AGE OF ENTITLEMENT - PART 1
THE
EMERALD CITY
A few years ago, when the LNP controlled the Australian Federal government, the Treasurer was a fool by the name of Joe Hockey. He was the face behind the LNP claim that the former ALP dominated Federal Government had run-up a huge National Debt. They never provided any supporting evidence or allowed an independent review of these allegations. Instead, they did what they had always planned to do, and inflicted Austerity measures to cut costs. They targeted the most disadvantaged, those who could least afford the cuts, those who could not challenge or stop this policy. In the space of just two years, the LNP managed to exceed the fictional ALP debt, doubling it, and earning Joe a title of worst treasurer. I was awarded by the world’s foremost economic experts. Joe had demonstrated what ‘Epic Fail’ really means.
Joe was doing his best to
become the most hated and reviled politician in the country. His closest
opponent was Scott Morrison, a fellow LNP hypocrite who seemed to enjoy
inflicting misery and torment on ‘illegal refugees’ (many women and children)
incarcerated in Australia’s off-shore detention camps, without due process and
in violation of many Human Rights, for years on end. He fact that Tony Abbott
managed to hold the title spoke volumes of how reviled he was, but it was his
inability to move his attitudes beyond the 1950’s was how he held it. When
Malcom Turnbull stabbed Tony Abbott in the back to claim the position of Prime
Minister without election, Joe Hockey also left, and there was much rejoicing.
Albeit brief.
After concluding his time as Treasurer,
Joe was given the most coveted of ‘jobs for the boys’ and left to be an
Ambassador to the United States. In addition to the six-figure salary this
paid, Joe claimed his political pension, costing the tax payers hundreds of
thousands of dollars more every year. He had previously accused pregnant women
of double dipping and sealing from tax payers if they claimed maternity leave
payments from their employers and the government, something they were legally
entitled to do at the time. He had also, during his time as Treasurer, claimed
tax-payer funded entitlements to travel to and from properties he owned across
Australia and ‘living away from home’ allowances while staying in a house owned
by his wife. But Joe wasn’t done.
This overbearing and arrogant cigar
chomping jackass had the audacity to spend $50,000 dollars to fly a chef over
to the US to cook lamb chops for his mates, and his most recent demand is for
the taxpayers to pay childcare fees for his children. Every other Australian
must pay for this out of their own wage, but not Joe and his snout-in-the-rough
ilk who believe the taxation system is there to support their lavish lifestyles
while they insist the rest of us tighten our belts and, effectively, live on
the poverty line. Sadly, too many LNP bobble-heads and human bollards will justify
what Joe did even as they criticise the ALP for less, and some will claim this
is just an isolated incident and well within the guidelines.
There can be no doubt there are lines
involved, though they be hard to see in the distance we have travelled since
crossing them so long ago. These are not isolated incidents. They are far too
common. They are what can only be seen as evidence of that entrenched culture
of corruption where nepotism and absence of real accountability ensures this
not only continues unabated, but escalates. So-called ‘political
representatives’ set the standard. They are supposed to serve at our pleasure.
But how much authority do the people have over them? When was the last time we
were able to demand their resignations? Just how trustworthy are ‘internal
investigations’? How is that not a conflict of interest? Why can we not see the
evidence from these things? How satisfied are we with the outcomes? Do we have
any faith in the system at all?
As Treasurer, Joe Hockey had demanded
Speaker Bronwyn Bishop answer to “the court of the people” over her decision to
bill taxpayers $5227 for a private helicopter trip to a state Liberal
fundraiser about 50km south of Melbourne. His loyalty to her was quickly
compromised by the fear of voter backlash at Bishop’s arrogance and audacity,
and like many of his ilk, Joe quickly sacrificed the most powerful piece on
their board to save himself. By comparison, that bill was small change to what
he himself billed taxpayers, but probably just a drop in the bucket of what
Bishop legally claimed as entitlements.
At this point, voters
should be asking just how independent the Independent Remuneration Tribunal
that sets these entitlements actually is, and what makes them think these kind
of claims are acceptable at all. If politicians claim every unemployed person
is a burden on society if they claim the full Welfare ‘benefit’ of just $12.5K
a year, then what does that make a politician. If a politician receives $250K a
year, after tax, in wages and ‘entitlements’, they are receiving tax payer
funds equal to what twenty unemployed people on full Welfare ‘benefits’ for the
same period of time.
