Mount Migently Manifesto

Dec 22, 2012 | Arts, Australian Values, Citizenship, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Education, Immigration, Indigenous, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, Love, Media Values, OzPol Values, Racism, Religious Values, Science Values, Values

Mount Migently Manifesto

 Australian Values

 

Australian values have lately been enthusiastically asserted by some Australians and Sir Roger has been much impressed – in much the same way a washed-up prize fighter feels the repeated impressions of his opponents’ fists in his guts.

These assertions of “Australian values” tend to be energetically debated:

in Melbourne with French and Indian visitors to Australia on trains, buses and trams,

in university college meetings in Sydney,

in the halls, offices and party rooms of Parliament House in Canberra

and particularly on commercial radio breakfast programs everywhere. 

Sir Roger was reeling from the onslaught and disheartened by the proponents’ ignorance, illogic, idiocy and illiteracy; by their fear, spite, narrow-minded prejudice, stupidity and frankly pre-agricultural social views. 

Someone had omitted to convey to them that for their brain to operate as advertised it is necessary to update the database regularly and to calibrate it with reality. 

Someone had omitted to explain to them that the texts on which their ethics are based and with which they (selectively) justify much of their self-righteous bombast are not actually sacred but were all simple rulebooks written thousands of years ago to enable the social control of brutal sand tribes, to suit their primitive times and conditions, calm their existential terrors, alleviate their ontological horrors, excuse their ignorance and justify their brutality. 

Someone had failed to explain to them that the foundation myths, the stories of Australia on which they hang their narrative of Australian culture, are just that. Myths. It never happened, Bruce.

It’s just like when your girlfriend lied to you – you weren’t the first. 

Dismayed by the galloping erosion of the humane, generous, fair and tolerant values of his Australia Sir Roger therefore repaired to the mountain top seeking counsel and wisdom from the winds,  the silence and the intelligences of the cosmos. 

Sir Roger was generously granted that counsel and has returned from the mountain top bearing enlightenment. 

Over the next few days and weeks he will share with his world these insights into the best of human and Australian values. 

 

 

Is Labor Finished?

Jan 2, 2012 | Australian Values, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, OzPol Values, Values

Is Labor Finished?

 

“A Realm of Despicably Effortless Incompetence”

 

Sir Roger Migently is not angry. He is over it.
According to Friday’s ABC 7.30 Report:

“ The Government is pushing ahead with its demand that dozens of dentists repay $20 million claimed under Medicare for treating people with chronic diseases.

Here’s how it is: Few people can afford dental service, not even preventive.

Just to open your mouth for a dentist will set you back over $70. To have any work done will cost you a lot more.

People who have low-paying jobs or none at all, especially if they have, for example, parental responsibilities, simply can’t afford to go to a private dentist.

They can go to the Dental Hospital (if they happen to live in a capital city) and wait for two or three years in some cases to complete a series of consultations.

Meanwhile, people with missing teeth can lose jobs, miss promotions or, if unemployed, find it extremely difficult to find employment. This is especially serious for people whose work involves standing up in front of people, or managing them: trainers, coaches, teachers, actors, etc. etc. etc.

What can they do?

Until some time ago if you had rotting or broken teeth you could go to your GP and make a case that your dental condition was life-threatening – which it can be because, for example, of gum disease which can be linked to heart disease. Your GP could create a Patient Management Plan which included dental work.

Dentists could, with this Plan, provide their services under Medicare. The problem was that they could claim only one item at a time. Therefore some dentists, if they had to do two extractions in a sitting, chose to space them over more than one date. They weren’t claiming or being paid for work they were not doing.

And even then, if a prosthesis was needed – false teeth – only the prosthetist’s services were covered. The false teeth themselves could cost $2000, which is a lot for an unemployed person.

Older (especially pre-fluoride), less-well-paid Australians often have dreadful dentition. This scheme was the only possible way to stay in the employment game, not to mention to cling onto some sort of quality of life, self-esteem and respect.

It was, frankly a crappy scheme put together by the Coalition years ago. It was, in conscience, the least they could do. And they did the very least they could.

Now the Labor Party thinks even that was too much and wants to junk it.

And on top of that they are punishing dentists with fines for making it possible for that scheme to work.

