TOM LEWIS writes:
Damned inconvenient. Cricket on. You’d think they could spice it up a bit by losing the third test just to get the odds up a bit and increase the take at the gate. Yes, a double, m’dear.
Now, where was I? Don’t really know since I died, but what was it I wanted to say to you lot? Oh yes, ran into Jack t’other day and he’s got a few tidbits of a yarn. Apparently that wheat thing’s over. No James, the massage is at 3, isn’t it?
Um, where was I? Ah yes. Well, old Jack tells me he’s got another yarn and I’m s’posed to see him next week to get the guts of it. Dunno, really. There’s a Chrissie party on and were having a memorial for Harold Holt over at the Chinese down the road at the Cheviot Beach Club so we mightn’t get a chance to get it all down before this bloody mob close down for Christmas. Journalists. I ask you. Always the same: never let a good news story get in the way of a holiday.
Anyway, here’s the last bit Jack gave me about the wheat thing. Happy Hogmanay and we’ll be back in the new year or so. Have to rush – the massage was at 2 after all.
Love to all and remember: vote Liberal. They may be a pack of incompetent bastards, but they’re our incompetent bastards. Mud in your eye.
The Chronicles of Nadir
As told from the grave by Tom Lewis
Tale the First
The Scion, the Wheat, and the Cabinet
Chapter The Last
The Final Report
As clouds of smoke billowed around the Teak Table and the bush firefighters were gaining Labor [sic] pre-selection in droves, other momentous portents were occurring in the land of Nadir. While the snow melted and the water rose, rats were leaving sinking ships like a drawn treader and faster than the increasing drought could reduce stock numbers (or even numbats). Little Lucy’s husband was making a concerted push on the water front and had made so many feel-good announcements that she was, victory over the Lady Jadis apart, clearly flushed with success.
Meanwhile, on this side of the Cabinet, Little Johnnie, in a public relations coup the like of which had not been seen since Mrs Petrov was dragged screaming from a Lermontov airliner in Darwin, the coalface had been closed down as a gesture towards appeasing the lunatic fringe on global warming.
AW Board had escaped by the skin of his teeth and had them firmly sunk into the double board shuffle somewhere in the Channel Islands while his erstwhile colleagues slowly committed suicide pending their respective committals.
With the Christmas hols rapidly approaching, the children had spent useful time relieving the tension of their adventures by installing themselves on their respective thrones in the park outside the Goulburn RSL. Although it had caused a bit of a stink at the time, as is the way of these things, like the coalface, time heals all wounds and things are easily forgotten if not always forgiven or vice versa.
Alexander had become both Queen of the Faeries and Foreign Minister as a fully-fledged member of the Inner Cabinet (price $482 plus GST – the modern equivalent of 20 pieces of silver, or, a pound of flesh as it was known in Treasury, the portfolio the now enthroned King Peter had been given and the only kingdom he was ever likely to rule). As a further diversionary tactic a former Jewish journalist, and Middle East expert, Rosie Rosie (always a red’s red) had been appointed as ambassador to the newly created territory of Palestine, a traditional historical homeland the size of Monaco which now sat on a floating island half a kilometer above the ancient land of Brobdignag.
Queen Amanda, for her part, had become, well, slightly larger than she formerly had been in life, and was given extra responsibility as a new Australian Territory in the Great Southern Ocean about 50º 25’ E, 28º 45’S where she was now inhabited by a colony of lesbian sea lions, all of whom had passed the recently introduced dictation test, knew all about mateship, Australian values, bbqing in cold climates, and turkey basting as well as having promised to vote Liberal for the rest of their natural lives. The turkey basting had initially seemed odd and could have been scuttled until it was explained to Jeanette, a well known animal liberationist (after all she had taken Little Johnnie away from his mum) that there were no actual turkeys involved just a long plastic tube and a thing that looked like the business end of a Klaxon horn on a model T Ford. Jeanette had always had a soft spot for the model T and from time to time had fantasies about Corder and a dickie seat. She often had fantasies about dickie seats but that still hadn’t stopped THAT WOMAN getting pre-selection for Southern Highlands.
For Little Lucy, being a Queen was little different to being a Little Lucy really. After all, once one was born to rule, one was born to rule (although there had been a tad of trouble about that combined with being a Roman Catholic in 1688). Still, time heals all wounds, even being thrown over at your fist popular election as Lord Mayor for a bedraggled chook the age of Methuselah with the brains of a herring (and personal hygiene to go with it).
