pub, though i try really hard not to post so you can have one little slice of heaven left on the net.

    Maybe i should post links at Bolts site and other places 🙂

  23. I was intruiged by the references to a mysterious Lisa Titterington in the 2GB/Oakeshott emails. His office says there has never been a Lisa Titterington in the office so I’ve put on my Misss Marple hat and done a bit of asking around and Googling.

    I’ve never heard of a former lawyer or an anything else around here called Lisa Titterington, and that’s not a name you’d easily forget.
    Lawyers are easy to find, they have lists and stuff on that interwebby thing, she’s not mentioned anywhere.
    #1 son knows Rob’s office staff, (and just about everyone under the age of 40 in town) he’s never heard of her either.
    There’s no trace of such a person anywhere in the country on Google, except for…..Tah-Dah!! ….. a mention in some story the Smelly did about Mr O after the 2010 election, when they claimed she was his chief of staff. So that seems to be where 2GB have obtained their ‘information’. A made-up story, two and a half years old. Gee, they have such brilliant research people in that place.

  27. Wasn’t Peter Shack the MP who was demoted from the Ministry by Howard for owning Shopping Centres whilst Minister for same?

    Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

    He’ll probably get sent to a Low Security Prison Farm though, not to Casuarina where the scary people are. 😉

  30. C@tmomma, I did include the links for the pics at the end of the comment to Fiona, there. Sorry, I simply addressed it to her as the post author and therefore I assumed was moderator. You’re a gem.

  31. Hey Rummel

    I’m mostly posting here at the moment, when I get the chance. I’ve not sworn off PB or anything like that, but do find it easier to keep an eye on just one most of the time.

  34. The mention of Peter Shack’s name threw up a most interesting article and analysis of Coalition policy by Lenore Taylor, from 2011:

    Beware the Promises not Properly Costed
    July 2, 2011

    Lenore Taylor

    Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a promising Liberal politician called Peter Shack. Shack was health spokesman under the then Coalition leader, Andrew Peacock, and in that role he promised a lot.

    He spent most of 1989 promising he was working on a health policy that would save money by changing the Medicare system. Specifically, he promised his new policy would be revenue neutral and leave no one worse off.

    Embarrassingly, in January 1990, just two months before Peacock faced the prime minister, Bob Hawke, at an election, Shack was forced to admit he couldn’t make the sums add up, alongside everything else the Coalition had committed to, and he wouldn’t be able to deliver the policy. The Liberals went to the election with a ”set of principles” rather than an actual policy on health.

    Shack’s experience suggests an important lesson about the dangers of promising big things before you know how a policy platform fits together.

    Whether it’s a lesson that has been learnt by today’s Coalition we won’t know for a while. Quite rightly, the Liberal and National parties are reserving their right to deliver full and costed policies close to the next election.

    But they are already promising quite a lot.

    There’s the paid parental leave scheme, which (once you factor in the business levy designed to pay for it, and the company tax cut designed to avoid a backlash over the business levy, and the abolition of the less expensive Labor scheme which would be wound in to the more generous Coalition offering) would cost a bit more than $2 billion a year.

    There’s the direct action plan to address climate change which would cost $3.2 billion in the first four years. (Most observers think the Coalition will need a lot more to reach its 5 per cent emissions reduction target but Tony Abbott has insisted he will not be spending any more, which raises big questions about his climate policy but provides certainty for his financial commitment.)

    There’s the abolition of the mining tax, at a cost of $11 billion. And there’s $420 million in additional mental health promises.

    And now we know the Coalition will also be promising income tax cuts of as-yet-undetermined generosity on top of all of this. We also know that to be even a tiny bit generous, tax cuts cost a lot.

    For example, the Howard government’s 2003 tax cuts derided by then minister Amanda Vanstone for being just enough to buy ”a sandwich and a milkshake” cost $10.6 billion over four years. Given that Abbott says his cuts will ”restore hope” to Australian families, they could hardly be smaller than that.

    Unlike the Howard years there are not fat surpluses from which to fund said tax cuts, and the Coalition has of course promised to achieve surpluses as least as big as those forecast by Labor. The Coalition cannot, as it did last year, plan to raid the infrastructure investment funds set up under the Howard government because they were pretty much cleaned out in the deal that delivered Julia Gillard minority government.

    Taken together, all of this obviously means the Coalition is very unlikely to be able to afford in the short or medium term other very sensible ideas such as Malcolm Turnbull’s plan for a sovereign wealth fund.

