FEEDING THE KLEPTOCRACIES OF AFRICA

Hundreds of thousands of Africans are fueling poverty and inhumane conditions primarily due to many African nations being run by politicians and businessmen who rape their populations financially at every chance.

We don't help either, that dollar a day we spend supporting some African baby is driving the unscrupulous to open Orphanages and hire in children from poor families to populate them. 100 Kids $100 a day, that's a small fortune to African child abusers.

Then we have the western world stirring the pot by providing the means by which these people can kill each other, primarily from Russia and China. The Kalishnikov has always been a terrorists favourite weapon.

The world supports the establishment of a country like South Sudan and then sits back and watches two battling Dictators encourage rape, murder and pillage of people with the wrong surname or tribal ties, genocide has become a natural phenomena. How many lives were lost in the fight to establish the country to then see how many of each others lives they can take afterwards.

Every time we spend money in Africa most of it never arrives. If you want to donate then do it directly to the affected people and not so-called charities.

IT WAS THE KRAUTS

There is an explanation for the present Christmas tree and its present use in the Australian Christmas.

In Europe also, about 1,200 years ago, an English missionary named Winfrid (Saint Boniface) was traveling in northern Germany. To the east of Dusseldorf, in Geismar forest, he came across a group of heathens who were preparing to sacrifice Prince Asulf at an oak tree, a symbol of the god Thor.

Winfrid stopped the sacrifice, cut down the oak and in its place a young fir tree appeared. Winfrid said this fir should be revered as the Tree of Life a symbol of Christ. In the later Middle Ages, fir trees were used in church mystery plays to represent the Tree of Life. But other than that, cutting down trees and bringing them inside as decoration was not seen in Christian homes until relatively recently. The first record of the Christmas tree was in 1605 at Strasburg, and in 1840 introduced by Princess Helena of Mecklenburg into France and by the Prince Consort to England. How did this become a custom of modern man?

Once upon a time thee was a bit of biffo going on between two cousins, the King of England and the Kaiser of Germany of Germany. Instead of just duking it out in the lounge room of one of their palaces they decided to let sixty million other people do away with themselves first and called it a Great War. To tell the truth there was nothing great about it at all, but I digress as usual.

Such trees were decorated with one or more apples, representing the forbidden fruit which we are also forbidden from eating. Today we decorate our trees with similar shiny red balls made of thin glass or plastic and many different shapes and sizes as well, and still not allowed to be eaten.

The Christmas tree therefore refers to Bibble metaphors teaching us to not succumb to sin. Nothing Pagan about it at all. To be on the safe side however, the tree should not be brought into the home and decorated before Christmas Eve, otherwise bad luck will befall the home and a lot of money wouldn't be made by profiteers. It is these superstitions are more likely believed if we include here and there old fashioned words like 'befall'. The Christmas Tree must be taken down and removed from the house before the Bells of Midnight on New Years Eve, otherwise you will have to wait until the twelfth night and burn it to chase away any mischievous spirits. Maybe it might be better not to have a tree at all so you won't have to chase those spirits away but you can just drink them with the money you saved.

Christmas is enjoyed by people all over the world regardless of race, gender or religious beliefs and there's no need for you to be upset over the ignorance of others. Jesus was born in the humblest of settings; indeed his whole life showed us the importance of humility. He taught us not to be judgmental. He taught us how to love.

So enjoy Christmas, wherever you are, whoever you are and whatever your beliefs.

THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT

Are we growing into a society that has changed from pointing bones to just pointing fingers?

The parents are to blame?

It was the Police and Justice system?

It all starts with our Social Security system?

Is it alienation, racism, bad jeans or just plain fucking boredom?

All of us have at some stage heard someone blame somebody else. But is it becoming endemic in our society? Is anybody accepting that they are the problem and then setting out to do something about it?

When you sit in Court the first defence is the adoption of the early onset of Alzheimer’s then move through the various social ills until the crime has been mitigated enough for innocence to be found or a reduction in possible sentence has been achieved.

Are these tactics being adopted by the general community? Have we seen so many Courtroom Drama’s on TV that we have begun to use the same tactics in our everyday life, regardless of the outcome, to protect our own backsides?

Be it called pride, ego, arrogance, self-importance or survival of the fittest if we are caught out cheating, stealing or failing to carry out our directed duties every time, and I include myself, will quickly jump to their own defence.

As ‘monkey see monkey do’ the chances that we are passing on these protective skills to our children and young people is extremely high. Children divorcing parents?

How often will I say ‘now be honest I can’t help you unless you are’ and then hear them, in some cases, come out with the most fanciful twaddle I have ever heard. One or two clients will come up with a series of events that would be better used in ‘animated cartoons’.

We know they are not always telling the truth but we should also realise that they are using the same protective skills as we adults have unwittingly taught them. Fortunately for us older and wiser workers we have managed to learn how to screen out the plausible impossible and can arrive at a situation somewhere between what the client wants and what we think they need ‘in their best interest’.

Feedback, that awful word which makes me think of physical regurgitation, between worker and client determines how best these decisions can be met. But we must be very careful to ensure that firstly, the client has the knowledge and ability to carry out the task, secondly that the end result will be a further advancement of the young person towards both personal and financial independence and finally ‘Is it legal?’

‘They don’t understand me’ is a common phrase of mine when trying to explain why very few people know what my job really is. 'That makes two of us, they don't understand me either'. That’s because the welfare sector is so caught up in models that something that doesn’t fit the mould. Then just when we begin to think we know what that model is it mutates into something else. Why? Because that’s where the gap is, how the care services see its role and what the client wants can be poles apart in interpretation.

So is the case with many of the young people who come to me for assistance, some agencies or individual workers have an idea of what they have to achieve and set out to bend and twist young people until they fit their mould. It took me two years in the job before I got the gut feeling of what my role was - do it the way the client sees best without all the contortions.

My job as a stand alone should have really been called WIP ‘The What-if Project’ for that is how I have developed this service to work with other agencies and our clients. Its not a case of what my service wants for them but what they want from my service.

The result of this has been a constant process of evolution to fit the project to the need rather than the other way around. My unique role was deliberately designed to be an enigmatic service so that the most disadvantaged of young people could meet their needs without having to fit to any particular model. My services have to become like its clients, unconditional access, flexible, twisting and turning according to the need that has to be met.

