Piers Akerman, cloth caps, and the ongoing campaign to keep gerbils relevant ...

(Above: as we celebrate gerbil week, we were strangely drawn to this illustration, allegedly for a real patent taken out in 1999, which offers up a gerbil shirt, replete with plastic tube passageways for your gerbil. Here it is at Patently Absurd. Beats a hair shirt).

Here on budget morning at the pond we're starting to get worried about the absence of Miranda the Devine. Could she have lost her mojo, like Bill Henson? (He ignited controversy - now he's ditching it). Could she have decided her reference to rogering gerbils was A crudity that was just too much?

The silence is unnerving especially as the federal government now needs a good rogering.

Sure, there's always Catherine Deveny, who seems to have leapt from The Age to lurk amongst the Drum's "robust community debate" - as if the ABC's latte sippers could ever indulge in robust debate, always the provenance of conservative thinkers - but who could not be moved by the clarion call at I'm tough, but I'm sacked and I'm heart broken:

Don't sack Miranda Devine. I believe in diversity in the media and standing by your staff. I don't agree with much of what Miranda Devine writes but by reading her I find out what I do think and why.

Excuse me, I have gerbils to roger.

Yes, please sign loon pond's petition to keep Miranda the Devine. We believe in diversity and a regular dose of stupidity. It's good for you, like bran, and helps you get through the day.

Meanwhile, it being budget day, we've decided to order a dress made of the finest burlap (exotic US term for a hessian bag made from jute or other vegetable fibres), not so we can don sackcloth on Ash Wednesday, but so we can join in the festive embrace of restraint. A scattering of ashes around the house - a few reserved for forehead and cheek - and a bowl labelled 'more gruel please' - and we've done our bit for Australia.

And here we were lathered up only yesterday by Barnaby Joyce about the way we were turning into an antipodean Greece. Debt here, debt there, and no relief, and now suddenly we're talking of surpluses, and all the pundits seem to have drunk the kool aid.

Fortunately we have Akker Dakker, aka the brave and noble Piers Akerman, to reliably explain the fiendish duplicity and extraordinary Machiavellian skills of Chairman Rudd and his kitchen clique. Akker Dakker even provides dictionary definitions while doing so, as he leads off The kitchen cabinet cooks up a mess:

Treasurer Wayne Swan has produced a fantastic Budget. Fantastic - as in created in the mind, illusory and unrealistic. It is the equivalent of a fiscal pink batts scheme, with all that disastrous program’s potential to explode into flames, and has all the authority of the Rudd Government’s discarded emissions trading system.

What a fantastic pink batt flame exploding discarded ETS opener.

It seems Akker Dakker's best hope for further doom and destruction now resides with a modern day Eureka Stockade, with the miners maintaining their rage and carry on the good fight. In short, truly revolting:

Voices from the miners’ bunker are adamant they will not fold, that those who made the decisions to proceed will not see their plans destroyed by a greedy government that failed to consult before imposing its punitive new tax regime. That the miners are there for the long haul and a fight to the end.

Yes, it's down into the bunker - steady, no comparisons to Adolf heading down into his bunker Berlin at the end of the war, you know about Godwin's Law and there's no excuse - and a righteous fight over the long haul, a fight to the bitter end, and with god's good grace, a steady hand and a vigorous wind in the sails, the miners might yet overturn the budget, justify Akker Dakker and ruin the fiendish Labor socialists.

Along with the Australian economy, but never mind that. This is a time for sacrifice, for rebellion, for ... dare we whisper it ... big mining to stage a tea party.

Because it's a class war!

It has been quite apparent from the first announcement of the resources rent tax that both Rudd and Swan believed they could unleash a new class war against the mining industry, employing the weapons of the tall-poppy syndrome and any incipient anti-foreigner sentiment they could dredge up.

You see, the socialists are anti-furriner, quite unlike the forces for good, who are extremely positive about furriners, except that it should be understood that there are good furriners (mining giants and furrin capital) and bad furriners (people who come in ships, beguiled by the lifestyle, little realising they are arriving in a den of iniquity run by the rough equivalent of a southern Fidel Castro).

But Australians simply aren't prejudiced, hate class war, and dismiss out of hand any attempt to ask about the budget 'what's in it for me':

The opinion polls would indicate they have missed their mark. Perhaps, just perhaps, Australians are now realising how much they owe to the mining industry for saving the nation from the worst of the fiscal meltdown.

Exactly. The miners are heroes, not the Maoist Chinese eager to buy up Australia as a job lot, and we're treating the miners like the dirt they dig up, and the result is doom and disaster:

This Budget does not map out a reform agenda, it sets out a retrogressive approach to the economy that would not have been out of place in the days of cloth cap trade unionism.

Ah, by goom, talk of cloth cap trade unionism reminds us all that Akker Dakker is an astute observer ... of British politics ... and carries a grudge ... from the days of Empire. Does he need a dose of the salts or David Cameron's progressive outlook?

You see, there's fair evidence that the term 'cloth cap trade unionism' is a hoary old throwback to when Kier Hardie, influenced by the socialist doctrines of the Fabian society, broke with the Liberals and sat as a Labour M.P. - even wearing a cloth cap rather than the traditional hat of the middle and upper classes. He founded the Independent Labour Party in 1893, endorsed by the Trades Union Congress, and Britain has been in cloth hat ruin ever since (here).

Whether it's unveiling the truth about chook hypnosis or cloth hats, Akker Dakker is our man.

Now to make his dream come true, we need a couple of things to happen. The Greek disease must spread here, China must suddenly fail, or more likely and happy days, most likely, as Akker Dakker whips them into a lather, the mining giants must revolt.

Yep, the revolting miners are our best hope ...

Now spare a thought, cloth cap in hand, for poor old Twiggy, as outlined in Tax threatens Twiggy's fortune ... It seems this new tax might bring him down a peg or two. Oh dear, and the poor lad worth only ten billion ...

It reminds me of Orson Welles in Citizen Kane, when told that he's slowly losing his fortune by running a Hearst-like rag at a loss:

THATCHER:: I happened to see your consolidated statement yesterday, Charles. Could
I not suggest to you that it is unwise for you to continue this philanthropic enterprise -
(sneeringly) this Enquirer - that is costing you one million dollars a year?

KANE You're right. We did lose a million dollars last year.

Thatcher thinks maybe the point has registered.

KANE: We expect to lost a million next year, too. You know, Mr. Thatcher - (starts tapping quietly) at the rate of a million a year - we'll have to close this place in sixty years. (full script here).

Oh well you can't expect that kind of feisty good humour in the lucky country ...

But wait, what's this? Even as I scribble, there's Wayne Swan on the radio, rabbiting away, claiming that the budget returning to surplus doesn't in any way depend on the new mining tax ...

Sheesh. Someone's talking through their cloth hat. Could it be Akker Dakker? No never!

Tea party on giant miners. Make sure that billion dollar surplus can't be delivered, so we can go cloth cap in hand to Twiggy to make up the balance ... after all, if he props us up to the tune of a billion dollars a year, it'll take him ten years to drop his bundle and leave us to make our own way in these troubled times ...

Oh dear, that sounds like tall poppy syndrome, but I keed, I keed, I love Citizen Kane ...

(Below: Keir Hardie, as featured in The Strand in 1983, another excellent feature of Project Gutenberg here, and wearing a cloth hat so you can immediately spot a modern day cloth cap trade unionist and form a tea party caucus to limit the spread of the virulent virus. Thanks be to Akker Dakker).