YAAAAAAAAAAY!!!!!

A little tune dedicated to our former Prime Minister (and is that not the happiest phrase EVER), lyrics by INC and music by Mike Oldfield (who probably thought he was writing a song called "Moonlight Shadow" at the time)



The last time ever we saw him (carried away, by a massive landslide)


He found out nobody adores him (carried away, by a massive landslide)


Stuck in a nightmare this Saturday night


Completely pantsed by the other side


Interest rates went up and it was really goodnight


And his message just wouldn't cut through





The rodent's finally leaving (carried away, by a massive landslide)


And I don't see anybody grieving (when he was carried away, by a massive landslide)


He really thought he could win another one


As the kids today say "Dude he went so dumb"


Turns out it was over before it had begun


And his message just couldn’t cut through





I say, hooray


That stupid bastard's finally going away


I say, o yay


I knew we'd be rid of him, one day








He made me think of emigrating (until he was carried away by a massive landslide)


With his policies that were all written by Satan (until he was carried away by a massive landslide)


Such a shame to see him looking so bereft


When he always thought that he was so deft


Turns out fear and loathing were all he had left


And that message just didn't cut through

I say, hooray

I knew he'd lose to Kevin and it happened today

I stayed, I prayed,

That I'd be proud to be Australian again, one day


......





And, with that, we can conclude that Redgum have been right all along. And I will wake up tomorrow as a very, very happy man.

R.E.S.P.E... oh forget it

I had a little conversation at work today that I thought I'd share. I was chatting to my dear colleague The Empress about parenting but specifically about the lack of sleep that goes with it. It went like this.


INC: The thing is, you have never actually seen what I am like after getting proper night's sleep*

Empress: You're sane?

INC: Well, no. But I have much more energy for coming up with funny stuff

Empress: OH FAR OUT! *quite literally runs out of the room*

*beat*

*Empress returns*

Empress: You need to have more kids.




I will refrain from commenting on the utter injustice of this and content myself with assuring you that, yes, she really did actually exclaim "Oh far out!" and that was the most wonderful thing I have heard in ages.







* The Empress and I have been working together for three years. Just for context.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel (says The Way of All Things)

Hey, remember this post from last year?


A couple of the predictions may have been slightly on the ambitious side, but with three sleeps to go it's looking like more than one is going to actually happen.

Frankly, I'll take it.

As you are celebrating the long overdue departure of the lying rat faced bastard formerly known as the Prime Minister, remember that you read it here first.


Expect me to be found wandering the streets of a previously safe Liberal but by then marginal Labor seat at 3am on Sunday morning screaming "ALL HAIL NOTCRAIGSTRADAMOUS"

Just when we thought there were no lows left...

Confirming again that I should never glance at the newspaper whichis being read by the person next to me on the bus, I found this story in the People's Paper. With only minor alterations, it said this:

ABOUT 6000 drug addicts and dealers would have their welfare payments "quarantined" under a re-elected Coalition Government.

Anyone convicted of a criminal drugs offence would lose control of their welfare payments for at least a year.

They would still be able to buy food and pay the bills, through the use of vouchers, but would not be able to get cash.

John Howard said yesterday taxpayers' money should not be used to buy drugs.

"We are the zero-tolerance Coalition when it comes to drugs," the PM said.
"It's not right that people should have control of taxpayer money when they have been convicted of such offences.
"This will mean they will not be able to spend the money on those sorts of drugs, or for that matter, alcohol or tobacco."

The policy would initially hit those involved with hard drugs, such as heroin, cocaine and ice. But it could be extended to the users of other drugs, including cannabis, in the second phase of the policy.

Under its Tough on Drugs election policy, the Coalition would also help addicts get back into the workforce by giving them higher levels of support under employment programs.

A spokesperson for halfway sane people everywhere, who didn't give his name except to mention in passing that it wasn't Craig, said:

"Much like absolutely all of this government's policies on drug, this one is absolute genius. It really is about time we took this approach.

"Independent study after independent study has shown that when a drug addict runs out of money, he or she would not even think of committing a burglary or an armed robbery to get money to spend on drugs. This is particularly true for long term users of speed and ice.

"Further, when researchers suggested this possibility, every single drug user surveyed was shocked by the very possibility that such a thing could even be hinted at.

"This research is strongly supportedby anecdotal evidence. In ten years of appearing on behalf of violent criminals, I can assure you that not one of them had ever used drugs. I guess they were just all born evil.

"With all the millions of dollars that this government is putting into top rate rehabilitation services, and those great ads aimed at parents of middle class kids, I'm utterly confident that six months from now no-one will be using drugs anyway.