The end result should be that young people having used my service should never be able to declare when things go wrong, that ‘the devil made me do it’…………………….. Anyone for litigation?

DEMOCRACY HAS TO BE THE WORST POLITICAL SYSTEM

 EXCEPT FOR ALL THE OTHERS - Winston Churchill

The best democracy, true government by the people, is the least amount of interference in our lives. Naturally we need to have some laws to protect other people but to protect ourselves we should have nothing but education and common sense.

Every time a new law is made at any level of government some other poor bastard gets it in the neck.
Of course we need to protect ankle biters and coffin chasers that’s a given, but to protect the moron against himself I would prefer we just revert to natural selection, lets allow the gene pool to narrow itself a tad.

We are over-governed with three level of self-serving power, now that’s a gene pool we need to almost eradicate altogether. If they aren’t in a brothel paid for by taxpayers and union fees there drinking $500 Merlot in Paris and staying in a grand a night hotel rooms at our expense.

One of the great episodes in self serving was the Nuclear Pact between Russia and America banning inter-ballistic missiles with  range between 300+ Km and 4000+ Km for this very reason
"That the flight time of the nuclear attack was too short for the LEADERS to seek shelter from the impending armageddon". In other words fuck the people just save my own arse.

What makes our elected representatives immune from prosecution, that cash in super well before we can, retire on ridiculously huge pensions and be allowed to double dip taxpayers money? It can’t be because they have superb knife skills, management expertise or supernatural patriotism. They are not Gods although they would like to be thought of that way. They are men and women who piss and shit the same as everybody else excerpt their shit doesn’t stink.

To top it off we are over-governed by half-hearted bureaucrats doing a half-hearted job whose only agenda is to climb over the person in front, scramble over anyone to get to the top table and garrote the competition as fast, as efficiently and hopefully with the least amount of blood to take that seat on the right hand of God, the Prime Minister.

It’s about time we broadened the taxpayer base by narrowing the public service gene pool as well.
To be fair I’ve known of few government employees who have the interest of the community at heart or should I say ex-government employees who moved into the private sector.

I was a co-worker with a community-minded young person who decided he wanted to be a prison officer and do something positive about our prison system. I met him again three months later and he had already resigned. His story ‘that he tried to do the right thing or be relegated to anal examinations for the rest of his career.'

One last final warning about democracy – it doesn't exist. It's a figment of your imagination.

CELEBRATE THE ORDINARY

It might also be said to be the professionalisation of normal.

When I was applying for a building permit in 2013 I was advised after some considerably problems with Golden Plains Council that there was no way a mere mortal could ever succeed in getting everything approved without professional intervention and that intervention cost money. D.I.Y? Preposterous.
What am I rabbiting on about this month? You may recall in the Christmas Edition of the Linton Astonisher the story of Robert Ingersoll, the free thinker.

“Each man is responsible in making a living for himself and his kin using all his knowledge and skills”

Oh! How true that may have once been. Once upon a time there used to be ‘General Practitioners’ and not just in the medical profession. They were called general as they covered a wide area of expertise and could advise you what you needed to have, or do, or go through to achieve a certain end. Most adults did their own legwork, filled out their own forms to lodge and even did their own tax returns. It was called personal responsibility and it was a learning curve to take you into an independent future.

Somehow, someone, somewhere made the decision that as clerical workers would begin to decline with the advent of computers so new jobs had to be created to fill the void and to maintain low unemployment. In some ways this meant that it would be an advantage for specialists to emerge, high priests of pen and ink.

The nomenclature of government changed to collateral and leverage, potential university students could no longer understand their own educational applications ending up in a situation where teachers colleges are turning our educationalists without full literacy and numeracy skills.

Where will this drive to have someone else do it for you ever end?

IT AIN’T A-TRICKLIN’

Victoria, once the envy of the country, with the exception of those reprobates in NSW, has always been able to hold its own both nationally and internationally. Over the last twenty years however, since the BIG SALE VICTORIAN INFRASTRUCTURE, things have been going slowly downhill.

One could lay blame at many different feet, but the most fault has to be laid at the feet of the economists, the bean counters, the mathematicians who see nothing but numbers, noughts and crosses.

In this issue I would like to explore the processes involved in our Freeway System, not that we have one in Linton, that are critical pieces of infrastructure for the economy and the country as a whole.

In this first part I would to example to the two different freeway models the states use, and, from this one can see why Victoria’s road, despite the fact with almost the same population as NSW, it only has to provide half the road distances of most of the other less populous states.

In NSW AND Victoria a freeway overpass looks like this:-



There is a major problem in Victoria (right) when every kilometre or so three lanes of traffic are forced to merge down to two lanes, thus choking 1/3rd of the cars. This does not happen in NSW (left) where lanes do not merge and thus do not choke up.

In both instances there is a general merging after an overpass but that is to be expected and as cars merge at the same speeds there is no major congestion
.
In some areas however, when traffic builds up, Victoria has installed traffic lights to ON ramps as there is insufficient roadway for any traffic, at any speed, to merge safely. This seems to cancel out any idea that these are expressways. The very term ‘Express’ means no stopping.

Then we have the examples of the appalling tunnel system in Melbourne. In NSW and Victoria Tunnel entrances look like this:-

Of course there are a couple of exceptions to every rule. These are just my observations.

However NSW has not only provided emergency breakdown lanes inside many  tunnels but installed off-ramps which can be used as emergency slip roads if tunnels slow down or get blocked. Victoria, in general, has missed this point. Along with rarely installing slip roads, except kilometres before the tunnel, giving drivers little chance to divert, they rarely have breakdown lanes either. In the event of an accident, OHS insists on two lanes being closed. In some tunnels this blocks it completely, in others it creates road rage as three lanes try to merge down to one which produces bad tempers and road rage.

Many moons ago, Main Roads Departments in all states had a motto ‘What do we need now, double that and then double it again. That should take care of the next 50 years” Now it seems to be “What do we need, what have we got in our budget, how long till the next election”.

It is safe to say that “No government has ever brought anything in on time and on budget” regardless of all the excuses they trot out. Contracts are so complicated and convoluted that not even the people who write them can explain them. When 17 Public Servants all draw their piece of the puzzle in their own way in their own time, without ever getting together. Little wonder that private enterprise runs rings around government services. In development terms the private sector thinks like mature and logical adults while the Public Sector is still dumping in its nappy.

