Government approves Santos Barossa pipeline and sea dumping

The Australia Institute Media Release   Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek’s Department has approved a…

If The Jackboots Actually Fit …

By Jane Salmon   If The Jackboots Actually Fit … Why Does Labor Keep…

Distinctions Without Difference: The Security Council on Gaza…

The UN Security Council presents one of the great contradictions of power…

How the supermarkets lost their way in Oz

By Callen Sorensen Karklis   Many Australians are heard saying that they’re feeling the…

Purgatorial Torments: Assange and the UK High Court

What is it about British justice that has a certain rankness to…

Why A Punch In The Face May Be…

Now I'm not one who believes in violence as a solution to…

Does God condone genocide?

By Bert Hetebry Stan Grant points out in his book The Queen is…

As Yemen enters tenth year of war, militarisation…

Oxfam Australia Media Release   As Yemen enters its tenth year of war, its…

«
»
Facebook

Glad All Over

“My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go.” (Oscar Wilde).

Tributes flood old and new media, when NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian is pushed under a bus, a bloodless coup, her parting shot at ICAC, timed to beat Friday’s putting out the garbage time slot. She falsely claims she has no choice but to resign when she could have stood aside. A Primadonna to the end, she rues the timing. The ICAC is interrupting her life’s greatest work.

As if. ICAC’s the warning light that comes on when your engine needs attention. Across Australia, Liberal Parties would rather disconnect that light than diagnose the fault in the motor. What could possibly go wrong? SA Liberals lead the way; render their ICAC a hollow joke.

Heard about the Morrison government’s Clayton’s ICAC? SA’s just got one. Its new ICAC has no powers to investigate either corruption, or misconduct and maladministration. But while Liberals hate accountability, probity and transparency, everybody loves Gladys now she’s gone.

Hypocrisy Morrison coughs up his typically evasive, empty encomium “Gladys is a dear friend of mine we’ve known each other a long time. She has displayed heroic qualities, heroic qualities as the premier of NSW,” he lies, of the woman who privately calls him “evil” and a “bully”. He’s got rid of her.

What Gladys hasn’t displayed is that she is free of the endemic corruption that infects the NSW government, poisoning trust; hollowing out a leader’s authority in times of crisis.

“I have worked with her extremely closely and she has always been a vibrant spirit when it comes to our debates, doing the best for the people of NSW.”

Morrison’s patronising tone betrays his paternalism. He’s a notorious, micro-manager and control freak whose approach to debate is to browbeat or evade, seek refuge in sophistry and specious argument.

Or beg off. Disagree with the premise of your question. There’s no sense here either of respect for his “dear friend”. Nor do we expect Morrison to have any friends in politics, apart perhaps from Stuart Robert.

Best for the people of NSW? Berejiklian’s rapport is decidedly with the top end of town. Her business-friendly approach; her lockdown lite or “mock-down”, where Bunnings is still open and masks are voluntary, is her undoing. She departs just before the worst of her pandemic hits.

Aircrews need rules for safe transport in a pandemic. Failing to regulate their travel, Bernard Keane notes, sparks a conflagration.

Unwilling to lose her coveted “gold standard” koala stamp from a PM who is a late recruit to lockdown, she dithers, until forced into restrictions that are too late. Her softly-softly regime feeds catastrophic infection rates in NSW which then infects Victoria, the ACT and New Zealand, and what looks like “a return to recession for Australia.”

Before she jets off to her post as ambassador to Singapore, as whispers have it, Gladys could explain how her government could tell nurses to take a wage freeze during a pandemic. Overworked? Stressed? “I don’t need to know about that” is a cruel cop out.

NSW Train drivers can’t feed their families and pay rising rents and utility bills. Inflation is back on the rise. “I don’t need to know about that” Gladys offers workers a 0.3% increase – an increase that will be instantly devoured by her mentor Morrison’s, you beaut, flat tax “reforms”.

Ed Husic, member for Chifley and shadow Minister for Industry on ABC Insiders tells of two Sydneys in Gladys’ government. He calls her “the premier for the east and north of Sydney.”

“She managed a very ideological, political lockdown that divided the city, saw things happen in the west that would not happen in the north and east, played politics with public health.

