In which the pond dons a green carnation, Bolter style ...

What a dinkum little battler!

Why he can hold his beer as good as any goddam bikie.

And now if the pond may divert to contemplate a local matter, as a proud new elector in the brand new seat of Newtown (bugger off loser Marrickville), the pond would like to congratulate Luke Foley on his first round of professional political lies from his new perch of Opposition leader.

The pond listened with intense admiration to Luke Foley as he denied the bleeding obvious:

Mr Foley who had insisted on a rank-and-file preselection to allow branch members to have their say, denied he was parachuting into the seat. 
"It is not undemocratic for a member who has long had a succession plan in place to sit down with her preferred successor and talk about a transition," he said. (ABC, here).

Transition! It was like a smooth funeral director helping with the last rites.

Of course it was always unlikely for Foley to start with a little truth telling, like "Of course I parachuted into the seat, and we bunged on a new contest to make it look respectable, and okay there was no contest, but golly it looked respectable, and don't you worry about brave Barbara Perry falling on her sword for me, because the brothers will look after her, oh yes they will".

But the follies of NSW Labor aren't the pond's usual side of the street, and if we got started on the useless John Robertson and his thuggish, boofhead ways - he left before Christmas and nobody noticed - we could be here for days, which is why the pond is indebted to correspondents for pointing out how the holidays seem to have sent the Bolter barking mad in a Proustian way.

Yes, over the holiday season, the Bolter has fallen for À la recherche du temps perdu, though he seeks to excuse his fall by claiming that Proust was a bludger, because anyone who scribbles his way through a seven volume work must be a bludger, as opposed to a man who cuts and pastes chunks of text in a blog, who is thereby surely an exemplary hard worker.

Never mind, it seems that at last the Bolter is on board with  fin de siècle decadence. Who knows, he might soon be a louche lolling around Fitzroy wearing a green carnation ...

Why yes, that would work, but there's an important corollary to the Bolter's Proustian embrace, and that's never to give an inch to any artist with divergent, different views of the world.

Because just below his slavish homage to Proust by cutting and pasting a gobbert, there was this:

Yes, Abbott's support of Flanagan still gnaws at the Bolter's vitals.

It's another reason the spurned and bilious Bolter is likely to keep giving Abbott a dose of his bile as the year progresses.

So how does the Bolter deal with the acid eating away his stomach (and possibly his cauliflower laden brain)?

Why quote a couple of pars from the novel, and then link to a review by Michael Hoffman in the LRB here.

Never mind that, as Hoffman himself notes, the book won the Booker prize and has been almost universally adored, and was a perfectly respectable choice, though whether Abbott should have interfered is another matter.

The point is that the Bolter had found his snark, and he then compounded the crime by lifting a couple of passages from the book ... which were embedded in Hoffman's review.

On the evidence to hand, it seems unlikely that the Bolter has actually read Flanagan, and instead stumbled on the one negative review he could find on his holiday break, and immediately treasured it (the pond found the novel for a dollar in an op shop before the Xmas break but that's another story).

Because - and it staggers the pond to say it - the Bolter can't manage any generosity of spirit or magnanimity to those who take a different view of the world, and such is his meanness of spirit, he manages to make even Tony Abbott seem capable of generosity.

And the Bolter manages it all with a cut and paste indolence that reeks of a languid Proust.

Why it seems like blogging is just the lazy art of cutting and pasting bits and pieces from other people, like a humbug trawling through other lives.

Thank the long absent lord the pond would never resort to such childish behaviour ...

What else?

Well the pond should acknowledge the valiant, ongoing work of the reptiles this day.

There is little doubt that the free health care system in place in Australia is now coming under sustained, regular attack.

Yesterday it was Maurice Newman attacking Obama for attempting to fix the worst and most expensive health care system in what passes for the western world, and today its Jeremy Sammut from the CIS offering up Means testing free hospital care will make medicare sustainable (no link, it will only lead to a begging letter from indigent reptiles).

If you've ever turned up to a hospital in the United States without a working credit card with a generous limit, you'll know exactly where Sammut is heading. And where you're heading. Out the door until you can get yourself a credit card or some kind of insurance ...

Of course Sammut dresses it up with all the right lingo - it's funny how "sustainable" is always entirely inappropriate when it comes to the treatment of Gaia but always exactly right when it comes to the treatment of anyone expecting to turn up at a hospital for help with their health.

Anyone wanting to read Sammut can just google the title of his piece, or these concluding remarks:

Is this unrealistic? Medicare as it currently operates is another form of middle-class welfare. A means test in combination with a national hospital subsidy scheme would better target government funding for health, and make the health system more sustainable in the long run by requiring individuals to bear more of the cost of their own health care through private insurance. 
This proposal is more realistic than expecting the private health industry to continue to compete on an unlevel playing field against the ‘‘free’’ Medicare system. The aim of the architects of Medicare was to drive the private health insurance industry out of business. A private hospital subsidy without restrictions on access to ‘‘free’’ public hospitals would promote the same objective.

If you flip that insight, you come to another one.

The aim of the critics of Medicare is to enshrine the private health insurance industry as the core way of dealing with public health in Australia.

Why? Well you only have to look at the way the system works in the United States, and the way various private health industry providers and insurers make out like bandits on the unlevel playing system which routinely punishes the poor and rewards the rich. All in the guise of sustainability and level playing fields ...

And once the poor, linked with middle class welfare, are confined in a government-constructed ghetto, then they can be berated for being on welfare, and have their services and right to care chipped away at, and reduced to the level that faced the poor in the United States, where their right to either pay or die led to only one sustainable option. 'The poor the', or if you like it in the original German, 'Die poor Die' ...

And finally the pond should acknowledge the ongoing work of that valiant 'condoms for the welfare bludgers' man Gary Johns, who brings us back to where we started.

Yes, the man who is routinely trotted out by the reptiles at the Oz as a Labor man - just like some like to trot out Hitler as a socialist - is all gung ho for Campbell Newman.

The Newman government has started paying down Labor’s enormous public debts. It did so boldly by cutting the public sector, and in so doing confining the pain to those persons sacked. The Abbott government has sacked no-one, its voluntary thinning of the ranks of public servants is mild and it has barely started paying down debt by cutting outlays. 
Should the LNP lose, Queensland and Australia should abandon all hope of rational politics and economic reform.

Elect Campbell Newman to save Australia!

But even more marvellous is that line It did so boldly by cutting the public sector, and in so doing confining the pain to those persons sacked. 

It seems that public servants don't have children, wives, parents, relatives, or drop their money in shops, or in any way relate to the community, or end up on welfare, or in a state of depression requiring medical help - provided they've got a credit card - and so when they sit on their bums doing nothing, the pain is strictly their own.

In short, it seems that public servants are sub-human.

Now there's a Labor man for you ...

But where's Tony Abbott when a matter of this gravity is being considered by Queenslanders? The whole future of Australia is at stake!

Oh that's cruel Mr Moir, a bit below the belt (and more Moir here).

What next? A fierce column in the lizard Oz comparing Tony Abbott to Nero? You know, like Moorice comparing lame duck Obama to Nero ...

Perhaps better not to hold the breath while waiting ...

And now, since some insist that people must take sides, the pond will take sides: