Sunday, October 13, 2013

A stroll through Taronga Zoo with Barners and the wild perking pigs ...

(Above: memes on the march)


What with Tony Abbott's tin ear about weddings and charity and sporting events - the pond is available to recite poems at your charity event, provided all expenses are paid - and his grand "sorry" tour of Asia, the pond's month is already full to overflowing.

It's allowed the usual suspects, like Mike Carlton, to go feral, deploying the internet meme above as a way to start Tony Abbott is 'a bludger', and it's forced the hagiographers to work long hours of overtime (please, no talk of loadings) polishing the brass knobs in the palace.

Sure it's bipartisan - hapless Senator Gavin Marshall seems to have failed the Google test, known to all teachers, as reported in Senator appears to have copied tracts of text for report on European study trip.

Abbott could have short-circuited the matter by promising to do something about it, but because his snout is so firmly in the trough, he's decided to tough it out - Tony Abbott defends entitlements, saying he won't be changing the system.

This is like a standing invitation for journalists to dig dirt, though the down under version of The Guardian has shown there are fewer dirt diggers by inviting a crowd sourcing solution to ferreting through the dirty laundry - the invitation's open at Investigate politicians' expenses, though it struck the pond as being too much like hard work.

Best of all is when the likes of Barners takes out the fountain pen, and scribbles a valiant defence, as he did for the Canberra Times a few days ago, in Taking on a different animal.

Now why the Canberra Times keeps publishing Barners must remain a mystery - perhaps they're being kind to a country cousin short of a sheep or two in the top paddock - but they do and it's always a delight.

This time Barners opens with a wallowing flourish of self-pity, mixed with strange metaphors:

Opposition is like a trip on a lonely sea looking for animal stories. Every now and then, you find a verdant jungle on a tropical island, and your spirits rise. Rarely, but not never, do you discover a trophy worthy of mounting on the political wall. 
Government is like a walk through Taronga Zoo with the cages removed and all the animals loose.

Oh it's a jungle or a wild zoo out there, and it has all the awkward charm and style of a fifth former at St Dominic's essay.

Barners is determined not to let the petty barbs of journalists get to him about his Gina Rinehart Indian wedding bash or his immensely important one day study tour of Malaysia, wherein he discovered that the land had roads that wouldn't be out of place in Australia (Pacific highway excepted).

You can tell Barners writes his own material. Who else could concoct this kind of verbal feast?

The pejorative and the parody are the barbs of opposition, which is an easier task than pursuing the more seminal thread of our national interest in government. Simple is what satisfies, what fills the gut, issues consumed by hand, fed like fast food, cheap from the plastic tray to satisfy a hunger. 

Why the man's a veritable Hemingway. Pungent and probing and real, as real as a plastic tray carrying food for the gut, like a raw keening and a howling of hunger in a feral land as the roaming lions prowl the zoo ... Or some such ...

Other issues require a knife and fork, and follow the complexion of a vastly more complicated set of rules. Getting our nation ahead in the area we live, south-east Asia, is not fast food; it is vastly more deliberate and prepared.

Yes, he might be bloody awful as a stylist, of the dark and stormy night school, but these days Barners is a statesman and a most important person determined to do something about the kangaroo meat trade to China so people in Australia's remote corners can take money home to their families.

Fair dinkum, the pond almost wept to read this valiant warrior's musings, this Gabriele D'Annunzio down under.

It turns out that while the cowardly masses huddle by the sea, Barners dares to venture into the dead heart, the blackness in the soul of Australia, and after crossing the blackness, even manages to reach that remote outpost, Darwin, as mysterious, exotic and distant as Timbuktu:

While in the air on the flight to Darwin, the most notable sight out of the window is darkness, because the population clings to the coast in a tiny area on a huge map. Australia's policy argument is a tiny piece of a major global play. We are days away from a US default, which could send the global economy spiralling out of control, but it has not yet struck a feature on the front pages; well, not in a form worthy of the effect it will have if this disaster occurs. If the US defaults, how will it hit the lives of Australians? Now that's worthy of a read on the train to work.

Indeed, mere mortals. Pray listen and take heed.

While Barners is off building empires in Darwin, his ratbag right wing cousins in the United States are intent on ruining the world. Read about that, rather than wonder about Barners' trivial expenses, and whatever you might wonder, please do not wonder at the havoc Barners and Dear Leader might wreak in Australia.

