an old beta-male baboon

 

Comrades,

Am I alone in being astonished - flabbergasted - by the extraordinary enthusiasm with which Sydney has embraced the COVID19 vaccines?

Never in my wildest dreams did I think NSW - and when you are talking NSW you really mean Sydney - would get anywhere near a 93%+ at least one shot Corona vaccine coverage in the 16+ population, and 85%+ on two shots. Sydney at almost five and a half million good burghers is enormous, add in Newcastle, the Central Coast and The 'Gong and that's another million, everyone else lives on the North Coast, while almost no-one in their right mind toughs it out west of The Divide. As PJ Keating once said "If you don't live in Sydney, you're camping out". The State Govt. run Winnebago's used to isolate the infected arrived in the Back of Bourke before the vaccines did, so little wonder jab-rates really lag out there in the bush. Not that it statistically matters much at all. Sydney people said "we're sick of this", the Govt. said "get vaccinated", and they did, in their millions, with no further incentives required.

After the strollout known as Scomo's "it's not a race" clusterfuck was resolved, and the vaccine floodgates opened, who knew that a heaving steaming metropolis would go to the clinic en masse, not once, but twice? Even though I was dead set wrong saying we'd be lucky to get to 70%, let alone 80%, in my defence, I've said all along that this "vaccine hesitancy" thing is a myth, just as it turned out to be. There will be such blanket vaccine coverage once the children are injected (and Pfizer & Moderna both reckon they're all systems go for the 5-11 year olds) you won't need no "vaccine passport" for much at all really, (unless you are desperate to travel at any cost, want to book a show, have dinner someplace fancy, get pissed in a licensed premises or go to the cricket - even then, vaccine requirements will fade over time). The Good Lady Wife attended The Salon just yesterday and was never asked for her vaccination status. QR codes are already old hat around here, when they used to be de rigueur for getting food & drink during the four months of lockdown. Just the other day, I found myself standing in front of the World of Fruit looking at the slim pickin's in the street-front produce display and counted nine customers roll right on in in a couple of minutes, without a blink of an eye from anyone, by the time I'd found the Gladys App on my phone to ping the QR code with. Why bother is the call - if the contact tracers are never going to get back you anyway? Folks will not be willingly surveilled for nothing, so that's it for QR codes, just like the multi-million dollar CovidSafe App - which did precisely SFA while some faceless geeks got rich off it. So, Sydney is giving itself a hearty pat on the back and a pull of the pud, yet again, big time. "God!" people will whinge at dinner parties "have you any idea what it was like living during lockdown in an 'LGA of Concern'? Absolutely appalling!", they'll cry. They'll also say "Lord help WA and QLD, those hicks are really dragging the chain on this one and bringing the whole joint down with them", with vax rates a full 20% behind Sydney/NSW. Never mind the fractured Federation, sitting ducks, they are.They won't know what's hit them, and hit them it will.

Everybody has their vax story from early on when they were in short supply and people were downright loose with the truth just to get a jab, any jab, but it'd be hard to top my 2nd dose, which was administered in an old fashioned barber's chair on 17 August. Gold class treatment. My beloved GP had been giving me consistently inconsistent advice on this one all along (and who could blame him?), but recommended that I should get on with it after my first, and get fully dosed up as the disease "is out and about at the moment". The only vaccines he does are the 'flu and the kiddies, so I looked up HotDoc, and saw a local medical centre were giving away Astra-Zeneca within 48 hours at a pop-up in the Old Sunbeam Factory just around the corner which was demolished for 700 flats years ago. Had no idea where, but then realised it was a shopping centre space that some shifty characters had leased and fitted out as a barbers' shop as a front for a drug running operation. When the Delta mutant hit, the dodgy tenants abandoned the 'barber's shop' but left the fittings behind. There was a single leather padded chair with a foot pedal to manoeuvre the patient up or down by the health pro in the full PPE, who was literally diving at you with the needle before you'd even rolled yr sleeve up, and then shooed you along for the next one. No time to get relaxed & comfortable. Someone else does the paperwork that tells Canberra that yr done, it's over in a few minutes, and yr another statistic...and still I have the hair of an old beta-male baboon.