    It also means that, before it even begins paying for any other policy (and it claims to have 40 of them already in the can), the Coalition has to find more than $30 billion in savings.

    It says it did find $50 billion in savings at the last election but Treasury said $11 billion of those were not valid and the Coalition has accused the government of snitching and implementing another $13 billion of its savings since the election.

    And while fiscal prudence is always advisable, in the current economic and political climate there are some limits on where savings can be made.

    Industry assistance programs are often a shadow treasurer’s first port of call and, indeed, the Coalition has relied on them in the past – most recently with a $500 million proposed cut to core car industry funding announced in January as part of savings that could have done away with the need for the government’s flood levy.

    But with Abbott promising to be the champion of every blue-collar job and the future of Australian manufacturing in general, big cuts to industry programs could appear a little inconsistent.

    Training programs, which took a haircut in the Coalition’s proposed savings at the last election, are tough things to cut when business is starting to once again complain about serious labour shortages.

    The first home owner’s grant is another potential saving that often catches the cost-cutter’s eye but, with a soft housing market, that also becomes politically difficult.

    The Coalition says it will find savings through ”hard decisions” and on the ABC’s Q&A last Monday night the shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, said one such decision was making 12,000 public servants redundant over the first two years of a Coalition government, citing the ”fact” that the public service has grown by 20,000 since Labor was elected as evidence that such cuts are necessary.

    But the next day the ACT Liberal senator, Gary Humphries, insisted the Coalition policy was not to sack anyone but to achieve the 12,000 reduction over time by not replacing public servants as they retired.

    And the public service unions clarified that the 20,000 figure included big rises in the numbers in the Australian Defence Force and the army reserve, and that the rise in public servants of almost 14,000 since 2006 represented a slower rate of growth than the increase in the public they serve.

    None of this means that savings can’t, or shouldn’t, be found. However, it does mean Hockey and the finance spokesman, Andrew Robb, are facing some decisions almost as ”tough” as those that confronted Shack all those years ago.

    Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/beware-the-promises-not-properly-costed-20110701-1gv3q.html#ixzz2RXhtHjpT

    Note that the highlighted sections of the article also point to the truth about the lie that Tony Abbott keeps telling, to this day, about the increase of 20000 Public Servants under Labor.

    Something that lazy Leigh Sales couldn’t even pick him up on the other night when she ‘interviewed’ Abbott.

  35. denese,
    This is NOT a Labor only blog. It’s a ‘Mind Your Manners’ blog about politics. Tends to weed out most of the Liberals and the Ruddite Luddites though. 😀

  37. Mark Scott is in discussions wiuth Uncle Rupert as we speak. Rupert has several suitable candidates in mind to host Media Watch.Former ABC board member Janet Albrechtson and popular commentator and Insiders regular Niki Savva are said to be his favourites.

  41. victoria

    It’s quite amazing how little stick the KR supporters can take before they go and hide.

  45. [defending a claim that ALP affiliated union should not spend money defeating Lib workchoices?? What do you think!]

    And that is of course exactly what he did. The others were helping themselves.

  47. To follow on from the Craig Thomson story – the Oz, of course, puts a very different slant on today’s outcome, doing all they can to give the impression that Thomson is as guilty as hell.

    ‘Fair Work Commission case against Craig Thomson to proceed.
    Craig Thomson must still fight a Fair Work Australia case against him for alleged misuse of union funds, after arguing he could not face that case and similar criminal charges at the same time.

    Federal Court judge Christopher Jessup today ordered the civil case brought against Mr Thomson by Fair Work Australia, now known as the Fair Work Commission, proceed apart from allegations which overlap with the 154 criminal charges pending against the former Labor MP in the Melbourne Magistrates Court.’

    Somewhere right down the bottom is a mention of Chris McArdle’s opinion.
    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/in-depth/fair-work-commission-case-against-craig-thomson-to-proceed/story-fndsip4d-1226630129515

  49. Who knows – maybe someday soon we’ll see a massive OO Headline:

    Thomson Found Guilty Of Rorting Ice Cream From HSU – Forced To Repay $9.60

  50. Aguirre

    [Thomson Found Guilty Of Rorting Ice Cream From HSU – Forced To Repay $9.60]

    “Random child-care worker pays fine for Thomson”.

Comments are closed.