Troglodyte City

You've almost got to feel sorry for Kevin Rudd and his happy band of newly minted cabinet ministers still in awe of their big desks, squeaky chairs and shiny titles.

Hardly have they drawn breath and the nitpickers are out in droves; and they're making fun of the fact that Peter Garret has the job title but Swann has all the responsibility for the Environment and the general bottling on the green agenda, but the cracks are already showing in other areas and any hopes Kev might have held for a honeymoon of any length are fading fast.
And this is all Kev's fault.

Johnny might not have had any meaningful insight into the reasons the ingrates turfed him out on his arse, but equally it seems Kev doesn't much seem to understand why he know has the keys to the Kingdom.

Empty gestures of the protocol signing / troop withdrawal pledge variety are no substitute for meaningful change and an embittered electorate will not be long in smelling the rat with its feet under the PMs desk.

The electorate not only wanted something else, they wanted something different and inherently better.

Instead we've got another bloke in a suit in thrall to the Christmas Pudding Party and those of their ilk: Yesterday, the powerful Australian Christian Lobby warned "federal Labor would … not want to be seen to break an article of faith with the Christian constituency so soon after winning office". Federal Labour might not, but the rest of us are positively wriggling with excitement in anticipation of the happy day.

These people (the fruit loop legion) believe that though they have never submitted themselves and their manifesto to the public scrutiny of a plebiscite they yet have some mandate to wield an (un-mandated) veto over elected bodies.

And so, because Rudd is another Chicken Shit in the Howard mold, no doubt soon to be found licking the arse of the Elect Vessel of the Exclusive Brethren and other deeply peculiar people, the ACT Government is in for a round of wholly outrageous interference from outside as it steps up its struggle to implement Civil Unions for same sex couples.

Who the fuck gets to vote for the ACT government and can't they quietly dispatch some of these cowardly lick spittles of the fundamentalist hue. Howard for Rudd, McClelland for Ruddock. Some change, let alone improvement.

Here's a question for the straight married members of the new cabinet: Would you be satisfied if your relationship were cloaked only in the ornamentation and protections to be offered by this new fangled register system you are holding out as a sop? And if so, if it is good enough, what purpose then does the existing arrangement for civil registration serve? And if not, please explain why you then believe it good enough for poofs and lesos.

Further thoughts on my Education Ukase

The empress spoke this morning in haste and has now repented.

Having been at work and been rendered bad tempered by the experience I have returned, reviewed and suffered the following reaction:

You are a stupid cow. It is much simpler than that. Chain the little fuckers to the desk at age five on the understanding that you'll release them at the age of sixteen or when they can recite their multiplication tables 1-12 fluently, which ever comes sooner. Ok. That's the new education policy. Simple, innit?

Bloody kids

A year ago or thereabouts, when he started working with us, I regarded him as a man-boy, half grown with some potential, but lots of maturing still to do.

Then he proudly announced that his girlfriend was pregnant and like everyone I struggled to be sure how to take this. He was still a puppy, but eighteen years old; that's old enough to drink, drive, smoke, and be sent to Iraq to shoot people. Difficult under the circumstances, to think it absolutely wrong.

So we all held our peace and thought and were rather touched by the enthusiasm. I had a conversation with him not long before the baby was born; he was unhappy that his girlfriend was so fixed on moving into their own (council) flat NOW rather than continuing to live with his parents and make some long term plans. He seemed to be growing up and sensible to the responsibility he was about to take on.

Then the baby was born and to see him with his son was quite lovely. But the baby was a little ill here, and a little ill there; in hospital a couple of times. One of those things of course. Since then things have happened to make me think quite a bit.

On Friday the newish father was agitated. He'd confided in someone that he'd been playing with his son and 'hurt his arm'. He feared that he might have pulled his shoulder out. The story seemed a little disjointed but I put it down to hearing it at second and even third hand.

Then it turned out the baby had cried through the night and the parents were only now getting around to making a doctor's appointment, and that dad was anxious that his own mother not find out what had happened.

Then it emerged that the incident had happened not the previous night but a couple of days earlier. And the baby was still distressed. And the baby had not seen a doctor.

The baby's now been taken to hospital by his paternal grandmother, finally taking a grip on the situation, and a broken arm has been diagnosed; social services are now involved and no one is entranced by a nineteen year old being a father any more.

Except the problem isn't nineteen year old men becoming fathers. There was a time when nineteen was positively middle-aged in human terms, and there are some parts of the world where even today life expectancy isn't much better than that.

