The pond was immensely moved and gratified to read in Politicians' 'age of entitlement':
Senator Brandis was outdone by Queensland Liberal National MP Bert van Manen, who claimed $5220 in publications entitlements last year - mostly on children's, craft, sporting and cooking books. Mr van Manen's purchases included 101 Great Rugby League Players, The Encyclopaedia of Woodworking Techniques, The Complete Book of Vegetables, Herbs and Fruit and children's books such as Lola the Lollipop Fairy, Edwina the Emu and 38 copies of Incy Wincy Spider.
A spokeswoman for Mr van Manen said: ''The books in question are entirely within the publications entitlements.''
Under broad guidelines, politicians are allowed to bill the taxpayer for publications related to ''parliamentary, electorate or official business''.
32 copies of Incy Wincy, though the version isn't clear from the report - so many Incy Wincys, so little time!
But the pond isn't bitter. No, MPs can never have enough copies of an heroic free market spider struggling against insidious rain, the work of deviant anarchist commie pinko socialist greenie perverts.
Some of these pretend an interest in the heroic spider's willingness to tackle the spout of life, but only if the hapless spider conforms to their demeaning collectivist lifestyle and the fraudulent, fat cat international climate science conspiracy which alleges there isn't that much rain coming down the spout in the future.
Why shouldn't Bert be allowed to paper pre-schoolers with a book celebrating the right Liberal stuff?
Meanwhile, the pond is taking the day off, but not before sending a cheerio and a fuck you to Malcolm Turnbull, Optus and anyone else inclined to argue that Australia is blessed with a wondrous broadband.
And commiserations and consolations to anyone else forced to use what passes for broadband in this fucked up country, with useless north shore and eastern suburbs prats and ponces in charge ...
Amongst the many bits of bullshit window dressing that big Mal and his woeful department has trotted out, perhaps the most insulting and useless is one dubbed MyBroadband.
No, it's not my broadband, you twits, it's my slow narrow completely useless band.
First of all if you access the site you're confronted by a set of disclaimers that indicate the information you're about to obtain is completely useless and inclined to be hopelessly skewed and unrelated to reality:
Now none of this is news.
Turnbull says they will be adding a speedtest to the site (I guess he hasn’t heard about Speedtest.net). On a more important note.. they may want to have another shot at the data as the results are wildly inaccurate from reality. Usually some data is better than none, but if that data isn’t accurate, it’s useless. Users have begun posting comparisons from speedtest to the results from the site (which is experiencing load issues) and the variations are dramatic.
Uh huh. Remember how big Mal's party used to mock the Labor party for mounting completely useless and disingenuous websites designed as a bit of faux window dressing.
Well here's the pond's current results, thanks to big Mal's Notbybloodybroadband site which inter alia allows you to ask "what is your broadband experience?" Well here it is:
Of course you'll note that in the corner there is a reference to Ookla, and if you head off to speedtest.net, you will indeed find your results vary wildly (and of course if you own a Mac, you can do all these tests by yourself without all the bullshit attempts to sell you My Broadband or sell you a chance to improve your slow Mac performance - just go to your network utility and ping away).
Never mind, right at the moment, the pond knows the feeling of watching the paint dry, or the experience of that poor bloody Incy Wincy as he struggles against the lies of politicians around the land ...
It will in due course get better and back to some sort of base level, still extremely irritating and incompetent working order, but hey welcome to the fraudulent world of big Mal.
Meanwhile, on this meditative Sunday, all the pond can do is summon up enough strength to shout fuck you to Optus, and while we're at it, fuck you to Malcolm Turnbull and to your fucking fancy, window dressing, useless, reprehensible site, which makes spending ill gained loot on Incy Wincy look like advanced statesmanship ...
And now, as loading these images is slower than watching the paint dry, the pond is off to join Incy Wincy up that spout ...
In my 50 years of following Australian politics, I have to say that this is easily the worst government we have had. It's a big call considering the number of mediocre ministers and PMs we've had in that time, but accurate.
ReplyDeleteThe only consoling feature is that their incompetence goes some way to nullifying their malice and evil intent. The most dismal part is that at least Turnbull and Hunt did know better, but chose to sell out. The rest are mostly ignorant oafs from Abbott right through Pyne, Dutton, Morrison, Hockey, Brandis, Cormann, Joyce, Andrews. Bishop is marginally less offensive but still gleefully wallows in ignorance. McFarlane seems relatively decent but recklessly hitched his bandwagon to fracking. All seem owned by IPA, big mining or News Ltd.
A lot of this was known, despite their deeptions, well before they came to office. But the Press Gallery chose to ignore, preferring the theatre of politics to the substance. Abbott and Rudd, with talent for little else, were strong on that and media stunts.
And our whole nation pays the cost.
Dorothy,
ReplyDeleteAs a "deviant anarchist commie pinko socialist greenie pervert" (you omitted bleeding heart) I can assure you that we are not responsible for the "insidious rain", I lay the blame for that (and traffic lights) on the rabid right...
Dannosaurus
So our beloved PM has sent 200 AFP, SAS, etc to Europe for the Invasion of the Ukraine. Now he's announced that 11 unarmed AFP officers will be going to the site. What a frickin' moron.
ReplyDeleteCommonwealth Games cycling is so bizarre. You've got fisting in the start of the Keiran. Don't tell us about the tandems (where smelling arses seems to be the go), and then there's mountain biking which seems to involve serious self-abuse.
ReplyDeleteTen aired pictures of Edinburgh Castle as part of their Glasgow coverage. Try passing off Melbourne as Sydney.
ReplyDeleteDicks.