The most likely reason Health Minister Plibersek has taken this action is as part of a larger strategy to claw back outgoings so that Treasurer Swan can announce his surplus in 2012. This surplus is supposed to prove his economic management credentials (and to poke his tongue out at Fatty Joe Hockey who said Labor would “never deliver a surplus”). But that Labor might win the next election, surplus or not, is a vain hope.

For Sir Roger, this action is the last straw.

With this there is no policy area remaining in which Labor can claim moral or political superiority over the coalition.

On every important issue Labor is in a panicked race to the ethics-free bottom to appease narrow-minded, ignorant, cashed-up bogans who are already, not rusted-on, but welded-on to the coalition.

Gillard today announces a tax-benefit bribe to low-income families with teenage children.

Labor has been in power for three and a half years. They could have done this years ago. Why didn’t they?

They’re in panic.

Do you think immediately, as I did, of Gillard and Abbott (not to mention almost their entire front benches) when you read this from the final chapter of Kevin Dutton’s Flipnosis?

“ If experience teaches us anything, it’s this:
behind the façade of assiduous, fumbling accomplishment there shimmers a realm of despicably effortless incompetence. An imperishable array of faux-pas, cock-ups and howlers that clunks into mortal existence at the whim of the cognitively challenged.”

So who is left to vote for? Who is left with the moral authority to manage a country for the welfare of its people? Not the Coalition ptui! ptui! who lost their moral compass years ago – so who is left who might keep them both honest?

 

Bugger.

Education and Life

Jul 6, 2011 | Arts, Australian Values, Cultural Values, Economic Values, Lifestyle & Life, Values

Education and Life

 

 Be Normal and Fit In

  

Sir Roger’s close confidante writes:

My mother used to ask me if I wouldn’t prefer to work in a bank. In those days it was a safe occupation – safe as a bank, literally. A job for life with almost guaranteed promotion. I don’t think she was joking.

Both her brothers – my uncles – worked in banks and eventually became bank managers.

She married a doctor. His job was secure as long as people got sick or had babies.

Her father was an Anglican minister. He’d always have a job as long as there was a god – or as long as people believed there was.

I think my mother wanted me to be safe. She worried about my creative, artistic, unworldly temperament. If I relied on it, it might not lead to stability and security. The bank was safe if unexciting and the school system was the ideal training for future decades of boredom and repetition.

And that’s how parents tend to think.

First we want our children to be safe.

Second we want them to do well and succeed.

Third we want them to be normal and fit in.

And we want them to find someone ‘nice’ to settle down with and raise a family (for the most part).

We encourage our children to be reasonable and more or less ordinary; to be ‘realistic’. That’s the way it works, that’s the way things are, that’s the recipe for survival and success.

Mediocrity.

And that’s what schools are exceptional at producing.

Nothing important or worthwhile that has ever been achieved in the world has been achieved by reasonable, realistic, mediocre people. They have been achieved by people prepared to be unreasonable, to see beyond the realistic to the possibilities and to fight to achieve them.

And that’s who our children are before we school them.

Indeed, replied Sir Roger, schools are not only exceptional at producing these results. That is their primary function and the original purpose of the compulsory education system in Prussia to which all modern education more or less owes its tradition. Obedient hardworking bureaucrats, obedient unquestioning factory workers. Today’s office slaves.

Bruce Petty once somewhere said (or drew) something close to,

 

 

“ Having reproduced the species, efforts are made to have it employable as cheaply as possible. Through persistence and determination many survive these deformative years and go on to be average.”

Denying Gay Marriage for Power’s Sake

Jun 29, 2011 | Australian Values, Cultural Values, Democracy, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, Love, OzPol Values, Religious Values, Values

Denying Gay Marriage for Power’s Sake

Sir Roger does not wish to marry a man but . . .

 

To put it another way, while Sir Roger and Dorothy have many good friends in common, Dorothy and Sir Roger are not Facebook buddies. And Sir Roger does not think that his personal preference for his own life is of any moment or interest whatever in what another human “should” or should not do or be permitted to do, particularly in the area of human personal relationships. It is quite simply none of Sir Roger’s bloody business. Sir Roger’s opinion is irrelevant. So, very much, is Julia Gillard’s. Even more so is Tony Abbott’s.

Sir Roger was shocked this evening, however, to hear a Labor Party heavy claiming on the 7.30 Report that Labor shouldn’t approve gay marriage because if it did Labor would lose 10-15 seats in Queensland.

