Twenty-eight Sleeps to Go – Time Out!

Fiona Uncategorized

Today’s post comes with a big hat-tip to Scorpio, who sent me an email with some gorgeous pics.

So, as I think we need a brief respite from Ordeal by Campaign, I selected some of them, and hope everyone enjoys.

Fearless Feline

Embrace the Zebras

Love in Paris

After the Earthquake

Cross-species Nurturing

Imprinting

845 thoughts on “Twenty-eight Sleeps to Go – Time Out!”

  1. Parakeelia is such an open and shut case of money laundering, it’s a wonder it’s taken until now to come out.

    You purchase phoney, over-priced services and then have the profits recycled back into the party. The directors and shareholders are all senior party functionaries, and even the registered office is at party HQ.

    Most telling of all is that, when questioned, they’ve all forgotten they ever heard of it.

    • Collective amnesia. Goes back at least as far as Howard and Vale and Downer, that I can remember.

  2. BB

    I’m getting worried for you and HI, you sound like you’re getting even more stressed. I wish the bastards would actually stop pissing around and get it over and done with, no matter the result. Take care of each other and know there are many here who are pulling for you both.

  3. how the fuck can anybody diagnose a two-year-old with depression, let alone prescribe mind altering substances to a baby with a developing brain?

    What parent would allow it?

    • It would be an idiot parent who wants the ‘perfect’ child, believes children should always be perfect, well-behaved angels who never cry or argue, has no idea how toddlers really behave, and thinks crying, or acting out, or saying ‘No!’ are signs there is something wrong with their kid.

      I’d like to know what sort of doctor would prescribe drugs for a 2 year old.

  4. I am of the simplistic opinion that most kids’ problems are as a result of helicopter parenting and not having anywhere to run free and happy, like through the bush or at the beach, and living under house arrest in a tiny yardless house for 18 years.

    We as a society have a lot to answer for, in putting money before the welfare of our kids.

    • And yet – Murpharoo has just had a bit of a Twitter stoush with some nutter who kept yelling about her being a lefty!

  6. BB
    You and HI are sounding like you are living in hell. I hope you have strategies for dealing with it. Sharing on here is one of them and I am honoured that you do,

    Remember you and Hi have something they can never have, the earnest and unwavering support and respect of this community where everyone is keeping their flags flying for you.

  7. The sheer stupidity, ignorance, arrogance and wacky assumptions behind this quote from Dodgy Dick are astounding.

    We don’t have people who go into a polling booth and say: ‘I’m voting for the Greens or for Nick Xenophon because my grandfather did it and my mother did it and that’s who I am,” he said on the ABC’s Q&A on May 30, 2016.

    “That identity politics is breaking down, you just need to look at the vote amongst young people. If there was a vote amongst people who are under 30 in Australia, there’d possibly be a Greens prime minister

    FactCheck says his claim is ‘far-fetched’. That’s putting it mildly. I’d say more ‘raving fruit-loop’.
    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-10/fact-check-would-voters-aged-under-30-possible-elect-a-green-pm/7467068

    Surely Dodgy Dick realises, seeing as he is a politician himself, that he needs to win government to be PM. Surely the fool realises that not everyone under 30 votes for a progressive party?

    What a fool!

  8. oh JHC. three siblings missing without a trace in Adelaide, three kids.Fuck fuck fuck that brings back the nightmare of the Beaumont kids. They were never found.

  11. It was hard to let my kids go around alone when I was a mother, because of those cases but it was a fear we just had to live with, it is not possible, healthy or good to keep them under your eyes 2/7. I taught the kids safety techniques and had them stay together. But if they wanted to go to the park, a friends or play in the street, they were able too. Of course there were lots of kids in the streets then, and they were aware of Stranger Danger as was run in the schools. Nowadays any kids out playing is a lone duck. The world is a sorry place.

  13. Labor has been busy taking down all those stupid petitions from their web sites ahead of today’s announcements.

    I thought those petitions, always begging Turnbull not to cut funding for whatever, were daft, and did not sign any of them. They were pointless, Turnbull and his ministers were never going to reverse a decision because Labor presented a petition.

    Now it’s all going to cause trouble, with lots of ‘but Labor wanted to ….’ comment sure to dominate the MSM for the weekend. Scomo has already been talking about backflips, and there will be a lot more of that.