I represent nearly 7,000 largely unvaccinated residents in the suburbs of Chifley that caught Covid, and I could not look those people in the eye and say ‘I thank Gladys Berejiklian for her service’ when really the phrase that should be uttered by her and the NSW Liberals is,

‘Sorry we let you down,’ and then they fix it.”

Why, Gladys was best on brand in handling the pandemic,” cries Andrew Probyn, on ABC Insiders. “Probes” seems to have missed the electorate of Chifley and others in the west of Sydney together with the Ruby Princess debacle.

Above all, he skips over how Gladys’ ineffectual, “lockdown lite” helped spread Delta throughout NSW and the rest of Australasia.

“… I think she has been an amazing premier, a person of high integrity, and someone that I would place my trust in completely and I think that’s what the community of NSW has done as well during these last 20 months.”

Brad Hazzard gushes, brushing over the fact that his Premier, who occupied positions of public trust, responsibility and power as State Treasurer and Premier misled the ICAC and kept her secret boyfriend a secret, even after he was brought before the ICAC. Why did she wait to disclose a conflict of interest only when ICAC forced her to?

The “Evil bully”, in her eyes, “a man of mystery who wants to control everything and to cut us out of everything,” as a senior Nat has it, Scott Morrison brings forward his Friday presser to upstage Gladys; do his announcements shtick, a surreal performance art which he’s cultivated to the point where it usurps any true leadership, government, or heeding the will of the people.

“It’s time to give Australians their lives back,” he bleats ‘n repeats, with typical vacuity, although some wags see a Whitlam allusion in the first two words. Implied is the PM’s Covid sales campaign pitch falsely equating lockdowns with the deprivation of life and liberty.

But, alas, there’ll be no political Lady Lazarus act for Gladys who gets a call, Thursday, telling her the ICAC will investigate her for corruption. The ICAC is holding further hearings into Gladys Berejiklian and her relationship with Daryl Maguire – in relation to grant funding and whether she “was liable to allow or encourage the occurrence of corruption.”

The commission would have called Gladys earlier, but according to legal scuttlebutt, a judge involved in Further Operation Keppel was badly injured in a cycling accident and is only just sufficiently recovered to attend court 18 October.

Former NSW supreme court judge, Assistant Commissioner, the Hon Ruth McColl AO SC, will preside. It is expected the inquiry will continue for approximately ten days.

It’s the sort of news that Scotty just can’t top. But just to rub his nose in it, Gladys fans all over NSW are putting blazers out, according to the Daily Mail’s plagiarists and a slightly less racy, Pedestrian TV. Glad, ever the snappy dresser, is famous for her designer label blazer collection.

But it’s not just about appearances, or disappearances for that matter, (who can forget the premier announcing giving up appearing at NSW Covid pressers), Gladys knocks the socks off everybody, with her work ethic and her integrity.

Along with blazers on letter boxes, there’s a Tsunami of good-will. And a feeling that compared with her federal counterparts, Glad’s been harshly dealt with. Hypocrisy is alive and well in the Federal Liberal Party.

“Christian Porter keeps his job, and she doesn’t,” says Ms Stacey Le Tessier of Kirribilli.

Or is it sexism? Speaking to Fergus Hunter in Nine’s The Sydney Morning Herald, Ms Le Tessier, seems to buy the spin that the NSW Premier is in trouble only over bad choice in partners. Ms Berejiklian is being punished for conduct that would be OK if she were a bloke?

Paeans of praise flood the nation’s fawning corporate media, led by Federal Liberal Party, Pravda, The Australian, whose role in our fetishising of wealth, a state religion, up there in the pantheon along with sport, ANZAC and anyone in uniform, includes praising St Gladys of the Cash Nexus and sundry other public acts of Neoliberal, libertarian or corporate hagiography.

The Oz is busy, busy, busy, posting announcements on behalf the business class and the government it owns, a bumper crop of bumper sticker talking points, Yellow Peril 2.0 alerts and sundry other grandiose fantasies, paranoid delusions which the PM and his cabal of former Crosby-Textor, Tory advisers, apparatchiks and PSA hacks concoct for our consumption.

