In which the pond drinks heartily from the billy tea of assorted parties ...

Perhaps the silliest burst of rhetoric in the current fuss over plain packaging for cigarettes comes from Tim Anderson, courtesy of Menzies House, in How Plain Packaging Will Help Spread Terrorism.

... one fact hasn’t yet been addressed by the Australian media: The undisputed fact that it will help fund terrorists.

Fortunately Tim provides his own answer:

This may seem silly and alarmist at first glance. Terrorism financed because of plain packaging? This must just be crazy fearmongering, right? I'm being ridiculous! I mean, drugs, sure, but tobacco smuggling? Surely I've gone mad!

Mad as a march hare Tim.

I do wish at some point you learned some Photoshop skills. Replicating any kind of packaging in a trice is now just a keystroke away, and if you want decent examples, look no further than the film and television industry. I say with some modesty that even I could produce the kind of packaging you can routinely find at the Newtown street market for illegal packaged goods.

On a more sophisticated level, there's always the fifty buck "replica" watches I've used to fool my respectable Eastern suburbs acquaintances, but this year in Canal street, New York, the cops had been through the forgery market like a gust of wind from the east, and the fifty buck watch was no more.

Unhappily, according to Tim, the federal cops and customs are so inept in Australia, the Australian marketplace will be flooded with replica, plain packaged, terrorist funding cigarettes ...

Fortunately for Tim there are some sensible comments attached to his piece, and failing aspirin as a way of bringing down the fevered hysteria, he might read them and contemplate how alarmist claptrap really doesn't help the Liberal party and big tobacco save themselves.

Memo to big tobacco: forget Menzies House, and go with the Institute of Public Affairs, who know how to craft a canny libertarian message.

Or, oh heck, lash out and hire Karl Bitar, and once he's finished saving poker machines in the cause of tourism, he might be able to save the tobacco industry in the name of tourism. Just think how hideous it will be for German and Chinese tourists to be confronted by plain packaging, knowing they're directly aiding terrorism and the next Bali bombing. (Bitar says casino role is to promote tourism).

Meanwhile, while we're on the outer arm of a galaxy spiralling out of control, why not drop in on the Australian T.E.A. Party, whose site features an "iconic movie" as part of its message. After viewing this "iconic movie", allegedly inspired by Animal Farm - sue them, socialist George Orwell, sue them high, sue them low - I began to get a glimmer as to why the Australian movie industry dismally fails to connect with an audience. Enough already.

The poor hapless possums realise that realise that the Boston Tea Party provided a heaven sent marketing opportunity in the United States, but doesn't have much to do with Australia, while the mantra No Taxation Without Representation is also a particular part of American history. What to do?

... while this was part of American history the sentiment is universal.

We have borrowed and modified this saying to reflect citizens frustration with government engorgement and our apparent powerlessness to reduce or even restrict it.

"NO TAXATION WITHOUT REAL REPRESENTATION"

Does this mean we're getting unreal representation at the moment? If so, speak to Tony Abbott, or perhaps the hand ...

The sweet concerned things purport to be of no party - a Non-Party Political movement - except of course everything is dedicated to a raving conservative cause, ratbag heaven, dressed up in a house style worthy of the National Enquirer.

While the site carries all the requisite patriotic jingoistic last refuges of assorted nameless scoundrels - maps of Australia, flag waving and such like - there's a most unhealthy linking to United States fundies.

It ends up making Pauline Hanson look like someone who understood the zeitgeist. At least she could do a decent barn dance ...

Why the antipodean tea partiers don't even have a commercial relationship with whoever now owns the Billy tea brand.

My grandfather used to swear by Billy Tea. He'd make it as thick as an Irish stew, then to balance the acrid, hepped up dose of caffeine, he'd heap in spoonful after spoonful of sugar. Once the spoon could stand upright in the brew on its own, the tea was right for serving.

Oops, wait a second, are the kangaroo and the bum talking to him a couple of disreputable swaggies, relying on hand outs and bludging while they trudge the outback roads? Shame, shame, you reprehensible kanga, you're not fit to be a dinkum Aussie emblem. Get back to work you bludgers, and I guess it's back to the raving irrelevant drawing board for new dinkum Aussie symbols ...

Enough of the outer fringes.

