Piers Akerman, the evils of Labor, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, feeding the chooks and brown paper bags

(Above: Joh Bjelke-Petersen, ruler of Queensland at a time when a man knew how to feed the chooks, harvest brown paper bags, and deal with intransigent lefties with a little verbal buckshot).

Lo and behold, I saw a fair land, so full of surf and sand and many colored reefs of splendid hues, that it was good, and I filled it full of cane toads, and it was good, and there came upon it the need for brown paper bags full of cash in the paw, and it was good, and I said unto all who listened, let them who need sustenance, farm for peanuts.

And so it was, and came unto its  own, and blessed was the earth called Queensland. Here endeth the lesson.

But what prompted the lesson? Well it had to be Piers Akerman, who else could write about corruption so expertly and adroitly?

In Where corruption is a growth industry, he even manages to write about corruption in Queensland without once mentioning Joh Bjelke-Petersen and his cronies.

Crikey, that takes some doing. You'd think that the reason Tony Fitzgerald's enquiry into corruption in Queensland came into being might have got a guernsey, if not at least a passing mention.

But the fat owl is intent on establishing at tedious length that the Labor party is the party of corruption. As if Joh had never existed, and if he had, that his record should be stricken from the slate.

On and on he rambles, and what turns up? Why of course it's the Heiner conspiracy, and here he has to deal with some recalcitrants in his own rag:

Distressingly, even senior media figures have downplayed the original gang rape of a ward of the State, with my colleague, The Daily Telegraph’s Malcolm Farr, last month describing the victim on his blog as a “girl who was groped’’ though two of the boys who assaulted her admitted to rape the day after the attack.

Et tu Farr? You've joined the conspiracy, which of course is led by Chairman Rudd from the front pew of his local church:

In the Sunshine State, vote rigging, favours for mates and rorts continue to be the order of the day.
Prime Minister Rudd, the favourite son who was at the epicentre of this disgraceful state of affairs, now piously holds a press conference at the door of his local parish church each Sunday.
As Justice O’Keefe reminded his audience: ``A man of words and not of deeds is like a garden full of weeds.’’
The nauseating hypocrisy displayed by Mr Rudd is the true measure of progress in the fight against corruption in the 20 years since Fitzgerald.

Dearie me, can someone feed the chook some wheat, so he's got some other nutritious conspiracy to feed on, or at least toss a brown paper bag over the back fence in the Queensland way to lead him into the bliss of silence.

Newsflash: in the smaller states, where you can much more easily meet a politician, the stench of corruption, and the need to fight it is always in the air, be they Labor, Liberal, National or Country Party politicians. If you think it's bad in Queensland, try Tasmania or the Northern Territory. 

In contrast Sydney of course is a marvel of incorruptibility, and as for Melbourne ... (and thank the lord this site is not noted for its sledge hammer sense of irony).

By making it all the fault of Labor, Akerman does a serious disservice to history, and to current attempts to tackle corruption. In his monomania he resembles a one trick pony who really is now reduced to frothing and foaming about the way two Labor legs are bad. 

Sure the chooks he feeds might be happy, but really for the rest of the world he must be a case of the kind of white noise you get from tinnitus.

(By the way, here's the Wiki on Joh and Chris Masters on Beyond Bethany).