wackjobs riding hobby horses

                                                           Shane Flanagan, former coach, Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks RLFC. Photo: Wolter Peeters

Comrades,

It was a sweet, delicious, ironic bookend to an annus horribilis for the Gumnut; the Prime Minister's favourite sporting team, the Cronulla-Sutherland Rugby League Football Club aka "the Sharks", found themselves in very very deep shit just six days short of the 2,018th anniversary of the birth of Our Lord The Saviour. The Sharks were fined a hefty $800K for multiple infractions of the rules and their coach, Shane "Flanno" Flanagan, was found to be an outright shonk and shyster, not once, but twice - and as a consequence will now be banished from the game for life. Of course, ScoMo is not guilty by association, but his footy team is clearly mis-managed by shady people hanging around in the shadows running rackets in a dodgy world where not all is as it seems.

Some backstory is required here for out-of-towners. I'll try to keep it short. Back in 2013 the Sharks coach was busted by ASADA and the World Anti-Doping Agency for injecting snaky substances into the eyeballs of his players in the "supplements saga" in 2011, and he was banned for all of the year 2014. ScoMo was fully horrified. Flanno then made a come back and was hailed a hero after taking the Sharks all the way to 2016 Premiership. ScoMo was over the moon. Only problem is, Flanno breached the "bail conditions" of his 12 month suspension, by continuing to have expressly forbidden contact with the club on an almost daily basis throughout '14, about "training arrangements, coaching department structures, negotiations with player agents, discussing player retention and recruitment, and even approving a few press releases along the way." As a consequence, the National Rugby League has now "de-registered" Flanagan, and given him a breech notice to show cause as to why he shouldn't be rubbed out of the game forever, altogether, for life with no parole - off-the-fuck you go, son. ScoMo's mortification was be beyond belief and he was so upset that he promptly left the country and went to Iraq.

So, not only has the Tory Govt. gone down the gurgler and through the S-Bend and is facing annihilation at the polls, the football team of which the PM is the defacto No.1 Ticket Holder has now been shot out through the Malabar Deep Ocean Outfall, with reputations - such as they were - in tatters all over the shop. What a mess, Mr Hart! What else could go wrong?

ScoMo seems to have the reverse Midas Touch at the moment, as everything he's associated with turns into a turd. Scotty would not have joined in on the mirth of the nation when they discovered that an obscure member of the Morrison Ministry had been busted for alleged immorality by that most august journal-of-record New Idea. Talk about LOL! An old fashioned "women's magazine" gets the scoop on the Member for Mallee failing miserably to get a sly root in Hong Kong; a town bristling with "working girls", not to mention Sugar Babes looking for Sugar Daddies [whatever that amounts to]. Of course, much hilarity ensued and droll commentary was made along the lines of "Australia deserves a better standard of sexting from its politicians" and "It's people like this who give James Bond a bad name". The Member for Mallee then falls on his sword after being hoist by his own petard - but really, he should be the subject of abject pity more than anything else - despite all the time, trouble and expense he went to "seeking arrangements" while on a 'private visit' to Honkers, he couldn't even get to first base, not even a hand-job, and will now forever be known in the ultra-conservative back blocks of Victoria as a filthy would-be adulterer who got caught, but didn't cut the mustard. Andrew "Broadly Speaking" Broad is bound to enjoy his Xmas, now that he's on holidays - permanently.

                                                                   Former MHR for Mallee, Andrew Broad,  Photo:  Jason Edwards /Herald Sun

The only positive thing to come out of the whole tawdry episode is that the Country Party now faces extinction or at the very least being reduced to a mere parliamentary rump without party status at the next election. Even the most right wing of rural electorates are now under siege; the ballot paper in New England just as a for instance will be as long as your arm as a swag of independents and sundry froot loops with "preference whisperers" try to unseat that Inbred Tomato and fair-dinkum dead-set ridgey-didge dinky-di adulterer in Barnaby Joyce. And the Libs are shitting bricks, knowing full well that they can never govern in the own right, always having to rely on a coalition with those agricultural root rats and screaming hypocrites.

After Wentworth, the political landscape has changed forever. You only have to look at the staggering DanSlide in Victoria; a mighty triumph for the Pinko's who inflicted heavy casualties on the Tories and at very long odds managed to wipe out all the golf courses reserved exclusively for male Liberal Party members on Melbourne's prestigious "sandbelt". Gone, in one fell swoop. But it's the Victorian Legislative Council which points to the way of the future with an unruly mob of rag-tag fringe parties, including the leader of the former Australian Sex Party [which has forsaken its roots entirely to morph into something called the "Reason Party"], getting a bum on the finest of leather seats. Under the weird proportional voting system for the Victorian upper house, as it stands, Labor has 18 seats, Liberals 11, the Country Party and the Greens just one seat each, and the other ten seats went to a bunch of wackjobs riding their own hobby horses. The Miracle of Democracy never ceases to astonish.

And of course, that's not all that's been going on.