St Gladys leads the nation’s war on Covid – according to its current, pernicious mythologising, until she falls victim to the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). ICAC’s an unholy trinity; a Frankenstein monster, a Star Chamber, a usurper, despite NSW Libs assiduously slashing its funding.

Now the watchdog must sit up and beg government for funds, requests which Berejiklian is keen to deny, last November, when she sees she is in ICAC’s sights. Bad move Glad.

ICAC misses out on an “extra” $7.3 million in funding, the premier announces; adding that spending public funds to win elections is not illegal just “part of the political process.” No. It’s a corruption.

The ICAC has conducted landmark corruption inquiries into public officials, including Arthur Sinodinos in the Liberals’ Australian Water Holdings (AWH) scandal, which corporate media successfully con the public is only about Eddie Obeid and Labor. Yet it must now plead with Berejiklian’s government for enough money to do its job. Without proper funding, it warns, it would be forced to reduce the organisation to its smallest size in its 30-year history.

If ICAC is the villain, Gladys is the victim. How dare they pick on a poor, single woman, a paragon of diligence and multicultural assimilation, whose close friend is fellow Armenian-Australian Joe Hockey? Glad just made the wrong choice of shonky boyfriend.

The absurd fable continues via The Guardian Australia where readers learn that Morrison will never now approve a Federal ICAC. Preposterous? His government’s Clayton’s federal ICAC would see corruption flourish.

“(a) sham [that] falls disastrously short” warn seven retired senior judges of the Coalition’s draft plans. “Extraordinarily misconceived” is Labor’s Mark Dreyfus’ view of the Scott Morrison model which makes a government of the day sole arbiter of which parliamentarians or their staff would face referral to its ICAC.

Those who currently claim that NSW’s ICAC is politicised would create a federal model that could be a purely political weapon?

“ICAC curse claims Covid crusader Gladys.” The Australian wails, committing two howlers in the one headline. Whilst the former Willoughby, Commonwealth Bank branch manager will be missed by her pals in corporate boardrooms, Gladys is under investigation for corruption.

“Typhoid Mary of Australasia pushed under bus before ICAC stench – and NSW Health collapse infect Morrison’s re-election chances,” is the real story, The Australian is trying to hide.

ICAC is investigating the former NSW Premier on four counts of misconduct. Yet even as she makes her teary farewell to a state she claims to have served virtuously, she hits out at the ICAC.

“My resignation as premier could not occur at a worse time, but the timing is completely outside of my control, as the ICAC has chosen to take this action during the most challenging weeks of the most challenging times in the state’s history. That is the ICAC’s prerogative.” she says, tweaking the myth of victimhood to insinuate a political motivation to the ICAC.

Meanwhile at home, wracked by Covid neurosis, a folie a deux between people and government, we worry ourselves sick searching for face-masks, QR codes, hand sanitiser, news of extended family, anti-vaxxers and “medical advice”. Stress over keeping social distance from supermarket space invaders. And paying the rent as well as buying groceries and paying the power bill.

Now, workers forced by lockdown to forgo wages, learn that support will be withdrawn. Treasurer Frydenberg muffs his lines when asked why. There is no rational explanation. Callous indifference or calculated cruelty? This mob reckons life on Jobseeker’s forty dollars a day “incentivates” you to find work.

All the while, each day, on Odin’s eye, the widescreen TV, plays out a theatre of recrimination in which a cub flubs a simple question, while veteran scalp-hunters go for the stiletto, in a ritual badgering of MPs, health experts, premiers and medicos that exhausts everyone.

Is it a version of the medieval witch hunt but with multiple inquisitors and witch-finders general?

Or is it a bad parody of the fourth estate; a tamed estate reduced to quibbling and twitting instead of holding politicians to account? No-one holds Berejiklian or Morrison or their corporate donors to account.

The slow dance marathon of state premiers’ daily pressers may begin briskly with a volley of trivial pursuit or frenzied, hyper-partisan, sniping but it all gives way to a torpor of exhaustion.

When she does throw in the towel, Friday, Gladys Berejiklian takes no questions. It seems- like her resignation itself- a tacit concession of guilt. Despite her protests.

ICAC has it all wrong. “Historic matters” already dealt with. Doesn’t the Independent Commission against Corruption know that she has her hands full handling the Covid crisis?

