Shame, Australia – Shame
In the later half of 1970, our family was dispatching our belongings to Australia and selling our old 25-ton Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter Cariad, as she would have had a hard time making it to Oz by sea, let alone surviving in tropical waters, being an unsheathed wooden boat.
Her name meant Sweetheart in Welsh, and she had a history, going back to 1904, which was recorded in A Yachtsman’s Log, by Frank GG Carr.
He was the curator of the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, and we bought the boat from him in 1957, a year before we married, inspired by over-ambitious and, as it turned out, unfulfilled plans to sail her round the world.
Our three children and I arrived in Darwin on 01/01/71, to join their father, who had already started work there some months earlier.
Soon after our arrival, we bought a somewhat smaller boat called Fairgo.
Little were we to know that between then and now, the Australian concept of a Fair Go would become a myth!
The video of Scott Morrison making a woman shake his hand for a photo op, when she and her community had just lost everything in the bush fires, epitomised the “it’s all about me” attitude that underpins his attitude to being Prime Minister.
Well, Mr Morrison – on behalf of a growing number of people, I am here to tell you that it is NOT all about you.
You are incapable of understanding what running a country requires – just as you proved incapable of performing up to scratch, pretty consistently, in your earlier careers.
You are currently running down our economy and failing to provide the urgently needed programs to deal with a list of crises which are all piling up, one after the other.
You claimed it as a miracle when your Party won a slim majority at the last general election.
It was not a miracle.
It was a disaster, and we are all suffering in consequence.
You are not only making a really bad fist of managing the economy, you and your party are politicising institutions like the AAT, wasting money on consultant reports while working to destroy the Public Service, encouraging corruption, damaging the Parliamentary process and wrenching the title of worst Prime Minister ever from Tony Abbott!
I love Darwin, which I regard as probably the most peacefully cosmopolitan city in Australia, if not in the world. But we seem to have a boom or bust economy which is not currently booming!
Now you are bribing, or coercing, the NT Government into starting fracking, when our sunshine records mean that we should be building geothermal energy generators, supplying charging points for electric cars, spaced suitably through the long empty spaces of the Northern Territory, while existing car manufacturing facilities should be coming out of mothballs down south and gearing up to manufacture electric cars – with all the energy being renewable.
Changing weather patterns are meaning that rainfall in the NT is reducing, meaning that we have a falling level in the water table. In consequence, using large amounts of water for fracking is something that will prove immensely damaging by leaving communities with empty bores.
Meanwhile, the gas recovered through fracking will be another source of greenhouse gas emissions somewhere in the world, feeding into an atmosphere shared by the whole world
Your fixation on coal and fossil fuels is a disastrous abomination and your planning ability is – if that is possible – even worse than your marketing skills.
And do you know what your biggest problems are?
You talk so fast that no one else can get a word in, and, if they actually succeed in doing so, you do not listen. You are, without any foundation for your self-belief, over-confident in your ability levels and incapable of recognising and acknowledging the fact when you are wrong.
Throw out your political advisers. Get advice from experts. Your god knows that your skills and interests are far from adequate for the job you have fought for and we are suffering in consequence.
If I have my way, increasingly people will be out on the streets, disrupting traffic and business generally, demanding that you shape up or call it quits.
You make me feel ashamed to be Australian!
Extinction Rebellion is only just warming up!
Calling for recruits now!
I end as always – this is my 2020 New Year Resolution:
“I will do everything in my power to enable Australia to be restored to responsible government.”
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Return to home pageDiolch yn fawr, Cariad 🙂
You are, of course entirely correct.
There is something fundamentally unhinged in all of the members in this Party in Government.
And so much for Gas becoming the gummint’s saviour in the Climate stakes:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-09/audit-questions-confidence-in-csg-regulation/12026136
Cowboys at large in QLD.
…and, to add another counter to this gummint’s lies:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/08/expensive-and-underperforming-energy-audit-finds-gas-power-running-well-below-capacity
And, like you Rosemary: “I will do everything in my power to enable Australia to be restored to responsible government.”
(Which isn’t very much, but might be akin to the “last straw on the camel’s back”.)
Get ready for the next Fake Green Energy scam coming up, Hydrogen.
Yes, it is clean and green, but they intend on using Coal-powered electricity to produce it.
Unhappily for all Australians, you are right. Our PM is, by any measure, a disgrace. He latched on to the tactic that conservatives around the world have discovered and which has proved massively successful. That strategy is counter an opponent who is trying to sell a policy-based agenda by building a personal brand. The frightening part is that Scotty from Marketing created a phony brand and around 50% of voting Australians, most of the rich and powerful, big corporates and all of the mainstream media either promoted or fell for that fiction. It’s unsurprising. Marketers make us buy endless “stuff” we don’t need. Bigger cars than we need (“this car is built for attention” is the most common selling message, but “this car is perfection” is common too); bigger houses (I drove through the area around Mt Barker in South Australia yesterday – appalled by the wall-to-wall housing developments, all promoting themselves as offering “the perfect lifestyle”) and we fall for it hook line and sinker – and governments want us to – it makes them look good, even when they can claim zero credit. That susceptibility to a simple, but hollow and even false message will convince us in large numbers. It works every day and it worked in May 2019. It worked in the US and the UK and a range of other countries where power-crazed despots have marched into power and are wreaking havoc either within their own countries or globally or both.
