Yeah. Nah.

Yeah.

Nah.

After my last rant against Australia’s Cult Member Prime Minister and the sycophantic gang of narcissists he surrounds himself with, I decided to write something that was Policy, not Political.

I haven’t done too poorly, only 1111 words but a few good points and no swears. I don’t even mention a single politician or party but it’s just ideas and questionable thought bubbles.

Fuck That.

I’m still too bloody angry to be any more constructive than to point out the short comings of The Happy Clapping Cabinet. There are some good arguments in the other one, and I’ll get back to it soon enough, but I find myself with only enough energy to rail on the train wreck that is the Government of Australia.

The current Australian Government will go down in history as the most unhinged, cruel and incompetently corrupt in the nation’s history. One need only look at the litany of scandals even before Scotty nicked off to Hawaii while the country was on fire. Bridget McKenzie and her “Sports Rorts”, Angus Taylor with something new every bloody week, Peter Dutton continuing to imprison The Biloela Family on Christmas Island and the list goes on.

Call me cynical if you like, but most Governments would privately welcome crises like the fires and the virus to deflect attention from their other failings. But not this one, they are happy to fuck up their response to those as well. I’m not diminishing the tragedy that was the Morrison Fires, nor am I downplaying the seriousness of COVID-19, just pointing out that if the Government response had been adequate, the electorate might have forgotten about the rest. Not forgiven, just not remembered, because we had more important things on our plate.

All the bushfires and the pandemic have achieved for the Morrison Government is to remind the country that, for some reason, we elected the glorified clusterfuck that is the Liberal/National Coalition. I say “we” because that’s how democracy is supposed to work. In truth though, Morrison lied, cheated and bribed his way to the top job. It isn’t surprising that he continued such behaviour after attaining office. Citizens of the USA could empathise with us, but they are holding out hope that criminal charges will be laid against the Orange Murderer-in-Chief once he’s booted from office. We have no such hope. Without a Federal ICAC, these thieving pricks will walk free after they are voted out.

If it weren’t so serious, it would be funny to watch this most hate-filled regime paint itself into a corner where the only way out is to show some measure of compassion for the great unwashed. But it isn’t funny, it is just another example of how disconnected from society they are. It was easy to dismiss dole recipients as “bludgers” and spout slogans like “It’s a hand up, not a hand-out” before Liberal Party voters had to queue at Centrelink. Now that their base has been exposed to the harsh reality that is social “security” in Australia, Morrison’s Government have, once again, scrambled to pretend they care.

The blatant attempt to skew unemployment numbers with the invention of the JobKeeper payment won’t serve its intended purpose as it relies on employers to distribute the funds to their employees. Even before it was rolled out reports of business owners attempting to rort the system began to surface. While this is something that shouldn’t have taken anyone by surprise it is one more example of the callousness exhibited by the Morrison Government.

That clever accounting tricks would delay any payments until after the March Quarter was expected but waiting until the end of April to cough anything up was just cruel. Again, no one should be surprised that this Government sought to prolong the unnecessary suffering of its citizens in the hope they will be able to lift restrictions before opening the purse. The money should not ever be given to the employer. The ATO has the details of every worker in the nation and operates possibly the most efficient payment system this country has going for it. Had they been given the green light to run the program, money would have hit bank accounts weeks ago and the stress of being unable to pay rent/mortgage/bills while still being able to afford to eat would have been significantly reduced.

Scotty from Marketing is fond of slogans and his most recent favourite is “snap-back”, as in, once this shit is all over, you dickheads are going back to pre-pandemic payment levels. I don’t think the dozy wanker realises that when unemployment reaches ten percent in the space of a few weeks, it won’t revert to pre-crisis levels in a matter of days. Paul Keating’s “Recession we had to have” took three years to get the unemployment rates we are experiencing now and eight-odd years to get back to a pre-recession figure. If this numbnuts Prime Minister seriously thinks the smashed avocado devouring children of the LNP will cop forty bucks a day before returning to their non-existent jobs he’s more delusional than he’s been given credit for.

What has been most enjoyable about watching Morrison fail over and over since he knifed Turnbull is grounded in the appreciation that the dumb fuck thinks a baseball cap and a smirk will solve all his problems. If anyone else was so ignorant to their failings they would have been removed from their position by those who had put them there in the first place. The only problem the Liberal Party has, is that no one in their ranks has a chance of winning public support.

