Great news, folks! The budget is back in surplus! Or at least it will be… After the next election.
Now, I know some of you cynical people will be saying, “After the next election? How convenient!” But you’re the sort of people who probably doubted that privatisation would bring electricity prices down. You probably don’t even realise that, thanks to the axing of the carbon “tax”, you have an extra $550 in your pocket.
So, of course, when Scott Morrison announces that we’ll have a surplus thanks to the rise in tax receipts and wages growth, only the most negative naysayers wouldn’t believe him.
Now, poor Scottie and Josh have been a bit upstaged by that nasty Labor Party holding their annual conference at the same time as the government was trying to get favourable headlines by announcing the new governor-general and the MYEFO. How terrible of Bill Shorten to delay the ALP Conference just because there were a number of by-elections being held on the date it was originally scheduled. If they’d just decided not to campaign or hand out how-to-vote cards, they could have easily had the conference on the same day as the mini-election.
Typical of the shifty Shorten… I understand that he’s responsible for almost everything bad that’s happened in the past twenty years apart from the sandpaper incident with the Australian cricket team. Actually, on a side note, I read recently that the Australian cricket captain was the second most important job in Australia after the PM. How absurd. I mean one is responsible for making decisions that affect people’s welfare and have important consequences and has real power and status, while the other is replaced every time there’s a few nervous backbenchers.
Mr Morrison once again demonstrated that he wouldn’t be bowing to the forces of political correctness and putting some woman in the Governor General job just to please those who think that women have a role to play in government. No, an ex-Army man was the best choice. In fact, as the ProMo put it: “I had only one choice, my first choice and he is standing next to me.”
The acting PM went on to tell us that General Hurley had served Australia for almost half a century and that he “joined the Army in 1972, that was not a time when military service was popular – sadly – in our country.”
Now some may suggest that military service wasn’t popular because boys were too young to vote (the voting age was 21) and were being conscripted into the army to fight in a war that many regarded as a civil war, but hey, we all should be sad that military service wasn’t popular.
We were also told about Hurley’s “his weekly boxing workouts with Indigenous kids”. I’m not sure how many indigenous kids he boxes, but whatever it takes to help them assimilate and there’s nothing like boxing them to help indigenous kids find their place in society. The Australian people then heard Mr Morrison say:
“It was General Hurley who first spoke the words; “The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept,” which is a lesson to all of us. It’s a phrase that embodies what Australian leadership is all about.”
Which brings me to Andrew Broad…
Apparently, he’s resigned from his front bench position after an article appeared in New Idea about his Hong Kong escapades.
Ok, I know that Barnaby Joyce is bound to be experiencing a little schadenfreude given how quickly Mr Broad sunk the boots when the former took his role as Member for New England a little too literally. But most of can forgive someone who’s been so public in their support of family values and who opposed marriage equality likening it to two rams mounting each other, when they happen to be caught out doing something that – on face value – doesn’t seem consistent with their aforementioned family values position and seems more in line with their position on rams: Rather confusing and not at all consistent.
After all, who among us hasn’t gone onto the internet with the view to hooking up with younger women and been prepared to travel halfway around the world in order to hook up with some stranger on the basis of a few texts? Ok, personally, I haven’t… Oh, neither have you? Mm, well, as a recent Deputy PM once told us, Canberra can be a pretty lonely place when you’re sober, so who can blame Mr Broad for taking out time from his important overseas trip to go to a food show in order to pull this stranger close and run his “strong hands” down her back, “softly kiss” her neck and “whisper ‘G’day mate”!
From the sound of things, this didn’t exactly go to plan, because, according to Mr Broad, said woman “may have engaged in criminal activity”. It’s unclear whether this or something else stopped him from his whispering. The nature of the criminal activity is unclear… even to the AFP who issued a statement to the effect that so far they’d found nothing. Leaving a restaurant because the person you’re with is a loser isn’t an offence yet, even when that person is “an Aussie lad”, who on his own estimation knows how to ride, fly and f—. (I presume the last word is “fuck” but it was unclear from the report and I didn’t want to presume in case it was something like “farm”… Although, it may have also been “fade” or “fake”)! Perhaps there is some upcoming legislation to make this a criminal offence and to apply it retrospectively.
Whatever, it seems that Mr Broad wasn’t prepared to walk past, because well, “the standard you walk past is the standard you accept.” And the Nationals Leader, Mr Whatisname, also sprang into action and accepted the resignation once it became clear that the story was public. Prior to that, I guess they couldn’t comment because they’d put the matter in the hands of the AFP… Not sure, if these were the “strong hands” of the AFP or whether only Mr Broad has such things.
Although the Nationals leader did say rather confusingly: “Mr Broad has made the right decision this morning when I accepted his resignation.” This makes it sound like Mr McCormack said that he was accepting the resignation and then Mr Broad made the decision… Oh, yes, I get it now.
So, it’s good to see that the Nationals have such high standards of moral behaviour. It doesn’t matter who you are, once it’s made public, you need to resign.
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