WARNING… it appears I’m a raving leftie. Who knew?

Rant alert! I can hold it in no longer!

Back in May 2019 I was working for the AEC doing pre-polling for the Federal Election.
At that time we were on our third Liberal PM, and arguably the worst of the three, although arguing that anybody is worse than Tony Abbott is a stretch. However, from a political point of view, Abbott is better than Morrison because you know what you’re getting... he is open and honest about his revisionist, antiquated, mysoginist and short sighted agenda. It’s almost admirable for a man to be so confidently wrong on everything... while chomping on a raw onion in his speedos! 

Anyway, 6 months of PM Morrison was enough to see that things were only going to get so much worse than they already were. You only need to know 2 things about the man to know who he is:

1. He keeps a statue of a refugee boat on his desk that has the words ‘I STOPPED THESE’ on the side.

2. He came into parliament holding a lump of coal and jeered at ‘lefties’ for being afraid of it. 

Why wouldn’t you want him in charge? A man of reason and intellect, obviously. Humane and caring, got a long term plan for the future of the planet. One who values science and teamwork over quick fixes and leadership cults. 

At the time, I was shocked at the apathy of the voting public... although we have compulsory voting here in Australia, it’s not compulsory to care, and our education system does nothing to educate the populace about why politics matters... again and again I was asked to help people vote for candidates who were clearly working against the best interests of that voter (the number of people who wanted ‘Centrelink fixed’ who were voting for Clive Palmer because his flyer said “WE WILL FIX CENTRELINK” made me want to stab myself in the eye with a fork. I mean, anyone who knows anything about Clive Palmer knows that is so NOT what will happen. Also, how was a minor party planning on getting the sway to do that?) 

So, as we all know, enough of the country believed Morrison’s dopey dad act and voted to re-elect a government that had alread proved itself to be inept, incompetent and a policy vacuum. Not to mention so much rorting and dodgy behaviour that goes completely unremarked. Don’t agree? Let me recap a few of the highlights by individuals STILL WORKING in this current government:

WATER FOR SALE: 

Barnaby Joyce approved an $80million water buy back scheme from properties owned by companies that Angus Taylor (another Liberal MP) was a director of and still had links to. That company made $52million on the deal and nobody knows if any water appeard back in the system.

POISONED GRASSLANDS:

Angus Taylor (AGAIN) and his brother have an interest in 30 hectares of endangered native grasslands that were deliberatly poisoned to clear the land for development.

GREAT BARRIER REEF FOUNDATION:

This small not for profit, with 6 full time staff and links to the Liberal party was given $444 million without a tender process and no guidelines on how the money was to be spent. They were more surprised than the tax payers.

INTERNET CHARGES:

Stuart Robert, currently the Minister for Government Services, who has been before multiple corruption enquiries, had to pay back $37,000 he billed the tax payer for his personal internet bill.

MANILA:

George Christensen spent almost 300 days over 4 years in Manila (at least 70 days in each year) visiting his fiance on his publicly financed salary... he called it ‘working from home’.

HELLO WORLD!

Matthias Cormann booked a $3k holiday but didn’t pay for it... Hello World has been the recipient of over $3billion in federal travel contracts as the LNP made them the sole provider of travel for all federal departments.

REVERSE ROBIN HOOD:

On the day before the 2019 election, the Morrison govt gave $15million to one of it’s largest donors - Wesfarmers. This money was allocated from the Indigenous Advancement Strategy and was given to Wesfarmers to deliver activities that focus on getting Indigenous Australians into work. How this will happen, why Wesfarmers was deemed appropriate recipients or why a multimillion dollar corporate business couldn’t be doing that with it’s own funds is not explained.

FAKING HOW TO VOTE PROCESS:

Peter Dutton’s seat of Dickson distributed fake how to vote cards instructing potential Greens voters to place a second preference vote for Dutton as opposed to the official Greens flyer where he was fifth or sixth. 

In Victoria, in Chisholm and Kooyong where the Liberals were under threat and the Mandarin speaking population is high, the Liberal party installed signs in AEC purple telling people to place a ‘1’ next to the Liberal Party candidate.

