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ScoMo – Macron and submarines – a Temporary Triangle

So the French have their noses out of joint over the submarine deal. Get over it. Show me any deal on this planet involving a 90 billion dollar spend by a government that did not have a few furphys told in its making.

  Macron has to make a lot of noise about it for domestic consumption. They are out heaps of revenue and jobs. He also no doubt has some heavy party donors banging on his door. We on the other hand for once seemingly will not have others old technology passed to us but rather a few submarines that might even be able to do the job for a while.

  My take on that is that the northern hemisphere have woken up to the fact that it might take a little more muscle to keep the Chinese in line and who better to do it than their neighbours. So let’s give them access to the real deal.

  Call our bloke a liar if you want to. We just think the French have a petulant child in their midst. He is our PM and we don’t take it lightly if others are rude about him, especially the French. So piss off, we will deal with him. If we think he is a liar then that is our problem.

  As an aside – thanks Joe for throwing our guy under the bus. Makes one wonder just how much this AUS/USA alliance is worth when the chips are down. Next time you and the boys decide you need a small war to help the economy, get the French to toss in their fair share for a change. There are 68 million of them. Or is it the case that you need Macron to shore up NATO if friend Putin wakes up from a bad dream.

  Also clever move ScoMo on the media on 3/11/21 telling us all that you won’t cop Australia being sledged (by Macron?). A feeble attempt to convince us that Macron insulted Australia. He did not. He had a go at you. So don’t try and spread the load. Remember that old American expression – “The Buck Stops Here” – that’s you mate – you won the job so what about doing it!

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ScoMo – Macron and submarines – a Temporary Triangle

So the French have their noses out of joint over the submarine deal. Get over it. Show me any deal on this planet involving a 90 billion dollar spend by a government that did not have a few furphys told in its making.

 Macron has to make a lot of noise about it for domestic consumption. They are out heaps of revenue and jobs. He also no doubt has some heavy party donors banging on his door. We on the other hand for once seemingly will not have others old technology passed to us but rather a few submarines that might even be able to do the job for a while.

 My take on that is that the northern hemisphere have woken up to the fact that it might take a little more muscle to keep the Chinese in line and who better to do it than their neighbours. So let’s give them access to the real deal.

 Call our bloke a liar if you want to. We just think the French have a petulant child in their midst. He is our PM and we don’t take it lightly if others are rude about him, especially the French. So piss off, we will deal with him. If we think he is a liar then that is our problem.

 As an aside – thanks Joe for throwing our guy under the bus. Makes one wonder just how much this AUS/USA alliance is worth when the chips are down. Next time you and the boys decide you need a small war to help the economy, get the French to toss in their fair share for a change. There are 68 million of them. Or is it the case that you need Macron to shore up NATO if friend Putin wakes up from a bad dream.

 Also clever move ScoMo on the media on 3/11/21 telling us all that you won’t cop Australia being sledged (by Macron?). A feeble attempt to convince us that Macron insulted Australia. He did not. He had a go at you. So don’t try and spread the load. Remember that old American expression – “The Buck Stops Here” – that’s you mate – you won the job so what about doing it!

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Wongapachuka

 The Pachuka was a small steamer that used to transport goods between most of the smaller ports of the two Gulfs in the 1920’s and 30’s. It was captained for most of this period by one Billy Packsaddle. Billy’s two sons Pack 1 and Pack 2 as they were known crewed on the boat. Billy hailed originally from Daly Waters in the Northern Territory and the story went that the family had been coastal mariners for many generations having learned the trade from Maccassan sailors who regularly journeyed out of SE Asia to northern Australia as far back as the 1500’s.

 Billy’s tribe was known as the Wonga Wonga and their tribal lands extended from the head waters of the Daly River in Arnhem Land all the way to its mouth in the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf.

 It transpired that on one dark and stormy night the Pachuka was moored at Port Augusta. Billy was hunched up in the wheelhouse quietly sucking on his gin bottle when there was a gigantic flash of lightning and Billy caught a brief glimpse of a swimmer in the water and going under. Billy tore off his shirt and dived in to rescue the drowning swimmer. It turned out that the drowning swimmer was indeed the licensee of the Great Western Hotel, one Augustine Clementine Smithers who that day had been successful at backing the winners at the annual Port Augusta race meeting and that the ensuing celebrations had got the better of him. AC as he was known locally and Billy spent the rest of the storm finishing off Billy’s gin. At the break of the next day AC declared Billy to be a local hero and in recognition of his brave deed AC renamed the front bar of the Great Western Hotel as the Wongapachucka Bar after Billy’s tribe and his boat.

 There used to be a brass naming plate set into the end of the bar but my uncle Colin told me it was lost in the fire of 1942.

 I have no idea how the name of the bar became associated with any club in Whyalla. Perhaps some Spencer Hotel drinkers found the brass plate in the ashes.

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The Terminator was Right

What a bvunch of bloody sheep. We just cant help ourselves. The supermarkets giants decide to use “just in time” as a logistics supply strategy and so they carry minimal stocks of everything. So we slavishly get into the habit of buying supplies daily.