Oh you can frolic at the feet of a serious Minister for Agriculture if you must, a serious and austere giant intent on feeding the hungry, yearning masses, but please, in your vindictive pettiness, don't interfere with the heroic work of puncturing the darkness, of bringing light to the bush so that the interior, the head heart, might glow like Las Vegas ...

 The agriculture portfolio delivers money; others may produce social goods, but they are a cost. The stark reality is, if you do not have revenue, you cannot afford social expenses. 

Yes, you frivolous hippies, Barners' major initiative - shipping 'roos to China - will save the day and allow you to flee the cities for well-lit bush retreats.

Now please, allow one more flourish of self-pity.

Our priorities should be tempered always by who brings the money in and how much of that do we catch and keep in our nation. If an Australian woman goes to India to sell coal from an Australian mine, why on earth would you run her down?

Indeed. Why on earth, you children of Gina, do you run her down? Why not adopt Barners' posture, of supine submissiveness? You can do it to Barners, and on your behalf, Barners will do it to Gina ...

And if we can sell off the coal, why shouldn't we sell off the farms? As many as possible ...

Now Tony Abbott has been busy trying to shut down brushfires on many fronts, with his main policy profile to run away from reporters and cut off as much information as possible - "stop the boats" has turned into "silence the boats, and the latest from the Minister for Gulags is Morrison imposes blackout on asylum seeker self-harm.

Yep, Stalin would approve, having set the pace with Stalin imposes blackout on gulag self-harm.

Perhaps it's wrong of the pond to offer a helping hand in this venture, but a tip to Abbott's office - can someone quietly arrange to vet Barners' copy before it hits the Canberra Times?

Loose cannon, accident waiting to happen, loose lips sink ships, wot wot old chums ...

No doubt Abbott hopes that if no one talks about all these things, the fuss will go away, but that's not the way it works these days, with major mastheads needing to cut through all the noise on the intertubes.

For example, the pond could have sworn that The Guardian v the Daily Mail v Miliband's dad had run out of steam, and then what do you know, silly old Paul Dacre gifted them with Why is the left obsessed by the Daily Mail?, a pathetic attempt at self-justification, which by this morning had generated a frenzied furious 3,395 comments ... as frenzied a gathering of the loons as you can find outside Huff Post.

The first comment set the tone ... "someone please tell me this is a parody".

The very words you might apply to Barners' piece.

Of course The Guardian readership had been warmed up by a series of cartoons by Steve Bell presenting Paul Dacre as a Goodwin's Law breaking figure of fun:


And Josie Long offered up this:

(Click to enlarge: more Guardian cartoons here)


Meanwhile the Mail on Sunday joined all the other Sunday rags in a circulation drop ... Sun on Sunday and Sunday Mirror sales fall after cover price rises ... year on year change -.6.47%.  Oh it's got a long way to fall, but fall it will ...

Just as well they have a successful tits and bum and gossip and scandal website ...

But back to the home front to wrap it all up, with the point being that stories don't go away, not when it's the business of newspapers to consume politicians, and consume their own kind if necessary, in the pursuit of hits and survival.

So every story that charts mean-spirited penny pinching by Abbott's government will now be refracted through the rorting.

The penny-pinching stories have already started to flow ... as you can read in Hit and run on crime prevention likely, which charts charity and community groups including the Police Citizens Youth Club, who might be going under the Abbott fiscal hammer.

Yep, there's an irony lurking there, ready to be written up at length.

The man who charged expenses to go on a charity ride is now intent on degutting charities ...

It's a sure fire way to freshen up stories which already show signs of wanting to maintain the rage, as in the conclusion to Tom Allard's Happy as a pig in perks:

Reform is long overdue by any measure, but Tony Abbott is digging in. He was a young politician when John Howard's government was rocked by its travel rorts scandal and saw close hand how it destabilised the team. 
Abbott wants to kill the issue and carry on. Both major parties have embarrassing entitlement breaches yet to be fully ventilated. It will be the minor parties and independents who will lead the push for reform, as well as the media, bloggers and fed-up citizens.

Only a month and a weeping sore refusing to heal. No wonder the pond is as happy as the pigs in their perks ...

What to do, what to do? How about a little sexist advice?



And while we're in the war years with Scott Morrison and blackouts:




1 comment:

  1. Possibly the worst thing about the Canberra Times serving up a weekly dose of Barners is that the Fairfax website does not enable comments on his articles. Given the nature of the denizens of this fair city, I think it only fair that we be given the chance to point out to Barners what a fatuous twit he really is.

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