CHINESE INFLUENCE:

Nick Zhao said he was offered $1million by the Chinese government to run for the Liberal party and work as a spy for them. He was later found dead in a Melbourne hotel room. The newly elected member for Chisholm, Gladys Liu, won by a narrow margin, (she was also the one putting out the above mentioned purple vote 1 Liberal how to vote cards!) and has very strong links to Zhao and the Chinese government. 

SPECIAL ENVOY:

Barnaby Joyce, after having to lie low during his personal life scandals (where he also used nepotism to get his girlfriend very good jobs) was appointed by Morrison as Special Envoy for Drought. He spent less than three weeks outside his electorate, claimed $675,000 in expenses over nine months and there has never been any publicly available report.

FORGERY:

Back to Angus Taylor... he accused Clover Moore, the Lord Mayor of Sydney, of spending $15.9million on air travel and called her out on the hypocrisy of calling a climate change emergency. Actual spending was $5,934 and Taylor’s office obviously doctored the paperwork... the AFP gave it a brief look and dropped the case for lack of evidence, as they always do when it’s an LNP rort.

SPORTS RORTS:

$100million of tax payer funding was allocated to community sport programs, which is supposedly a free and non-political process overseen by the Minister for Sport, but 66% of the funds allocated before the 2019 election were given to LNP marginal seats and over 40% of them were provided to projects that were ineligible for funding. There are clear email trails between the PMs office and the Minister for Sport’s decisions. The National MP who was the Minister moved to the back bench in the ONLY instance of a minister doing the honorable thing. Her move backwards removed approximately 25% of the women from the frontbench!

Then there was the Female Facitilities and Water Safety Stream program which had a fund of $150million to develop women’s change rooms. $120million of this fund was allocated to the construction of 14 pools in marginally held Coalition seats... no guidelines, no tenders, no application forms. There was at least one case where a rugby club got large investment grants to build women’s amenities: they have NO FEMALE TEAMS but are in a marginal LNP seat.

FOXTEL:
$30million was paid to Murdoch’s Foxtel to ‘promote women’s sport’… no info has ever been released about it and News Corpse has refused to outline how the money was spent, in context of a decline in the broadcasting of women’s sport on Foxtel. No paper trail… money for votes?

They also provided a $300,000 grant to Warren Mundine for him to create a TV show on Sky News. He was a member of the Liberal Party at the time and went on to contest a federal seat at the election. The grant was awarded before the application was submitted and was taken out of the Indigenous Advancement Strategy fund. No paper trail on costs of show has ever been found.

AU PAIRS:

Peter Dutton. Where do you start? He personally authorised visas for several Au Pairs for wealthy pals, while simultaneously torturing and imprisoning thousands of proven refugess in the most cruel and inhumane ways imaginable. Just one example as the latest act of cruelty and outright evil: Currently he is throwing hundreds of seriously unwell refugees (yes, we have determined them to be refugees, in danger of death and persecution in their own countries and they were brought to Australia on medical grounds from offshore detention under legal duress brought to bear by advocates through the courts) onto a new class of FINAL visa that gives them no access to medicare or any government support. They can stay in Australia without any rights, or they can go back to their own country (most of which won’t accept them) or they can find a third country. But not New Zealand, who have offered to take them... if you can think of a reason not to let poor, vulnerable people emigrate to New Zealand for the possibility of a decent life we don’t want to provide, please fill me in. Pure bastardry is all I have. This man is indistinguishable from satan. 

Here are a few more you might have heard about in brief:

ROBODEBT:
thousands of vulnerable people falsely billed for debts... many of these people killed themselves in despair before it became known that the debt letters were wrongly issued. NO public apology or any recompense has been forthcoming to my knowledge.

GLADYS and MAGUIRE say no more. 

DEB FRECKLINGTON (just google her... she can’t move without breaking a law or an ethical code)

HOLIDAYS IN HAWAII:
Morrison tells his office to pretend he’s in the country when he’s lying on a beach in Hawaii.... while the country literally BURNS.

I’M OFF TO THE FOOTY:
Knew about the pandemic in late 2019, did NOTHING to prepare for it, had NO PLANS at all for border control, Cruise ships, Aged Care, Hospital systems... planned to carry on as normal for as long as possible while people were dying. STILL yelling OPEN UP whenever he speaks. 