"In case you are wondering, this sort of sarcasm is, indeed, the only thing that stops me from spiralling into a pit of the blackest despair when I realise that someone, somewhere, is so insanely disconnected from reality that they think this policy is a good idea and that person is, by an unfortunate coincidence, apparently writing the government's drugs policy."

"Okay, I'm done now. Fortunately, so is the government."

Schools there are many/ renowned in our story

Yes, folks, Carey Grammar may have the stupidest school song ever, but they now balance it out by having Excellent Dude of the Month as their headmaster.


Phil de Young, asked by The Age what he thought of the government's latest bribe (otherwise known as some sort of education rebate) briefly conceded that it would lighten the load for parents, before adding "But is it going to solve long term equity problems? I wouldn't think so". He added to my reasons to love him endlessly by adding that the biggest challenge that both parties should tackle in education was disadvantage - or "unequal outcomes because of unequal opportunities" - across the government and non-government systems.



The next day, he was back again. The Age asked him about the economic merits of the rebates.

He said:


"Without getting into marginal propensities to consume, one would assume that the rebate would find its way into expenditure patterns of consumers and, clearly, have the potential to be inflationary."

And my favourite one:

"Personally I'd rather see the surplus going back into infrastructure, perhaps expanding educational opportunities, on research, on building schools or hospitals."


I'm glad that he didn't go into marginal propensities to consume, because frankly I just can't see how a tendency to eat too much of a polyunsaturated butter-substitute is relevant, but apart from that this man is my new hero.

All former students of that school must be pretty happy right now. Except for Peter Costello, who is, quite possible, a bit cross.



In more concerning news, less than two weeks from the election, a member of the Coalition has finally given some indication that he is aware of what might actually be important to voters and, even more surprisingly, he is willing to discuss it honestly.

Barnaby Joyce, who really should switch parties now, said this week that the government would lose if the latest polls were repeated on election day. He added:

"It's important to say back to people that you understand the way they're thinking, so that they get the feeling that you are in touch with them. If you say 'I understand you're ambivalent and I'm going to tell you why you shouldn't be (that's good).

"If you say 'I think you're wetting yourself with excitement over how excellent our campaign is', then they'll just say 'Well no, not really mate'."


So, with exactly one week to go, I have a very important message for our Prime Minister:

KEEP DOING EXACTLY WHAT YOU'VE BEEN DOING. IT'S WORKING GREAT!
AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, DON'T LISTEN TO BARNABY! IT'S A TRICK!

Stupidity? It's On The List

My esteemed colleague, Ogre Boy, is getting married in a few weeks. Earlier today, my wacky workmates decided we should come up with some songs to play at their wedding. Ogre Boy likes to cut hair in his spare time. His lovely fiance apparently likes to cook. Challenged to makewith a list of songs about haircuts and cooking in ten minutes with no internet access, here's what I came up with:

Get a Haircut - George Thoroughgood

She Cuts Hair - Darren Hanlon

Running with Scissors - Ben Lee

I don't feel like dancing - Scissor Sisters

I just died in your arms - Cutting Crew


Clambake - Elvis Presley

Hotdogs & Hamburgers - John Cougar Mellencamp

Scenes from an Italian Restaurant - Billy Joel

Ice Ice Baby - Vanilla Ice

Comfort Eagle - Cake

Fall of Rome - James Reyne

Cook Me Up - The Veronicas



Are there more? There must be more, surely.

If INC was a cat, he'd be dead by now

I should probably start by explaining why I find the title of this post so hilarious.


The 'phrase 'he'd be dead by now' is not inherently comedic or anything, but in the right context it is seriously funny. Many years ago, around March and specifically the Sunday immediately after daylight savings ended meaning that the clock was claiming that it was an hour earlier than my body thought it was, I sat through a stunningly tedious evening church service.


The guest speaker, whose name utterly escapes me (perhaps this is fortunate) seemed to have no regard for the general concept that anything worth saying can usually be said in half an hour and if it can't too bad becuase people will stop listening if you go any longer than that on a Sunday night, chose to talk about nothing much really for about an hour and a quarter.


Early on in this utterly uninspiring exercise, this guy tries to illustrate faith or some similar concept by telling a boring story about a boy trapped in a burning building (it's not easy to make such a subject boring, but he managed it), the point being that the boy had to jump out a window so his father could catch him and apparently there was some faith involved in the exercise somewhere.


Anyway, at the point at which I was seriously considering just going home because this guy had been talking for an hour and showed no signs of stopping, but I had decided that would be a bit rude because I was playing bass that night and people would probably have noticed if I packed up all my gear and made multiple trips to the car to load it all up, something interesting finally happened.