In the second part I would like to write about……………………..hold it a second

‘Hey you……
Yes you with the fucking hat on…….
Would you stop talking while this person tries to read this story.”

Where was I, oh yes, the Trickle Down Effect. It doesn’t just apply to rich bastards trickling their money down, about as true as the Domino Theory, to us poor bastards at the bottom.

No it applies to the tendering process when building our tunnels and freeways as well. It’s called capitalism, but in name only, the truth is capitalism died years ago and we just haven’t noticed.

When I worked for a government department examining prices and tenders I worked hand-in-hand with experienced Clerks of Works who knew what different jobs entailed and supervised those jobs as well. We were taught to operate on the ‘Goldilocks Principle’ for the prospective tenderer.
The quoted costs would be either too high, too low or just right.

If the cost was too high it meant that a hefty profit margin had been added to the bottom line either by inflating wages or overestimating materials. If the cost was too low it was an indication that the tenderer was either inexperienced, desperate for the work, or was shoddy and unreliable. If the quote was just right, which means it fell between the two or three other quotes it was a good indication that the price was about where it should be and put forward to head office as the successful or preferred tenderer for the arrangement of contracts.

The Trickle Down Effect generally applies these days to all major contracts.
Example: Each with profit margin of 10 percent.
Company One: Designs and tenders. $20 million
After profit $18 Million.
A Major Construction firm is engaged - to oversee the whole job.
After profit $ 16.2 Million
Hire company for construction equipment - After profit remainder $14.5 Million
Sub-contractors for various activities - $ 13.1 Million remains
Hire of safety barriers and notices - $11.8 Million left
Recruitment company for labourers - $10.6 Million with the balance left for purchase of materials and to cover all other other costs including worker insurance, wages and salaries, power and water, etc.
This might leave $ 9 million, less than half of the tender price, for the purchase of the actual building materials.

This trickle down effect was shown adequately when the Linton Replica Train Station was built. Over a period of time, with Golden Pains insisting that the project come in on time and on budget had to keep erasing bits and pieces of the plans until only about half of what was supposed to be stands there today. Funded with Commonwealth money there was no way the council was going to contribute anything to the project except for all the publicity that Council was providing us with this magnificent town gift.

It is an asset to the town, but when one takes into account the many stupid errors during the process, like insisting there was no water there when there actually was water available.

Thanks for staying quiet while this was read.

HYPER-TRAVEL

Even though the developers of hyper-travel systems are having teething problems in 2018 doesn't mean that by 2028 those problems would have been solved. Twenty years ago nobody ever though about the Internet as we know it, and the potential for paperless communications, fifteen years ago the fully electric car was all but science fiction and even ten years ago the self-driving car the stuff of comic books. 

Given that our government cannot get any large infrastructure built within twenty years of conception, waste billions in the processes of consultation, development and legal challenges picking up and dropping ideas around the electoral cycle and refusing to admit intelligent people into the public service, nothing gets done without a lot of argument and angst.

As a result a fetish for developing uniquely Australian products rather than just buying fully tested and operational off-the-shelf projects preferably of Australian origin and manufacture has become the norm. The end product is that political interference in major projects have proved disastrous and we begin to look like a third-world banana republic.

Given the tyranny of distance of our nation cross-country transport is an essential part of our economy and is need to drive growth. What we face is the fact that after 150 years no government service has ever been able to keep wheels on trains let alone get them to run on time.  What have the fat cats of the railways services been doing for the last century and a half?

Well, now our government has got the idea that, like Battleships, they want to build a fast train system that is bound to be both out of date and inferior to the possible transport alternative twenty or thirty years in the future. We will have a Fast Train between Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane by 2045. That's the promise they believe they want to make. By the year 2045 even aeroplanes may be a thing of the past so why begin building what exists now instead of looking to a future that holds cheaper and faster transport alternatives.

The readers of H.G Wells, Alex Asimov, Peter Singer, Timothy Leary or even Ray Bradbury would see that after science fiction there sometimes becomes science fact.
The troubled Hyper-loop may be the future, with our topography and distances, but that and other futuristic transport systems need to be explored and considered.

What we need our government to do is to firstly stop the brain-drain to America and China by actually putting the money where their mouth is about developing a innovative and inventive economy, allow the intelligence of our community free reign,  waste not money on unwinnable wars but invest it instead in the CSIRO and other research organisations so that they can attract the best brains for the best projects.

Australia needs desperately to look far into the future, not just tomorrow or the next election. We need Statesmen to build a nation, not a superannuation nest-egg. We need government workers with the freedom and flexibility to innovate and improve their roles, we need imagination not migration, we need faith in ourselves and not continue to be the lick-spittle of international bullies, we have the ability to go it alone without the help of any other nation, we need fire in our bellies and under our arses. We need a hyper-government for a hype- future and not the Flat Earth Society residing in Canberra..

FREE HISTORY LESSONS

Australia has much to thank Captain James Cook for. Even though he was an illegal boat person landing upon the shores of Terra Australis, denying the aboriginal population the right to say who comes to their country and under what circumstances they come, he did introduce the concept that if the land was Terra Nullius, in that there was nothing here, a whole lot of people in chains could arrive bringing with them their family pets, dogs, cats, foxes and rabbits.

His foresight in positioning Australia to take advantage of this Asian Century, he believed that the West, Sydney with its pure Anglo bloodlines, would eventually move towards the East, Kathmandu as the economic center of the world and take it over as well. Historians of the day told us that the Chinese were too backward and that the Japanese had poor eyesight and thus no foresight, our future would lay somewhere between here and London via Seth Efrica. Of course it was proven some time later that what lay between us and the Mother country via Seth Efrica would see us pouring all our treasure into those fractious, tribal states to keep them from committing Genocide on each other and Australia prostituting itself to pay for it.

Of course Captain Cook believed that America at that time, a rambunctious adolescent nation, desperate to rid themselves of the English language and King …….. , would never amount to anything if they didn’t have a Monarchy to lord it over them. This was well before the Trump reign.

His mistake was corrected geographically when the Japanese who couldn’t see straight decided to re-arrange the Eastern World. They failed but drew our attention to the fact that the fertile crescent would be a nightmare and the Far East - China (so called because of the hegemony of the West) would eventually dictate to us what we had tried for decades to dictate to them.