With a deeply deeply conservative free market capitalist running dog with a laissez-faire approach to killer diseases now in charge of the Great State of NSW, Premier "Let 'er rip!" Perrottet kicked off in a grand fashion by welcoming the resumption of international travel to and from Sydney before Chrissy, which got ScoMo all a flustered. You'll recall that Scotty from Marketing referenced the Kid Premier as "a fuckwit" when he called for the re-reinstatement of Jobkeeper a while back, so the unintelligible tongue-speaking PM was quick to put the upstart back in his place..."hang on there sonny Jim, immigration is not yr Department, hold yr horses". Yeah, yeah, it'll be a long time until the likes of you or me can afford to easily visit any corner of the globe on a whim like back in the day (i.e. two years ago). So, Tetter's, in his infinite wisdom, has offered every citizen of NSW a free $50 accommodation voucher to spend anywhere they like in the Great State and the taxpayer will pick up the chit. Woot! He's unaware that a pineapple won't buy you a night in a 1950's-style drive-in motel room with a urine stained mattress and rodent droppings in a joint like, say, Gilgandra. Obviously, he doesn't get out much. As it is, residents of Sydney are still prohibited from leaving town for 'the regions' until November 1, with December 1 looming as the "all bets are off" date. Which is something of novelty, given the annual traditional Silly Season officially starts next Tuesday and runs right through to Australia Day. There is only one thing certain when everything remains a day-to-day proposition -  this year's Silly Season will be the silliest seen in many a long year.

In the meantime...as the bodies pile high...in San Telmo, Buenos Aires... 

 

Translation: In Memoriam of the victims of Yellow Fever in the year 1871 and to the heroic residents of San Telmo who fought the Dantesque conditions of the epidemic.

"Will similar memorials be erected for the victims of COVID-19?"... so went the caption when I saw this photo.

In this instance, the death toll for the barrio was about ten thousand, so fair enough, but commemorations involving mass graves pose interesting questions, to which the answer is always probably...ah...well...no. Took a century to get this one up.

 

 

Freedom Day!

Comrades,

After 107 days, yesterday was hailed as "Freedom Day!" in NSW by the new unelected Tory State Govt. Head Honcho. The Ruby Princess purposely shied away from such a phrase on public health advice, but the new Kid Premier is having none of that, oh no siree, it's ScoMo's famous "snap back" all over again and business as usual, "you deserve back-to-normal" with the State Govt. Dept. of Propaganda releasing a fine public image of the upturned arse of our freshly minted Great & Glorious Leader doing things...

 

Freedom to go to the pub is great news for those with no job, living on the poverty line, the sick, the crippled or the hundreds of thousands of good denizens of NSW who simply couldn't afford a beer even if they wanted one. Such fabulous news. Freedom used to be described as not something you are free to do, but something you are free from - such as hunger & tyranny, but that appears to be a very archaic idea now in conservative circles, concerned only, as they are, with the "boom times" that are assuredly coming. And despite, or perhaps because of, Rooting Dom making a fool of himself first up, and adopting the Bonking Boris policy of "let 'er rip and watch the bodies pile high!", still we have very little to no idea in which direction we travel in times of plague.

Mark Bryan, Who's driving this thing?, acrylic on board, 2021.

 

 

dirty little secrets

 

Comrades,

For what it's worth, that's what you get for hiding dirty little secrets.

For those of us who spent years of our professional lives as hacks masquerading as journalists covering the myriad proceedings of the Independent Commission Against Corruption, The Royal Commission into Police Corruption, Coroner's Inquests and any number of other judicial probes - like I did - there was always one over-arching mantra that used to come up whenever a juicy witness faced the prospect of being compelled to climb into the witness box..."If you are ever called to give evidence at a Royal Commission, be afraid, be very afraid". Gladys Berejiklian's first appearance at the ICAC last year really surprised me - not that she was there, but that she survived politically. Let's face it - any male politician who was found at an inquiry to have an obviously as corrupt-as-fuck secret lover would have been a dead man walking; straight out the back door, booted off the patio and flat on his arse. But the Ruby Princess's excuse of "I stuffed up" appeared to be all she needed to say to stay on as the Big Kahuna. Until now.