RUBY PRINCESS

INCOMPETENT OVERPRICED NBN

CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL AT EVERY TURN... THEY ARE LITERALLY KILLING OUR PLANET

COVID SAFE APP:
Tens of millions of taxpayer money spent on developing and marketing an app that has so far done NOTHING that the contact teams can’t do better and faster. Covidiots indeed.

BUSHFIRE RELIEF FUND:
Remember the fanfare with which this was announced. Last I hear about $12 had been outlayed on it and people are still living in tents on burnt out land. ALL MEDIA CONFERENCE, NO DELIVERY.

ARTS RESCUE FUND:
Same same. Used Guy Sebastian to announce a pathetically small support fund for arts organisations, and so far NOT A CENT has been outlayed. FUCK OFF!!!! 

TRADIE RESCUE PACKAGE:
If you want to spend $150,000 upgrading your kitchen, there was some assistance to encourage you to do it... this was to help stimulate the building industry. Which wasn’t really suffering. Which is lucky because so far about 12 people have been wealthy enough to take up the offer.

JOBSEEKER/JOBKEEPER:
Forced to put Jobseeker up at the beginning of the pandemic by saner heads (thank you Labor, Greens, Unions) and invent a way to give people money when they were out of work that didn’t involve direct payments via the tax office (because that’s what they have spent the last decade criticising Labor for doing) they came up with an easily rortable business friendly payment that excluded anyone in industries they don’t support (the arts, higher education) etc. and booted childcare workers off it as soon as they could. They are planning to drop jobseeker back to previous unliveable levels as soon as possible, despite every credible economist agreeing that money in the hands of low income earners gets returned to the economy much faster. Which is good! Every tiny gesture of help has been offered under duress, not been enough and been wound back too early. 

CHARGING OUR KIDS MORE FOR ARTS DEGREES:
After killing the TAFE sector over years of cuts, they are now trying to turn universities into vocational colleges (TAFEs) by charging higher fees for degrees that don’t have a job in the title. You do nursing because you want to be a nurse, not because it’s a cheaper course... and you do arts because you don’t know what else to do... so we’ll probably get fewer people doing arts and the same number doing nursing. So our kids who’ve just done VCE in the shittest year ever now get to pay heaps more for their degrees with little chance of a job at the end of it. Awesome work, dickheads. 

PAYING 10 TIMES THE VALUE OF LAND TO LIBERAL PARTY ASSOCIATES:
This one’s happening RIGHT NOW! A triangle of land around Sydney airport was bought by the Federal LNP for $30million when the land is valued at $3million. That’s OUR money being wasted on a deal with mates… the justification is that when the land is needed, in 80 years, it will be VALUE for money by then. I’m pretty sure this is a) bullshit and b) not how you use taxpayer money. That money could have really helped a few bushfire victims is what I’m thinking.

SHIRE PM:
I’m not sure if I’ve missed it, but I haven’t heard any thanks to Victorians for the sacrifices we’ve made to keep this virus under control and out of the other states. He doesn’t govern for us, he governs for his base. 

AGED CARE:
Yes, the FEDS are responsible for Aged Care but decided early on to leave Covid infected patients in the aged care facilities rather than move them to hospitals to protect the uninfected... they have about two thirds of the deaths in this country on their hands. And NO PLAN for a transient underpaid workforce that work across several sites at the same time. WHAT COULD GO WRONG??? This very week the minister for Aged Care Richard Colbeck, denied any responsibility for what has clearly gone wrong in his portfolio’s response to Covid (not to mention the normal day to day actual running of aged care homes… abuse, neglect and outright criminal underfunding)… no surprise to hear it’s actually all the fault of Dan Andrews’ hotel quarantine failure. The fact that once it was in the aged care sector it ran riot in federally run aged care homes appears to be no fault at all of the Minister responsible. Odd that there wasn’t a single case in state run care homes…