Another huge error was to not harness the environmental power of our original inhabitants, or even the physical power for that matter, as Terra Nullius denied their very existence. The idea that a nation, a culture, a civilisation could exist without landholders, streets, shops and civic centerers was pure fantasy. A parcel of land, regardless of its size, could not call itself a country unless it had a flagpole to show the world that it was civilized.

Of course without vegetarian environmentalists, later to be called the Greens, Cook envisaged Botany Bay to be the place to put Oil Refineries and Chemical Works while further North in Sydney Harbour subsequent wandering seafarers would put a city, with its bridges and tunnels and houses built right down to the waters edge occupied by the twin evils Prime Ministers, Catholic Archbishops and Drug Lords.. The whole idea of reserving the harbour for the rich and powerful, was to keep anything dirty and smelly as far away as possible while the stench of industry was good for the healthy development of the working classes to the West of the city it offended the sensitivities of the political class.

Nothing was thought wrong with the concept of placing several of the countries tanning works, rubbish dumps and heavy industry at Mascot, which, years later would prove to be a nose destroying entry to Sydney if you arrived by flying machine. The rich those days traveled by ’Liner’ via Aden for cheap shit on the way.

It would be half a century or more later when John Batman (Great-uncle of Bruce Wayne) saw the potential of digging holes all around Ballarat but living in the unpolluted atmosphere of Melbourne. His attraction to Gold was only to be superseded by that of Brown Coal an equivalent distance to the East of Melbourne as Ballarat, again to keep as much soot as possible from the clothes lines of the aristocracy. This brown coal, cheap, nasty and highly polluted could be used to power the boilers of the era of steam, heralding the use of railways to get more people into Myers Department store and the products of industry out to the country. This tradition of bringing the countries wealth to Melbourne and shipping its rubbish back out to the country would go on for a long time, but now the rubbish comes from China via Port Melbourne.

The City Planners of Melbourne and Sydney saw no need to design anything further than there eyes could see, a tradition dating back to the time of the Pharoahs, this land would always just be a suburb for Mother England, a place to strip away its wealth, and like shit to the countryside, a place to dump its boat people, crooks and vagabonds housed in rotting hulks on the Thames River.

Who would guess two centuries later that Australia would treat its new boat people the same way shifting them from rotting hulks from Indonesia onto the shores of New Guinea, Port Moresby being seen by the rulers of Australia as Sydney had been to the rulers of Great Britain. A good place to send your rubbish and bring back much plunder.

Anyway, the planners only laid out a city for a few hundred thousand people, not that many Britain's would want to come to this God-forsaken land unless it was to vandalise it. Here it was thought that, like the aboriginals, the crooks would eventually breed themselves out by being absorbed in the advanced civilisation of the West. The explosive growth of Australia after 1945 put paid to the fact that we would remain a British backwater nation, great for cattle, sheep and minerals. Since we had cut the apron strings of Britain they could not hold us back any longer, and, following the war would begin to tie ourselves closer to those rebellious Americans and leave Britain to sink under the weight of it’s faux-supremacy and Margaret Thatcher.

It is little known that William Solander once wandered around the fields of Kingsford-Smith and would foresee thousands of great birds landing there, nor that Joseph of the Banks Family would establish a repository (aka suppository) for the whole nation called the Bank of New South Wales to lock away the riches for safekeeping until they could be eliminated through the London Stock Exchange by computers that just said ‘No”. Nor is it known that Queen Victoria, originally pleased to have a state named after her, was not amused when it turned out to be a gigantic mine site.

Long live Victoria the drug-ridden slut that she was and the state that sells itself to any sleeze in a fancy car.

HOW TO WIN WARS BY LOSING MONEY

Society is constantly in a state of confusion over what is best for its future. From the earliest begining the law has been based initially on the Ten Commandments, and not withstanding the 18 million different interpretations of those laws are still essentially the basis of a functional community.

Part of that function has been to hurt those who are naughty and punish those who cannot afford to break the laws.

But where after 40,000 years has it got us. Even the most severe punishments, the taking of a life by the State, has never deterred miscreants from breaking the law.

Data will show in general that for every $20 Billion a year lost by society through the committal of various crimes it costs society $80 Billion a year in control, detection, justice and punishment. One might ask the question is it worth paying out $4 to save $1? Statistics says it doesn’t but our community has to be protected and there must be a better way.

Switzerland has four more times the guns per person than in the United States yet less than 1% of crime is committed with such a a weapon in that country. It does not compute, so there must be another explanation.

In the Northern European countries the prison system would appear to us to be a joke, group homes, minimal security and only those who are the most violent are locked up. Crimes where there are no victims are generally punished in what Australian would describe as an unpaid holiday. Yet the recidivism rate is only a quarter of what it is in this country.

Where are they going right or where are we going wrong?

Data in the United States would suggest that with their imprisonment rate increasing by around 15% every year that by the end of the next century every American man, woman and child will be locked up in prison. Maybe that’s good - crime will cease to exist except within the controlled environment of a penitentiary. And think of the court costs that will save.

The cave man tore peoples tongues out, the Pharaohs crushed criminals under heavy rocks but people were still naughty. The Romans threw them to the lions, Kings and Queens used hanging as a punishment and then added drawing and quartering to the mix finally sticking their head on a pike and propping it up on the nearest bridge as a final flourish but the prison hulks kept filling up. Vlad tuned people into kebabs, while boiling in oil was popular in the Otterrman Empire. After the reign of Henry VIII the axe became less popular and hanging people in a cage from a gibbet by the roadside until their bones fell through the bars was thought to be a more modern day deterrent. Dogs and pigs were well fed but crime went on un-abated.
The British in the 1770’s even despatched criminals across the seas, exhiled them to the hell of the antipodies hoping to never see or hear of them again so what happened to that experiment? It evolved into people smuggling.

Exiling people and sending them off to Gulags didn’t get Russia anywhere. Their criminals became the ruling class. Concentration camps either in Poland or in the Pacific has not deterred anyone from continuing anti-social activities, Asylum Seekers made out to be those most heinous of criminals can’t even be stopped from tramping all over the garden beds of Europe and we can’t even stop them from tramping all over Christmas Island.