    Who came up with this stupid ‘let’s have another petition’ idea? The moral of the story – always plan ahead, always think about what you might want to do during an election campaign, never leave yourself wide open to criticism or talk of back-flips and if you really want a petition, have a supporter do it, not the party itself.

  14. I really wish the chaps from The Chaser would stop annoying everyone with their pointless stunts during the election campaign. Running after Bill Shorten’s car and screaming ‘but you said I could have a lift ‘. Pfffft.

    It’s not funny, it’s the sort of thing 9 year old boys find mildly amusing in drama class at school. Actually, most of the 9 year olds I taught would have dismissed such rubbish as ‘dumb’. These ‘boys’ are pushing forty, it’s time they acted like adults.

    The really sad thing – this crap gets media attention, and that just encourages more stunts.

    • I agree. I usually watch Mad as Hell, but included Chaser just to see if the series was going to be worth it – Micallef moderately funny in parts, but Chaser was boring and juvenile… didn’t help that both shows used the same video clips from the campaign for their send ups – not intelligent scheduling by ABC, the shows should not be back to back.

      Anyway, won’t bother with the Chaser any more..

    • Just saw that.

      Will he get enough support to see off Pruneface? He will at this end of the electorate.

    • LOL – the nickname Pruneface is so universally known, that everyone knows who you are referring to – and not just around Port MacQ!! Quite an achievement for a local member who does not have a national presence as senior minister.

    • “I confirm I have nominated to be the Federal Member for Cowper in the 45th Parliament. To achieve this, I ask for the support of the communities of Coffs Harbour, Bellingen, Nambucca, Kempsey and the Macleay, and my home town of Port Macquarie at the ballot on July 2.”

  16. Just after 2013 election Rob Oakeshott said something that implied he might have another run in three years time. It was not noticed or widely reported at the time, because he was no longer in the parliament. Some of us didn’t forget.

    • Is he likely to get enough votes to maybe split the conservative votes..? Anyone likely to Vote for Rob, who would they preference..?

      I know there is still a lot of resentment toward Rob for supporting “that awful woman”..

    • Rob last time attracted Labor voters and a lot of conservatives who were fed up with the National Party. People who would have always voted Liberal, then moved here and had to vote Nats were strong Oakeshott supporters. He appealed across the political spectrum, but attracted a lot of National votes because he was once ‘one of them’.

      This time there is a lot of anger in Port Macquarie about the redistribution, and having Luke Hartsuyker as our MP. Some rusted-on Nats voters who were very vocal critics of Oakeshott have even said they would vote for him if he ran again. Whether or not they will do that remains to be seen.

      As for his support for the Gillard government – there was a huge amount of anger at first, after that decision, but gradually people came to understand why Oakeshott had gone that way. Money flowed into the electorate, it was like nothing we had ever sen before. Before he decided to retire, he said people had been coming to him and saying things like ‘I could have cut your throat back then, but now I see what you were doing and you have my vote’.

      I still think he would have won narrowly if he had run again in 2013.

      This time it’s a different electorate, and who knows what way things will go. Hartsuyker came close to defeat in 2007, when there was a strong Labor candidate, so it’s possible the northern end of the electorate would be happy to be rid of him this time, and they only have to look at what Rob achieved for Lyne to be convinced he would work hard for them.

      While Rob was still in the NSW parliament and still a member of the National Party I seriously considered voting for him, he was so good, and such a strong local member. Then he turned indie and saved me from having to vote National.

  17. Thanks for the supportive replies.

    HI is fine, just a little disappointed that they won’t give up. And she misses her friends. It was an unanticipated consequence of her suspension that she would be prohibited from contacting any workmates, a lot of whom we are on social terms with.

    To tell the truth, in her heart of hearts she doesn’t want to go back now. Too much time has passed and too great a flow of water under the bridge. We fell like we’ve had a moral victory, in that it’s cost them probably 8-10 times as much to sack her (or try to) as it should have if she was as bad as they made out.

    That’s the problem with these processes. If they don’t have a case, they manufacture one, apparently by making the employee seem to be such a bad person that they barely qualify to be members of the human race, much less members of a workplace. It’s not enough to complain about a few clerical errors, errors which HI’s accusers make themselves with astonishing regularity… youse’ll have to accept that characterization, because I don’t want to go into details, except to say we are talking absolute trivialities trumped up into major threats to the integrity of the Organization. Proof enough of the triviality of the allegations is that it’s taken them so long to work up the backbone to come to an actual decision.

