what would Cook do?

Comrades,

I must say I have never understood Queensland politics.
Who does?
Not even back in the day of Sir Joh, when everyone was on the take and everything was clear cut - "oh, no, no, no, don't you wooorry about that..."
And Joh didn't keep the Country Party in power for 19 years for no reason - apart from being a master of the "Dark Arts", Joh had the Gerrymander down pat - everyone north of the 27th Parallel got two votes, everyone south, got one.
Simple.
Them's were the days.
On the face of it, all One Nation and the Katters did was split and fracture the Tory vote into shards, while the Pinko vote remained rock solid.
Two of the golden rules of the Miracle of Democracy right there - Solidarity Forever, and divide and rule.
By all reports, Pauline Hanson was last seen leaving the One Nation election night function clutching a half-drunk bottle of Bundaberg Black.
She must have been a bit tired and emotional.
It was very clever of the Pinko Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, to go for the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics - "everything tends to chaos" - in the last week of the campaign, effectively saying to the electorate, "no deals with anyone to form Government, it's me or nobody, and if you vote for any of those other bastards, our cherished stability will go up the chute and down the gurgler, and the Great State of Queensland will rapidly go to rack and ruin".
And it worked a treat.
No one likes rack and ruin.
That appalling Adani cock-up didn't raise a ripple in the bush, and the Greens went nowhere in the cities.
Labor cleaned up in Brisbane and won Townsville.
Game over.
The other main upshot is that the LNP experiment is now deceased - dead, buried, and cremated.
Their vote died in the arse something shocking - the merger of the Liberals and the Country Party was an idiot's idea from the off...god, the "wets" and the "drys" in the Liberals are about as predictable as the monsoonal seasons, and who thought they'd ever get on with the rabid hard-right farmer's lobby?
Have you ever tried to argue with a sugar cane grower?
I haven't, and I don't want to.
They used to whip Kanaky you know.
The poor ol' ABC psephologist, Antony Green, was having a very hard time of it on the live television call of the card ..."and now we come to the seat of Cook - oh, that's impossible...ah lets have a look...mmm...errr, it depends on who's votes are eliminated first here, and preferences could go anywhere, lots of postal votes, I just can't even remotely call that one...and the next seat is..."
OK then, lets have a look at Cook, Antony, if you like...it's a super-vast electorate that takes in the Torres Strait islands, and all the Cape York Peninsular right down to Skasey Town [after Christopher Skase, formerly of Majorca, now re-named Port Douglas], and out to Mareeba.
That is as FNQ as you can get.
Millions of square miles, and hardly anyone there, at a total of roughly 30,000 voters.
You could draw a 2km circle around my gaff here on the outer edge of the Inner West of Sydney and get that many electors.
And it has a long history of returning colourful Members ...Billy Gordon was the sitting MP, elected as a Labor pollie, he then became an independent after being thrown out of the Labor caucus for failing to acknowledge his not insubstantial criminal record.
During his time in office alone, Billy was the subject of an extortion threat, was falsely accused of domestic violence and fudging his tax returns to avoid paying child support for his five children, crikey - even his own mother took an AVO out against him at one stage, and then he was done for drink driving as he tootled around the Atherton Tableland.
Sensibly, Gordo decided to retire from the game at this election.
Then you can go back to the 1950's to find the wonderfully named MP for Cook - who had the seat for 16 years - Bunny Adair.
Also a Labor turn-coat who went Independent, trading off his own reputation as the publican at Freshwater.
Bunny's main claim to fame while in office was going for a short walk north of Cape Tribulation and getting lost in "impenetrable jungle", and being found by chance and rescued in farcical circumstances a week later.
Onya Bunny.
If you don't understand any of that, then you don't understand Queensland.
As everyone on the election panel kept on saying during the Tally Room count - Queensland is different and no-one else understands.
One of the anchors said "if you were wondering what's happening, we don't really know".
Mr Green was probably screaming at the executive producer "can someone, please, just tell me what the fuck is going on?"
Some boffin on the telly said "Queensland is its own machine. It operates without any need for Canberra".
Queenslanders see things that other people can't see, and they know things nobody else knows.
There is no accounting for them, and the rest of Australia is happy enough for it to stay that way, you would have thought.
Unlike Western Australia, it's a living wonder there's never been any serious secessionist movement up there.
Beautiful one day, perfect the next.