Shocked by the inexorable spread of a virulent mutant variant in a pandemic which kills 700,000 making it the deadliest in US history, we are all vastly comforted by the notion that an anti-corruption body is, itself, a moral hazard, a malediction or just a bloody, dirty rotten boobytrap.

Or all three. Yet “Covid Crusader Gladys” is gaslighting 101, given that the former NSW premier craves approval above duty. She’s so keen to be the PM’s favourite in appeasing business at any price that her government is criminally lame, late and lax in its efforts to contain Delta.

True, her act could win a Cohen brothers’ award for its noir spin-fest. Her regime injects a dark comedy into its misgovernment by posing as libertarian or laissez-faire, a neoliberal state that looks after its people by doing as little as possible – lest it impinge upon their freedoms or family picnics.

Cue the sound of one invisible hand clapping – doing nothing undoes everything. The Covid Crusader’s government presides over the baffling mystery of who gave permission to the Ruby Princess to dock in Sydney 19 March 2020 and to let all 2650 passengers disembark.

It’s an enigma. At least the ruling elite’s cult de jour, our Hillsong prosperity gospellers, are allowed to come ashore and bring their covid infections with them. No-one is brought to account. What we do is have an inquiry.

Normalising corruption is something the Morrison government has turned into an art form, the embossed wallpaper of modern politics. Instead of penalties, Ministers get promotions. Witness sports rorts’ Bridget McKenzie. Back with not one but five portfolios.

In the end, Gladys makes a bad exit. Whilst she may appear to enjoy a type of celebrity, this is not to be confused with legitimacy.

Indeed, her authority is undermined by the corporate media’s wilful myth-making, in which she is taken captive, made into a type of mascot or trophy wife for appeasing business demands for as little regulation as possible.

Pernicious in the extreme is the idea that the premier’s blinkered, submissive diligence is good government. Or good leadership. But it’s alarmingly widespread and sedulously cultivated by those with vested interests in securing a compliant figurehead to legitimise their shady or unscrupulous dealing.

Gladys’ resignation should come as no surprise. It was inevitable from the moment she disclosed to the ICAC her secret relationship with Daryl Maguire, a grifter who could exploit and use her but only if she were prepared to let him.

Or aid and abet him. Ultimately “I don’t need to know about that” is no protection at all but a facile and fatally compromising collusion.

Rather than rail against the ICAC, Ms Berejiklian should be grateful for it. For without it, who knows how much more trouble she could have got herself into? Not to mention how her manifest capacity for dud judgement would have caused even further suffering of those in her duty of care.

And rather than gut or defund our ICACS, we should ensure they have all the powers and resources they need. For without their vigilance, our Commonwealth would be a congeries of corruption, in which each state would engage in a free for all with the others to the detriment of the many for the benefit of a powerful few.

We’re halfway there already.

On her duel with the wallpaper of corruption, both must go – but it is Gladys who must make the first exit. Let her PM follow her example.

Like what we do at The AIMN?

You’ll like it even more knowing that your donation will help us to keep up the good fight.

Chuck in a few bucks and see just how far it goes!

Donate Button

30 comments

Login here Register here
  1. Paul Smith

    What bothers me about what may be coming is that if ICAC does find against her and back it up with unimpeachable evidence, it’ll be “Well of course they’d go after her – she’s a woman.”

  2. BB

    “Heard about the Morrison government’s Clayton’s ICAC? SA’s just got one. Its new ICAC has no powers to investigate either corruption, or misconduct and maladministration.”
    “Morrison will never now approve a Federal ICAC. Preposterous? His government’s Clayton’s federal ICAC would see corruption flourish.”

    Australia needs a Federal ICAC with real teeth.
    https://www.federalicacnow.org/

  3. Harry Lime

    Love your work,allows me to vicariously imagine myself writing it.”Let her PM follow her example”..How soon O Lord, how soon?

  4. New England Cocky

    Rossleigh, you have nailed it in one excellent objective analysis of corruption.

    It’s time!! ….Again!!

  5. I.Khan Singh

    What a great, absolutely brilliant article by David Tyler!

  6. leefe

    “It’s time to give Australians their lives back,”
    (Except for the ones killed by gross mismanagement of quarantine, vaccines, aged-care and general public health.)