Over in the Land of the Free, it's notable that DJ Trump!'s long-time personal attorney, Michael D. Cohen, is no longer free, being sent down for a three year stretch in a Federal Penitentiary for "a veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct". From the day I first heard of the existence of Stormy Daniels, I've been saying to anyone who'll listen - that woman will be the downfall of the 45th President. It took them years and years to get the well known gangster Al Capone behind bars, and even then they could only book him on tax evasion, and so it will be for The Donald. Hush money is strictly verboten when you try to hide it under the Campaign Finance Laws and as Mr Cohen now knows, there's hell to pay if you are caught. The list of the now-outed criminal associates of the POTUS is too long to detail here, but DJ! is looking more and more like the ruthless mob boss that he is. Never mind that he did all he could to rig his own rise to power, with the help of the odd Ruskie subverting every principle of a free and fair election. Bobby "Three Sticks" Mueller will sort that out on the quiet in due course; he won't make no 'final report' on Russian Collusion, as many people vainly hope for - the special counsel is a top-flight prosecutor of many decades renown and will do just that - prosecute - with extreme prejudice, to the full extent of The Law. Given that it's generally accepted that US Presidents can't go to the jailhouse while in office, Special Counsel will just indict a "known person" to be dealt with by the courts at a later date, and there certainly aint gonna be no pardon from any incoming Democratic President, oh no siree. Under those circumstances, Impeachment is a waste of time if all you end up with is Mighty Mike Pence. The Home of The Brave is looking at a pretty stark 2019.

And back in the Heart of the Empire - the Poms are boiling and broiling in a cauldron of fat of their own making, there's hubble bubble toil and trouble and are they're ready for their island to lazily drift off somewhere in the direction of Iceland. It's remarkable how PM The Rt. Hon. Teflon Tessa has hung onto her job as the common people take to the streets, while here, the Tories can sack a Prime Minister literally overnight in an ult-right fundamentalist coup, and there's no hint of rioting. I don't claim to come come even close to pretending to understand the intricate ins and outs and ups and downs and whirl it all about of Brexit, but they certainly have tied themselves up in knots, S&M style, and there's no Harry Houdini on the horizon to get them out of it. In the final paralysis, and with the festive season is upon us, it seems to come down to choice...those who prefer a real English ale, a home grown turnip and some Stilton cheese, and those who would much rather have vintage Champagne, Normandy oysters and Roquefort on the Xmas banqueting table. The best of British luck with that, chaps.

a very different time

Comrades,

When I learned that George H.W. Bush had shuffled off This Mortal Coil, I immediately thought...there's a man who came from a very different time...1989 was his first year in his only term as POTUS.

When George took the oath and moved into the Oval Office I'd only recently knocked up the missus who I'd just "shacked-up" with [and of course these days you can't say 'knocked up the missus' without attracting opprobrium] and my first child, who was born a bastard, was just weeks old when the Mighty Balmain Tigers RLFC were robbed blind in the Grand Final and Backdoor Benny still has nightmares about that drop goal attempt that hit the black dot.

The music was absolute shite, the Baby Animals and the Bondi Cigars had only just started off on their brilliant careers as a for instance, and the Jackson 5 and Gladys Knight and the Pips called it quits. Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade were the best they could come up with in popular movies.

I had to look that up in the encyclopedia because if you got me around a dining table now and asked "righto, Craves, take us through the 80's" I'd be struggling big time. But, as a radio news journalist who's stock-in-trade was the telephone, I do remember that any kind of hand-held mobile phone was a real rarity and devices like "The Brick" were still a few years off for common use back in '89 [the radio station did have a couple of 'mobiles' about the size of a car battery and as heavy], the internet was a weird fledgling universe known only to geeks with science degrees, [primitive computers with fuzzy green screens on cathode ray tubes had just replaced great clunking Olivetti typewriters in the newsroom, much to the dismay and resistance of the Luddite old guard - "they'll never catch on. if it's not broke, why fix it?"], Google was still a decade away, Mark Zuckerburg was five years old, and everybody chain-smoked at work.

While Comrade Bob Hawke was cheating on his wife and was well into his third term in office and the former Oxford champion can still chunder a yard of beer at age 88, George Snr's best buddy on the international cocktail circuit was the unlamented Maggie Thatcher and he wanted to spend one last summer at the family beach house at Kennebunkport, Maine, before he died and he ate a few oysters and drank whisky in his final weeks and is consistently rated by the pundits in hindsight as about the 6th or 7th worst US President in history [not including the incumbent].

George did jack-shit about Tiananmen Square, [Jiang Zemin got away with blue murder and he's still hiding in plain view at 92], his military adventure in Panama to depose the late Manuel Noriega is now a footnote to history but The War on Drugs didn't go so well, and then sending in Gen. Mad Dog Schwarzkopf to chase them damned Iraqi's out of the strategic oil reserves in Kuwait [yeah, right, a good cause for a Texas oil man] with pointless loss of life was a swift victory and an abject failure simultaneously. Bush the Elder presided over a world wide recession as the American economy went down the S-bend and he didn't have to do much to end the Cold War; the Berlin Wall astonishingly crumbled overnight to almost everyone's complete surprise and the Soviet Union imploded all by itself, but to his almost singular credit H.Dubbya did sign the START 1 treaty which finalised Reagan's work to the end of the plainly insane nuclear weapons stockpile, and resulted in an 80% reduction in the number of nuclear tipped warheads that could be loosed upon this world - which then stopped worrying about The Bomb. But that's where my praise ends.

I was scouring the new-fangled World Wide Web for a single image that might best sum up the Bush presidency, and was having a hard time of it, before this one popped up.

How little we remember, how much we forget...