Why are we not looking at what ideas are working and ignore the Queen of Hearts screaming “Off with their heads”. We must devise ways not to violently fuck up other peoples countries so they all want to rush over here in a peaceful invasion. We’ve got to spend those $1’s on young people through proper education and training, support and encouragement to save the $4 they’ll cost us when they get older.

We’ve got to stop subsidizing the rich and close the tax loopholes so that every citizen pays their fair share towards the combating of crime through the human improvement to our community. Make make everyone pay their fair share so that some bastard doesn’t decide to take it from us illegally.
Make the punishment fit the crime for rich, poor, elite and even ruling classes alike but make it a punishment that works.

FIRE SALES DON’T FOLLOW BUSHFIRES

The economists tell us there is an under-lying deficit in our economy because we need investment from abroad to expand our economy. This would be totally un-necessary if Australia invested in Australia. The potential superannuation funds that can be invested plus the huge income from the Carbon Tax probably increases Australia's worth by billions, even trillions. Why are we sending this money out of the country. The Future Fund and all, other Government Investment in addition to a large proportion of the countries savings should be forced to remain in Australia not float off to world Stock Exchanges. We all know that in the long run Land and Bricks are the safest investments, not foreign currencies.

We whinge and whine when China buys our inheritance but we don't seem to hear anything about what Australia is buying overseas. Buy Australian or invest Australian is a joke when it comes to Big Business. Governments exist to pander to Big Business on the spurious argument that they create employment, growth and riches.
We complain about foreign investment but do we ask ourselves why they are investing in Australia? Primarily it is due to Australia’s stability economically, socially and politically. Investors know, that dissimilar to many countries we are unlikely to nationalise anything, confiscate anything or change our constitution on a whim. Foreign investors want certainty and Australia provides that. We have virtually no government debt, unlike Greece and Italy, we have little private debt relative to our average incomes, unlike Ireland and Britain, and unlike America we are not constantly increasing our national debit at an unsustainable rate with their aversion to raise taxes or cutting expenditure and a need for continuous warfare.

Regardless of the political climate foreign investors want certainty and a future and Australia has that in spades. Overseas investors through private equity and superannuation funds want a long-term blue-chip investments. They see us as a potential food bowl for Asia, they see what we can do for a growing China and a wealthier Asia, countries who are no longer living on rice or subsistence farming. The Asian Tiger as we keep referring to it, is not. It is an Asian Elephant ready to consume huge amounts of our agricultural produce.

Australia on the other hand seems to have more of an interest in Shares and Bonds and playing the Stock Exchanges of the world. Maybe this stems from our need to gamble. We risk everything on overseas markets, the world financial crisis proved that, our investors got stung by people playing with our money through roulette wheels of junk deals, don't let me out when it comes to fake money, cyber-cash, Bitcoin etc. If you can't hold it then don't hold it. We don’t seem to be satisfied with pokies gobbling up our money so we are silly enough to let stock markets gobble it up too.

Our CEO’s, like those in other developed western nations are more intent on a quick buck, a healthy bottom line, an undeserved bonus even when losing investors money for them. Asia on the other hand, particularly China, wants long-term investments that may only grow half as much but will earn twice as much over many years. True that it is still only 10% of our arable land, we still have a lot left, but as the world recovers, as Asia grows they will want more and more of it. Asia wants certainty, they want stability and good prospects for growth. They see it in Australia. I don’t think we have to fear the Yellow Peril invading us, ever. We will need to wake up soon to the Yellow Peril taking us over economically.

As Bob Katter put it ‘why do we need foreign companies to fuck us when we can do it so well ourselves’.

JUST A MINUTE

THE ONLY THING WE HAVE TO FEAR IS ………….

Once upon a time our children could walk to school on their own from as young as 8 or 9 years of age. My sister and I walked to school together from the age of seven and never feared anything except stepping on a crack or anyone bar the old lady on a patio in her rocking chair who yelled at us every time we passed. Only when we were older did we understand about the combination of Stroke and Alzheimers, or the real ‘Crack’.
It is apparent that no longer do parents dare let their kids walk to Primary School. Oh! Lordy lordy it’s all about ‘Stranger Danger’.
It is we adults who will tell them not to talk to strangers and then shove them onto the lap of some old bearded guy in a red suit. Now that’s what you call a mixed message. We, as a society, have taught them to fear everyone and everything from red-headed people to peanuts.
All of the information available to us would suggest that ‘Strangers’ are the last thing we should fear. Statistically children are just as safe today as they were a century ago. Even though the relatives of Fagin still exist we need not fear them. These days they are in charge of our Juvenile Institutions and no longer steal hankerchiefs.
No. The real fears we should have for our children today are the adults who responsibility is to protect them.
At home or at school, at a friends house or even at Sunday School children are more likely to be assaulted than travelling between these different places.
As a person who for many years worked in the same environs as kids who not only walked the streets but lived on the streets and traded themselves on the streets I feel I am well versed in saying that except in a few exceptional cases some children who have chosen to leave home are sometimes many times more safe on the street than in the care of any so-called responsible adult.
Children on the streets have in the main been abused at home, or at school, or in the hands of carers, under the control of government agencies or even under lock and key.
It is an ignored fact that a vast majority of people in jail today have at some stage in their life been cared for by the professionals of the State.
Every time someone says that children are not safe on the streets of our villages, towns or cities I am staggered by how naïve they are. Naïvity might be a bit harsh, maybe it’s the fact that we couldn’t give a stuff about it and just believe whatever diatribe the shock-jocks want to feed us. We should teach our kids to fear politicians and commercial television before we fear strangers.
We should really fear the tendency for society to fix everything with medication or allow our children to ever be ‘helped’ by a ‘professional’.
Many Teachers are professionals but do we really respect them as we used to? Fifty years ago we were complaining about the poor standards in schools and the quality of their education – have you read the papers lately?
Teachers have one of the strongest Unions in the country and they know it. Our education system has been hijacked by the Teachers for the Teachers and I don’t think we realize it. Why would Teachers fear being ‘tested’.
There are many Doctors who profess to be professionals but rely more on the pitch of medication salesmen than on their own moral values. I don’t know the exact data but I believe that up to a quarter of children in Primary School are on some form of medication anywhere between Ritalin and  and Remeron. The only stool softener I used as a kid was a cushion.
Some people even fear the Police. The law can be harsh, unkind and uncaring. The law is blind so they say. So is commonsense I say.
Worry about the fears imposed by society before you worry about the fears posed by people.