 Along comes some unusual event like say a very contagious virus infection. People get sick or are quarantined so they wont get sick and things go awry. The “just in time” thing stops working because there is less people to do the work. Then add our global addiction to social media. Some dill with nothing to do in some dead end shit hole puts up a post that  there is a shortage of arse wipe in his local supermarket and within a day this is a global issue because we think we need to panic buy toilet paper which causes a global shortage.

 Lets extend this a little. No arse wipe, so we improvise. We use tissues or face wipes or whatever else the supermarkets have been shoving at us for years and which we don’t need. None of these things are compatible with modern sewage treatment systems and so they block up. We cant get them unblocked because one of the maintenance crew went on a cruise ship holiday, got infected, turned up for work and now the entire city maintenance staff are in quarantine.

 So now we have raw sewage in the streets and we have a real problem. So far the survival rate for people under 40 from the virus is 100%. The sorts of diseases that can eventuate from poor sewage treatment don’t age discriminate. They can kill; everybody.

 So step back for however long it takes you and have think about the consequences of the next item some dirt bag suggests needs to be panic purchased. How long before we are stripping the shelves bars of everything.

 I don’t know why the Chinese are building military bases in the South China Sea. All they have to do is export a bug. Although perhaps they should contemplate what sort of world they think they will dominate in the future.

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Ode to the Lighters - Oh that you lay me down too deep

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Sunsets over Norfolk Island. The locals told us that such sunsets were unusual and put them down to smoke from the bush fires in Queensland. Norfolk Island is 2 hours in a Boeing 737 east of Brisbane -  could be smoke?

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Spring in the garden - Orchids

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Spring in the garden - Orchids

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Aroona Dam - Leigh Creek - South Australia

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The Ediacara Fossils

These fossils are in the main moulds, casts and imprints of soft bodied creatures that lived in a shallow sea that covered most of Central Australia between 635 and 542 million years ago. That is The Ediacaran Period named after the Edicara Hills in northern South Australia where the fossils were first found by Mr Reginald Sprigg in 1946.

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Real Money and Their Money

 In his book “To England with Love” Sir David Frost talks about Real Money. The money that one goes to work for and receives in a pay packet and spends at the local or the supermarket. He then differentiates between this and Their Money. That is Government money. Money that is spoken of in amounts that are incomprehensible to ordinary folk. Like the Health Budget or the Defence Budget.

 I am not sure that Frost’s line of thinking on this matter has filtered into the Aboriginal Industry in Australia but one thing that I have learned about some Aboriginal people is that they seem to have no appreciation of where Government money comes from. They (and it happens often enough for it to be generalised) seem to have a notion that “The Government” is the keeper of some giant pile of money and the game is to find ways to get it from the Government (no matter which level).

 The notion that the citizens, the people, us, actually contribute to this pile of money seems not to have occurred to the Aboriginal people or they choose to ignore that aspect of it all. Not paying tax perhaps leads to this state of mind.

 There have been some significant attempts by the Aboriginal Industry in Australia to put in place a system that delivers a steady stream of this money to any Aboriginal organisation or individual who says they have a need. All have been successful for a time but the nirvana of a permanent system has so far evaded the Industry. It however is tenacious if nothing else and the quest continues.

 Past large scale exploits of note include:

 Aboriginal Land Rights. This has secured a lot of land (about 50% of the Northern Territory as an example) for Aboriginal people but the system does not bestow ownership of the land in the sense that it becomes an asset that can be sold or borrowed against. So no land sales and so no endless money trough. Working the land to create wealth has occurred but does not seem to be a popular option.

 The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. Many did well from it. At its zenith and when PM Howard abolished it, the Commissions budget stood at $1 billion per annum.

 Then there was the Stolen Generation. Firstly having established that such a thing existed, it then fell to the Industry to establish a test case that proved compensation was payable to all of those that were stolen. Every player stood to win a prize (from The Government). No such circumstance was able to be proven. Again – no money tree.

 Then there was the Yulara Statement seeking something called a Voice in the national parliament. Perhaps a way to reinstate ATSIC.

 Now we have the new campaign. The quest for compensation for damage done to sacred sights and locations of spiritual significance by anybody but if the Industry can join a Government in an action then that is better. The first score is on the board. The Aboriginal people at Pine Creek in The Northern Territory have won an action in the High Courts against the Northern Territory Government for damage caused in road building. The Court awarded $2.5 million tax payer dollars and the Pine Creek Aboriginal People are to have a family meeting to decide what to do with the money.

 Observers predict that the cost of this High Court precedent could run to billions of dollars. And predictably the first cab off the rank to test the precedent is one Galarrauy Yunnpingu. He wants Nabalco, Rio Tinto and the Government to compensate the Yolgnu people for damage to their spiritual places through mining for Bauxite on the Gove Peninsula for the last 50+ years.

