Hard to be jolly, despite being the season to be so. Ideologically pure ALP Left tries to destroy Gillard by forcing her to vote against her election promise on homosexual marriage. Gillard displays yet again the business naivety of the ALP. More mendicants trying to dip into the public purse. Is our multicultural Australian paradise exposed by The Slap?
*Title lifted from the popular TV series.
Mad ALP Left tries to destroy Gillard by forcing her to vote against her election promise on homosexual marriage.
‘When I joined the Labor Party as a boy, the branches were filled with the cream of the working class, when I leave it, it has been replaced by dregs of the middle class.’
Kim Beazley Senior, distinguished MHR for Fremantle from 1945 to 1977, father of the ex-ALP leader Kim Beazley.
Nevermore was the dominance of the ideologically pure inner city dregs in the ALP demonstrated better than in the attempt at the conference to make her vote in Parliament against her election promise. It would have been a media event bigger than breaking her promise not to introduce a carbon tax, which was on her own initiative. And what would have happened if individual sitting ALP representatives decided to ignore the Whip? They would be automatically expelled and sit on the cross benches. Yet another group to placate.
Union leaders also wanted compulsion. These days they are mostly ex-private school lawyers who are awaiting a seat in parliament. They exercise their power without consulting their members.
Marriage is a long established traditional institution, by religion or otherwise, in all civilizations, between a man and a woman. Let us keep it that way. There is nothing stopping homosexuals forming civil unions.
Gillard displays yet again the business naivety of the ALP.
The ALP is always commercially naive. But the nadir was Gillard’s performance at Asia-Pacific Economic Conference on !4 November. She embraced a pledge to cut tariffs to 5% by 2015 on ‘green’ goods. This supposed to
‘open up markets to Australian-made goods such as wind-turbine parts, energy-efficient fuel cells and water-saving shower heads’.
What is so special about these goods that the Chinese will simply not add them to their range and destroy our local industry, as they have done with local solar panel manufacture? A day later after her announcement, Australia’s only manufacturer of solar panels, SilexSolar, suspended manufacture at its Homebush site, citing Chinese imports, the high $A and lack of state and federal government support. In August SilexSolar had stopped making the cells, importing them instead from China.
The ALP is keen to have free trade agreements with China and Japan. China is a centrally controlled economy in which national or private needs will override any agreement in the crunch. Bureaucratic obstacles to our exports would appear. In Japan nationalistic ethos and old boy networks serve much the same purpose.
More mendicants trying to dip into the public purse.
The latest applicant for Government handouts is stay-at-home-families of fly-in-fly-out miners. (SMH 20 Nov 2011; The families left behind). FIFO Families is requesting the same support services as the Defence Force gives to families of personnel to help with loneliness, isolation, communication difficulties and stress, in a submission to federal inquiry into the FIFO workforce.
Never mind that the FIFO miners earn salaries higher than serving personnel; that dangers faced by them are neglible when they are away, and the mining companies are earning prodigious profits, well able to provide support services. The comparison is invidious.
This incredible claim is symptomatic of a sad downward path where everybody wants to get into the public purse. The European debacle arises partly from generous responses to mendicants.
Is our multicultural Australian paradise exposed by The Slap?
The TV series The Slap has been hailed as presenting a contemporary multicultural Australia instead of a homogeneous Anglo-Irish community. In it the wogs and the skips (terms used as in the series) are mostly unpleasant, the wogs overall marginally worse, so there is little doubt that had the book been written by a skip, racist/ xenophobic allegations would have been raised.
None of the main characters are the sort of people one would want to invite to one’s own barbecue (maybe Manolis, the Greek patriarch, as long as he didn’t bring his wife). Most are plain nasty. Is The Slap a reflection of contemporary multicultural Australia? If so, a depressing vista.
Aside from the very nasty Harry, the women are by far the worst characters - manipulative, untrustworthy, treacherous, and irrational. The author of the book, Christos Tsiolkas, is openly homosexual.
In the same period I saw the film The Eye of the Storm, with equally high production values, based on a book by Patrick White, also openly homosexual. Again the main female characters are the most unlikeable, with similar vices. From what I remember of Somerset Maugham’s books, none of his female characters were likeable either. For real nastiness try Jean Genet's The Maids.
Are homosexual writers misogynists? Or do they see women as competitors? Or do they see women more unsentimentally and clearly than heterosexual men do?
Comments: editor@independentaustralian.com.au