You look comfortable under your newspaper . . .

Right around Australia – which is, you know, NSW and a couple of other fairly unimportant (albeit it occasionally charmingly old-fashioned) bits – Community Leaders are in panic over the impending loss of all essential local services due to proposed restrictions on the spending behaviour of poker machine addicts. Particularly in rural areas. The most panic-stricken are the Managers of rural drinking festivals – “pubs”, “RSLs”, “Bowlos” and “Leagues clubs” in the local dialect.

These managers claim that the sky will fall and the earth be swallowed up as earthquakes of doom and the tsunami of proposed poker machine gambling legislation simultaneously devour, desertify and drown their villages.

The playing fields will turn to dust, the cultural centres to rubble, and the cows will stop producing milk.

Country music will no longer be heard. Women will no longer know that they ought to stand by their man. Men will not know when their dog has died.

This is why these beacons of social cohesion, these massifs of Aussie common sense and basic good old Australian values, have gathered together with one voice and with one purpose.

This week they have been seen around the “rule’n’rege’nel” towns of Australia, in its dusty back streets and forlorn parks.

Hundreds of good old Aussie boys in RSL badges and footy jumpers have been talking to down-and-outers throughout the land.

One by one they have approached the homeless pokie addicts who for so many years have taken their life savings, their pension money, newstart allowance, their wife’s money and the money they have embezzled from local businesses, and poured it into the poker machines of the happy-to-oblige no-questions-asked local RSLs, footie clubs and pubs.

“No, don’t bother to get up,” they say to their depressed, broken, often drunken, and emaciated fellow-citizens. 

“You look too comfortable down there under your newspaper in your shit, piss and vomit. 

“We just want to say thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you! It is only because of you that we are able to maintain the wonderful community services that our establishments provide with a small percentage of the huge profits that we make; thanks to you. 

“We’re sorry to hear about your wife and kids and how they’ve left you. We’re sorry to hear you lost your house and your job.

But make no mistake, you are the real pillars of our community. Without your addiction to our bright, shiny and excitingly noisy machines our towns would be nothing.

“Without you, how would our townsfolk ever hear mediocre, has-been talent scraping the last few dollars off their careers singing Slim Dusty covers? Where would they learn to do line dancing? How would the old folk spend their last days if your gambling addiction wasn’t funding the perfect manicures of their bowling greens?

“We honour your sacrifice (again, sorry about the wife, kids, house and job).

“In fact at our next board meeting the Committee will discuss naming our poker machines after all the pokie addicts who have given our town so much. So much money.

“You are more than welcome at our clubs and pubs on pension day (or if, you know, one of your estranged kids comes across a little money and forgets to hide it from you) to keep up your important work for the community (but please have a bit of a wash first, okay?)”

And as they return to their comfortable houses on the hill, they smile contentedly over a thoughtful job well done, slide into their leather recliners with a Johnny Blue, scowl at that bastard Wilkie on the news, put on the Céline Dion CD, ponder the pros and cons of a future career in politics . . .

. . . and thank god for the pokie addicts.

 

Thank you for reading this far!  You might think producing a post like this takes a bit of work. 
It does! If you’ve appreciated it you might consider encouraging me. ( We all like validation! )   

Buy Me A Coffee

All posts

Categories

You might also like:

Sprezzatura – the New Cool

Only Connect!   S ir Roger has been somewhat troubled of late that persons of his (ahem) “vintage” have become quite out of step with the young’uns these days. Not in terms of worldliness, because after all his generation have seen a lot more world (times Time), with...

Migently Mountain Manifesto: 2

  6. hen we swear to something, that is kind of a proper commitment. The word “swear” comes from an ancient word that means “to speak”; to say words. In one of the most savagely beautiful and exceptional works of fiction, the Book of John...

Blameshifting 101

You've got to hand it to our Prime Monitor. He is the absolute guru of blameshifting and that’s something to be proud of. You know, he has a position to maintain, an aura to protect, an air of infallibility to project. We can’t have him looking weak and fallible.  He...

How Australian Values Are Changing

Are Australian Values moving left or right?   The answer is YES - both. And, more worryingly, also a trajectory outside the known political universe towards the delusional realms of a poltical and social Fantasia. And even more upsettingly, otherwise...

Draft Mateship Guidelines Exhumed

Fair Dinkum Aussie Mateship Cetrificate Test   new Mateship test will ensure Australia strikes the right balance between the British and the rest, says Minister for Aussie Mateship, Smeagol K. Dic. The Ministry today released a draft guide...

Bundy Rum 2011 NSW Election

  Swine Flu, brought to you by SPAM    t’s all the rage these days. Not so long ago, as we were basking in the great spiritual joy of the Wetchex World Youth Day, we reflected also on the overwhelming success of the then recent Crown Casino...