After talking about I can't remember what for I don't know how long, our speaker said "We now return to the boy in the burning building". One of the young folk in the fourth row, unable to take any more, called out "He'd be dead by now!"


See, in context, it's richly comedic.

Much as I enjoyed that moment, it was not the point of this post at all, or even the reason for the title. It may actually turn out to be the best part of this post, but that's not the point either.

The point I was actually planning to make was that I have a terrible case of curiosity. But, before we get to that, there's a little more context needed.

The 940 people who, at last count, had read my profile may recall that I have listed, among my favourite bands, the legendary-for-possibly-not-all-the-right-reasons Christian rock band known as Petra.


The lovely Actonb, who is probably the only person reading this who has ever heard of those dudes, has commented on this before. It would be fair to say that Ms B was rather unimpressed to find this band associated with my blog in any way.


It's true that I did listen to rather a lot of Petra's work when I was an impressionable teenager. I even saw them live at Festival Hall on their 1988 tour, and, tragically enough, I STILL HAVE THE T-SHIRT.


Pleasingly, it still fits.

I continued to listen to their music for a couple more years after that, but I am reasonably relieved to be able to say that I am completely unfamiliar with anything they recorded after "Beyond Belief", which I bought (on cassette) in 1990. I can't remember when I last listened to it, but some guidance may be gleaned from the fact that when I was in Perth this time last year, I found my copy of that album in my brother's car, which at least explained what happened to it. As far as I know, he still has it, although I must say I'm not sure why that is.

So, with all that in mind, I was moderately amused to receive the following email:

To: notcraigorama@gmail.com

I noticed you have my old band Petra on you favorite music list. I want to invite you to my personal blog.


Talk to you soon,


Pete Orta

http://www.ortaology.com/

"Talk to you soon", in this context, may be the most optimistic sentence ever written.

I have never even heard of Peter Orta. However, since I was unable to resist googling, I know know that he joined the band a few years ago (yes, they are still going) and has since left it again, to be replaced by the original guitarist who has been in the band since 1972.

Yes, this band is older than I am.

So, naturally, I forwarded the email to Actonb in the hope that she would be as amused as I was and decided to otherwise leave it at that. Surely, I thought, I would not be silly enough to follow the link and actually read this thing.

Why? What did I not delete it immediately? Am I insane? Why?

Sure enough, curiosity got to me and I ended up reading the blog of Peter Orta. I justified this on the basis that I thought it would be interesting. And I was right.

If you suffer from the same sanity threatening condition that I do, feel free to follow the link and experience the magic for yourself. I have nothing more to say, about that blog, other than that it is an excellent argument for never being curious again.

And of course, I have to add one other small message:

VICTORIA BECKHAM, YOU HAVE LOST YOUR TITLE.

Let's see if this works

Dear swinging voters

I have written my election night post already.

And, with all due modesty, it's excellent.

More importantly, it's a musical tribute to our soon to be departing Prime Minister, to the tune of a classic tune from no lesser musical genius than Mike Oldfield.

Of course, the only way that this will get posted is if Kevin actually wins. So, if you vote for the Liberals, you will never get to read it.

So, if 11 years of this country getting meaner and dumber is not enough to get you to change your vote, maybe the prospect of entertaining musical posting will do it.

How do we sleep when our campaign's burning?

Peter Garrett is either a complete idiot or a total genius and I honestly can’t decide which it is.

Here’s why.

On the face of it, Peter’s little joke with Steve Price is the kind of insanely bad gaffe that whole elections can be lost over. With three weeks to go, and the Government living their worst nightmare as nothing they do causes the polls to shift their way even a little, and Labor apparently cruising towards a landslide with a single minded focus on a small target strategy so blatant that ‘me too’ may as well be their official campaign slogan, it is utterly unbelievable that a frontbencher from the Labor Party would say, in any context, that they are actually going to ditch the 'me too' thing the minute they get elected.

It would be staggeringly stupid to say this at a meeting of the local branch of the Labor Party with no journalists presents and with every person present having made an Unbreakable Vow in the manner of Severus Snape and Narcissa Malfoy never to breath a word of what was said to anyone ever.

It is about a billion times more stupid to say it to Steve Price, a man with no love for Labor who would be utterly unable to resist grabbing the first available microphone and telling everyone.

Can I say at this point that having Richard Wilkins present for the conversation is just weird.

Every media report on this that I have seen or read so far has commented on Peter Garrett’s lack of political experience and taken at face value that it was an ill advised joke that has been an unintentional yet huge gift to the Government.

So, a pretty strong case for the total idiot theory there. But I still have my doubts.

Even though Peter has been in federal politics as a Labor party member for a few years now, most people haven’t really paid much attention to his earlier involvement in politics. This is why everyone assumes that his little joke was simply the undisciplined act of a political novice.