"wiser heads will prevail"

Comrades,

Not only is the result of the "non-binding postal survey" a victory for common sense and decency, it's also an outstanding endorsement of the Miracle of Democracy.
And one we didn't need to have.
Never mind that the margin in the poll was emphatically in favour of YES and it easily carried all the states, to have just 20.5% of the electorate in the "don't care" basket in a voluntary 'plebiscite' is truly extraordinary.
As the turn-out numbers were posted weekly by the ABS, and the participation rate climbed higher and higher, my daughter put it to me that perhaps it's just because Australians are so used to voting in compulsory elections, and have been educated about the importance of turning up at the ballot box [the "civic duty"] and the diligence to do it has been drummed into people from an early age, with the threat of a big bad-ass [well, really small] fine if you don't, and the stigma of being branded as a non-voter.
I pooh-poohed the idea at first, thinking "jeez, maybe I've underestimated this thing and it is a 'hot-button' issue after all", but now I'm not so sure.
And if you don't believe that there is stigma around not voting, my other daughter has a friend in her mid-20's who for some reason or another had not enrolled to vote - slipped through the cracks - and when she was urged by her friends to get on the roll for this one, she was genuinely worried that it would mean trouble, because of the fact that her non-enrollment would be exposed.
I don't know if she ever did enroll, but it was very simply - and forcefully - explained that there would be no penalty or backlash whatsoever; the Electoral Commission is a rough pub, they'll let anyone in, anyone at all, no questions asked, as long as you meet the criteria for eligibility, which is citizenship.
And, yes, you can be a dual citizen and vote.
So, the quiet grass-roots Pinko campaign to enroll as many young folk as possible through the 'social media' before the cut off date for this nonsense was supremely effective.
In less than a week before the electoral roll closed, new enrollments rose from 36,769 to more than 90,000...and you'd expect that the huge majority of those would be the people who have just turned 18.
I am now thinking, maybe they're right - they'd been taken to polling stations many times as children and been told and shown how to cast a ballot - compulsory voting is so ingrained in the Australian psyche that we just can't help ourselves from turning out in huge numbers.
We know the turn-out in general elections is generally somewhere in the mid-to-low 90 percentile [and the informal vote rarely rises above 10%], so the 79.5% voluntary roll-up for this - even the patently pathetically weak political compromise that it was - is startling.
Of course the 'campaign' was awash with bald-faced naked propaganda and there would have been instances of multiple-voting, but trying to organise it on a meaningful scale to have any significant impact on the outcome was all but impossible.
That may come, and be one of the many serious threats to democracy, but rigging free & fair compulsory elections will take some imagination.
And there has never been a serious push anytime, as far as I'm aware, for the re-introduction of voluntary voting.
Re-introduction, I hear you say?
Who knew, and pardon the little history lesson here, that it was back in 1924 that compulsory voting was enacted almost by accident - after a record low turn out in the 1922 election - by amendment to the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918, which by all reports was passed on the voices in both Houses after about 15 minutes of debate?
And to think the bumbling fumbling right-wing fools missed the chance to do the exact same thing with the Marriage Act in 2017, with a minimum of fuss?
Instead there was all this gnashing of teeth and pulling out of hair for months on end for a result that was pretty much beyond doubt.
Gawd, help us.
Still, we're virtually on our own here, with only Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Ecuador, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Nauru, Peru, Singapore and Uruguay having enforceable compulsory voting, but there are exemptions in those countries for the illiterate, 16-18 year olds who may and some do have the right to vote, and the over 75's...none of which apply here.
Even the dead can vote in our democracy, until they are probated out of the picture.
Our system is for all intents and purposes unique.
High turn-outs add hefty weight and legitimacy to the well-worn hackneyed expression "the people have spoken".
I remember Joe Biden commenting before last year's US General Election on the chances of DJ Trump! winning the White House with the famous last words..."wiser heads will prevail"...but we all know the turn-out in that one was 57.9%, and some 95 million eligible voters just didn't bother to show.
Wiser heads are all very well and good, but you need to turn out the numbers, Joe.
So even though the weak-as-piss Tories have had an almighty "bagarap" keeping secret foreigners under their beds - losing their majority on the floor in the process - and are so hopelessly fractured on ideological grounds to the point were they have very little to no ideology left, the polity of Australia remains strong.
As much as the religious fundamentalist right will get themselves into a foaming slobbering lather trying to subvert the process, there is simply no arguing with this result.
"The question is resolved in the affirmative".
The electorate might be dumb, but they are definitely not stupid.
It goes without saying politicians who ignore that do so at their own peril.
In any case, everybody knows the next election will be a grand exhibition of one of our great national pastime's -- "Vote the Bastards Out!"
Vote early, vote often.
Bravo.

bánh mì in Da Nang

Comrades,

Bánh mì in Da Nang..."pâté, soy sauce, water pickles and herbs only thanks, and one with the lot for him", might have been the order.
Mr Trundle parted with tens of thousands of Dong for a couple of these excellent looking baguette.
By the look on her face, the unsuspecting woman running the trolley is thinking "who are these total ning-nongs?"