Think about it. There is not a single person in the Lower House Liberal Party ranks that could be deemed a safe option to replace The Great White Shart. Honestly, Dutton, Frydenberg or Porter would have zero to fuck all chance of winning a general election and no one knows who the rest of them are. Mention Dan Tehan or Stuart “I was responsible for Robo-Debt, racked up thirty eight odd grand on an internet bill and for some fucking reason I’m still a Minister” Robert and you will be met with a blank stare, or silence, depending on what social distancing measure you have employed. It will surely be a dark day in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs when they realise The Nationals have a greater proportion of recognisable figures in Parliament than The Libs.

Not to detract from Gladys Liu being a CCP agent and Tim Wilson’s responsibility for more oxygen waste in Australian Political History than Mattias Cormann could ever hope for. But it must be a sad time for The Liberal Party when The Faceless Man, Mick Mack McCormack is more recognised than the rest of the front bench. For fuck’s sake The Nationals BACKBENCH is more prominent than The Liberals Front Bench. Sure, the Libs have some nutjobs from their own backbench to roll out, Craig Kelly has been conspicuous only by his absence, but Andrew Laming has happily stepped up to fill the void. Yet they fail in the proper fuckwit competition when compared to Joyce, Christensen and Canavan, while if you’re looking for Taylor level corruption in The Nats it’s hard to go past Littleproud.

The Nationals. The best party Australia never had. What could have been a truly representative body for the parts of the Nation that produce the bulk of income for the Commonwealth is nothing more than a cabal of self-serving climate-denying fascists. The problem we have now is that the nimrods have figured out that The Liberal Party needs them more than the other way around. Disturbingly, this revelation was not made apparent to The Nationals until Labor started pointing out that the unions have more elected members than any other party in Parliament. Electing Hogan as Deputy Speaker was the most thinly veiled threat they could come up with, but it worked. Until COVID-19 rocked up.

It’s been fun watching The Nats not roll out their heavy hitters since lock down landed. They, of anyone, should know how much the inept response to the outbreak directly affects their base. Fires and floods had fucked a good whack of what hadn’t already been destroyed by drought before the virus was allowed to run roughshod over our borders. Having gained a seat at the last federal election while the Libs lost them all over the country, should have been enough to light a bulb above at least one empty vessel in The Nationals party room. Unfortunately for Australia, they had to led by the hand by Labor only to use the opportunity to double down on Climate Denialism.

How Canavan and Co. can front up to farms and properties crippled by drought and spruik more coal mines and coal fired power stations is fucking beyond me. Before you start on about “Droughts and Flooding Rains”. Fuck Off. So, the fuck, does damn near every other fucking country in the world. I can hear it now, “But we get it more and it’s worse than other places”. That is bullshit. Name one other country that is a continent (Don’t ask Tehan, he’ll say Africa). Australia regularly has some part of the country in drought and another underwater, often at the same time (as do most other continents), given the size of the landmass no one should be surprised. It is the severity and extent of recent events that is of most concern for the future of the planet.

Don’t accuse me of silver lining COVID-19 by pointing out that air travel has all but ceased, there are less cars on the road and demand for fossil fuels has decreased to the point that oil futures were briefly trading in negative territory. We could have done that shit already. That we needed a pandemic which can kill a person now to show us that we can take steps to save millions of lives in the future is fucking embarrassing. That Scotty from Hillsong is hell bent on removing the increase to Jobseeker payments in September is not only sadistic, it’s fucking stupid.

Bear with me for a moment. Think about which industries are going to be hardest hit by the four crises that have affected Australia in 2020 but don’t say Agriculture, that’s too easy and the Nats gave up on farmers years ago. Now consider that it is widely recognised Scott “I believe in miracles” from Marketing won the 2019 election thanks, in a large way to Queensland voting overwhelmingly for the LNP (excluding the Katter Fiefdom of Kennedy), outside of the South-East corner. Except for Warren Entsch, all regional Queensland LNP Members sit in The Nationals Party Room, as do the two regional Senators.

