(Above: hmm, something in the ether? Find more at the Canberra Times here).
The pond almost missed it ...
More than 90 per cent of Kevin Andrews' free relationship vouchers are still in want of a couple and a couch, even though the trial period for the scheme is almost half over.
The Social Services Minister is urging couples to take advantage of a $200 voucher, especially over the Christmas period, which can be an "emotional and traumatic" time...
What? Visiting a church sets people off?
But the take up of the scheme has been sluggish, with just 7785 couples registering as of this week for one of 100,000 vouchers. According to the Australian Institute of Family Studies, there are 4,684,701 cohabiting couples in Australia, meaning about 0.2 per cent of couples have taken advantage of the scheme so far.
To promote the vouchers, Mr Andrews' department recently wrote to all marriage celebrants in the country. Seminars with celebrants and family relationship experts have also been organised to stir up interest, and the vouchers are being promoted at bridal expos, GP surgeries and in hospitals. (And more at Fairfax here).
In short, an ideologically and theologically driven bear with little brain, put in a position of power, and able to indulge in his pet hobbies and his foibles, and trying to flog something no one wants ...
In its own microcosmic way - twenty million smackeroos offered up for a year's trial - it says everything you need to know about why the Abbott government has been a boon ... for satirists and ironists ...
Of course if you want a more detailed description of how the Abbott government has fiddled while Rome burned, frittered and futtocked its way through an abject year, you could just head off to Lenore Taylor at the Graudian, here.
Taylor has been getting increasingly grumpy and acerbic as the year progresses, and in this outing, she ravages the shape of the budget, 'the roads are building' (so we can all park at peak hour on a motorway), the emissions of hot air, the collateral human damage and unmentionable cruelty from which eyes avert, the nonsense of red tape rhetoric, and this:
Backed by a merrily twinkling Christmas tree, a sombre prime minister insisted he was listening and conceded things had been a bit “ragged” of late. But he also said he was sticking to his existing policies, with a few minor tweaks. The tone was conciliatory and just a little bit humble, but the substance was, in essence, the same old slogans.
Yet 2014 has been, above all else, the year the slogans stopped working. It was the year when it became painfully clear actual solutions were much more complicated than election jingles and pamphlets promising a “plan for real action” but containing no such plan.
It was the year when the Coalition’s broken promises – after all those attacks on Julia Gillard’s “lies” – meant the breach of trust between government and the governed became bipartisan. It was the year when the budget not only broke promises, but also introduced new “reforms” never mentioned before the election: big changes to everyday-life policies on health, education and welfare. It took the electorate’s breath away, and then its faith in the government.
It was the year when Gough Whitlam’s death juxtaposed his enduring reforms against the current myopic agenda and unleashed a deep yearning for brave politicians who fight and win a public battle of ideas to enact changes that transform.
Uh huh. So could Ms Taylor find anything positive to say?
The government was more sure-footed on the international stage, particularly in its response to the aviation disasters of Malaysia Airlines flights MH17 and MH370.
Say what? A sure footed in response to MH370?
In an address to a lunch in Shanghai on Friday, Mr Abbott said the search area had been narrowed. "We are confident that we know the position of the black box flight recorder to within some kilometres," he said. (and a lot more at Fairfax here, with forced video).
Yes, the dumb cluck had to be hosed down by anyone in the vicinity, and still, many months later the search goes on, and the media has moved on ...
But the pond isn't here to indulge in a review of a forlorn year. Why at an entry a day, we'd have to do 354 blog posts in a day ...
Truth to tell, an ill wind and all that, and the Abbott government has been great for pond business.
Now that's possibly a bit like Rupert Murdoch saying "congrats" about a couple of brutal murders:
Do these increased security measures have anything to do with the boss's most recent Twitter debacle?
Rupe copped a bollocking on social media after he tickled his iPad and displayed an appalling lack of sensitivity by Tweeting: "AUST gets wake-call with Sydney terror. Only Daily Telegraph caught the bloody outcome at 2.00 am. Congrats".
Sadly, not many others around Sydney and Australia felt there was much to celebrate and let Rupert know in no uncertain terms, much of which is not fit to publish in a "family" column like PS.
