It’s state Election day here in Western Australia. We use preferential voting (technically Single Transferable Voting), and as such I shall be voting thusly…
Parties with good ideas, which includes the Greens.
Labor, which means my preferences will probably stop here.
Well meaning but fundamentally harmless idiots.
The Liberals (who are actually the conservatives). If my preferences didn’t stop at Labor they will undoubtedly stop here.
The Nationals, who are the hillbilly version of the Liberals.
Parties and Independents who I can find absolutely nothing about.
General Lunatics, including the “Stop Pedophiles! Protect Kiddies!” party. I am of course in favour of stopping pedophiles and protecting children, but when you name your party that and provide no public information on your policies I will consider you insane until presented with evidence to the contrary.
Dangerous Lunatics, like that Christian party who claim their leader can raise the dead, or the guy who changed his name to “Aussie Trump”.
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. In the bin where they belong.
Sadly the Senior Citizens Centre just down the street isn’t a poling place this time around, so I’ll need to head over to Hillcrest – but that’s OK because there’s a better chance of getting a democracy sausage there.
Peter Dutton and His Majesty’s most loyal Opposition. Yes, it’s an old joke, but it works damnit!
It’s election season here in Australia with voters shortly to choose between the currently incumbent Labor Party under Anthony Albanese and the Liberal-National Coalition under Peter Dutton (there are plenty of other parties but the odds of any of them winning enough seats to form government are so tiny as to be laughable). Good old Pete has been campaigning for quite some time on dealing with climate change by building nuclear power stations, which is something so out of left field for Australian politics that it has a lot of people wondering what’s in the water in the Liberal party room. Well, read on and all shall be revealed!
(Note for Americans and other aliens: The Australian Liberal Party is Australia’s major conservative party, with the Nationals their hillbilly cousins. This causes all kinds of problems, most notably when the sarcastic hashtag #imvotingliberalbecause escaped Aussie Twitter some years back and utterly baffled the poor Americans)
Reason 1: The Liberals have spent the better part of the last 30 years arguing that climate change is a hoax, and renewable energy is a scam. The majority of Australians now know that neither of these things are true and are demanding action on climate, but years of denial have painted the Libs into a corner where they can’t embrace renewables without handing the Left a massive propaganda coup. So they’ve grabbed on to nuclear as an alternate ‘clean’ energy source that won’t make them look like they’re caving to the progressives.
Reason 2: Renewable energy – rooftop solar in particular – has massive potential to take energy generation out of the hands of big corporations and put it into the hands of individuals. This is a nightmare for said big corporations, who will see their profits plunge as people switch to making and using their own power. Nuclear keeps power generation in the hands of big business, which is where the Liberals’ corporate donors/masters want it!
Reason 3: Every non-partisan expert says that it will take at least 30 years to get nuclear power up and running in this country. Dutton denies this with vague hand-waving about ‘breakthroughs’, but from the Liberal viewpoint a big delay is a feature, not a bug. The longer it takes for nuclear to come online the longer the Liberal Party’s big business mates can keep on turning a profit from coal, oil and gas. Dutton’s dream reactor is the one that starts operating in the infinite tomorrow – the tomorrow that ticks over a day every day at midnight.
So there you have it, the three reasons Peter Dutton and the Liberal-National Coalition are suddenly crazy for a nuclear future. What a shower of dicks.
Well, the Voice referendum was – as predicted – a total shit show. I’m a big fan of democracy and so should support the will of the people and all, but I can’t help but feel that the vote was affected by huge amounts of people simply not understanding what we were voting about.
I disagree with the opinion of No voters who understood the proposal and rejected it, but I respect their right to have their say. And if their view was that of the majority of Australians then it’s democratically correct for the referendum to have failed. But how many voters said No because they thought the Voice would result in them having to pay rent to local indigenous bodies? Or that they’d have to hand over their house to the first indigenous person who called dibs? Or even that the entire thing was a nefarious scheme by the United Nations to destroy the white race? All of that bullshit was circulating (and being actively spread by bad actors) and all of it would have distorted the vote to some extent.
The Yes campaign seemed to have been blinded by their own comprehension of the proposal and concentrated on aspiration rather than the much more needed education. A goddam one minute explainer video on what the Voice is and what it could and couldn’t do would have been worth a thousand ads with an indigenous kid dreaming about a brighter future.
Anyway, it’s done, and now we have to live with the consequences. I can at least take some small comfort that my electorate voted Yes, and that Western Australia did not turn out to have the lowest Yes vote – the ever reliable Queensland hitting the bottom of that particular barrel.
But on to other matters.