Mr Patel, on the other hand had struck up a clandestine correspondence with Mr Lodhi. Both were planning a break-out known to the law as an appeal. The thin-lipped veinless Ruddock had his eye on them like a, well, not like a hawke, (he, after all, was from the other side) but more like a Caldwell (come to think of it, he was from the other side as well but, it was an old saying: two Wongs don’t make a white and there was no point in playing with a Lodhi weapon.) Of course, every cloud has a silver lining and at least Mr Patel knew he didn’t have osteoporosis – he could now see the bones in his wrists for himself.
So, as the fire gutters and sleep draws on, gathering the loose ends as any good children’s story does, we find the four at the end of their particular adventure, returned from the Land of Nadir, blessed by the Scion and happily ruling over a grateful populace seemingly forever. Yet, while this is a children’s’ story, we live in an adult world with the dangers of war not yet receded. Home by Christmas becomes yet another casualty of realpolitic if not of a terrible war. In fact, in the time it has taken in the telling of this tale, the dangers only increased. ‘Tis but the way of the world (and of tedious, crude, laboured, Christian allegories) that the struggle never ends.
Unbeknownst to them, the children, Little Johnnie, Jeanette, Corder and all their fellow travellers were about to face their greatest challenge since the days of the Communist Party Case.
From the North, suddenly, unannounced, except by himself, had come the threat of Prince Crispian now allied with the Wicked Witch of the South, an evil, fire-breathing, unmarried, childless, whining, grating, gyrating, combinationalist, red both in hair and craw, Jules of the Galliard, who was to Dowland and courtly Elizabethan dancing what the rulers of the Peoples’ Republic of China had been to Tiananmen square. Suddenly, crocodiles were developing Hawke eyes.
Like the endless ebb and flow of the big bang cycle, force against force was aligned and the ever to be repeated battle loomed. Once more unto the breach, the mettle of their pasture was again to be tested: this time it would not just be about wheat.
THE PUB 
Any caring person wants this horror with asylum seekers to stop.
If Labor tries to change anything we can look forward to a LNP government being re-elected.
gravel
Julia Gillard did try to move to the right, and Rudd too, and he still lost to the LNP.
Sorry. Did not see it further up.
2gravel
I don’t think so. People who support the current system are pretty much rusted-on Coalition voters anyway.
If Labor came up with a decent, well-thought out policy and somehow managed to get it out there (the MSM would do all they could to prevent that) then I think it could be a winner.
I’m so sick of seeing people threatening to vote Green because Labor’s asylum seeker policies are the same as the government’s. There are plenty of arguments in favour of on-shore processing and for accepting as many refugees and asylum seekers as we can. These people have skills we need. We waste their talents.
From ECQ website –
Declared Seats Summary
Party No. Seats
Australian Labor Party 44
Katter’s Australian Party 2
LNP 42
Other Candidates 1
Total Declared Seats 89
Florence
It’s worth repeating.
There is a part of me that would occasionally like to propose a appropriately Swiftian solution to Mr Abbott and now Mr Dutton for the problems caused by all these inconvenient asylum seekers (I would have suggested it sooner, but Mr Morrison might have actually acted on it).
Save the money (something which I believe Mr Abbott’s government would like to do) currently spent on incarcerating these poor sods, by paying the overseas company that is running the camps a one off fee for shooting the inhabitants. That solves all the problems of having to look after them.
Then just issue orders to the RAN to blow the boats out of the water as they are spotted on the high seas (neither in Indonesian/Malaysian waters nor our own … just in case) as the cost of the PTSD payments to naval personnel involved would be much less than what we are paying out now. Plus they would get to shoot their guns off, which has to be a plus from Mr Abbott’s point of view even if the shells do cost a little bit.
I too, would have liked the ALP to have grasped the nettle firmly and said “we was wrong” on the asylum seeker thing. But I fear that there are still some ancients in positions of power within the ALP who still fear change to a ‘less white’ world, even as the world is changing around them.
Just have to keep kicking at the cellar windows until someone can show us how to aim for the chimney pots again, I suppose.
curioz
If your ‘solution’ ever came to be then it would be accompanied by wild cheering from a certain section of the Australian population. One of my brothers-in-law tells me every time I see him (not often, thank goodness) “They’ should blow those bastards out of the water”. He is far from alone in saying such stuff.
