The Brisbane Line was a controversial accusation from Labor’s Eddie Ward that the ruling United Australia Party under “Honest Joe” Lyons and “Pig Iron” Bob Menzies was prepared to surrender the northern part of Australia to the Japanese in WW2. Such accusation was never proven but it is incontrovertible that SmoKo Morrison is prepared to surrender Australia’s well-being to the interests of the voracious mining moguls. SmoKo’s Brisbane Line marks the point of no-return for our environment.

Menzies’ denialism was his insistence in 1938 on the sale of pig iron to the Japanese, despite all of the warnings. Scotty From Marketing‘s denialism has now predictably morphed into denial denialism and fatalist propaganda while mother nature is turning our vandalism back on us just as the Japanese would’ve turned our pig iron back on us as munitions. The spin merchant is in whirling dervish mode but he will heedlessly persist with surrendering our country to the eco-vandals and disaster capitalists while we “quiet Australians” “adapt and become more resilient”. It’s his version of turning Japanese (1).

The Brisbane Line analogy is somewhat ironic given it was voters from Queensland who got Scotty From Marketing across the line, it is Queensland that has already surrendered to the coal warlords and it is Queensland that produces an inordinate number of Tory hard core Luddites, weirdos and mining grifters.

The Tories are not just surrender monkeys they are active collaborators.

Clive Palmer, Queensland’s white-shod version of a yellowed Trump is a dishevelled bag of laundromat lost property. Clive is calling in the Lib’s $60M IOU as he targets the Galilee Basin for tax-payer funded rail links to his planned, subsidised coal mines and the consequent water theft that goes with it while the state is drying out and burning.

Georgie Porgy Christensen, that ten pin-shaped nudie bar consultant and ping-pong ball fieldsman saw his vote at the election actually increase. Apparently his climate denialism is more important to the finger painters in his Queensland electorate than was his regular cashing in of his frequent perver points in the shady Philippine neighbourhoods of cut-price bordellos, strip clubs and back alley knee trembles.

Poider from Security also had his vote increase at the last election. Parochial Queenslanders love nothing more than the prospect of Spud’s dark-uniformed goons tasering southern greenies. A heavily surveilled police state? Tojo didn’t quite make it as far as our pointy-ended state so its citizens now vote for Poider as an acceptable alternative. Poider was last seen publicly when at a Gold Coast Indonesian restaurant ordering take-away nazi goering.

Matt Canavan, climate criminal number 1 who in true Tory fashion is boostering the business interests of a family member via coal mining (2). This squinting, shifty-eyed Tony Abbott mini-me and his dodgy mate Black Angus Taylor can smell tax payer money through a concrete wall. These two despicable arseholes would happily club baby seals if they could hide the profits in the Cayman Islands.

Then of course there’s Pauline Hanson. A Ronald McDonald look-alike but with more credible clown credentials she continues to trigger coulrophobia across the land and drive down the national IQ average. The closest Pauline has come to nature conservation is deep-freezing her John Dory fillets and carving Peter Dutton images into the spuds as customer keepsakes. Pauline wants “this nonsense thrown out the window”. So do I, Pauline, so do I.

Queensland refugee, Barking Barmy Joyce, with his purple majesty tucked back into his dungarees for the moment, is never one to let an opportunity for graft or publicity go unanswered. Mouth aflap, revealing dentistry made from a discarded witchdoctor’s necklace, Barking has been throwing his deity under the environmental bus, accusing his maker of being behind the drought. If you want a do-nothing approach to planetary survival Barking is your man.

Susssan Ley, consonant abuser and Minister for the Environment (who says Tories don’t have a dark sense of humour?) has taken time out from incinerating koalas and destroying their habitats to visit a home for flambéd wildlife as an opportunistic self-promotion. Upon discovering that real koalas were much larger than the souvenir versions on her aroma therapy bracelet she took fright and passed the time poking wombats with a stick.

* * * * *

In the past I have accused the Tories of being lazy as well as incompetent. I will revise that. Their work ethic has resulted not only in the extinction of species but also their ongoing work towards the extinction of affordable health care, progressive taxation, public ownership of resources, adequate funding of public schools, open courts, the right to dissent, an independent public service, transparent government, support for science and the arts, world class comms, TAFE, manufacturing, the right to organise, affordable housing, liveable wages and freedom from religious bigotry.

Winston Churchill said, ‘Truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it and ignorance may deride it, but, in the end, there it is.” The truth of climate change has caught the Tories out with their climate lies, their denialism, their distortions and their corruption. They’re now busily re-writing history, yet they will not change their underlying objectives – unconditional surrender to the coal magnates’ empire of a reddening sun. Australia’s future under the Tories is a treeless, sun-blasted quarry populated by compliant serfs and the charred corpses of whatever’s left of our wildlife.

Notes:

(1) You Boomers may recall the suggestive lyrics of The Vapors 1980 hit Turning Japanese. The underlying inference is more than appropriate for the wankers we have in this farce we call a government.

(2) Canavan’s brother John Canavan is Managing Director of Winfield Energy, a private coal company with a significant interest in Australia’s second largest coal mine (Rolleston) and financier of a export coal terminal (WICET). He’s also a former executive of Peabody Energy.

This article was originally published on The Grumpy Geezer.