The problem lies in the business of being a teenager. We've deferred adulthood with the relatively modern construct of teenager-dom. Now we're extending the franchise deeper and deeper into our lives. Quite when we're actually required now to grow up is obscured to so the very least, and now it eats into the very thing it had been developed as a buffer for, to shied from encroaching responsibility.

These days no person is obligated to pay his or her own way in the world, to provide for ones self, to be self-sufficient, self disciplined. No one has to grow up, to any extent at any time, and take care of ones self. Being grown up isn't actually about being old enough to drink or drive or smoke or gamble, but sadly the message seems to be that if you can do all those things then you've made it.

Well in 1855 my eighteen year old great great great (G3) grandmother was married in Wiltshire to a bloke from Gloucester she'd been introduced to by her step-mother. The step-mother had been born in Wales and married twice before marrying my ancestor. The second of those two marriages had been to a man from the same village as my great great great grandmother's husband.

With in a year she'd had her first child, by the time they arrived in Australia in 1861 she had three and another on the way. She went on to have a baker's dozen in total, all surviving infancy and childhood, even amid the rough-and-ready conditions of the Ballarat goldfields.

No, there's nothing inherently problematic in early parenthood.

The father of my G3 grandmother was the son of an 'agricultural worker', and his antecedents were entirely in that mold going as far back as is traceable. These were 17the, 18th and 19th century equivalents of medieval peasants, lacking capital or qualifications.

They tended to marry early and breed enthusiastically. His very young mother was illegitimate born and the daughter of a very young woman who herself was illegitimate. The record is unclear earlier than that.

But things didn't turn out too bad in the long run. Or maybe I've just explained an awful lot.

The thing that matters most is that the baby is fine, and he probably will be. Quite how that will happen will become clearer over the course of this week.

Ew, they're proliferating. Get the bug killer.

The Greens appear actually to be worth voting for. And worth negotiating with.

The Christmas Pudding Party can hardly be said to have been put on the offensive by the prospect of a preference deal involving Labour and The Fern's Best Friend. Offensive is their natural state.

And yet Senator Fielding, who is the Little Sprig of Holly atop the Christmas Pudding, is 'outraged'. It is according to Mr Sprig of Holly outrageous "to think that Kevin Rudd would want to preference the Greens". After all, Mr Sprig demands, "Whether there was a deal or not you've got to ask the question why would Labor want to see the Greens holding the balance of power in Australia?"

Why indeed.

Possibly Labor (or Labour, whatever its just spelling) don't want to be responsible for delivering power over the fate of 20 or so million people, some of whom don't actually want to be steeped in doctrine, wrapped up in pages from the bible and steamed in 'christian' orthodoxy for the remainder of our lives.

Curiously Senator Prig has tacitly acknowledged casting a remarkably wide net when it comes to the murky business of gathering preferences and intimated that he's prepared to screw Pauline Hanson's anti-immigration 'United' Australia Party (but only in the political sense) if it will bolster his chances of holding the balance of power.

Would it actually be safe for me to go home. Would I be able to settle. The place seems to be seething with crackpots and nutcases. The ones who garner media coverage are only the stupid ones the press notice. Its the quiet and ostensibly intelligent ones I'm really afraid of. Peter Costello for example and his slightly less effectively surreptitious side kick the Mad Monk.

Poor lambs: execution date confirmed

Young Australian voters are turning away from Little John in droves; as voting is 'compulsory' most of them are looking at the alternatives and considering them all as potential least worst places to park their vote - the rest are art school undergraduates and will use the reps paper for a cartoon and the senate paper for a full blown masterpiece of donkey voting.

Boy are they in for a disappointment. Today they're all taunt skinned, bright eyed and full of hope. Tomorrow they'll wake up and realise they've not voted for some one who is focused, as one young prospective voter put it, on "the things that matter to him like climate change and human rights"

She's talking about Kev. Lethal with a skewer is Kev. He's shafted his foreign affairs spokesperson this week in the furore over that individual's elucidation of the Party of Opposition's policy on the death penalty. How many other principles is this party leader prepared to sling overboard in his efforts to secure and retain power? Quite possibly nearly as many as Little John's prepared to sacrifice on the altar of power retained.

Au fond, Kev's just another power thirsty god botherer who, when he tots up the numbers will recognise that his bread is buttered on the side accessible to those who believe the indiginous population in need of patronising, women belong in the home and that men should always fuck women and never ever wear a dress - everything else is background noise.