But it was all smiles around the dinner table at Lachlan and Sarah Murdoch's rented mansion in Vaucluse on Wednesday night when Rupert invited his editors over for a feed. (Fairfax here, with forced advertisement).
Yes, the reptiles at the elite inner city bunker have had to endure enhanced security measures, but the real joy in that story comes with the mention of Lachlan ...
It was only a little over a month ago that the old chairman was hailing the heir in the reptile rag ...
Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son, has been tipped by his father as the man to lead the global publisher into a “very prosperous and bright future” in the digital age.
Speaking in Los Angeles at the company’s first AGM since the creation of the “new” News Corp last year, Mr Murdoch said Lachlan had proved himself to be a “talented, successful executive in his own right here and in Australia”.
Nearly a decade after walking away from News, Lachlan returned to his father’s side in March as non-executive co-chairman of News Corp and 21st Century Fox.
“I am confident as you get to know him better you will share my and the board’s belief that we could not have found a more passionate and committed chairman,” Mr Murdoch said. (save your dollar and just google away).
Now the pond hasn't got anything against Lachie - the closest the pond ever got was two feet away from him and James Packer at a do to launch yet another folly by the dynamic duo ...
But everything young Lachie has touched has shown signs of the indolent, half-baked silver spoon in mouth at work, from One.Tel through the folly at Fox to the disaster that is the Ten network ...
Young Lachie shows every sign of being the next Warwick Fairfax ... with the same capacity to piss the inheritance against the wall (Fairfax did a catch-up on Warwick in November 2008 here).
Which means it's going to be another great year for the pond ...
Now that sounds a little like Chairman Rupert saying congrats about a couple of murders, but it isn't the pond's business to give two figs about the fate of the tree killers ...
What's routinely astonishing about the paranoid reptiles that now lurk in the fog of war at the heart of the Murdoch print empire is the way the angry old white men feel besieged, surrounded by foes and enemies whom they must smite mightily and righteously ...
It leads to a most peculiar form of schizophrenia, as can be seen in today's editorial.
Here they are, yet again, banging on about the lefties and the ABC and the Fairfaxians and anyone else outside the Holt street gulag:
...As political leaders, security agencies and police focus on improving security, the foolish blame game and Islamist denial rife in the liberal-Left media and twittersphere is irrelevant and counter-productive. Political journalist Mark Kenny wasted space on the front of The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday claiming non-existent divisions between Bill Shorten and Tony Abbott over national security, a sphere in which their bipartisan stance this week was vital. Inside the paper, in a string of non sequiturs, Kenny claimed the Abbott government was “failing’’ on national security, complained stronger counter-terrorism measures had not reduced the terror alert and argued Australia’s air force commitment to fighting Islamic State had worsened the risk.
Yes, the kool aid and the force stays strong in these angry old men. But here's where it gets richly comical ...
Most Australians are sensible and pragmatic enough to recognise that the terrorist menace must be faced head-on, at local, state and international level. Fortunately, their grasp of reality is better than that of Mike Carlton. The disgraced ex-Fairfax columnist showed he needed basic comprehension lessons when he tweeted, erroneously, that our editorial yesterday “blamed the ABC, Fairfax, Bernard Keane and Mark Latham’’ for the siege.
Uh huh. So the kool aid drinkers aren't into the blame game, even though they just spent a par blaming mark Kenny.
So what happens if you revert to the actual text of the editorial Liberal-Left still in denial despite terror in Sydney. Here's what you copped:
Sadly, the deaths of two innocent people have not cleared the moral and political confusion of many of our liberal-left elite. Some online, ABC and Fairfax commentators and lawyers are bending over backwards to indulge in denial about the reality of Islamist terror and the threat it poses not only in Africa, the Middle East and Asia but also on our shores...
The Fairfax Media paper claimed “reprehensible beliefs will not take root in an environment of freedom and tolerance’’, implying it was somehow due to Australians’ intolerance that the siege occurred...
Not to be outdone in woolly thinking, Crikey’s Bernard Keane tweeted: “The fury of the Right that their terror toy has been taken away from them by #illridewithyou is palpable, isn’t it?’’ What rot...