    The issue with disparate treatment of Berejiklian and federal counterparts such as Porter, Taylor, Joyce et al – and yes, it is a major issue – is not that she had to go but that they didn’t. The problem with different standards isn’t solved by being easier on her; we have to insist that the blokes are judged and treated the same way.
    Of course, that isn’t going to happen. Not with Mudrake still calling the tune.

  7. Phil Pryor

    I’ve just lost a long part…so, again, I’m Glad GLAD has GONE. ICAC is starting the cleanup of a continental pile of conservative political filth. A federal body will have so much work, will be under resourced and hobbled, but can clean up so much from this conservative poo pile of putridity. Morrison, a lazy defective, dodger, plotter, schemer and rigger, runs a show that has taken corporate, coercing, rigging, patronising, plotting and paid up support a long way into the future of exclusiveness for donors only. Let the cleansing commence, and may the Prince of Pissuppery from New England be a spotlit splendid splash. The robbers, rorters, rooters, riggers, scrapers, gougers, organisers, connivers, grafters All deserve some illumination, for the long suffering tax paying sucker craves honesty, openness…

  8. HENRY RODRIGUES

    Let’s call it out once and for all, St Gladys of the North shore, mates with that other fat cigar chomping bastard, Hockey, (who now is comfortably esconced in Washington, living the good life), is by no stretch of the imagination, a latter day Joan of Arc, being burned at the stake for her travails in the cause of freedom and democracy. But the developers and the fat cats did love her, not in Dazzling Dazza’s way, but otherwise.

    She is a product of the Liberal party, the party that cannot bring itself to being led by a woman, except if the woman is accomodating to the men, (is, as or more, corrupt than the men), who uses her gender as shield when her personal behaviour gets noticed, and then coyly admits she’s was mistaken in her choices. All this is playing out according to Scummo’s and Murdoch’s game plan for the coming elections. Despite all the outpouring of grief and outrage in that official gazette of bullshit, the Australian. ( I wonder what Julie Bishop thinks of all these comings and goings), Gladys served her party and the business mates well, even better than any man could. As for harping on about her ethnicity, tell that to vast immigrant population of western and S.Western Sydney, and they’ll tell you exactly where St Gladys can go.

  9. Kaye Lee

    As we speak, I see the helicopter dragging the huge Everest flag flying over Sydney. Will we once again offer up the Opera House sails for gambling advertising? What a coincidence that we are opening up just in time for the Spring super-spreader carnival.

    I have a very bad feeling about where NSW may be headed.

  10. Jo.

    RE;

    spending public funds to win elections is not illegal just “part of the political process

    Indeed it is. And it’s been going on … forever – with no end in sight. Further it’s endemic to all sides of politics. Note in particular Barnaby’s contribution in the light of those recent developments.

    “We elect politicians, not bureaucrats.

    So it will be interesting to see how ICAC proceeds. To view the proper democratic processes that they theorise.

    If this is to be a new standard for propriety, then it’s difficult to think of a politician who wouldn’t be compromised. Rudd, Turnbull, Abbott and Morrison for educational funding as well as … Pyne for subs? Joyce, Taylor et al – for their whole careers?

    Where do you draw the line? Will politicians (individually) be able to make promises? What about the ‘party’? Should bureaucracies publish their priority listings? If so – then how far in advance?

    Are politicians just there to legislate? Are Ministers there to just execute bureaucratic recommendations? (One would hope not because so many have no administrative experience).

    Can of worms on the way.

  11. New England Cocky

    Thanks BB for the link. It appears that ICAC has had a double win with the resignation of Porkbarrelo. Nothing is known about his contribution to the investigation into Gladbags.

    The feral Liarbrals will be happy that the many scandals in NSW may have been quieted by these resignations (and the tacit acceptance of guilt by the person resigning) and hope that the electorate will forget this corruption before the feral election for Scummo in 2022. It seems unlikely that there will be a feral election in early December because of the three(3) bye-elections in NSW (Gladbags, Porkbarrelo & Constance).

    It appears likely that there is more background to this story than is known at present.

  12. Jo.

    We get the politicians we deserve. And we get the corruption we demand. How often do the voters applaud when their (excellent) local member is able to jump the queue with that ‘new railway crossing’? Their new bypass road is constructed? Their new assembly hall is delivered? The hospital is commissioned?