HOTEL QUARANTINE:
Last I heard it was the federal government who decides who comes here and the circumstances under which they come (John Howard’s terrific remark that commenced our national slide down the slippery dip of bad decisions on who we want to be)... so I’d argue that the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT is responsible for coming up with a way to safely quarantine overseas arrivals. Despite having several largely unused and large overseas internment camps at their disposal, they decided that letting the citizenry see the appalling quality of accommodations we have been offering the worlds’ most vulnerable wouldn’t be a good idea after the brief interring of Chinese returnees on Christmas Island and the unfavourable comments on the accoms... so the FEDS had NO PLAN for how to make this happen. Apparently Dan Andrews suggested hotel quarantine and the FEDS leapt at the chance to outsource their responsibility to the states. It’s a pretty good idea overall, but where viruses are concerned, isolation is key, so keeping people from overseas away from the main population on the ISLAND we live on would have been pretty foolproof. Such a shame that we didn’t have a federal government capable of taking charge. And now they get to blame Dan Andrews for every failure in every state. Win win. Maybe we did elect a group of winners!

There is so much more to include, but I’ve run out of steam. My point is this... almost any one of these things would be enough to sink a moderate government, yet NOTHING has stuck to this teflon regime. They are more incompetent and corrupt than any government in our history and yet all we hear is DICTATOR DAN IS AT IT AGAIN. HOTEL QUARANTINE. VICTORIANS ARE REVOLTING. OPEN THE BORDERS. THE ECONOMY!

I’ve had ENOUGH. I want the bad guys to lose for a change and the people (yep, just normal people like you and I, who happened to have the bad luck to be in the top jobs when the shit really hit the fan) like Dan and Brett and Anastacia (and even Gladys tbh) who are listening to the experts, following the advice and trying to do the right thing for the citizenry in their care to be the winners. I don’t know what to do, but what we are doing is so very wrong. Please, if nothing else, ignore the mainstream media and remember this list when you cast your vote federally next time. #Scottyfrommarketing and his useless band of brigands and freeloaders don’t deserve your vote.

End rant. And I don’t even feel better! Sorry if you’ve read this and also feel worse. But REMEMBER it when you vote next time. Vote for decency and kindness, as New Zealand have shown to be possible. We do have some good politicians here, genuinely trying to make the world a better place. Read their policies, watch what they do as well as what they say, and vote accordingly. Maybe we can improve things eventually.

Have you ever seen a more mysoginist, tone deaf, arselicking post. This guy! How FUCKING disrespectful to all the women who have held the post his (implied) nagging wife now holds. Is he hen-pecked? Is that the inference. Or is he just a complete di…

Have you ever seen a more mysoginist, tone deaf, arselicking post. This guy! How FUCKING disrespectful to all the women who have held the post his (implied) nagging wife now holds. Is he hen-pecked? Is that the inference. Or is he just a complete dickhead who should be running a used car business in Engadine rather than dragging an entire country into the swamp of his ineptitude. How ANYBODY could think this guy is a winner is beyond me.

To market, to market ...

Continuing on my creative journey, I am having my first market stall in nearly 20 years this Saturday (at East Ivanhoe Village, 10 to 3, if you are reading this before Saturday December 15!) I have framed up a heap of work, put together lots of smaller unframed works on paper and lots of cards… here’s hoping at least some of it sells! I’m looking forward to getting some feedback on my work though… hopefully I’ll come out of it with a better idea about what I’m doing and whether it is commercially viable or not. Scary, but also liberating to be able to just get out there and try selling my art. Woo hoo!

Also, so great to have had a reason to make lots of art! I’ve been loving just coming up with lots of little paintings, some on christmas themes and some just what I like to paint (Okay, flowers!)… If nothing else, doing the Create course has definitely given me back my art mojo.

And we have lift off!

It’s not often you get to launch something, so I’m proud to announce the launch of my new website on this auspicious occasion! Complete with my first blog entry as an extra special bonus. It’s been about 5 years of saying ‘gee, I really need to update my website’ and having no time to do it, so I’m very grateful to the CREATE course at NCAT for giving me the much-needed shove. It’s taken about 80 hours of my life over the last fornight, and that’s using Squarespace, which makes it all very easy. Collating images and making them look nice and working on text and putting it all together just takes a lot of time… so in retrospect I’m not feeling so bad about taking 5 years to get around to it. Anyway, have a look around, and I hope you like what you see!

#Create18 #NCAT #lifegoals