Little Thought for Thursday

Well now this is a lovely piece of snark from Smile – Be Happy, aimed at our illustrious Prime Minister and his minions. All of whom have just decided to gut funding into research, revoke funding for the environmental research and planning, increased the cost of medicare along with raising the age of the retirement pension from 65 to 70.  At the same time Tony Abbott has confirmed Australia’s $4bn purchase of eight new military aircraft, saying that ‘the defense of the nation was a government’s most important priority’.

In fact the prime minister announced on Friday that his government had approved the acquisition of eight P-8A Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft, to be delivered between 2017 and 2021. They will replace the air force’s AP-3C Orions. [The Guardian]  Well obviously a good plan as Australia is always on the verge of invasion and having to defend our coastlines from all sorts of malcontents, well at least in Abbott’s opinion.

Life is nicely ironic at times

His fear in regards to asylum seekers and the level of antagonism he attempts to raise against the idea of them in the community is something I find truly disgusting.  He behaves as if theses asylum seekers are storming our beaches in number to numerous to count and toting the latest in military style weaponry.

The very fact that these new fighter jets are for maritime use strikes me as perhaps just a ‘little’ on the paranoid side of the coin but I am sure there are plenty of people who would understand where he is coming from, just perhaps not in the way he’d expect.

The irony of all this is while on one hand Abbott is trampling all over human rights and simple compassion in the way he deals with asylum seekers, all based around the idea of some sort of foreign threat to jobs and security, he is on the other is doing his best to hand over Australia to a variety of Pacific interests including Japan, Korea and China.

Now I am not underrating the need for an adequate defense force or the cost to the nation to support one.  What I do object to however is being told by this pompous fool that Australia must ‘tighten its belt’ and accept the cuts to health, education, the elderly and a myriad of other areas while at the same time outlaying this kind of money for fighter jets to protect us from WHAT.

Okay I get the whole fighter jets are sexy and these new ones have all the latest specs that could get a gadget girl quite stirred up but weighed against what we are losing in terms of service provision in the community and his plans for the environment I feel like Australia is being screwed over and we didn’t even get dinner first.

Liar, liar, pants on fire!!

What is worse is he is completely unapologetic about the blatant lies he has been caught in over the past few months and I’m not talking tricky wording or implied suggestions. As you can by the campaign billboard Abbott made some very specific promises and has broken every single one of those listed here.

It appears that this governments current economic policy is based on encouraging large-scale mining and trade opportunities with overseas clients and works on the theory that the big money being outlaid by the government to these large companies via tax exemptions, looser regulations and ‘red/green tape’ will filter down eventually into jobs and opportunities for the average person.  This economic theory is called the ‘Trickle Down Effect’ but it is better known as ‘pissing on the poor‘.

We are already seeing cracks in this theory after Abbott’s negotiations with the Chinese where some of the conditions that they would require before signing his ‘Pacific Free Trade Deal’ leave a little to be desired.  It seems that two crucial ones are the right to bring in their own workers and have the legislation passed that would allow them to sue state governments for policies that impede their projects. For example they would have the right to sue Tasmania for banning logging in certain areas and banning of fire-bombing as a method in the areas that are available for logging.

One can live in hope

So what to do?  When I was reading the accounts of the trade negotiations with China and finding them to appear more like a hostile takeover bid in the business world with the aim to strip out or strip mine the assets from the soil and sea, then sell the rest of the country for whatever price is offered once everything is gone I had some fairly choice words to say [which are not really appropriate in this medium].

So moderating it a little I would simply suggest that Mr Abbott should be careful, the whole reap what you sow and karmic debt he’s piling up is going to come due one day and I’m pretty sure you won’t like the price paid.  If he’s not careful he’ll go down in history as the Prime Minister who put Australia up for auction to the highest bidder – don’t think that will earn him the knighthood he’s had his eye on since reinstating the handing out of royal honors in Australia.  

Yes you read that right last month, Abbott stunned the nation — and his administration — by revealing that he had asked Queen Elizabeth II to reintroduce Australian knighthoods and damehoods, honors that have their origin in the Norman feudal rule of Britain in the Middle Ages. The first to receive this award was Australia’s new Governor-general SIR Peter Cosgrove who:

Swore to uphold the values of equity and compassion as British Queen Elizabeth II’s representative in the country.

The list just goes on and on and while it makes entertaining copy and amusing memes it is also destroying much that is of value in this country. While we have remained a member of the Commonwealth Australia left the Empire quite a while ago and had eschewed the English honors replacing them with our own such as the OEM [Order of the Medal of Australia]. Now once again Abbott would undo what took others time and effort to achieve and take us back to an era we left behind decades ago.  His attitude regarding his desire to overturn hard-won World Heritage Listings for Tasmania and the Reef to mention just two is another example of this refusal to acknowledge the world we now live in and the future most want for our country.

When US newspapers who had laughingly compared Abbott to Bush now say that perhaps that is unfair to Bush then I really suggest we all stop and think for a moment.  We are in danger of losing more than face in the international arena. We are, I believe, very much in danger of losing our country to multinational corporations who seem to use Tony Abbott and his compatriots the way you would sock puppets.  If we are to have a future we need to impede his plans and policies, through concerted effort and protest, long enough to get to the next election.

Unfortunately that is two years away and if the past six months are any indication it’s going to be a long, hard two years and there will be times that regardless some things may be lost.  SO