    Often, the result of a pork-barrel behind closed doors. Often the result of a factional member putting the weights on his/her factional Minister in Cabinet who is only there because it was factional members who got behind that nomination.

    Suspect the upright citizens don’t want to know about that. Don’t really want to to know about the metaphorical smoke filled rooms (and not parliament) where the real political dramas are played out. Where the political stabbings, the blood-lettings, the double crosses which are all part and parcel of daily life are enacted.

    And it’s in all party rooms.

    Then there’s the legal profession …. Kangaroo Courts everywhere.

  13. David Tyler

    There is a lot more to this story, NEC. Perrottet has an ICAC, icare scandal simmering under very insecure wraps. There’s also a scandal in Gladys’ choice of staffers, one of whom is being investigated for child sex offences committed many years ago when he was 17-18. And the job Gladys is alleged to have given the staffers wife. And another job she allegedly created for the same staffer on another occasion.
    Then there’s the colonisation of NSW Treasury by a cabal of former bankers, woven into the icare scandal.
    Just for starters. The edifice of the NSW government is so rotten, it’s only the graft that keeps it together.

  14. Jack sprat

    Apparently it’s not the worst possible time in the history of NSW for John Barilaro to resign and quit politics, go figure .

  15. DrakeN

    So very traditional, David – that which is now NSW maintaining the standards set in the late 18th Century.

  16. Kaye Lee

    The trouble is, they don’t consider there is anything wrong with giving family, friends and backers contracts without tender or unadvertised jobs or public grants they haven’t applied for. Using public money and power to advance your own political aspirations and hand out rewards is expected.

    They are flabbergasted when the public objects to their expense rorting, telling us how hard politicians work when, in fact, all they do is constantly campaign for re-election. Imagine if they read expert reports instead of talking points or met with constituents rather than photographers.

    I hope something comes from the icare investigation but I’m not holding my breath.

  17. John O'Callaghan

    If we had a truly objective media there would be no need for ICAC and other anti corruption bodies who are doing the work that in the past would have been done by honest non corrupt objective media……. Why dont we just tell it like it really is…. Gladys is a crook.. a thief..a liar..a dishonest utterly corrupt compromised politician along with her government and other governments who are being propped up and protected by the most corrupt criminal evil media organisations on the bloody planet……. Im talking MSM here….. And usually when two organisations such as Corrupt Corporate Media and equally Corrupt Authoritarian Government join forces to subvert common law and decency, and oppress\imprison and rob the tax payers ….that if i remember my history correctly spells Fascism… but i could be wrong of course!……….,

  18. Terence Mills

    I have no idea why John Barilaro chose now to resign !

  19. skip

    definitely pop poo time bahahahahahahahaha! In penal poison greasy slime rulin LIEbral Stralya the pathetic shame of the Nuke Sub Merck Pfizzer poison BioTech concentration land.

  20. BB

    @John O’Callaghan, “…..that if i remember my history correctly spells Fascism… but i could be wrong of course!….”

    You are not wrong, the MSM is ruled by a few narcissistic fascist media barons, namely Murdoch, Costello, etc., etc..
    And the L/NP kowtow to their every command.

    The laws on media ownership need to change, that so much of the media is owned by so few is unacceptable.

    IMO I sadly think too many ignorant people think that because we speak English, no way could we become fascists! 🤦‍♂️
    I would suggest they read the poem by Martin Niemöller: “First they came for the Socialists…”

  21. BB

    @Terence Mills
    “I have no idea why John Barilaro chose now to resign !”

    Why are so many 🐀s leaving?
    Berejiklian: I had no choice… (bullshit, there’s always choice!)
    Constance: time for a fresh start… (correct, It’s Time!)
    Barilaro: public life took its toll… (pathetic dummy spit)
    excuses excuses excuses, blah blah blah, blah blah blah, blah blah blah!
    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-04/berejiklian-barilaro-constance-resignation-end-of-political-era/100511668

    But wait, there’s more…… 👍👍👍

  22. Roswell

    BB, it’s like when a retiring footballer announces that he wants to quit while he’s ahead. To come out on top, so to speak, when everyone knows he’s past his prime and was facing the axe.