    In fact, the “expectations” HI is supposed to have breached are not written down anywhere. They are made up to fit whatever they are accusing her of. The way it works is to accuse her of doing something that, in isolation, is a mistake, but not necessarily work-related: let’s say “tying your shoelaces so that they come undone before Close Of Business”. Now this may have happened, but our point is that it is irrelevant to the workplace. Their reply is to say that the Code Of Conduct states all employees have to be appropriately dressed at all times, and that untied shoelaces have been determined to be inappropriate dress”, and that untied shoelaces are not only in breach of this provision, but may present a “Risk Hazard to the Organization” on OH&S grounds, and are thus an “unsafe work practice” plus a “budgetary risk”, also against the Code Of Conduct. Arguing that this is a crazy allegation gets you put down as someone with “low self-awareness” as to “collaborative work practices”, which is also against the Code Of Conduct. So, by the time you’re finished, you’ve “breached” the CoC two or three times, when all that really happened was that someone noticed you tying your shoelaces at lunchtime.

    Fill a couple of dozen pages with shit like this, and almost anyone who reads it will come to the conclusion that you must have done *something* wrong, somewhere, sometime for there to be so many complaints about you. For every single complaint about untied shoelaces, or knocking on a door too loudly (or too softy, both have been alleged) that’s documented, in the mind of the reader there might be half a dozen more, especially if the last complaint is that “these are only examples” i.e. complaints not specified, and hence completely unsupported, unproved and unproveable, but getting realer and realer in the imagination of the reader as they plough through such a damning document.

    To make sure that the reader (usually a senior executive) only sees the bad stuff, anything good is deleted from the management brief of evidence. You have to fight for everything: fairness, due process, copies of relevant documents, answers to emails, promises to be kept and so on. You constantly have to point out the same lies that are recycled time and time again. Each time they ask you for proof. Each time you provide it: names, dates, signed documents, independent witnesses. Each time your response is ignored, buried or disregarded. the lie is then repeated. And again you have to rebut it. They never volunteer anything without you having to drag it out of them. The only picture presented is one of a recalcitrant, mistake-ridden employee who can’t spell, write, calculate, interact with normal human beings, or carry on a conversation without saying something wrong, racist or offensive. It’s a wonder she can even feed herself or take herself to the toilet without making a muck of it. It’s character assassination posing as “clerical error”. No stone is left unturned in the vilification process.

    Why would anyone employ someone as bad as this? THAT is the question that is never answered, because the person who employed you is now the person complaining about the person she employed. Senior management goes along with this because an employee who fights is a danger to them all and their petty obsessions and ambitions. they are a Self-Preservation Club. The first to be pushed over the side of the sinking ship is always the more junior employee. There’s more room in the lifeboats for the 1st class passengers that way.

    I do sound bitter, and at times I am, but $100,000 a year pro rata for doing nothing sweetens up the sour taste. It could be worse. HI might actually have to go to work an be polite to these people.

  18. In Labor’s financial plans –

    Labor will abolish the Innovation Xchange within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Funding will be re-directed to meet other frontline Overseas Development Assistance priorities

    This was Julie Bishop’s pet project, financed by cuts to foreign aid. You would, of course, remember her channeling AB Fab by describing it as a ‘gorgeous little funky, hipster, Googly, Facebooky-type place’

    So what happens to the $500 apiece beanbags Jules bought for her pet with our money? Will they find a new home? Will they be flogged off in a garage sale by an incoming Labor government? Will they be sent to Vinnies?
    http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/dec/14/taxpayers-shell-out-1700-for-three-beanbags-for-julie-bishops-creativity-initiative

  19. All class is our DPM

    Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce told a constituent to “piss off” after a heated exchange over mining in a pub in his New England electorate.

    Mr Joyce lost his temper with Nicola Chirlian, a Liverpool Plains beef farmer and anti-mining activist who had tackled him on the topic of coal and coal seam gas mining on ABC’s Q&A program in Tamworth on Monday

    http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2016/election-2016-barnaby-joyce-tells-constituent-to-piss-off-during-heated-pub-exchange-20160610-gpg857.html

    • “Ms Williams, who was standing talking to Mr Joyce at the time, said he was clearly “off-duty” and did not deserve to be “attacked” in the pub.”