Mark Latham also joined the dots in The Australian Financial Review yesterday. Erroneously, he claimed our engagement in the Middle East was “futile’’ and Tony Abbott had “exaggerated the direct threat to Australia’’. Hardly. The Left cannot play down the role of Islamism in the Sydney siege, on one hand, but argue, on the other, that the siege was a result of Australia bombing Islamic State.
If that's not the blame game, then pass the kool aid please.
It was, in its own way, in its ideological frenzy of abuse, as offensive as the Chairman's 'congrats', and as short on logic, sensitivity and awareness as the tone deaf Chairman himself ...
And so back to today's outburst:
Carlton was evidently unable to grasp the simple point that even illogical members of the Left cannot have it both ways. It is nonsense to argue, as some have tried, that our military role in the Middle East has made us more vulnerable to attacks, then pretend in the next breath that the Sydney siege was not a terror attack by an Islamist waging jihad.
Which is so richly ironic and stupid that the pond can't imagine the breath-taking hubris of the fool that scribbled it ...
Since if the Martin place matter was indeed a terror attack by an Islamist waging jihad, then even the fools in News Corp can't pretend in the next breath that the jihad has nothing to do with Australia's military role in the middle East ...
That's the trouble with stupid binary logic. It might work for computers, but in the hands of a mind addled by kool aid, you end up with Sharri Markson scribbling:
...the indoctrination appeared to be strongest at The University of Sydney where the entire first major lecture focused on News Corp’s power and its impact on journalism, irrespective of the fact it is one of the largest employers of journalists in Australia.
Please, there must be a junior Arshat of the year award for aspirational kool aid drinkers ...
You see, when you're as heavily into the kool aid as Markson and the editorialist, that's what you think everyone else is drinking.
You know, when you see enemies everywhere, and you think that they're the victims of indoctrination, you realise you've stepped out of elite Surry Hills and into the elite bunker...
That's why you'll find this very day the usual suspects out doing the usual dance, which would in any sensible part of the world, turn into a bonfire of the vanities, but instead turns into a bonfire of sparrows wheeling as one, in unison and in cry, through the turbulent air.
Angry old white man:
Adelaide based balding angry white man:
Desiccated coconut and proud prattling Polonius white man:
Hyphenated deliverer of hyperbole ...
You see, it's not just the pond that should throw squillions into the Godwin's Law swear jar ...
But while we're at the Nazi evil, the pond was pleased to read this entire commentariat, lifting their voices, and demanding in unison that young Lachie should tell Prince Alwaleed should take a hike ...
Didn't happen? Well that's how you get the humour and the irony:
..In an awkward moment on Fox News this week, a pundit suggested that a member of the Saudi royal family who has supported the bridge-building work of the imam behind a planned Muslim community center and mosque in Lower Manhattan “funds radical madrasas all over the world.” The awkwardness came from the fact — unmentioned by anyone on the Fox set — that the same Saudi, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, also happens to be the second-largest shareholder in News Corp., the parent company of the Fox News Channel...
...taking the Fox pundits at their word, Jon Stewart suggested on The Daily Show this week that the best way to keep the Saudi prince from making money and then possibly using it to back the mosque project, is to boycott Fox News: This is the proposed ‘terror mosque.’ We know that it’s a ‘terror mosque’ because the money may be coming from a bad guy, who definitely owns part of Fox News. Now, we know that he’s a bad guy because we just heard it on Fox News. And by hearing it on Fox News, watching Fox News, I’m increasing their viewership. And their advertising rates go up. Now, part of that money goes to the bad guy we learned about on Fox because he’s their part owner — Prince Alwaleed bin Talal — allowing him then to make it rain, so to speak, on the ‘terror mosque.’ My point is this: If we want to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque,’ we must, together as a nation, stop watching Fox. (and more comedy at the NYTimes here).
Or together as a nation stop buying Murdoch newspapers full of rabbits rabbiting on about Islamic evil.
Whatever. In the end, these ranting members of the commentariat are as useful as a Kevin Andrews' gift voucher for counselling ...
You see, it's one thing to talk about Nazi evil, and then quite another to do business with a man who has helped fund temples to Wahhabist thinking around the world ...
But now you should be able to pick the real terrorist in this photo:
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