  23. Max Gross

    Has ICAC dug the dirt on Bruz as well as Gladys? Seems that way. But why resign? Why not just stand aside? Oh, right, because if the shit hits the fan and they get sacked, they lose all their perks and entitlements. But if they resign first… well, happy days! These fuckers sure know how to play the system.

  24. wam

    A nice read, David, with good advice for gladys’ gratitude for ICAC. I am old enough to remember ‘Our Glad’ which prohibits the use of ‘Glad’ for a sleazy politician whose state decisions seem complicit in every covid outbreak from day 1 in march 2020.
    Any meaningful ICAC is gone with the SA effectively instructing no pollies can be investigated.
    BB is right ‘claytons’ is a perfect description.
    ps
    this was a post from when we all wanted kerry to return:
    “aha what a wish, Helvityni,(died since then and missed-RIP) he was a one off honest journalist whose only blemish was: O’Brien welcomed the replacement of Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbott by the less conservative Malcolm Turnbull in 2015, telling Fairfax that it was “a little burst of sunlight nationally…” and that “There’s a surge of relief because things were so bad”[24] Sadly, the abc without him is so left wing. Recently, its leftie uhlmann has gone to pollute ch9 with his pinko ideas and that leaves the commo probyn in charge. What a lovely spray today, Lord. The look on kerry’s face was priceless when the rabbott thought peak speed needed a ‘tech head’. As I read, I pinched myself at the truth of this man being a rhode’s scholar? Laborites, like me, were guilty of expecting the electorate to see his immorality in diverting to a clinic after a fund raising jaunt to Melb so he could claim expenses. I have one friend in his electorate, an former executive for a large multinational with stints in America, NZ and Aust, recently retired, who admires his local member with praise that would qualify the rabbott for local gov neighbour of the month, but his true love is the IPA. QED. ps it may be irrelevant but institutes who charge $60000 for course like your ‘dressmaking’ gained access, in 2014 to the VETFEE trough. That is 100 bums on seats for a cool $6m.”

  25. John O'Callaghan

    Yes BB good comment… you speak the truth!…

  26. New England Cocky

    @David Tyler: The surprise resignation announcement from Nazional$ leader Giovanni Porkbarrelo has slipped under the weekend radar beneath other more city news. Who has the ability to fill these empty shoes?

    Checking out the declining numbers of party members, branches frequently having less than 20 members, the important consequences will be maintaining access to MDB water in NW NSW to the detriment of downstream agricultural enterprises, gifting political largess to corporate agriculture enterprises in other locations and insuring that country towns continue to beg for long overdue maintenance of decaying public infrastructure.

    The present Deputy Paul ”The” Tool did a great job as Minister for Local Government allowing local councils unmitigated self aggrandisement, but has the political charisma of a long dead mullet. Nazional$ ”Family Values” will insure various female Ministers are considered ” decorations” rather than competent political operators to maintain the misogynist theme and there appears to be little male talent elsewhere.

    So the dark horse may be Adam Marshall, Minister for Agriculture, Member for Northern Tablelands, former impressive Mayor of Gunnedah (for five years) the home town of the Minister for Education, Sarah Mitchell.

    The Northern Tablelands electorate has slowly crept west as agriculture mechanises and townspeople abandon country living for city work opportunities. It now incorporate some of the NW-NSW irrigation interests in the MDB water allocations and the Minister was an important part in organising the 2019-2020 drought access for Costa Guyra Tomato Farm to Armidale city drinking water held in Malpas Dam. So, there will likely be generous financial support for the Nazional$ Party because of his efforts for foreign owned corporate agriculture.

    In a NSW Parliament better known for corruption Marshall may be the best (or worst) of a bad lot.

  27. Lovo

    G’day all…the following link shows last Saturday’s front page of the Barrier Truth… ” The Limericklian of Berejiklian ”

    https://www.trendsmap.com/twitter/tweet/1444153155525099526
    P.S. the barrier truth is the world’s oldest continually running socialist newspaper.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

The maximum upload file size: 2 MB. You can upload: image, audio, video, document, spreadsheet, interactive, text, archive, code, other. Links to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other services inserted in the comment text will be automatically embedded. Drop file here

Return to home page