The Saturday of the referendum also turned out to be the day of my 30th Anniversary High School Reunion at the Breakwater at Hillarys. I was not intending to go, but got badgered into it by a couple of friends. Overall… it was alright. I didn’t recognise half the people there but had a few decent catch ups. I also got a hug from the second-prettiest girl in our entire year, and the prettiest refused to let me leave before we’d had a quick chat – both very gratifying to the shy, damaged nerd that still lurks in the back of my brain. I did bail a bit early though as I felt myself starting to get a bit maudlin – which is the reason I wasn’t inclined to go in the first place. I am far too prone to maudlin nostalgia and if not controlled it can wipe me out for days. I got out before it got too bad and merely lost Sunday brooding on lost opportunities and the merciless passage of time.
(On the subject of the merciless passage of time, one of my classmates could have passed for 60. I don’t know what he’s spent the last 30 years doing, but it definitely hasn’t been kind to him…)
On Sunday, just to make my crappy weekend complete, I ran out of money. Which is not to say I had no money, I just found myself completely unable to access any of it. I misplaced the debit card for my standard bank account a few weeks back and was holding out on reporting it lost in the hopes it would turn up, living in the meantime on the hardly-ever-touched card for my savings account. As I was already feeling crap on Sunday morning I decided to bite the bullet and report it lost. With that done I decided to ease my troubled mind by downloading some truly embarrassing music from iTunes, for which I had to set up and use the savings account card.
It was in the midst of purchasing music that I got an SMS from the bank telling me that said card had been blocked because of “suspicious online transactions” and that I needed to call them right away (in hindsight I suspect that Erasure’s Blue Savanah was too much for the bank computer to handle). I did call them right away (after checking that the number in the SMS was in fact their real number and not that of a Belarusian scam artist) and was immediately connected to a recorded voice that told me I’d called them outside of business hours, then hung up on me.
(Why didn’t I log on to my account online? Because I’ve deliberately avoided setting up online access to my savings account to make it harder for me to spend it all.)
So until I was able to get them on the phone this morning and explain that no scammer would pay $2.99 for a digital copy of the 12 Inch ‘Summer’ remix of Baltimora’s Tarzan Boy I was entirely unable to pay for anything – including any more atrocious music.
Anyway, it’s all sorted now and I should soon be back on an even keel, financially if not psychologically.
Tomorrow we discover what force rules the soul of the Australian people – inclusivity, fairness and decency, or fear, ignorance, disinformation and racism.
I won’t stop hoping for a miracle, but all the polls indicate it will be the latter.
But hey! If ‘no’ wins at least we’ll all be safe from the United Nations taking our houses, or whatever other stupid shit is circulating on social media!
It has come to my attention that there doesn’t seem to be a decent version of the lyrics to the Chasers’ appallingly obscene yet incredibly funny take on our appalling former Prime Minister’s intimate relationship with fossil fuels. I cannot let this stand, so here is my best shot at a transcription.
COAL MAKES ME CUM by DJ SCOMO (THE CHASER)
Fuck you, and your family, and the essential services you rely on, Right now – as a criminal – the thing I love is corruption, Fuck you other cunts facing floods and the bushfires, When disaster strikes I’m ready to go on vacation in Hawaii,
Coal makes me hard, coal makes me cum, My dick is always hard for coal, And it’s only getting harder, Coal makes me hard, coal makes me cum, But the thing I love about coal, Is it doesn’t run away in disasters,
All those build up, and when those floods build up, well, we know what happens, It makes me hard when I think about coal, New South Wales used to party hard and we endеd all of that, So we could have more coal, the dеstroying of fun, I want you cunts to know,
I’m a criminal with a capital ‘C’, I love coal! I’m a criminal, Mister, Mister, Mister, I want to destroy the world,
Coal makes me hard, coal makes me cum, My dick is always hard for coal, And it’s only just begun,
Bullying, bullying, bullying, and I want you cunts to die, China, China, China, being racist gets me hard, It’s Australia’s fault that I’m such a cunt, This election is a choice, For the destroying of lives, people would die, Attention to genocide,
Well, it’s been an interesting few days hasn’t it?
I went to bed on Thursday after a quiz at the local pub, having seen online that doctors were concerned for the Queen’s health, then woke up on Friday morning to find that she was gone and we now had a King. I had the day off work and had a medical appointment to get to, so it was all rather surreal. I kind of felt like the world should have stopped for a bit, while at the same time was wondering just why the world – especially the Australian bit – should have stopped for the death of one rather elderly person.
Maybe it was the speed of it. If she’d taken to bed and been ailing for weeks it would have been less surprising. But she was up on her feet and doing things – including swearing in (or whatever) a new Prime Minister – only the day before. I guess she kept going right until the motor burnt out.
I was raised as a monarchist, in the sense that my mother is English and both she and my dad are social conservatives that got into the reproduction game fairly late. I can’t recall ever being specifically sat down and told that the Royal family were our rightful rulers and overlords, but it was a kind of unspoken assumption. She was the Queen, and as such we were her subjects, how the world be any other way?