So stuff doing what’s right. It’s all about staying in power.

Now, Sir Roger can understand that a political party would argue that you have to win seats to form government.

The question is, to form government to do what exactly?

The answer can’t be to form government in order to stay in government. Nor can it be simply to keep the other mob out. There is no vision, leadership, or social progress in that. It is morally bankrupt.

The point of winning the privilege of forming a government is so that you can do good things, so that you can do what’s right, not just so that you can be in power. You don’t sacrifice what’s right on the altar of Power.

This Labor backroom zombie has, like almost the entirety of the Labor machine, lost sight of what it’s all really about and what really matters. It’s people like him — once again, basically the entire Labor machine — who are responsible for the decline of the party. They’re not going anywhere. They’re just clinging to power.

The other question is, why a gay or lesbian person would want to be “Married”, other than the financial/legal benefits? If they want to publicly affirm their love for each other in front of their friends they can do that already and more cheaply than a full-on wedding. Why would they want to ape the straight community’s rituals? Why would they want to be just like stuffy old straight people, or like Mum and Dad? It would surely be easier to pass legislation that confers non-discriminatory economic/legal rights on all people. If the big problem for straight people is just calling it “marriage”, why not just call it something else?

Of course, legislation that confers equal, non-gender-specific economic/legal rights on all people in whatever combination of relationship, where it is not in law now ought to be.

But as Sir Roger says, it’s none of his bloody business and the government(s) should stand away and get out of our bedrooms. Their job is to manage infrastructure like education, police, power and health and not to legislate morals. After all, being politicians they can hardly claim the high moral ground. In most cases in every party they are among the least moral and most dishonest (let’s just say “sleazy”) members of the community they are supposed to serve.

Just look at Tony Abbott.

 

 

Communities Thank Pokie Addicts

Apr 28, 2011 | Australian Values, Corruption, Cultural Values, Economic Values, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, OzPol Values, USPol, Values

Communities Thank Pokie Addicts

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.

 

Women in Uniform

Apr 17, 2011 | Australian Values, Cultural Values, Democracy, Legal, Lifestyle & Life, OzPol Values, Values, War

Women in Uniform

“Women Are Too Emotional”

P oor old dill-brain Barnaby Rubble comically suggested today on Insiders that perhaps he was a bit old-fashioned about women in uniform. 

“  I just couldn’t get my head around shooting a woman. Maybe that makes me a bit old-fashioned and I imagine other people get themselves in the same position. Nor would I like to see a lady shot.

It’s not a joke, Joyce. Leopold Bloom’s Day is over, gone. You are a dinosaur.

What these men – politicians and brass – just don’t get is that they don’t own women. Women are not “their” women. They do not own them.

Their personal opinions and sensitivities simply don’t enter the equation. They are irrelevant. It is not up to them to decide for women what women in uniform (or not) may or may not do, or whether they should be “permitted” to serve in the front line.

Men never did own women.

They just got away with pretending to — for a long, long time. Some men, sadly, in many cultures still get away with it by intimidation. As do almost all men in some cultures. 

Why are women supposedly [they’re not, actually] so bad at maths? Because Barney keeps telling them that “this is six inches”.

Of course any person who wants to be in the front line has to be competent.

But some pundits are saying they need to be “psychologically capable” as well. (Ah, the old, “women are too emotional” ploy.)

Which apparently means that at the officer level  – as allegedly demonstrated by several young officer trainees – they have to be emotionally mature enough to think it’s a real hoot to broadcast their sexual conquests on Skype at whatever cost to the victim.

Sadly, of all the (voluntarily) military people Sir Roger has met many seem to be immature, ignorant, reckless dickheads who clearly fail to understand that they really are being readied to put themselves in the way of a bullet or an IED.

Get over it Joyce.

If anyone – woman or man or anywhere in between – chooses to travel to distant, exotic lands, meet interesting and different people, and kill them, then that is their choice, whatever your difficulty ‘getting your head around shooting a woman’ (I can’t believe he actually said that).

Sir Roger asked himself:

“Am I really willing to call Joyce “a total, ignorant fuckwit and neanderthal sexist” concerning just about anything but particularly about women in uniform, you know, directly, to his face, as it were?”

“And yes I said yes I will Yes.”