(Above: vale Wilson and Steve. Both hall of famers on the pond, but now sadly it's time to get down the wooden 'pro patria' honour board, drag out the gold gilt, and inscribe their names to celebrate their passing).
Looking at the glass half full - as we love to do on the pond because we love a cliche and a half glass full of a good SA riesling or shiraz - the news that Wilson Tuckey has gone down caused more than a few corks to pop, or screw caps to be unscrewed, on the weekend.
Sure it means that the squawking on the pond has dropped below aircraft engine decibels at maximum roar to a pussycat purr, and some will miss the crazed bugger, but here at the pond we're exceptionally pleased that the electorate took an ironbar to the man, and destroyed his bizarre 'mad uncle' dream of becoming a new Billy Hughes and lasting for fifty years in federal parliament.
If we had a spare dollar for the Godwin's Law jar, we'd made a cheap joke about the reich that only ran thirty years (Tuckey's dream in ruins).
Never fear. The pond shall never lack for first class prize loons, and on a Monday Paul Sheehan is a first class loon of the first water with chocolate medal and bar.
Aghast at the election result, Sheehan doesn't round up the usual bunch of suspects - which is to say grasping Celts and their lazy doltish ways, or Canberrans, or Greens. No, this time, in The Yarra monster is killing us, it's Melbourne and Melburnians:
Keen observers remember that previously it was all the fault of Canberrans:
And of course on a global level, the Celts:
England makes, the Celts take. The economies of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are essentially state-funded.
Sheehan spends an inordinate amount of time berating Melbourne and Victoria for growth driven by immigration, but it's actually much simpler. While you might think Victoria is full of nice people, I know for a fact it's full of Irish bludgers, the lot of them connected to me in some mystical incestuous way by their Celtic genes, or more directly by bloody marital vows. Oh to live out James Joyce on a daily basis ...
Where you might have thought Melbourne to have a large Greek community, the reality is that it's full of Celts and Canberrans, all of them on the take.
Phew, there, done it, I've saved you the trouble of reading an entire Paul Sheehan column in which he parrots the Dick Smith line about immigration by resorting to the thoughts of Bob Birrell, and the greedy ways of Melburnians.
Having berated Melbourne as a Yarra monster, Sheehann grudgingly includes Sydney:
Having drawn a picture of Melbourne's bloated needs, fairness demands the lens be widened to include Sydney. The wider picture is not pretty. The great sucking force is not just coming from Melbourne.
Yes those bloody Celts in Sydney are on the take too.
Yes those bloody Celts in Sydney are on the take too.
The result?
My personal solution?
We need to build a Yarra in the Kimberleys full of grasping Celts so that the mineral wealth can be spent on the spot and in situ, while the concept of national economy disappears up Sheehan's and Birrell's collective fundament. Better still, let's turn Perth into Melbourne so they can use their resources properly. Oh hang on, we'll need a few migrants for that ...
Whatever, here's the new slogan here at the pond! Trams for the Kimberleys, or light rail for Perth, if you want a more modernist catch phrase.
The great irony is the mining boom underpinning Australia's economic prosperity requires only modest increases in immigration. Here, too, Birrell is a willing heretic. In a new paper written with his colleague, Ernest Healy, they conclude: ''The Labor government's high immigration policy has little to do with the skill needs of the resources industry.''
Indeed, which is why I constantly marvel at the way an industry and a business I know something about in the IT sector, currently relies heavily on the 457 regime, and without it, would find it simply impossible to mount its current push into south east Asia. Well over half the staff are on 457's ... and damn it, those Scandinavians and Indians know how to code ...
What this says about the education programs of state governments, led from behind by the Howard government for a full decade, is another matter, except to say that as a forward thinking country Howard was as dumb as Sheehan, and as much of a tech head as Tony Abbott ...
Heigh ho, never mind, if you want to read more about all the ills that immigration brings on the country, you can read Sheehan, but we will settle for this one:
It increases Australia's greenhouse emissions, per capita.
It makes it unlikely Australia can meet its targets of greenhouse gas emission reduction.
It makes it unlikely Australia can meet its targets of greenhouse gas emission reduction.
Um, Mr Sheehan, in the spirit of Australia gives, Woollahra takes, Australia gives, Herald columnists wank as they take, surely you remember Beware the climate of conformity, in which you firmly established that Ian Plimer was a visionary:
The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology.
The hypothesis that human activity can create global warming is extraordinary because it is contrary to validated knowledge from solar physics, astronomy, history, archaeology and geology.
That's why we had to develop an entirely new thesis to explain global warming, which happily pinpointed the scientifically verifiable insight that gas emissions could be cut in half by the simple expedient of silencing conservative columnists in the Fairfax and Murdoch presses.
All of this poses the question, if Melbourne is going to become a city of 5 million people, but only by sucking resources from the rest of the country, what's in it for the rest of the country?
Nothing. It should not be surprise then, that on Saturday night Victoria, the state so reliant on big government and big immigration, went hard for Labor and a Melbourne Prime Minister.
It wasn't just parochialism, it was greed.
Um, actually, the good city of Melbourne voted in their infinite wisdom for a Green in the lower house. And in the upper house that prize gherkin Steve Fielding has been swept from the field, with his likely replacement a Greens candidate Richard Di Natale. That's why Bob Brown could boast From where I sit, that's a greenslide (here).
I don't know how Australia will recover from the shock. Wilson and Steve both gone, and bugger me dead, it's a green slide.
Still looking at that glass half full we always have Sheehan ...
Why not amuse yourselves, gentle readers who've made it this far through Sheehan's folly (a much worse drop than Lake's Folly), by heading back in time to as recent as February 2, 2010, wherein the dumb Sheehan spends his time quoting the likes of Viscount Christopher Monckton as he broods on Ten debates the greens didn't want to have.
Can a man be unerringly wrong on matters of detail, rhetoric, economics, love, pain and the whole damn thing?
Yes.
So here's our own rousing conclusion to Sheehan's parochial piece:
It wasn't just parochialism of a Sydney kind, it was just plain bare faced greedy commentariat cupidity.
And now, since Jon Stewart has his moment of zen to end his show - Jon you can always park your slippers in the antipodes, with or without scratchy beard - here's another moment of zen:
Desiring to show his attainment, he said: "The mind, Buddha, and sentient beings, after all, do not exist. The true nature of phenomena is emptiness. There is no relaization, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity. There is no giving and nothing to be received."
Dokuon, who was smoking quietly, said nothing. Suddenly he whacked Yamaoka with his bamboo pipe. This made the youth quite angry.
"If nothing exists," inquired Dokuon, "where did this anger come from?"
Silly Zen master. He should have said:
If Paul Sheehan exists, I know where this anger came from ...
(Below: and now, since if you do a google image search on Paul Sheehan these days, you might get an actual portrait, or you might get bizarre images from loon pond, here's a couple more conflationary images, showing that in Borrisoleigh Ireland there's a Paul Sheehan leading a useful life running a restaurant and doing good work in the community. And to be sure it's in the county of Tipperary, home of many of my Celtic genes, and a grand place to visit.
So it goes, some Sheehans give, and the Celts take ...)
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