Why go on a tour there when we always have the minions of Murdoch, and sure enough the anon edit for The Australian once again comes up trumps, fomenting class hatred and sounding exactly like ... Gerard Henderson ... of all people ... in Emu Plains subsidises Bondi:

Under Labor's solar panel program, the battlers in outer suburbs whom the party once claimed to represent were made to subsidise the green aspirations of the prosperous north shore and eastern suburbs middle classes the party once despised.

The anon edit presents no statistical data for this assertion, which seems to amount to the peculiar notion that the circa 110,000 households who have taken up the scheme reside in the north shore and eastern suburbs, and possibly subscribe to Fairfax, the fiends.

Strange then that the Wauchope Gazette should report discontent in the Port Macquarie region:

Mr Alley says the Solar Bonus Scheme was successful in the Port Macquarie electorate with many thousands of home owners taking up the opportunity to install solar panels on their rooves. (here).

Well Port Macquarie is to the north. Guys, consider yourselves promoted to the northern suburbs of Sydney, courtesy the anon edit of The Australian. Then stand by for a belting because of your wretched selfishness and Greenie ways:

Not surprisingly, the Greens, whose electoral base is professional elites in expensive suburbs and inner-city areas that formerly voted Liberal, or perhaps Labor if they work in universities, want the scheme retained and will oppose its rollback in the NSW upper house.

Funny, you know, in this capitalist age, that the question of contract law and retrospectivity is rarely raised as a key issue. Still, the notion of being arbitrarily capable of overturning an agreed and contracted deal, simply because one party no longer likes the deal, is a handy one, and perhaps should guide the pond in all its future dealings with the state government, especially when it comes to taxation. Go for it Tea Partiers, do the restrospective taxation without real representation and contractual obligation state government down ...

Of course back in the day Terry McCrann was very hot to trot on the matter of retrospectivity:

A key issue was the way the proposed tax acted retrospectively on existing projects, where much of the cost of developing them had been written off, so the tax would impact even more punitively. (here)

And again:

If you stay with the retrospectivity, you are announcing Australia had become a republic. A banana republic. Because you are effectively confiscating some part of successful projects. (here)

But that was about the mining tax and the long suffering big miners.

Mug punters from Port Macquarie are a completely different billy tea kettle of fish (and worse they use mixed metaphors).

Ain't it wondrous how simple ideological zealotry can totally obscure any real insights into who participated in the solar panels program and what might be fair compensation for those, both inside and outside certain Sydney suburbs, who took part in it, beguiled by the notion that a contract with government was more solid than a handshake with crossed fingers, only to discover that these days a contract with government is worth less than the paper it's printed on.

So what else do the Murdoch minions have going today?

Well there's Greg Sheridan once more slaying that double crossing traiterous treacherous beast Malcolm Fraser - kill the beast, kill the beast - in Fraser's unreliable memoirs rewrite history, and Gary Johns' explaining how Wayne Swan is a goose - kill the beast, kill the beast - in A ball short of a tennis match, which is a bit rich coming from a goose who somehow thinks a wayward tennis court at Nundah State School serves as a metaphor for discussing big mining and the mining tax. Call it a royalty in Wayne's Western Australian Liberal party world and perhaps the problem will be solved?

Then there's Peter Anderson explaining how the Carbon tax is a free-trade risk. Funnily enough the Kudelka cartoon attached to the story sends up Tony Abbott, and by implication, Anderson, special pleader for the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, shitless.

And then there's Ian Harper of Access indulging in special pleading and piety and semantic distortion to explain how it's a jolly good thing to keep Christian chaplains in school in the name of pluralism and pastoral care (and a little bit of Xian propaganda on the side). (A place for spiritual and ethical guidance).

But there is one shocking, disturbing omission. We're spared the daily reminder of how the NBN, or is it the ABC, are the ruination of Australia. Why it's been a full three days since Mark Day fulminated in Scott's talk of ABC being a market failure is cheap, and days and days since Mike Quigley was dusted up for all that was wrong in Alcatel, and all that's now wrong with the NBN.

Perhaps tomorrow? Surely tomorrow ...

(Below: Australians saved from terrorism because there was none of that plain packaging nonsense for decent dinkum Aussie tea back in 1910, as cheerful Ceylonese workers scoured the hilltops for the tastiest tips with which to fill the billy).