FAMILY COUNSELLOR IMPRESSED

As he looked around the room and saw about thirty odd adolescents playing, arguing and fighting the Family Counsellor told us that we seem to have some really well-balanced young people using our youth centre. Here we were standing in the middle of a melle in an Inner-Sydney Youth Centre, where the Police often asked to take the kids away on a camp somewhere so that for at least one week-end there would be a pause in the Redfern crime rate.

We honestly though that this North Shore professional Counsellor was well and truly off his rocker, these kids, our kids, ‘normal and well balanced?’

We looked at the kid that stole cars and then posted a notice that if he found it them would happily accept a reward of $50, then at a girl whose mouth when she was in a good mood was just foul-mouthed but if she was in a bad mood would tell a dozen things that your brother or sister could do with a broomstick besides sweep the floor.

The girl who was pregnant with her fourth child at seventeen because as she put it herself “its the only thing I’m fucking good at”

These ‘things’ we worked with were being described as well-balanced?

We let the matter drop until the centre was closed for the night and then asked for a clear explanation for such an astonishing statement. We knew the guy had extraordinary success rates with troubled young people still with their families, as were most of ours, so we were keen to learn how he arrived at such a position.

Once must mention at this stage that this occurred prior to Smartphones, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and all that other technical shit but the situation has changed little for the child even now. The situation might have changed but the facts remain the same. Unless kids face conflict directly in the eye, face-to-face nothing will improve for them.

“Up on the North Shore” he said, “ we have middle to upper class families, living in detached houses, with all the toys a kid would need to amuse themselves and supportive parents. So we have a situation where a child feeling threatened can just go tell Mum and Dad to do something about the bullying or simply retreat to their backyard until the storm blows over and then return to the street and rejoin their previously estranged friends. All is well until conflict arises again and the process starts again.

Here in Redfern and Waterloo you have young people who live in high-rise government housing, a high adolescent crime rate, all of the main phobia's, the majority coming from poor and socially isolated single parents who don’t have a backyard, or even a front yard for that matter, to where a kid can retreat for safety.

The result is that when conflict arises the child has no fallback position, they either face up to the challenge diplomatically or get a fistful of fives to the face.

So, your kids have to learn tact, diplomacy, co-operation and teamwork the hard way. When confronted with a problem they can either talk their way out of it or fight their way out its up to each individual. Rich kids don’t face this same problem and so conflict is something they never learn to handle. What results is an eruption of violence when faced with conflict.

Oddly enough its conflict with helicopter parents and other children, even in the kindergarten sandpit that allows them to develop into balanced young people able to handle the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”

He was of course, in my opinion quite right. It is for this reason that I believe today's young people who don’t communicate directly with each other, who can friend and unfriend each other electronically, the toys in the backyard, that has created the perceived increases in violence among young people. It’s always been there, disrespectful teenagers, wild parties and pub brawls (been there, done that) right back to the middle-ages. However, until now children growing up have not had to come face-on with conflict as often in the past and so, when confronted in the street do not have the skills to negotiate their way out of trouble and violence arises from frustration.

I'm going to go out on a limb here by suggesting that maybe 'some' bullying is a good thing it is part of out development as humans.

CRIME DOES NOT PRAY

When one openly professes to be a Christian they are expected to live a full Christian life, much the same as Jews and Muslims. I’m none of these but like nearly all athiests have a spiritual side too but one that doesn’t include a Diety. We celebrate Christmas, Easter (including a meatless Good Friday) and even Hanukkah. If it’s a celebration for good then we’ll be in it.

What gets me is fake Christians who act insincerely, even the most powerful will do un-Christian things, and other real believers let them get away with it just because they worship hold the same belief.

They worship money not God
They make themselves into idols
Take the Lords name in vain
Don’t observe the Sabbath let alone attend religious services
Certainly have no honour for their Father or Mother or they might not have dragged the family name through the mud
Aid and abet the act of murder or even commit it themselves.
Commit adultery including those divorced three times.
Steal not just money but dignity, respect and honours

Christians are not what they say they are, Christians do not act the way their God intended.
Is there a message here for Evangelicals (those who believe they are the actual children of God) that support an increasing erratic Trump?

If there is a God he is crying.

FAVOURING THE UNDESERVING

There are at least two hundred ex-servicemen wondering the street homeless while charities try to pick up the tab for what Veterans Affairs are failing to provide. At the same time 2,000 asylum seekers are filling hotel and motel rooms around the country at taxpayers expense. Fight for your country and get fuck all, flee your country and we’ll look after you. Little wonder we are seeing more and more advertisements failing to con young people into joining the military, uniforms are about as popular as a busted fly.

Universities are failing to attract the best and brightest except for those who have the money to bribe their way through the course. Our higher education system at every level is becoming totally dependent on foreign students with plenty of cash to the detriment of our intelligent young people who end up selling technology rather than researching it.

On the matter of homelessness, what about the 15,000 kids sleeping on our streets every night, or the abused women escaping domestic violence hunkering down in over-crowded refuges except those with boys over the age of twelve who are excluded from womens refuges.

Why are we not spending money on housing our own citizens so that they can contribute positively to the economy instead of being a drain on our resources through charities and social security.

If you are a young, educated, crime-free, drug-free but underpaid worker you cannot get assistance to be housed but be an ice-addled mother with seven kids by five fathers we bend over backwards to give them all the basic necessities of life. Is there not something wrong with this scenario?

AUSTRALIA TO BE TAKE OVER BY THE TWO PERCENT

Extreme politicians scream it, those who have no interests other than the Voice or X Factor believe it and uneducated morons spread the word. Is there anybody alive who could possibly believe that 2% of people could take control of the other 98%, except for politicians this cannot happen, ever, in Australia.

The figures show it, even non-believers outnumber either Aboriginals who people say want all of their land back or Muslims who all want Sharia Law. It’s the greatest load of bullshit ever showered over Australians and/or its Citizens-to-be.

