Brett Gale, Anthony Albanese, Paul Keating, and geese that take to the air have to land somewhere ...

(Above: couldn't count the rivets? Too slow? Not to worry, just admire the view).

And now for a parochial digression.

We live under the flightpath for Sydney airport.

It's only the third runway, and it was built after we moved in to our current emoh ruo, but never mind, it's not that noisy and it has some benefits.

I can always drop off a difficult telephone conversation if a jet handily shrieks over the house, and I love to go outside and count the rivets as the fireflies come home to their nest.

My partner is a bit more sophisticated.

That's a rare Kaleshnikov FU 69, very rare, the ones with the turbo feathered dynamic props comes a mutter as we bird watch at dusk in the back yard - haven't seen or heard of one of those since they were in a mid-air collision over New Delhi.

We both love to watch Air Crash Investigations, and now it's the silly season on FTA in Australia, they turn up on a weekly basis, unless there's sport programmed by the dummies at Seven.

We especially love the episodes where aeroplanes crash into densely packed suburbs or apartment blocks built near the airport. Nothing like a disaster to get the endorphins pumping. Pity about the people involved.

One of our favourite movies is Donnie Darko - what fun, how surreal it would be to have a jet engine drop into the front parlour, the one we keep clean and tidy in case the local pastor drops in for tea and bikkies to argue the case for belief over nihilistic uncertainty and existential despair, driven by absurd anxiety attacks ... over the notion that a brief moment of technical or maintenance incompetence, or an absurd assembly of minor matters going wrong might somehow turn into an air disaster, so that we might get to star in an ACI episode ourselves, seeing as how God is always vindictive towards secularists. What a bitch she is.

Of course we don't bother with a rainwater tank. The black festering mass of burnt avgas that darkens the back roof reminds you drinking the stuff would be like licking the exhaust pipe of a motor car. And ruin the Scotch you used to dilute the water.

Luckily the washing is under cover, and the upside is that it only takes fifteen minutes to get to a plane, and fly somewhere else so we can drop shit all over someone else's suburbs. Adelaide's a particularly pleasing place to visit in that regard - nothing like staring down at Mile End, and thinking it's pay back time baby!

So much pleasure, so little time. Though there's a downside too.

Mention you want a taxi from the airport to Palm Beach and you'll be crushed under a herd of taxi drivers imitating stampeding elephants.

Mention you're heading to the inner west, and suddenly they can't find the way, can't understand English, and have to be coached from corner to corner to get there - until they work out you're a local and suddenly remember the way. Show you're an out of towner and you'll be driven into the city and out again, and maybe around and around in a circle a couple of times, just to run up the clock. You think I'm kidding? Hey, land in Sydney and give it a go ... like our innocent Melbourne friends did, as they ran up a sixty buck bill for a thirty buck, in the peakest of peak hour, rides.

Never mind, when brooding about such matters, we love to drop in on Ben Sandlilands' always reliable blog on aviation matters, which you can find here.

Funnily enough it only took a couple of years to knock up the third runway, thanks to the Hawke Keating government, which could thereby fudge any commitment to a second Sydney airport. The gutless, useless clowns.

Which makes it all the funnier that Paul Keating, urban visionary, antipodean architect with a renegade capacity to imitate the school of Prince Chuck the interfering, and general know all, should have offered up a plaintive howl about the abandoning of Badgery's Creek as Sydney's second airport (Badgery's Creek was the right site then and is the right site now).

If you want a better insight into the ways of federal politicians, why not take a look at A giant hole in the runway, which proves that Anthony Albanese is just the latest in a long line of ministers and governments who didn't know what to do, or if they did, didn't have the guts, the wherewithal, the capacity or the guile.

That's because Labor governments don't give a toss about their rusted on electorates - abuse by a Labor MP is seen as love, in the masculine Australian way- while conservative governments care even less for the inner west, full as we all know of pinko, pervert, latte sipping, chardonnay slogging ponces.

Well one day that casual indifference is going to catch up with federal and state Labor MPs and hand the greens an opportunity to score an inner west seat. It won't change anything of course, but the day is getting closer, driven on by this kind of rhetoric from Brett Gale, the executive director of the Tourism and Transport Forum:

The curfew policy is outdated and out of step with the latest technology that both airlines and Airservices Australia are investing in. Noise mitigation policies should adapt and respond to technological innovation to keep pace with quieter modern commercial aircraft and air traffic management procedures. (Sydney needs a secondary airport).

You see, in the half baked half assed way of compromising politicians there's a curfew in place, which keeps the noise down between 11 pm and 6 am, and though it's regularly broken in the 5 am to 6 am period, it provides a modicum of quiet for the mug punters in the vicinity of aircraft noise.