Everyone seems to have forgotten that this man ran for election to the Senate as long ago as 1984. He was at the time a member (and indeed, co-founder) of the Nuclear Disarmament Party. He needed 12.5% of the vote to win a seat in the Senate, but a primary vote of just over 9% was insufficient when Labor withheld preferences.*

After that, Peter went on to be president of the Australian Conservation Foundation from 1989 to 1993 and 1998 to 2004, and did a bunch of other relevant political stuff, including being on the board of Greenpeace.


In other words, the general perception that he got done with playing at the Sydney Olympics, briefly wondered what to do next and then strolled into Parliament on a whim is at odds with reality. So, is he really inexperienced enough to make a mistake so basic that even I wouldn't have made it? The alternative is that the rest of the Labor Party, also not being complete morons, may have started to catch on to what a number of pretty intelligent analysts like this blogger, as well as some rather less cluey types like me have been worried about for a while, which is that if you don't give people some reason to change the government, they won't bother to.

So, since it's a bit to late to officially stop with the 'me too' shenanigans, and since said shenanigans have actually been irritatingly effective so far, why not send out a few hints that actually things might change a bit after the election.

Lets face it, no one believes the official promises made by the parties any more anyway. Rudd isn't willing to go all Latham and present himself as some sort of radical ideologue (and would anyone have believed it anyway?), and we need to give our ridiculously afraid of change compatriots some reason to believe that the Labor Party can handle the economy and generally take a sensible approach to running things. As I said, that's been working pretty well. But if, in addition to creating a general impression that a change is safe, you can also create a general impression that your party has it's own vision for the future, then you're in excellent shape.

So, if you do want to drop the odd hint that the Labor Party may behave a little bit like a Labor Party once it wins government, what better way to do it? Take the one guy on the front bench who is not perceived as a political insider and who can't be pinned as a unionist, get him to make a joke to a broadcaster who is taken seriously by no-one other than rusted on Liberal voters anyway, do this in the most casual setting imaginable (in the presence of political heavyweights such as, er, Richard Wilkins) and then officially deny the whole thing and blame it on political inexperience.

If it is a deliberate strategy, it's staggering clever, although history will judge whether, in giving the government a whiff of oxygen at a point where they looked like they were about to suffocate themselves with their own pants, it may not have been too clever by half. It's also possible that this is just something dreamed up by a blogger who is half cynic and half optimist and who desperately wants to believe that Kevin & Co are pursuing some brlliantly intelligent masterplan, instead of believing that they started with a strategy I hated and now they are screwing it up becuase Peter Garrett chatted to Steve Price shortly after he'd finished 'celebrating' Silverchair's recent success at the ARIAs with old mate Daniel Johns** (which would also explain, finally, what the hell Richard Wilkins was doing there).***

If there is one thing that emerges from this rambling exercise in stream of political consciousness blogging, it's that if there is one person on the Opposition front bench who could get away with this, it's Peter Garrett. Can you imagine what would have happened if Julia Gillard (or, heaven forbid, someone with actual union connections**** like Lindsay Tanner) had said it? However, as I've been at pains to point out, most people seem unaware of Garrett's political history.

The pleasing part of all this is that the Government has had plenty of time to attack Garrett over his ties to the Greens movement or everything else he's done in politics for the past 23 years. Instead, they have apparently been working on the theory that it is far more effective (and, I'm sure they privately believe, devastastingly witty) to have Alexander Downer regularly quote Midnight Oil lyrics in his own special snotty way.

So, if Labor gets away with this one (yes, I'm back to leaning towards the 'stuff up' theory) it will be largely because of our Government's incredible arrogance and determination to take cheap shots at its opponents instead of engaging with the issues, coupled with 11 years of commitment to dumbing down public debate at every opportunity.

That loud clucking you hear from 8.00pm on 24 November onwards will be the sound of 11 years worth of chickens all coming home to roost at once.


Yes, just like the lovely and talented Ms Higgins, I am All for Believing.








* Not actually ironic, but something similar


** The word 'allegedly' may be inserted into that sentence at will, and should be, several times.


*** Let's face it, Tony Abbott is also pretty experienced in this politics thing and if anyone can tell me what his masterplan is, I'm impressed. Actually, scrap that, he's clearly decided that of Howard wins and hands over to Costello, Abbott will never be PM, whereas if come November 25 Costello has around 6 years as opposition leader to look forward to, I'll bet Abbott thinks he could cut that to 4 years 6 months and have a reasonable shot at the title after that. Oh great now even the footnotes are rambling


**** Being a lawyer at a firm that has represented a union DOESN'T COUNT