BUDDHISM 2.46, CHRISTIANITY 61.14, HINDUISM 1.28, ISLAM 2.21, NO RELIGION 22.3
OTHERS AND NOT STATED 10.61% (HILLSIDE CHURCH, MORMONS, GLORIA JEANS, CYTOLOGISTS, UNDERCOVER PSALMISTS) and ABORIGINALS 2.4

And what about our homes and businesses and our food? That, apparently is under threat from Chinese ownership. What you don’t here mentioned is that the UK owns 7.2% of all Australian land, the biggest foreign ownership. Then in descending order:-
USA 2%, Netherlands 0.8%, Singapore 0.5%, China 0.4% (supposedly taking us over) Philippines and Switzerland 0.3% each, for heavens sake even the Island Of Jersey holds 0.25%, and remember this is ALL Australia's land mass including its dependencies, Indonesia 0.2% and that arch enemy, the yellow peril only owns 0.18% and that’s mostly tourist stuff in Queensland.
Yes, we agree China is taking up too much over too much of our resources under the spurious government policy of ‘investment’ but as the late, great, truly demented Christian Blake-Peterson put it “It’s not like they can tow it all back to Japan”.

These figures may also be inaccurate to the point that some Australian companies, traitors to their country, headquarter themselves overseas for the purposes of avoiding tax. Not that we say he does but an example of this might be Singapore-based Brett Blundy Retail Capital (BBRC) so you can’t accurately trust this data in that sense. What we need is the Register of Ownership which our government seems strangely reluctant to bring into existence.

We don’t need foreign investment, that’s just money being thrown out the door, we need our own companies to step up to the plate, especially our financial institutions and start investing in our own country. If these other countries can see a profit investing in us then maybe we should be keeping more of that profit for ourselves.
We don’t need foreign investment, they can all piss off, and Australians who do not show allegiance to this country can piss off too.

BEATING THE FUNK OF REGIONAL AUSTRALIA

In the next era of innovation companies seeking to disrupt entrenched industries like agriculture, energy, transportation or health care will head to those places where those sectors and industries exist in a grab it and run economy like Australia.

In reality we need to encourage and create national innovation and to keep it here.

One way to do this is to throw out the baby and the bathwater and rebuild a more vibrant, creative , innovative education system and not the learn by rote method we have utilized for the last 100 years. Teachers need not do any more than encourage experimentation, the skepticism to query all that we see for ourselves and turn a blind eye to some risks, let loose the power of the child’s brain and supervise the learning chaos that will erupt.

If you look at many of the successful and innovative people around the world you will find an incredible number who never finished school. They had the energy and creativity to leave formal education and use the skills that they already had.

Linton needs desperately to embrace the new world and encourage to our hamlet those families who make their living through the Internet or skillful artisans. Employment will never grow very much here unless we have a vibrant community that invites innovation.

ABC MUST BE PROTECTED AT ALL COSTS

The constant threats to shut up our National Broadcaster on political grounds by cutting funding has to stop. The visual downgrade of a wonderful organisation under successive Liberal governments does them no service. Littke wonder you imagine left-wing bias in the ABC when governments try to manipulate opinions.

No matter what your politics or your opinion of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, its cost, its inefficiencies and its perceived left-wing bias, it is a bastion of balance in the Australian media scene.
Without the ABC we would be opinion the the whine, whinge and scream of the like of Alan Jones or Sam Zamanic or any of those other radical bigots who, despite their supposed popularity have less of the audience share than SBS. Yet, like a minority of villagers in Linton, they have a voice much bigger than their balls.

Without the ABC we would be inundated with nothing but Foxtel sensationalism and the perverted logic of Rupert Murdock which has me quivering in my rolls of fat. The Young Liberals who are pushing for the ABC to be privatised, led by Cory Bernardi (No longer a member of the Liberals) wanst to kill off diversity and encourage our penchant for hate.

A privatised ABC would be captive to the needs and prioritise of advertisers and open to payment for comment which would totally skew news and information to avoid upsetting their source of revenue. If the government threatens the ABC with financial sanctions imagine what Coles and Woolworths could do to it.

What chance for both sides of the story being told. Even though it may have what people believe to be a left wing bias it is the only national broadcaster to give both sides of every story whether you fucking like it or not.

Sometimes it is good not to like something you hear, that's what it means by hearing different arguments, and it is hearing both sides that gives us the choice to divide for ourselves and not be dictated to by one side or the other.
Should we not be free to make our own decisions?
With a privatised ABC we may never get to hear the other side because it may not be a pleasing sound to the ears of the advertiser.

A commercially driven ABC would be at the mercy of 'corporate imperatives' and 'shareholder greed'. A commercial ABC with such a huge broadcasting range both in Australia and Overseas would see an exodus away from local and state-wide radio services to the national network. We might see a more efficient ABC but we would also see a centralising of opinion at a national level at the expense of local and community broadcasters.
The slow dissolution of the newspaper empires is a prime example. News Limited and Gina Reinhart would have the ability to massively sway general opinion and that is something very few of us would want.

When I was involved in establishing Community Radio back in the mid-70's one of the prime directions we were to go was away from traditional radio and toward the promotion of local community services and local news to which small communities like Linton could tune for information directly relative to them.

Diversity in radio and television whether it be vision like Channel 31 or the sound of Voice FM is a priority for any democracy..

A CHEAP HUMPY IS OUR COUNTRIES FUTURE

Everyone knows that the more money being thrown around the more expensive things become. It’s called the law of supply and demand.

Houses built by the government are always at least 50% dearer than those build for the private sector. The moment a contractor realises it’s a government tender he adds on at leat 25% and in some cases is then told he’s come in too low. Try that in the private sector.

Lets say a house and land package in Melbourne is around $750,000 and out our way, with land cheaper we might get away with house and land packages half that. These prices are not going to stay at that, they’ll go up around 10% a year, far higher thasn the C.P.I or the rate of inflation caused by overseas buyers wanting to park there cash in a safe haven, where money is portable and taxes are rortable. In around eight years my land has increased in value by nearly 400%, that’s bloody 25% a year in rough arithmatic, my grass is turning to gold why mine for it.

In the failing War On Terror, mainly because what we are doing to fight it is actually making it worse, like pouring battery acid on your cut finger, and turning back refugees from safety creates even more conflict when we are the ones that made them refugees in the first place.

All that aside we may have spent in and out of country 50 Billion Dollars that we need not have spent if George Junior and Halliburton Industries had not designed and planned the regime change of Saddam Hussein.

What would that money have bought us back home?

200,000 houses complete with essential services?