This may come as a surprise to some, but peak tourist season for a fair whack of Queensland is in the cooler months. There are many reasons for this and most of them revolve around the coast. No cyclones, the whales are migrating, there are less Irukandji in the water and the weather is usually better than south of The Tweed. All good things and you can’t blame people wanting to see The Reef, or lay on a beach in The Whitsundays, but these activities require people to fly the plane, pilot the boat, prepare food, serve drinks, provide accommodation and the list goes on.

As of July 16, 2019, tourism employed around 9% of the Qld population directly or indirectly, roughly 217,000 people. A Queensland Government statement dated June 21, 2019 stated that the mining, oil and gas industries directly employed 70,000 people. Given a significant portion of those workforces are Fly or Drive In or Out from tourism centres allows for some crossover with tourism regarding indirect jobs, but the tourism specific and those hospitality jobs that only exist in peak season are in dire straits. International travel had already suffered a major downturn due to international media reporting that the entire country was alight. If not in the body of the bulletins, in the headlines. The virus has only served to compound the problem.

Domestic tourism has suffered with border lockdowns, enforced closures of cafes, bars, restaurants, camping grounds and other places of mass gatherings, serving to cut off the trickle of income that regional towns can usually count on from Grey Nomads and itinerant workers passing through from one location to another, all year round. Jobs will dry up in regional Australia, not just Queensland, when there are no tourists this year. The ski-fields will be shut, Dark MOFO is cancelled and no one is holding their breath in anticipation of any music festivals for the next twelve months. If the tourism industry, and by extension; accommodation, hospitality and the arts, are not included in Government stimulus, The Nationals will feel it.

Small business is often touted as “the backbone of the economy” by both sides of the aisle and rightly so. Many small businesses make up an industry and a lot of those small business are dependent on another industry’s small businesses in order to be viable. This flow on effect, if not recognised by the National Party, may result in a serious backlash if they fail to use their power in the coalition. By not sticking up for their constituents, The Nationals will be complicit in the closure of numerous small regional businesses across the country.

Conservatives, once upon a time, were so concerned about the spread of Communism they used the term “Domino Effect” to justify their wars against The Red Menace but failed to see what it can really look like when applied to Capitalism. A century since the last real pandemic and eighty-odd since The Great Depression can do that to simple minds. What The Nationals can do with their controlling vote for their electorates is force The Liberals to protect small businesses in regional Australia. If the entire National Party crossed the floor to vote with Labor on anything, it would pass even if the cross bench didn’t support it. I’m dealing in fantasy here, I know, but if The Nats were at least half as smart as they tell us they are, they’d be holding Scotty and his Rapture welcoming peons to ransom.

What it really comes down to is – Trev closes his fishing charter business, which means Mary shuts the door on the Bait Shop. Neither of them need to drive as much so the petrol station starts to struggle, with a drop in transient visitors to the hamlet, there is nothing to justify employing one of the local kids who used to work for Trev or Mary. The takeaway is forced to shut not only because of the lack of visitors, but because most everyone in town can’t afford to eat out. The Pub might push through on the back of the bottle-o, as disenchanted residents drink themselves into a stupor, but the numerous troubadours who ply their trade around regional Australia can’t play in everyone’s front yard each Friday.

That the Coalition can spout Dorothea Mackellar whenever they want to deny Climate Change but throw the arts under a bus when it comes to job security because “Science Says” is fucking laughable. Especially when you consider that most artists who have a day job are often employed on a casual basis so are ineligible for JobKeeper payments either way you look at it. Authoritarian regimes often attack artists and intellectuals in the early days of their reign and the LNP are no stranger to cutting arts funding. Still unable to lock us up for fomenting discussion and debate they have decided to starve us out. Being far and away the most likely industry to restart last after the virus is taken care of, the arts may take a generation to recover. So the next time you’re talking to a Nationals voter, remind them of The Tamworth Music Festival, The Gympie Muster and every bloody musician, lighting technician, sound engineer, roadie that works behind the performer that bring entertainment to their RSL, Bowlsie or Surf Club.

Yeah.

Nah.

Whatever.

I’m done.

Rant over.

Took me a bloody month as well.

Note to self: Don’t start writing a novel mid-rant.

If you’re playing at home.

Cheers.

“Unprecedented”

“Flatten the Curve”

“Lock-Down”

“Home-Schooling”

“Remote Learning”

“Snap Back”