Kev’s Massive Package

  It takes Balls to Punish the Jobless   he thing about the unemployed is that, well, they’re powerless; or rather, they’re disempowered, particularly by the feeling of being unemployed in a culture in which what you do, not to mention...

Sex Romp or Sex Scandal?

Matthew Johns   o this time it’s the turn of Matthew Johns, poster boy for Rugby League – the second official poster boy for Rugby League to be shamed within weeks – and regular on the cross-dressing Footy Show. When I was eleven years old my...

Chateau Quelquechose

  Gone out the window   e were on the train this morning and for the first time in a long time noticed the truly stuffed in our society and how comprehensively invisible they are to most of us. “Stuffed” in the bad way, not 'stuffed' like...

Migently Mountain Manifesto: 1

  S ir Roger is returned from the Mountain with the Migently Mountain Manifesto.Here are Tablets One to Five:    1.  Do what is right.     2.   You are safe. Now, at this instant, you are safe.You are safe, right here, right now. This might allow you to...

Money money money?

'In my dreams I have a plan'   lthough we are proud of our reputation for being disreputable, confusing, harmful, misleading and offensive it is quite clear that all the best blogs have serious posts by Nicholas Gruen or Peter Martin, Fred...

Haneef “Not Uninnocent”

  The materials available to me While there are inferences that are available from the material I have, I am of the view that they are not sufficiently strong to exclude reasonable hypotheses consistent with innocence.” – Damien Bugg, DPP Did...

Afghanistan Photos

Bad Apples? or Bad Apple Tree?   hen will they get it? Or do they get it and try to hide the truth about the Afghanistan photos before anyone notices they’ve got it? First the disclaimer: To gloatingly photograph yourself with a slain enemy...

Drugs are Bad

 M’Kay?   mean, some drugs are bad. Just bad. Some drugs are good, like medicine. Some drugs, well, they’re legal even if they kill you, like cigarettes, or, like alcohol, kill other people you run into. But drugs drugs are just B-A-D. Inherently....

Let Them Eat Yellowcake

Carlo Bonini           STATE OF THE UNION 2003: " Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of Uranium from Africa." Or not ...   Well, as Bill Moyers reminds us, it wasn’t true. It was all a forgery, perpetrated in Rome. And Carlo Bonini, the Italian...

Hell, Pell

Cardinal Pell after Bacon   To Hell, Pell-Mell   C ardinal Pell has claimed on PM today that Global Warming is not happening. He has “studied the science”, he says, and come to the rational conclusion that there is no evidence for global warming. In fact, he...

The Devil Rides Again

  es, Dick ("Dick") Cheney has thrown off the coffin-lid; with a sulphurous emanation he has emerged from the flames of his hell; and he has spoken to a human – Martha Raddatz of American ABC News – about the War in Iraq and of his deathly dominion...

Passionate Indifference

Indonesian war crime     SW Deputy Coroner, Dorelle Pinch, this week found that the newsmen known as the Balibo Five were deliberately killed by Indonesian forces 32 years ago to cover up the Indonesian invasion of East Timor.   She has...

Pedants r Us

  What on earth is going on?   Is it all over, after all? Have the barbarians claimed victory?   First: Sir Roger listens to ABC Radio A LOT. One evening, or early morning, he was listening to an interview with an author by a respected ABC presenter....

Trust Me…I’m From the Feds…

  Wha..!? I woun’t not of never of dun nuffink so bad like wot you say!   ederal agent Bruce Pegg, who interviewed Mr Ul-Haque in prison, told NSW Supreme Court judge Michael Adams he had done nothing improper by questioning Mr Ul-Haque...

Ordinary Australians Lose Automatic Citizenship

Ordinary Australians are terrified by a new test the Australian Government is planning to introduce.

Porter Loo

The GuardianWhen Christian Is a Dirty Word   This won't take long. The Department of Home Affairs ("the Potatocracy")  stirringly asserts that people love to come to Australia because:  " ​​​​​​​​Australian values are based on freedom, respect, fairness and...

Malcolm Turnbull: Next Prime Minister?

  Backing into the limelight ir Roger believes Malcolm Turnbull could easily be the next Prime Minister of Australia.What do you think? Here’s why: 1) The coalition and the right wing media will bring too much pressure on Julia Gillard about...

Hi …

Hi!     i Hi!    (gulp) Hi hi ho! (gulp) Hip! Hip! Hooray! The national result, the result in Bennelong and the role the Greens played in getting Labor over the line are a clear enough repudiation of Howard’s political ideology....

Disaster Capitalism

  In other news… Better the devil you know?   oward’s appeal on 60 Minutes tonight fits right into the well-worn Disaster Strategy.   On the one hand: “you’ve never had it so good” but on the other: “these are savage, uncertain and...

Thank You For Listening and Fuck You

  George W Bush and Dick Cheney address the nation  on the Whitehouse Weekly Radio Address      

0 Comments