      A politician is never ‘off duty’ when out in public, especially not when that politician is deputy PM and is facing a fight to be re-elected.

      Ms Williams is obviously a rusted-on National voter.

  20. Waffles cut and run from his presser before it started and has left Snot to bawl out Labor.

  21. tlbd

    I watched Shorten and co with their presser, they were very good. I cheered on some of the announcements. BK will be happy that alternate therapy’s are gone. Turnoff has run off, probably realises that there is nothing he can complain about this.

  22. The latest revelations on the Hornsby Fiasco bring out some interesting facts:

    1. The patient was “sectioned” and his file marked “not to be released under any circumstances” from Hornsby Mental Health Service (HMHS).

    2. This was over-ridden by a senior psychiatrist, who allowed him 1 hour per day’s leave.

    3. He absconded once and was retrieved from Melbourne(!).

    4. Soon after, he had a loud shouting match with his family, during a visit, stormed past them and absconded again.

    5. One or more of the police who shot him had previously brought him back to HMHS, a couple of times. They knew him personally.

    6. It is reported that one of the reasons he was to be detained was his expression of homicidal threats… against police.

    From this we could speculate:

    1. The cops won’t be very happy with HMHS.

    2. The cops who shot him may have been aware of his homicidal, anti-police sentiments.

    3. This may have contributed to the shootings (and he was carrying a knife, i.e. was potentially homicidal specifically against police, perhaps these very police).

    4. This is a fuck-up of monumental proportions as:

    (a) The shootings were carried out in a public place, with innocent members of the public seriously hurt.

    (b) There may have been a serious lapse of duty of care on behalf of HMHS.

    (c) There may have been a serious lapse of duty of care on behalf of the NSW Police Service.

    (d) There will be a huge scandal as this erupts, with the Police blaming Health, and vice versa. Only a full investigation has any chance of bringing out the truth, but it will need to be done at the highest levels, higher than the Police and higher than NSW Mental Health.

    (e) I wouldn’t like to be the doctor who authorized his release, especially after he’d already absconded once.

    (f) The HSU is screaming blue murder about the lack of trained security personnel on Mental Health campuses.

    (g) I wouldn’t like to be a director of any regional NSW Mental Health service right now, as they will almost certainly all be about to have a large dose of salts put through their operations.

  25. I watched ALP presser with Shorten, Bowen and Burke. All 3 were very impressive. I try to look at politics through the eyes of the conservatives. In other words I try to find as many faults in the performance of ALP speakers as I can. I’ll say again they were good.
    Bill gets a bit robotic when he has to stick to the script but when he’s on a roll he let’s the passion take over and he comes across as very genuine and sincere.
    I didn’t have much time for Bowen because of his role in JG etc. But I have to admit he’s across his brief and is very confident in his presentation .
    Burke is just good. I liked him as a Minister and he hasn’t lost it

    • Especially good when compared to Morrison, who comes across as a raving loony.

    • Good descriptions. rnm1953. I’d agree 100%. Bill sometimes tries too hard to stick to a planned script, and really looks a lot more convincing when allowing his feelings and belief system to run with him. He just needs to trust his instincts more to become a well-respected leader.

      Yes, I didn’t think I could ever respect Bowen after his long work with the Cardinals. However, somehow during this period in the shadow ministry, he has really come into his own. I think it might’ve helped that he quickly understood he had the measure of Hockey, Morrison and Cormann. He seemed to become much more relaxed and in control and has shown he’s prepared to take risks (e.g. Negative Gearing, and Banks RC) to get there while keeping credibility. C@tmomma knew his dad, who told her that all Chris ever wanted to be was Treasurer. I think it shows in the way he’s on top of his brief.

      Burke, as you say, was good as a minister, getting that marine national park up for one thing and also the MDB water flow agreement, and he’s gone one from that to be a very good Leader in the House. On Finance, his strength is that he’s articulate and persuasive. He can get to the key points very succinctly.

      They have a very strong economic team, with Leigh and Wong taking up the remaining positions. The differences between them and the coalition is stark. I’d like to see them drawn into public debate, but I suspect that the coalition will be too cagey to allow that.

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