However, as can be seen here, our Great & Glorious Leader was not that impressed with the taste of the Commo Roll.
"Spare me, Jesus. Do I really have to eat this thing for the camera's trying to out-do Obama mixing with the common people?"
Next time, try not to tuck yr shirt in, mate.
And just what is that device-thingy strapped to yr left arm?

PS. From personal experience, strangely, I never did have a great Vietnamese pork roll in Vietnam, so who can blame him?
The finest bánh mì on the face of this earth without a doubt are on offer in the capital of Laos, Vientiane, best paired with the Champagne of South East Asian beers - 660ml bottles of Beer Lao, with ice.
Muddled Mal should get out more...

doing the taxpayer cold

Comrades,

I could not help but notice the uniform of the cads, bounders, shonks and shysters in Bermuda on this week's 4 Corners program, as they were looking very pleased with themselves doing the long suffering taxpayer cold.
Among the national costumes of the world, it is a very weird one.
That said, I'd be more than happy to slip on a pair for a squillion.
Scruples?
What scruples?
I'm guessing even the Prince of Wales would have been seen in them from time to time.
They are quite spiffing, wot ho?

Let's face it, who doesn't like Bermuda?
What's not to like?
181 islands to choose from, the sun shines 24/7, the palm trees sway, a warm gentle breeze blows, the ice tinkles in the glass, and there is no shortage of banana lounges surrounded by shady people to stretch out on.
Excuse my cynicism, but tax evasion has been going on since some dude thought up the brilliant idea of taxation back in ancient Roman times, and why should it be any different now?
It's been very effective for millennia, and laws are made to be broken.
Fact.
Jeez, just as a tiny example, it's all of 26 years ago now since Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer famously appeared before a Senate estimates committee and told them "I am not evading tax in any way, shape, or form. Now, of course, I am minimising my tax, and if anybody in this country isn't minimising their tax they want their heads read, because I can tell you as a Government you're not spending that well that we should be donating extra".
And that's the truth!
No fake news there.
Hyper-capitalism at its finest.
I remember one time many moons ago dropping by Kay Bros. winery in the McLaren Vale to sample some booze, and being told that egg whites were essential to the wine making process and the story of evading the "chook tax" during WWII, when there was a tax on eggs...so when the tax inspectors came to the Vale, vintners would let their flocks of chickens loose to run hither and thither through the vines so there was no chance of there being a head count to link individual birds to their owners for tax purposes, with the sneaky bastards knowing full well that their layers would return home at night to roost.
What a ruse!
While the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists [who run a marvellous magazine called The Global Muckraker] will never ever reveal their sources, it would be very interesting to know just who was responsible for the herculean task of scanning 13.4 million pages of documents, everything from the most magnificent elaborate spreadsheets right down to hand scribbled notes; the biggest "leak" from the Dodgy Lawyersville, ever.
It only suggests to me why being a legal practitioner is such a dang lucrative profession in Bermuda, Belize, the Cayman Islands, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Singapore, Ireland, Luxembourg, Curaçao, Hong Kong, Cyprus, Bahamas, Jersey, Barbados, Mauritius and the British Virgin Islands just to name a few.
Everybody knows justice goes to those who pay.
And all this talk about there being "paperless courtrooms" in the future, my arse.
Why do you think the legal system insists on original documents, and legal eagles have enormous industrial confidential paper-shredders for the copies?
It will be centuries before any of that goes "on-line".
Who wants the 'paper trail' to be any easier to trace?
I did think the monika "Paradise Papers" was a bit lame; how about "Champagne! Cocaine! Caviar! The full story revealed!"?
In any case, the coppers [the chronically under-funded and under-resourced ATO] are doing deals with tax evaders/avoiders/minimisers every day of the working week - just ask Paul Hogan, he'll tell you.
The modus operandi is the ATO does an audit, issues an ambit claim in the form of a Tax Assessment Notice, and then by no-fault negotiation, will settle out of court 99% of the time for a fraction of the assessment [typically 10-15%] on the time-honoured basis of legal dispute resolution - clauditis et vade aliquam - "shut up, and go get some".
Everybody's happy, the non-taxpayer gets away with blue murder, and the Govt. has more sacks of pineapples in Consolidated Revenue than they otherwise would have had.
Brilliant!
All anyone can do about it is to pity the poor working poor, who, in relative terms and without access to legal advice, carry a tax burden as big as an elephant...you know, the one that's in the room.

got it all wrong as usual

Comrades,

Just a quick update - I said "why would I have any idea?" and so I got it all wrong as usual.
It's all come together in remarkably quick time for a place that moves at a glacial pace.
Boom, boom!
Here is Iceland's new Prime Minister, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, chairman of the Left-Greens who has managed to cobble together a four-party coalition with the Social Democrats, the Progressive Party and the Pirate Party to gain a one-seat majority in the Althing.