500 medium sized hospitals or the treatment of maybe 5 million patients?

1000 really pretty Schools?

There may have been no deficit, despite the fact we might not have sold as much steel to make tanks, bullets and bombs but then that would have all gone into high-rise apartment blocks.

With the average wage now nearing $1000 a week it means that an average family living off one income and paying off the house with the other would still have to suck up 30 years of pain and poverty and just have the house paid off in time to move yourself into a retirement village.

But like a bad gambler we have lost the lot - transferred it all into the pockets of overseas arms manufacturers and the makers of tents for at least 30 million displaced families. We have lost out too in employment and the flow-on benefits from the fact we no longer even make bullets or uniforms in Australia. This government was forced into even building our submarines. Now we don’t make cars, we won’t even refine our own petrol, we’ve sold off our gas and want to sell off even more at the expense of our environment. I’m sorry but I don’t believe our countries security should all be down to market forces.

There might be no real war at least into the foreseable future but that does not mean that we should sell our countries security to the stock exchange.

I SPY WITH MY LITTLE ….....

How can anybody keep tabs on our spies? We can’t and not even the Minister knows the full extent of what’s going on.

In a way there is a scintilla of truth in those supposedly fictional adventures of Bourne and Bond as they route and root across our screens from one nail-biting moment to the next plausible impossible action. The C.I.A in the United States is a proven rogue element, working as much against its own government as it is against naughty Dictators and terrorist thugs.

But we have stupidity and ineptitude on our side when it comes to A.S.I.O or our other quasi-spy services. Who in their right mind would hold an exercise including kicking down doors and firing blanks on a whole floor of a hotel without even telliung the management it was going to happen. Several guests shat themselves when faced with armoured Ninja’s screaming hup, hup, and clear, clear bursting into their room without even crying out room service.

What spy agency advertisers in The Australian and other major classified papers that A.S.I.O is looking for new recruits to be spies. It seems they have moved from the clandestine recruitment of suitable university students (in England had already been recruited by the ‘other side’) to become a secret agent instead of a business analyst.

One wanders what skills they are looking for. Creep? Nerd? Stalker?

A.S.I.O is a seriously incompetant organisation who would be better off subscribing to the Peoples Daily or Pravda to get information. Who would outsource their communications to Optus, owned by the Singapore Government, on a promise that they wouldn’t peek.

Recently they requested a further $100 million taxpayer dollars for unspecified purposes.

‘We can’t tell you how we will spend it, that top secret’.

In reality we all know that a senior public servants salary package, of which only half we know about, is tied to the number of staff he has under his command. The more staff the higher his remuneration, and as ouyr Prime Minster is paid more than the President of the United States, our top spy is probably paid more than the Director of the C.I.A or M.I’s.5 and 6 combined. Jesus even Xinling Ping of China is only paid around AU$23,000 a year after discounting the AU$17 million in bribes.

There used to be a saying that ‘what we know won’t hurt us’ and that was true when we had a government we could trust and believe in. But in an era when the electorrate cannot be told what’s going in with the Pan-Pacific Partnership (a euphemism for fuck Australia) how can we ever believe that the likes of Clive Palmer, Kim Jung Un or Vladimir Putin have the our best interest on their mind.

By upgrading the terror alert to ‘probable’ means even more money on security as every other agency goes in for the financial kill as well. When half the terror plots and terrorists are discovered and thwarted by people pushing shopping trolley or serving coffee why should we not just offer huge rewards for finding the culprits and downgrade A.S.I.O to that of a Filing Clerk.

To make it even more difficult for us to trust our fellow citizens along come the white Australia bigots and shock jocks like Alan Jones (with a following of a massive 100,000 people out of 23 million) to beat up stories of murder and mayhem in the Islamic communities. Nothing would please these horrible humans more than a few more Cronulla riots to further divide the country.

I say lets just get rid of A.S.I.O and trust our own instincts after all A.S.I.O, in reality, is just an extension of the C.I.A and beholden to their whims since the downfall of Gough. I might end this confusing tirade by rephrasing those famous words ‘Well might we say God save the people for little will save us from the ravages of public servants’.

EVEN THE BAD GUYS CAN BE HEROES.

Two things that annoy me are people that whinge about the government but just donkey vote or don't vote at all and those who are quite happy to suck the nipples of the state, like unemployment benefits and universal health care, without recognising who provided those benefits in the first place.

I openly admit that Gough Whitlam had a vision for Australia that his Ministers didn't quite share, and I'll even give credit to Malcolm Fraser, even though he did send me off to Asia for a working holiday in Vietnam, for the good work he did following the Menzies era. I admired Gough, Fraser and his ilk, John Gorton, although he was too far left for his right to be comfortable and the Elders Curtin, Chifley and Menzies.

All of these men, whether to the left or the right did some good for the country unlike the syncophants that walk the halls of power these days. Even Malcolm Fraser decried the fact that Statesmen were no longer around but only party hacks and functionaries that managed to leap-frog and back-stab there way to the top. In this group I place Gillard, Rudd and Abbott firmly at the centre ??? well, the jury is still out but I do hear the grinding of knife sharpeners somewhere behind Turnbull..

No amount of shuffling of the portfolios makes one bit of difference except maybe taking out a whinging Poodle and replacing them with a Rottweiller. Back to the whingers. Don't stand near me and cry foul about Whitlam then put your hand out for unemployment benefits, don't carry on about Labor and then happily traipse down to the doctor for free health services, don't cry in your beer when you have to pay some of the cost of your medicines. Nearly all the benefits of a welfare state came through the Labor ranks.

Maybe there are exceptions but it seems to me that the Liberal-National party sends us off to war and Labor brings us back. Do I hear howls of derision? Liberals brought in Conscription and Labor saw it farewelled. Gough brought in Free Education so the potential of every child could be reached only to be terminated by Howard two decades later, after all his supporters had graduated for free of course.

There is good and bad in every political party despite your voting preferences, even the Sex Party has some great policies, so rather than just scream blue murder about the party you don't like think about the party you do or even consider the ideas of single issue groups off in fairyland. We live in a democracy and to make that democracy work we are allowed to vote them in or out every four years. Lets see what the winners do and then vote accordingly the next time.

To change the words of Gough and as a warning to all knee-jerk voters

“May well we say God Save Trump for there is nothing that can save America”