 We must all watch this development diligently. We perhaps might make the point to some of our Aboriginal brethren that it is our money that they are seeking to have the Government pay to them. That it is also to be used for such things as hospitals and the general health budget. Which as an aside I mention that the Aboriginal people, who constitute 25% of the population of the Northern Territory consume some 85% of the health budget. It might also be worth reiterating that over the last 50+ years of mining on the Gove Peninsula the Yolgnu people have received many millions in royalties from the miners who also spent many millions in consultative processes. One assumes to prevent any intersection with spiritual locations.

 We are brow beaten into a level of sensitivity about things Aboriginal. Unfortunately this is never reciprocated. I, for example, refuse to be referred to in the negative as a non-aboriginal. I am indeed an Australian and I have made a lifelong taxation contribution to this country and continue to do so. I acknowledge and embrace like acting folk no matter ethnic or racial origins. I have little expectation of the worthiness of those that make no contribution and seek to have the contributors support them seemingly forever.

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Bush Stone Curlew

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She’s our Pauline

 Today (2/5/2019) Andrew Bolt devotes his page in the Gold Coast Bulletin to what he calls the “sting” perpetrated on One Nation and conclude that “something stinks” about the whole Al Jazeera infiltration of the Party.

 I don’t often line up with Andrew Bolt but I am in total agreement with him on this issue. Better than that, I am bloody angry. What has Australian politics got to do with a so called media organisation in the Middle East. Imagine the outcry if a group in say Mt Isa stated publishing details of the political goings on in Qatar. Whether you line up with the politics of One Nation is not the issue. She is our Pauline and it is up to us to deal with her and her politics as we see fit. There is a lot of Australian blood on a lot of battlefields from defending this idea.

 Firstly let’s just put aside the morals or otherwise and the lack of political acumen of two members of the Party and ask the question – Why would a minor media player based in the Middle East go to three years of effort and expense in an attempt to destroy a minor political party in a democracy of 22 million languishing in the Western Pacific. And if Al Jazeera is really the brains behind this and not just the trigger puller, then who has the most to gain and who is pulling the strings. Who has the most to gain from the political demise of One Nation? Not too hard to work out. If you are the LNP and looking down the barrel at certain and decisive defeat, then you might want to ensure a majority in the Senate so that you can play havoc with any ALP Govt initiatives that you don’t like. Then it is in your interest to limit voter’s choices at the ballot. No One Nation equals fewer choices.

 There is really only one way to take the option of this type of skulduggery away from the likes of Al Jazeera and other rabble and that is to give one of the major parties a clear and workable majority. Only then can we dispense with the awful situation common in Australian politics in recent years of the elected Government having to barstardize its policies on the whim of some minority group or independent member.

 If the Opposition has the greater numbers in the Senate, so be it. At least they are the Opposition and are much more answerable to the electorate.

 So – for sake of our democracy on 18 May do yourself and this great country a big favour and vote only for a major party.

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Feet

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The Cenotaph at ANZAC Square, Brisbane

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Australia Day

Has come and gone for yet another year but still I am getting emails etc about invasion day and changing the date etc etc

 I find it difficult if not impossible to generate any energy for this topic at all. It seems to me to be nothing more than a symbolic birch branch with which the softly feely touchy brigade (SFTB) from Vaucluse and Toorak can flail themselves in order to feel better about some perception that they should repent.

 The image that I cannot get out of my head is that of an aboriginal man in the streets of Port Keats beating the living daylights out of an Aboriginal woman to get her to cash the fortnightly welfare cheque so that he could buy beer with the money. To attempt to avoid this and to ensure that the women and children got fed, the then Federal Government introduced a trial of a plastic card which held a credit to the value of about ¾ of the welfare payment and this card could only be used to buy food. The trail was cut short and the idea dumped because that same SFTB in southern Australia again took to the streets protesting that the card rendered Aboriginal Australians as second class citizens unable to handle their own financial affairs and insisting that Aboriginal welfare recipients be treated the same as all others in the land. This was in the late 1980’s. Now almost 30 years later I read that the same card idea is on trial in some locations in Australia and working well. I wonder how many Aboriginal women had their faces bashed in during the intervening years.

 Which brings to mind another event that might carry a message to those would be opinion makers in the south. About 10 years after that terrible beating in the streets of Port Keats I was escorting a representative of Nelson Mandela’s ANC Government of South Africa on a tour of Central Australia. While stopped at a traffic light in Alice Springs a group of six Aboriginal women crossed the street in front of us. Now it is my experience that most South Africans are quite forthright and don’t waste a lot of time getting to the point. And so he turned to me and said “why are the native women so ugly?” I smiled and did not respond. I was a little taken aback that it took a foreigner to point out the obvious. Is it because we are so used to them looking like that. He pressed me on this later and I explained that domestic violence exacerbated by alcohol was a problem.

 So I will be impressed with the SFTB when they are in the streets urging measures to introduce real jobs into rural Australia and training for those jobs so that Aboriginal people can at least have to chance at a different life.  I am a supporter of the Noel Pearson doctrine which put plainly says to Aboriginal people – “get off your black arse and get a job”. But we (all of us) have to do a bit to create the jobs in the bush.

Having slid the soap box back under the table I bid you farewell.