Mmmm. Perhaps I should have marked that previous post with hefty sarcasm markers, just in case some snoopy anti-electronic-graffiti-watcher from the PMO’s office decides that it is actually a good idea?
LeoneTwo, have you ever noticed that when you offer people who say things like that, the opportunity to actually go and commit those murders, they turn all squeamish and run away?
It was Rudd, not Gillard, who came up with this solution. Although Gillard may have started off the deal with O’Neil.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/immigration/kevin-rudd-to-unveil-manus-island-expansion-plan-in-bid-to-stop-boats/story-fn9hm1gu-1226681830019
Yay!
Meanwhile, ECQ has rejected Pauline Hanson’s request for a recount in the seat of Lockyer.
Given the declaration of all 89 seats and the fact that it is now unlikely that the result in Ferny Grove will be voided as it can’t be adequately justified that if the PUP candidate had not been on the ballot then the result would’ve been different, the LNP needs to accept that they’ve lost and get out of the way in order for a new government to be sworn in.
Gippsland Laborite,
I’m waiting for the QLD LNP to start the chant of “illegitimate government”.
A couple of quotes on asylum seeker policy.
On the ‘expert panel’.
https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/51883
29 August 2012
http://www.news.com.au/national/prime-minister-julia-gillard-defends-policy-on-holding-asylum-seekers-in-offshore-processing-centres/story-fndo4eg9-1226460470892
——————————–
My views are possibly a bit harsh. I believe we do get taken advantage of by some asylum seekers who are simply economic refugees who, for whatever reason, choose not to go through the usual immigration process. Reza Berati was one, his own family told us that he could not find work in Iran and decided to head for Australia. Unfortunately he chose people smugglers over the normal immigration process, ended up on Manus Island and we know the rest.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/someones-son-someones-brother-reza-barati-an-architect-who-had-hopes-for-a-better-life-20140228-33r4n.html
No matter how or why he and so many others decide to move to Australia no-one deserves to be locked up in hell holes and mistreated. What’s wrong with this country, that we think human beings who simply want a better life should be treated in ways that would make Nazis shudder if they were here to see what we do.
Boo. Raffle Night
Comments closed here soon.
On the Asylum seeker issue..of course, both Leone and Janice are correct..mistakes were made and solutions attempted in good faith…the problem lies in the fickle electorate…”whatever it takes”…A good example of public fickleness is in this district where I live..a Germanic population at the outbreak of the first WW. , they were hated by the Anglo govt’ of the day to the point of establishing a “Nomenclature Committee” to rename all the German towns and streams to a French or English name..eg; “The Rhine River” became “The Marne”…”Rhine Villa” became “Cambrai”..etc…and if you go to the war memorial at Sedan, you will see the names of those “who served” in the first WW. are all except three or four, Anglo-Irish…yet, at the time of the second WW, a generation on, all the names except one or two are Germanic…so somewhere in between the wars, there was either a forgetting or a forgiving!
There is, I believe, a fault in the human psychology that will not allow collaboration between different tribal / ethnic groups..without a period of testing and proving some obscure point…it is the same, I think , with a disability of some kind..as a matter of fact even a stutter was once seen as a thing of mockery or disdain…
I remember a Greek lady telling me that in their homeland, ANY slight physical disability would earn one the epithet of “cripple”…she told me of one such youth in a family on her home island who had a limp, possibly from one leg being a miniscule shorter than the other so that it was only JUST noticeable…but he was shunned by the girls an was referred even by his own family as “the cripple”…
Humanity is weird…and very destructive…..I believe there must be another human species in the evolving as this one is too destructive for it’s own good !
Absolutely stupid. Bishop has just closed off any chance these two young men had. Who does she think she is?
The Indonesians cannot lose face by being suspected of giving in to threats of Australians spending their tourist dollars elsewhere.
Also, expect any semblance of Indonesian co-operation regarding Boats to cease forthwith.
Idiotic Abbott government, throwing its weight around when it has none.
What was that I heard about Abbott being a statesman?And Bishop being a brilliant Foreign minister?
Perversely, it might all be true… but the Foreign Minister actually saying it, in the middle of this delicate situation, is a stupendous blunder.
hello!!…I’m sin-binned again!!…hello , hello!