Toxic Peter

Australian Bloody Mindedness!

I find it interesting, and passing strange that a species with such a short memory span and even shorter tempers has spread so far across the earth’s surface and even considers itself the pinnacle of evolution.

Let us consider just a few events of this century and how we, as a species, have reacted.

Firstly, here in Australia, in the distant past, we had a communications network, run by the Government. It ended up being called Telstra and in private hands and in competition with a foreign entity known as Optus!

Telstra was far to close, in people’s minds, to the Government and so came in for a lot of criticism from the ordinary communicator or consumer. So much so that a lot of people left Telstra and decided to trust the Optus group. Because it was, and still is, either/or!

The Telstra service was poor, the Telstra personel were unhappy and Telstra was – well – it just wasn’t up to standard! And this was a decades-long attitude and people hated Telstra.

Optus was new and bright and shiny.

Then it had a hack from outsiders and inconvenienced a lot of its customers. And a year later it had a 12 hour breakdown which took it out of action accross Australia. Leading to screams of outrage.

So much so that many people immediately began leaving the inefficient and apparently troubled Optus, returning to Telstra whose past faults have suddenly been forgotten.

Sooooo – let us now look at the political world within Australia.

For the first eight years of this century, we had a Government which failed in humanity AND in economics Then for five years we had a Government which did reasonbly well with its humanity and some brilliant economic work. Being human, there were a couple of alleged mistakes made and so for nearly a decade we had yet another Government which became increasingly incompetent at both! Finally, for the past couple of years we have had a Government which is trying to repair all the damage.

Yet our attention-span is so short that we are already beginning to long for a change away from such competence.

Through it all, we, as Australian Homo Sapiens Sapiens, have ignored the final effects of Climate Change in pursuit of this week’s bottom line.

The past is forgotten in favour of the ever-changing NOW!

The Future is ignored because of the apparent safety of the NOW.

Could it be that we ARE the pinnacle of evolution? Because Evolution will need to begin all over again by the time we have stopped causing Climate Change.

I am beginning to see a pattern here – – –

Can you?

The Mike Pezzullo puzzle

Let me ramble a little.

My 78.7 year old brain is a little slow at times nowadays

Sometimes I wonder about the Why’s of politics and political life. I remember a wise person once told me to always follow the money.

So I am puzzling about where the money is when I read that ‘The secretary of the Home Affairs Department, Mike Pezzullo, is asked to step down as an investigation is conducted into text messages he is alleged to have sent to Liberal Party powerbroker, Scott Briggs.’

I see no money being involved here, at least not on the surface.

The text messages appear to have been leaked so that raises the question of who benefits from this leaking. Possibly the leaker and probably the recipient of the leaks. In this case, Channel 9 and its associated newspapers; The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review.

All taking advantage of a secret whistleblower!

Of course, with my rambling and wandering mind, speaking of whistle-blowing, I wonder if civil servants protecting their own arses is why whistleblower Richard Boyle is being prosecuted for disclosing the wrongdoings of the ATO!

And if David McBride remains in the court system because his whistleblowing of material which later formed the basis of “The Afghan Files”, a 2017 ABC expose revealing allegations of misconduct by Australian special forces in Afghanistan, including possible unlawful killings embarrasses some high ranking public servant somewhere in Canberra.

Perhaps, and this is where my old braincells begin to wander down the conspiracy trail, perhaps there is a group of Public ‘Servants’ in Australia committed to protecting their own jobs, reputation and remuneration! They give their elected ‘masters’ the information needed to run the country. Could it be that our elected Ministers are being fed false and selfserving information by their trusted Departmental Secretaries?

Have our leading Public Servants become confused about just where the line should be drawn between their own interests and the interests of the Nation they have promised to serve.

Perhaps we can ignore the money trail in this case and simply follow the trail of self-interest!

Let’s Buy Australia

A country is managed by its Government. Dictatorship, Monarchy, Democracy, whatever. The Government is Governing.

It is there to ensure the safety first of its rulers; elected, assumed or hereditary. Secondly, the rest of the population.

To do this, the Rulers appoint subordinates to do the day to day tasks. Defence, both external and internal. External defence is an obvious task but Internal defence has many facets.

Keeping the populace in order is the overarching directive.

In short there are four major divisions of Governmental action.
Making sure the subjects are employable through education. Making sure they are healthy so as they can continue to be employed. Keeping internal Law and Order. Ensuring that the economic units receive enough for their labour to keep them happy.

This is normally done by a Public Service.

A number of honest, dedicated people who have the well-being of the Nation and its Rulers at heart.

That is how it happens in most countries and nations.

In Australia the public service was ‘out-sourced’. The repercussions are still not fully understood but one consequence is now known, although it is being downplayed!