I'm reminded in this of a very old joke, sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill, which runs something like this:

Wannabee Prime Minster: Virgin Voter, would you vote for me and give me power if I make a pledge of higher expenditure (as well as a cosy policy on the environment and soothing words about Human Rights)?

Virgin Voter: Geez Mr Wannabee Prime Minister ... Well, I suppose ... we would have to discuss terms, of course ...

Wannabee Prime Minister: Virgin Voter, would you vote for me and give me power if I make a pledge of a modest rise in expenditure?

Virgin Voter: Mr Wannabee Prime Minster! What kind of voter do you think I am?

Wannabee Prime Minster: We've already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.

I'm a mother, therefore ...

I walk the offspring to school or cycle with her, because she isn't old enough to go by herself in this (paranoid) day and age, because it is good for us, because it saves money, because it permits me to feel smugly virtuous about the environmental impact of our mode of travel.

I don't do this for the exhilaration of putting my life on the line or the adrenalin pumping fear arising from putting her life in similar peril.

The school is located on a side street, because building it there twenty years ago when the town was smaller facilitated the provision of a playing field. But it was always a side street. Every other building on the street is a dwelling. In keeping with urban development everywhere in this bloody country the street is just wide enough for one lane going each way, or when cars are parked up on both sides just one vehicle at a time.

When the cars parked up on each side are 4x4 size vehicles and the car attempting to drive between them is another there's barely a cigarette paper's distance between any of them. Women who can barely see over the steering wheels of the vehicles they drive will sit and wait for someone to move out rather than attempt to negotiate between parked up vehicles. Tempers fray, inevitably.

One mother's lost leg after being caught between two of these behemoths.

Recently I've been harassed off the road by the woman who runs the local bookies. She's got to get back and open up and that means I've got to get out of her way.

Stopping to drop off or collect on the zig zags, double parking, parking on double yellow lines, speeding, careless door opening, parking on the right, failing to indicate, using a hand held mobile phone, smoking. It's all there, on display, every day; flagrant disregard for the most basic and sensible rules government behaviour while in control of what is potentially a lethal piece of machinery and lack of consideration for everyone else.

Some one's going to be killed and all because these women won't do the right thing.

In defence of drivers

Historically those who injure, maim and kill have expected to find themselves punished, and severely at that. What is about drivers and driving that those who voluntarily place themselves behind the wheel and in charge of a machine that is a lethal weapon think that:

• they can eat and keep that lethal weapon fully under control
  
• they can drink and keep that lethal weapon fully under control
  
• they can put their make-up on and keep that lethal weapon fully under control
  
• they can twiddle with a radio/cassette/CD player and keep that lethal weapon fully under control
  
• they can read a map and keep that lethal weapon fully under control
  
• they can read a newspaper/book/magazine and keep that lethal weapon fully under control
  
• they can listen to an iPod/CD/Cassette etc player and keep that lethal weapon fully under control
  
• they can twiddle with the SatNav and keep that lethal weapon fully under control
  
• they can get dressed/undressed and keep that lethal weapon fully under control
  
• they can text/phone and keep that lethal weapon under control

Never mind introducing stricter penalties for those who injure, maim and kill. Seriously we should introduce psych testing before issuing driving licences. There are some people who genuinely believe that they can perform an exotic combination of two or more of the above non--driving actions simultaneously while controlling their late modal lethal weapon.

Driving is difficult, with practice it becomes easy like everything else, sometimes to the point where in normal circumstances it becomes almost instinctive.

But it is still the case that a momentary lapse in concentration can end in catastrophe and not always for the driver. In the past couple of years a young mother with three children at the local primary school lost when a mother who wasn't looking carefully enough reversed her great big vehicle into the woman, trapping her against the car behind and crushing one leg. Everyone with a child at the school knows this story. Everyone sees her each morning and afternoon, struggling to get her children into school on one leg and a prosthesis.

We all see the stories of deaths and injury on the roads, experienced the frustration of being trapped in the aftermath of a serious accident, creeping past a mangled vehicle with a blanket strategically draped over the windscreen.

Everyone knows how dangerous cars can be. Is it too much to ask people to take care and concentrate on the task in hand? The answer to this question is apparently yes. Will people behave more responsibly if the consequence is a slap on the wrist. The answer is obviously no, or people would have abandoned driving with a mobile phone planted to one ear.

It is time to send out a message to all drivers that they are to be held fully accountable for their irresponsibility. Killing someone is killing someone. It is indefensible that in this day and age a person can take the life of another and not suffer a heavy penalty. Most drivers, it seems, need a reality check.