Luckily, for now at least, Scotty from Marketings false brand was found to be a total fiction fairly quickly and his neurotic behaviours were identified. Tragic as it was that many lost their lives and many, many more lost their homes and livelihoods, it showed just how shallow, petulant, aggressive and immature the PM is when he has to wander “off script”. He can only deal with that kind of situation by resolutely trying to force the situation back to his “script” (e.g., by forcibly shaking the hands of people who have basically given him the “bum’s rush”). Another is lying (e.g., over the invitation of “Morrison you have a problem” Houston to the White House; denying that he used the “Shanghai Sam” epithet repeatedly in reference to Dastyari); or simply denying the question, or getting aggressive (which is usually accompanied by a smirk of self-satisfaction). When put under pressure, the “real him” emerged and ity= is utterly frightening for a range of reasons. One is that he is still the PM. Another is that he ever became PM in the first place, but that is about “us” as much as him. Yet another is that there are still many voters who will vote for a government that he leads and that gives me no assurance that the electorate will reject him and his singularly inept and corrupt government in 2020.
Less a “miracle” than an outrageous smash and grab on the public piggy bank,inevitably assisted by that vicious and repulsive piece of twisted parchment rotting away in his New York penthouse.Not forgetting that paragon of human excrement, Mudguts Palmer,pig that talks,or the happy clapper himself with his unbroken stream of third rate bullshit.Even then ,they just fell over the line, and it’s been a straight shot to the bottom ever since.
With this rancid “government” and it’s woefully inadequate dickhead “leader” starting to bite more and more of the previously comatose citizenry,we must retain some hope for change.
Japan says Australia will use brown coal to make hydrogen. Hence the need for carbon capture and storage which remains commercially unviable unless it’s pushing oil out of the ground.
“The hydrogen vision published by Japan’s ministry of economy, trade and industry is expansive. It starts with brown coal in Australia, which will be gasified to produce low-cost hydrogen, with the carbon pumped back underground. The hydrogen will then be shipped to Japan on vast tankers and distributed to a nationwide network of filling stations. The only problem is that this visionary infrastructure does not yet exist. Toyota, one of the biggest backers of hydrogen, has recently stepped up its investment in battery-powered vehicles.”
Hydrogen and CCS might become viable one day but it sure as heck ain’t gonna happen in the ten years they say we have to urgently reduce emissions.
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Well written. This is an excellent summary of what this government is ruining in the NT let alone Democracy in australia.
They will reap the whirlwind….
Great article, but I would change “the job you have fought for’ to ‘the job you bought with sports and other rorts’. Labor needs to get out the mongrel and hold whatever number of RCs is necessary to expose these abominations for what they are, and hopefully send them into opposition for a long enough time that the existing and upcoming RWNJs (Pasty Paterson, Georgina Downe, Alex Hawke etc) are persona non grata in their own party.
https://www.smh.com.au/education/an-arms-race-for-prestige-the-billion-dollar-private-school-building-boom-20200306-p547ki.html
Some of Sydney’s wealthiest private schools have more than $1 billion worth of building projects in the pipeline, ranging from aquatic centres and sports precincts to science hubs and basement car parks.
Some of the most ambitious projects include a $153 million, multi-decade overhaul of St Ignatius’ College, a 10-year, $115 million expansion project at Trinity Grammar, and $125 million worth of new facilities, including a pool and theatre, at Cranbrook.
Several are still in very early stages of the approval process, such as Sydney Grammar’s application for a $47.8 million, four-storey sports complex at its Rushcutters Bay site and a $55 million plan to build an all-weather sports and wellbeing complex at Kambala.
Through the foundation at Scots College, which is spending $29 million on a library resembling a Scottish castle, donors can sponsor a floor for $1 million, a room for $500,000 or a learning space for $100,000.
The news a week ago shows a blow-out from $4.6 billion to $4.8 billion in special deals exclusive to private schools consisting of:
$200 million to provide schools with flexibility while converting to optimal census data
$3.4 billion for Direct Measure of Income changes and
$1.2 billion for a “Choice and Affordability” fund.
https://news.nswtf.org.au/blog/media-release/2020/03/media-release-morrisons-gifts-private-schools-now-valued-almost-5-billion-public-schools-get-nothing
Well said Rosemary. Yes, this private school rorting is f#cking criminal.
Here is a statistic that surprised me….
According to the United Nations, the fashion industry is responsible for 8 to 10 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
NOW, this seems to me one easy way to help reduce emissions by just reducing shopping. Easier said than done I am sure, as shopping has become an addiction for many.
There are only 3 counties in the world that don’t accept the science of climate change. Australia, America and Brazil. ( How embarrassing is Australia )
Rosemary…my grandfather owned ‘Kindly Light’. Same vintage as ‘Cariad’. Funny old world!