Now consider this.
The official poverty rate is $18.5K a year. The full Unemployment ‘benefit’ is
barely two-thirds that, and next to impossible to survive on. The idiocy of the
argument that it is not there for the unemployed to survive on but as an
incentive designed to force them to find work is self-serving and used to
generate bigotry toward the unemployed and disadvantaged. Given there is only
enough advertised work for one in twelve unemployed people, the ‘incentive’
becomes a Human Rights violation. The unemployed have no real power to create
jobs, only politicians. And given politicians are so insulated from reality by
their wealth and circumstances, they clearly have no comprehension or right to
make decisions about those things that directly impact in a negative manner
upon the most disadvantaged.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-25/speaker-bronwyn-bishop-ejects-400th-mp-from-parliament/6573926
How did it ever reach
a point where the LNP dominated government was able to cause so much damage and
harm to the Australian economy and society? Well, aside from their overwhelming
majority, they had Bronwyn Bishop in the role of Speaker of the House. She had
the power to eject whoever violated House rules, and was more than willing to
use any excuse to silence criticism of the LNP. 393 of the first 400 she
ejected were members of the opposition, just 7 being from the LNP. Tony Abbott
and his hypocrites claimed she was justified, that the opposition members were
behaving like ratbags.
In reality, they were
doing their jobs. They were elected to represent the people that voted for
them. They were opposing flawed, foolish, and unjust policies and Bills. What
Bishop was doing was unconscionable: she was circumventing democracy. Demanding
the opposition support what they cannot is an act of what can only be
considered fascism, authoritarian dictatorship, by its nature, right-wing
extremism. If it hadn’t been for her delusional arrogance and monumental greed,
who knows how bad things may have become. It was, ultimately, the combination
of this kind of self-centered, bigoted behaviour that undermined the LNP.
The fallout from this
kind of government has had disastrous repercussions, the initial incidents
being drops which triggers ripple that spread. And they are by no means limited
to the LNP. They are also present in other political parties, private
enterprise, the public service, the Unions, churches and other institutions,
the last two being targeted by the LNP in a campaign to silence all opposition
to its extremist ideologies during the Royal Commission into Institutional
Responses to Child Abuse and another into an alleged rampancy of Union
corruption.
The Terms of
Reference for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse
ensured that only accusations of sexual abuse would be considered, and none
involving police and public services. It effectively discredited the Churches
in their efforts to speak for the disadvantaged impacted by the LNP’s policies.
The one into Union corruption was plagued by problems from the start. The LNP
nominated one of their biggest stooges to oversee the operation, and then
delivered pre-determined findings that bore no correlation to the facts uncovered
during the hearings.
The most brazen
aspect of the investigation into Union corruptions was the deliberate efforts
to smear and (apparently) get even with Bill Shorten and Julia Gillard, the ALP
leader and former ALP Prime Minister, for daring to defy Tony Abbott and his
LNP ilk. But they weren’t done. An investigation into the deaths of four people
due to dodgy operators taking advantage of the ALP’s Home Insulation scheme to
stimulate the economy to reduce the damage of a looming recession (which
actually worked) was used to drag Kevin Rudd into the inquest in an effort to
smear and get even with him too. To this very day, there are RWNJs who insist
Kevin Rudd is responsible for those deaths rather than operators who violated
workplace health and safety regulations. The smear campaigns worked, but the
slander had disastrous consequences.
It allowed the LNP to
manipulate and control the most ill-educated, ignorant, bigoted and self-centered
voters in our society. They went to the Federal Election with a new leader and
seventeen seat majority. They won and formed government with by just one seat,
and now struggle to push through more rotten policies and Bills without making
sneaky backdoor deals, an ironic twist given one of the things they are trying
so hard to do is deny equal rights to gay members of our society, many of the
LNP ‘representatives’ citing religious (Christian) laws rather than recognising
they represent the State. Setting a precedent like that becomes problematic if
Islamic representatives gain enough power to impose their religious laws
instead.