I can tell you from long experience that the ICAC does not go on fishing expeditions, because they don't have to - they have all the investigative and coercive powers of a Royal Commission, and they use them. And they do not go you until they are absolutely certain that they've got something on you. Going by history, when politicians of all stripes became the target of an ICAC investigation, they would just step aside from any senior roles/bloated stipends they may have had until the final findings were handed down, and Bob's your uncle. So, for Gladys to quit the top job, and hightail it straight out of Parliament altogether must mean that she knows they've got a "gotcha moment". She is not exactly crowing that she is innocent, after insisting for the last 12 months that "my personal conduct is not a focus of the ICAC". Er, sorry mate, but it is - and you've been fooling yourself if you didn't think so. For God's sake, everybody already knows that ICAC had been bugging your personal phone (and probably your house), so why would you assume that that stopped just because "I stuffed up"? It didn't. And why would she keep her secret lover secret in the first place if she was confident her own conduct had been all above board. That always had a pretty wiffy aroma about it from the off, and ICAC wasn't fooled. If it became common knowledge before the corruption allegations against Mr Maguire emerged, people would have thought "oh, the Premier's got a brand new boyfriend, good for her, move along". And oh, if the tabloid press are right, her current lover is no less than her personal lawyer, Arthur Moses SC, who represented her at ICAC last year, for crying out loud. You'd better drop her like a hot potato, Arfur.

People who hate rigourous watchdogs keep trotting out those really tired old lines that the ICAC is a "Star Chamber", a "Kangaroo Court" and the Inbred Tomato came up with a real doozy, likening it to the "Spanish Inquisition" - well I'm sorry folks, but that's exactly what it is - it's all those things and it's meant to be. The hallowed Rules of Evidence in a court of law do not apply at ICAC public hearings, the burden of proof is always "the balance of probabilities" and QC's acting as Counsel Assisting are there for the express purpose of tying you up in sado-masochistic knots in the witness box. And it's not as if any of this is at all new or novel - the ICAC has a long and proud history of destroying corrupt politicians' careers. And it don't matter what side of the aisle you sit on. The word "independent" means plenty here. Former Labor Party powerbrokers Eddie Obeid and Ian McDonald both know this of course, much to their chagrin, having done serious time down at Long Bay after some polite inquiries by the ICAC - and Eddie's just about to do some more behind bars. Jesus, Mary & Joseph, folks are still looking for that Grange that former Liberal Premier Fatty O'Farrell (still on the gravy train as the Australian High Commissioner to India) swears black & blue that he can't recall ever drinking. Might have seen the bottle in question at some stage in proceedings, y'know, yr Honour, the Penfolds reputation and all that, but never saw it open and if a drop of it ever passed Fatty's lips then it must have been a very forgettable vintage or a corked bottle. It doesn't matter a jot to the ICAC whether the corruption involves many millions of dollars or is miserably petty, it's still dirty work. Back in the day, Labor MP and former rugby league player Paul Gibson was the gift that kept on giving for us reporters, accused by a well known Kings Cross crim, Louis Bayeh, of taking all sorts of bribes and kickbacks and gladly accepting a free all-expenses-payed über-luxe Fiji holiday with his secret lover (a fact also unknown at the time) - a former sports minister. Turns out Bayeh, who's done long yards in the jailhouse, was bullshitting, but Gibbo did go to the South Pacific unbeknownst to his wife or children, and according to the ICAC Commissioner at the time "I find myself utterly unable to have any confidence whatsoever in the truth or reliability of anything said by Gibson when it conflicts with the evidence of any other witness, other than Bayeh."

ICAC has no fear nor favour of or for anyone, they work on the "how long is a piece of string" principle, and will pursue corrupt servants of the State for as long as it takes. And what a shocker of the Ruby Princess to say that the announcement of an ICAC public hearing into her conduct "could not have come at a worse time". Your are dead wrong there Gladys, it could not have come at a better time...it just goes to show that no matter what shitshow might be going on around them, the ICAC is still there toiling away at their vitally important and essential work. Plainly, corruption is the number one killer of The Miracle of Democracy. So, it doesn't take a Rhodes Scholar to work out why ScoMo and his ragbag mob of reprobates and recalcitrants are scared shitless by the prospect of an anti-corruption body with teeth coming to Canberra. Or why the Tory Govt. in South Australia has just stripped the ICAC there of its powers to investigate politicians. I won't even mention the name of the outgoing self-exiled leader of the NSW Country Party, Pork Barrellaro, as he's very litigious.

The rise of a 39-year-old hard-right God Botherer to the Premiership of NSW is for another time, but suffice to say it's a self-fulfilling prophecy for those 'moderates' within the Liberal Party who have been warning for years now that the party is in real and present danger of being taken over by evangelical extremists.

Be afraid, very afraid.