She is a mother of three young boys at 41, has widespread personal popular support, comes from a long line of prominent Icelandic academics, lawyers, politicians and poets, and holds a Master of Arts degree in Icelandic Literature - so she is the full bottle on The Sagas.
Katrin is also fluent in French and English.
After being in power for a very very long time...73 years in fact [apart from a recent four-year hiatus]...the centre-right Independence Party, has now been banished to the Opposition benches.

Just another example of the Miracle of Democracy handing over the reins of power to people in their late thirties and early forties, while us baby boomers look for hippie pot-head friendly Twilight Homes to contemplate our navels and our abject failure to lead the world in any sort of direction at all, as the planet slowly returns to primordial slime.

Despite claims to the contrary, there is hope for the future.
All power to her oars.

hopelessly fractured

Comrades,

People keep coming up to me in the street and asking "what on earth is going on with the Miracle of Democracy in Iceland, Craves?".
Why would I have any idea?
All I know is it's hopelessly fractured.
After the weekend's snap general election for the 63 seat Althing [the oldest Parliament in the world est. 930AD], try and work out what these final results mean:

Bright Future: 0 seats, down 4, 1.2%
Progressive Party: 8 seats, break even, 10.7%
Reform Party: 4 seats, down 3, 6.7%
Independence Party: 16 seats, down 5, 25.2%
Peoples’ Party: 4 seats, a new party, 6.9%
Centre Party: 7 seats, another new party, 10.9%
Pirate Party: 6 seats, down 4, 9.2%
Peoples’ Front of Iceland: 0 seats, 0.2%
Social Democrats: 7 seats, up 4, 12.1%
Dawn: 0 seats, 0.1%
Left-Greens: 11 seats, up 1, 16.9%

Crikey!
It seems Iceland isn't wanting a Bright Future at the minute, and the Centre Party, formed just three weeks before the election, picked up a startling seven seats, as Icelanders drifted in on a floe from the left and right to the centre.
The scandal-plagued former senior coalition partner, the Independence Party, lost five seats, but still managed to get the majority of votes.
But forming a Govt. will be ridiculously difficult.
A two-party coalition won't cut the mustard numbers-wise, a three-mob coalition is on the cards, but the Independents hate everyone else's guts, and vice-versa, so there will be some hard bargaining and banging of heads together going down.
There's even talk of the possibility of a five-way coalition, for chrissake.
Like last time, when it took three months to sort out, Iceland's President Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, will again just sit on his haunches for as long as it takes waiting for someone to come along and say "Hey there Pres. I can form a Govt.!"
It was a shame to see the anarcho-socialist Pirate Party lose four of their ten seats, after their leader, the loopy "poetician" Birgitta Jónsdóttir retired, so their chances of making Reykjavík the capital of the New World Order have been dashed for the time being.
Pinko hopes that the Left-Greens would storm ahead didn't come to pass, so it's unlikely although not impossible that Iceland will veer off to a left wing Govt. for only the second time since Independence in 1944.
The whole post-poll shootin' match will be about as inscrutable as the Icelandic language itself.
248,502 ballots were cast, which works out at just under four thousand voters per seat.
Tiny numbers, so each vote carries quite a bit of heft.
It mustn't be that hard to get elected; you could personally ring up that many people at random out of the phonebook and try to bribe them, or just ask them, to vote for you.

PS>
Going a bit off topic here, but I stumbled into a bookshop in town the other day and saw that Kevin Rudd's lavishly produced auto-biography, Not for the Faint Hearted - A Personal Reflection on Life, Politics and Purpose, was already on the remainder table at a bargain basement price of $35.
It was ten bucks cheaper than Jimmy Barnes' Working Class Man.
And what a doorstopper that'd hold anything open in a gale it is - coming in at a whopping 627 pages.
Obviously, he didn't have an editor who could say "Aw, c'mon Kev, you're not writing 'War and Peace' here, mate".
It had an extensive index too, and I'm kicking myself now for not having a closer look to see if the entry "Chinese, Mandarin", was followed by "Chinese, ratfucked".