I remember going out to join the crowds lining the streets to see her Maj on one of her visits – the one in 1981 seems a bit early but it can’t have been the bicentenary visit in 1988 so 1981 it must have been. I remember standing by the roadside near the Mount Hospital, waving a small Union Jack while a large black car sped past with a white-gloved hand circling out the window. I think I was slightly disappointed, I suspect when Mum said we were going to see the Queen I thought we were actually going to meet her – or at least see more of her than her hand.
As I got older I found myself increasingly conflicted. The fact that our country was ruled (de jure if not de facto under most circumstances) by a foreigner rankled a bit. As did the fact that said foreigner got the job based not on any personal merits but by accident of birth. It seemed unfair and undemocratic. But that said, the Queen really didn’t seem to do much. Wouldn’t it be worse to have someone at the top who had actively pursued the role? I could see arguments on both sides.
When the first $5 polymer bank note came out in 1992 production problems made it possible to scratch the design – which included a portrait of the Queen – off with a fingernail. An informal movement sprung up with people scratching her off the notes in protest at a foreigner appearing on our money. It was prevalent enough that my high school had to issue a rule that defaced notes would not be accepted at the canteen – although how many students were doing it as a political protest as opposed to simply engaging in general mischief must remain unknown.
At the end of the 90s we had a referendum on ditching the royals and becoming a republic. By this point I had come to an uneasy internal truce, balancing my royalist upbringing with my sense of the unfairness of the whole thing with a somewhat disingenuous argument that things weren’t terribly bad so why go to all the trouble of changing them? I voted ‘No’ to the republic, but at the same time utterly despised some of the advertising promulgated by the No campaign. There was one TV commercial in particular that informed the public that “The Republic movement want to make over 200 changes to the Constitution!” without mentioning that around 197 of them were replacing the words ‘Monarch’ or ‘Governor General’ with ‘President’. The referendum failed to get up and we remained a Constitutional Monarchy.
In the years since I have got over my upbringing and although I have no specific problems with the Royals I think that we should stand on our own two feet. It’s been said for many years that the time to revisit the Republic would be when the Queen passed away, and now she has. We’ll likely have another referendum in the next couple of years and if Charles III is still our Head of State in 2027 I’ll be rather surprised.
Concerning the transfer of power I find myself quite surprised by the speed of it all. I guess it was always going to go like that, but I’d always envisaged her Maj passing away then there being about a week of arranging things before Charles was proclaimed as the new monarch. Of course he became King the moment the Queen passed (possibly due to the instantaneous transfer of kingons), so in hindsight why would there be any delay? It still all feels rather strange.
Whether monarchies should exist is a valid question, but overall I think her Majesty did a decent job of managing a very difficult position. I had hoped she’d make it to 100 like her mother, but the elderly tend to not long survive the loss of their spouses, so when Phillip went it was really only a matter of time. She held out for her Jubilee, then left.
So, the Queen is dead, long live the King. I was a bit confused when the media was calling him Charles III as I understood that he was going to take the throne as George VII, but apparently he changed his mind – maybe he didn’t want to have to keep explaining regnal names? Given the disdain he’s been surrounded by ever since the Diana fiasco he seems to be doing remarkably well – I imagine the media fixers at the Palace are working overtime to convince the public he’s the best thing since sliced bread before the sympathy for his mother dies off.
In any case I’m now mostly just waiting for the ABC to go back to regular programing instead of 24 hour live coverage of every leaf that blows down a Westminster avenue. I did happen to catch the Proclamation at the Royal Exchange and was amused in equal parts by the noisy dog in the crowd and by the ABC commentator telling us that “Lord Mayor Sadiq Khan” would soon call for three cheers (what do they teach them at journalism school these days?). The Mace and Sword of the City of London were quite impressive, although I’m not quite convinced about the sword bearer’s fuzzy hat.
I’ll finish up with a song. In 1951 composer Ronald Binge premiered a piece of music he named Andante Cantabile. The next year he renamed it Elizabethan Serenade to celebrate the newly crowned Queen and the start of a new Elizabethan age. Eight years afterwards it was re-recorded as Elizabethan Reggae by Boris Gardiner and the Love People. And here it is.
(May I address you as ‘Bumblepuss’? I ask only out of form, as your opinion on the matter of being addressed as ‘Bumblepuss’ is entirely immaterial as I am firmly resolved to address you as such regardless of your actual thoughts on the matter. Additionally – now I think of it – there is not the slightest trace of affection towards you to be found anywhere within my heart or soul, so ‘dear’ is in your case as inaccurate a form of address as ‘Your Royal Highness’, ‘My Learned Friend’ or ‘Archbishop of Titipu’.)
Bumblepuss,
In reference to your recent unsolicited text message. I shall consider voting for the United Australia Party some time after hell freezes over, and no amount of (regrettably legal) text messages will change my mind on this matter.