The blather that Gale emits - technological innovations, noise mitigation policies, management procedures - is the kind of crap you deploy when selling a particularly noisy pup to a dummy (never barks, except at the full moon, and with proper management procedures, will only nip the ankle of one in ten passers by).

In fact, Gale's whole column is a fine example of the blather you can expect from a bureaucrat expert with soft soap and KY jelly, designed to smooth the way before inserting a blunt instrument in places where the sun is not normally thought to shine.

All options for supplementing Kingford Smith should be on the table, including using existing aviation infrastructure such as Canberra, Bankstown, Richmond and Newcastle airports. There are obvious financial benefits to redeveloping an existing facility than building a new one. Whatever the committee arrives at, the consideration of land transport infrastructure will be critical, including improving the current public transport links to Sydney's Kingsford Smith Airport.

It is of course all so much tosh, and the sort of crap Sydney siders have read for decades, way back to the days when Gough Whitlam hung himself out to dry by trying to take a firm stand. Canberra and Newcastle? You mean the state government will get its shit together to build a fast train, or an even faster metro to these Sydney suburbs?

Oh go jerk the chain, and while you're at it flush the toilet. The loons couldn't even build a decent railway service to the current airport, no matter that the airport had been around for decades before they added a suburban extension so tawdry and tragic international travellers must wonder why they landed in Kabul when the ticket said Sydney.

That leaves the vultures circling Bankstown and Richmond, as they have for years, and civil war for the federal Labor party, and not much chance of anything happening, since next year is an election year, and these days governments plan not on principle but according to the need to keep their pants warm on a nice sinecure seat in Canberra.

What else can Brett come up with? Well how about insisting on a whole new gambit, which likely enough will see environmental studies and reports and discussions and consultants kept in work for the next twenty years ...

There is no reason why primary and secondary airports would not work well. Secondary airports have been demonstrably successful around the world, and Australia. Melbourne has Tullamarine and Avalon and South East Queensland has Brisbane and Gold Coast.

You mean Melbourne actually had a plan, called Tullamarine and another one called Avalon, and it's already happened. This is Sydney you gherkin, we don't do Victoria. Planning's for the feeble minded states.

Not convinced by the smooth Brett's reassurances about secondary stupidity? Well that leaves us with back with that other option:

This process also provides a unique opportunity to have an open and frank discussion about the artificial and regulatory constraints placed on Sydney Airport, particularly cap and curfew and the regional ring-fence.

An open and frank discussion? Isn't that code for lie down so the steamroller can crush you into the tarmac? And Macquarie Bank can gouge us all with its pineapple corer?

How about a bit of pious chain jerking to wrap it all up?

History shows us that finding solutions to Sydney's long-term airport needs is no easy task. We have to get it right this time.

Get it right this time? You complete and utter goose, next you'll be telling me that a fourth runway is needed so Santa can make his deliveries on time.

Well I think one of Ben Sandiland's correspondents called it right:

Once the Badgery’s Creek site is sold off there is nowhere else that a good airport can really be sited. So, there will be three options as Sydney air traffic grows.

1. Move the regional airlines out of the valuable landing slots they have now and schedule big airliners to land during that time (not really an option because the regional carriers are flying from marginal constituencies)

2. Build and fourth runway at Sydney Airport (this will have to be an east-west runway because of space constraints, so the departure and approach procedures will ensure flight paths over labor electorates rather than the liberal electorates on the North Shore)

3. Remove the curfew and have 747s taking of over residential areas at 3am.

This is the ideal situation for the airlines and for Sydney Airport’s owners.

I’m just glad I don’t own a house anywhere near Sydney Airport. The noise is going to be off the charts.

Block your ears!!!!!

Yippee.

Now of course nobody gives a stuff about the suffering of Sydney siders, and frankly on an off day, I can't stand to hear the whingeing sods myself as they whine about living in paradise one minute, then bleat about the missing second airport, before heading off on their annual overseas junket.

But you have to wonder how long the Labor party can keep pushing its incompetence and indifference before a hard rain begins to fall.

Never mind, I see that this Wednesday's ACI is about a China Airlines Boeing 747 that disintegrated mid-air and crashed into the Taiwan Strait just 20 minutes after taking off, killing all 225 people on board, with the more than 600 pieces of debris retrieved only to deepening the mystery of why the plane crashed.

Great. Can the silly season offer any greater pleasure than this? What's that you say? Speak up, plane going overhead, can't hear a word you're saying ...

Oh you think I'll be voting for Anthony Albanese next election? And his wife in the state election?

Reward all that wonderful planning? Darn tooting. And I'm told hell is freezing over as the result of global warming ...

Oh the silly season is such fun, and such a sensible time to once again be discussing Sydney's second airport. Now must dash, got Xmas presents to buy. Might just have time to send a happy seasonal blessings return card to our kindly local member ...

(Below: a cheap joke, and Minister Albanese's personal car number plate?)