But all the while
these parasites deny citizens equality and drag their feet on the Domestic
Violence and Child Abuse epidemic, the entrenched culture of corruption in our
political, police and public services has continued unabated. We see examples
of it on an almost daily basis, and yet these are referred to as isolated
incidents and no real action is taken other than to enact damage control to
sterilise and silence information. Well, this week, Steve Herbert, Minister for
Corrections in the Victorian State Government demonstrated just what kind of
nongs we have supposedly representing us.
This genius misused his taxpayer funded
Limo service to transport his two pet dogs (Ted and Patch) from his city
residence to his rural holiday home. His chauffer would collect the dogs, drive
them the two hours here, drop them off, then return to collect the Minister and
drive him there too. The two hour trip cost the taxpayers $300, just for the
dogs. It is unclear how many times this service was misused in his manner. The
Minister tried to justify what he had done and refused to even apologise for
the misuse until he was forced to do so. Then news broke that he had failed to
declare he had the country home. This was the Minister for Corrections. That
news report sounded like a bad Dr Seuss story. I tried writing it.
This is Ted.
This is Pat(ch).
This is the Limo
In which the two dogs sat.
It took them here.
It took them where?
To a house that wasn’t there.
Riding in a taxpayer funded Limo is quite
the trick,
But possible if your master is a
self-absorbed
And that’s where I got writers block. I
was going to use ‘politician’ but it doesn’t rhyme. Feels like it really needs
to be a ‘p’ word though. ‘Parasite’? ‘Paddymelon’? ‘Pathogen’? No. Never mind.
I’m sure the answer will become obvious.
What is abundantly obvious is that Steve
Herbert was an idiot. It’s that special combination of stupid and knowing
better, a nexus where there is no ignorance but an overabundance of
self-centred behaviour firmly entrenched in that Age of Entitlement. Just like
Bishop and Hockey, Herbert believes he has the right to use taxpayer funds as
if this was his own money. Once again, average citizens have to pay for
childcare and transport costs out of their own pockets – they do not get
reimbursed by tax payer slush funds. Demanding the working and under-class
tighten their belts and lecturing them about being greedy, Welfare dependent
people with an over-developed sense of entitlement is projection, and
dehumanising the disadvantaged to justify unconscionable austerity measures and
behaviour are acts of sociopaths and the psychotic.
Admittedly, a
$300 tax-payer funded Limo ride for a pair of dogs doesn’t seem that bad… until
you think about what unemployed people are forced to try to survive on. The
full ‘Welfare benefit’ is just $255 a week. That’s just over two-thirds of the
official poverty-line. They’d need another $100 a week to reach the
poverty-line. Now the willful stupidity and arrogance of Steve Herbert suddenly makes a lot of folk that might dismiss it
cringe, and the rest are clearly so self-absorbed and psychotic there’s no
point even trying to reason with them – you cannot reason with unreasonable
people.
But a $64.5 million Payrole system that
doesn’t work is a far more
damning issue. That kind of money is what is spent on five-thousand unemployed
people for an entire year. That’s a lot of people. Really, that kind of fug-up
is monumental. No it’s the very definition of epic fail. IBM washed its hands of
the errors despite supplying the system, and Premier Anna Bligh insisted her
deputy Paul Lucas was safe despite him being the guy in charge and damning
report by Auditor-General Glenn Poole on the bungled rollout, which left
thousands of health staffers incorrectly paid and caused them months (even
years) of hardship, had no contingency plans once failures emerged, and the
project team giving the green light despite knowing about its defects and being
warned it had not been properly tested.
Like him or loath him, Campbell Newman was
right to order an investigation into the failed payroll system. In the end, the
original costing of $6 million reportedly sucked up $1.2 billion. That’s a
shitload of money. That’s what would support just over 90,000 unemployed people
for a whole year. Did Campbell have a right to be irked? Did the taxpayers?
Damn right they did. It really doesn’t matter if the rumours he had an ulterior
motive (to discredit and ‘get even’ with Anna Bligh and the ALP) had any truth
in them because he was right to expose systemic failure to find ways to avoid
similar issues in the future.
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