Our Public Service was just sold, from one private contractor to another without reference to those who were once the Rulers of Australia.

And what was it worth? After a decade of Coalition self-interest? After a decade of selling all of Governance off to private enterprise? Just what is the Nation of Australia worth on the open market?

ONE LOUSY DOLLAR!

The End of the Human World

It seems the human world is in great danger from three events and three people.

Events

The Climate will change and make much of the Earth’s surface uninhabitable by humans.

The economic (and military) dynamics of the world are changing and China will overtake the USA in dominance which will not be catastrophic unless the USA becomes belligerent! (Hint – They already have!)

Learning, Science and Commonsense will become less important as conspiracy theories grow and a new age of Global witch hunts begins.

People

Putin, Xi and Trump who all, like many dictators before them, will be trying to destroy their world as they find their own mortality is inescapable! ‘How dare others go on living if I can’t!’

Oh, and there are those who consider me an optimist!

A Perceived ALP Strategy

The Albanese ALP Government is suffering a lot of criticism just now. There is a groundswell of disapproval because it has not yet ‘done anything’ about a number of items which need funding. Mainly ‘Welfare’ in its various forms but housing is also a major thorn in its side.

The big solution to all these problems are the looming ‘Stage Three Tax Cuts’ imposed upon the Australian population by the previous Tory Government. The Party of always lower Taxation! The fact that those ‘Lower Taxes’ are all smoke and mirrors is irrelevant. What really matters is that the headlines can be parlayed into election catch phrases. Ones that have worked in the past!

Taxes aside, one major flaw in the previous Government was its lack of credibility. It lied, it schemed, it broke election promises, it was corrupt! As a part of the drive to reach the Government benches the Labor Party promised to implement the ‘STTCs’ because it had voted for them when wedged with the choice of no tax relief at all for lower waged Aussies.

We, the poor deluded voters, thought that meant Albo would go around breaking promises because it seemed the sensible thing to do!

But would it be sensible?

Come the next election, the Great Potato Lizard of Dickson would be able to stand up and say, with complete honesty, and no sense of shame, ‘Labor breaks promises and Labor are the party of increasing taxes!’

By biting the bullet and holding to his election promise, Albo risks losing a number of electors to other very small socialist parties and to the Greens! The Greens may be three to four elections away from surpassing the Extreme Right Wing Coalition so that is a problem for next decade.

The ‘Teals’ are a small group of Tories who worry about the climate and will attract some of the Liberal Party but have no effect of the National Party. By failing to increase the Government coffers by dumping the STTCs the ALP really risks very little because politics is, in most cases, about the long game.

If the ALP loses the next election, having junked a whole lot of Coalition policies which the ALP said it wouldn’t do, then the Coalition has a green light to dump everything Labor does in the next two years. So winning the next election is VERY important.

It seems Albo has used his political nouse and looked at the big, long term picture and decided that the short term pain of holding onto the Tax cuts for the wealthy parasites is worth it to be able to go to the next election asking the permission of the electorate to remove those tax cuts in return for huge benefits in the ‘Welfare’ or Social Security areas.

Totally negating the usual lying Tory election pitch.

AND there is no guarantee that we need to wait for two full years for a Federal election. The past three elections have been delayed as long as possible by Governments which expected to lose. It is possible that the next election could be held early by a Government which expects to win! Especially if the Bald Solanum tuberosum is still the Leader of the Opposition halfway through 2024!

So, yes, yell and scream about a Labor Government which appears to be failing those who voted for them. Ignore the fact that we are living in an historically difficult period brought about by Tory Governments which have raped and pillaged our Common Wealth for 25 of the past 30 years.

And expect to see real, helpful honest results by 2026! Ones which have been chosen by the Electorate (You and Me!)

NSW Election Today

A Thought on Capitalism

Armenian Genocide – Australian Genocide

An interesting article which, although it does not mention Australia, applies to Australia.

Especially in our current discussion of the ‘Voice’. –

I make no other comment. I shall leave that to the reader.

https://www.sapiens.org/archaeology/armenian-genocide/

The Wisdom Of Katharine Murphy

Albo Hits New Low – Eats Icecream in Public!

The Demise of the Coalition in Australia

For thousands of years the average person was owned. By Kings and by Nobles and by the Church of the Day.

We read of wars and invasions and the glory of war. Yet many average people were killed in those wars which only served to change the survivors’ owner.

The Christian Church created a small problem in that it preached that all people were God’s children and over the centuries, this preached equality became a problem for the owners of people. Slavery became a bad thing and so wages had to be paid and job mobility allowed so that there was an appearance of freedom for the masses.

This was accelerated as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace. New skills were needed so education became something the State sponsored. Of course under the facade, it was simply so the ‘Bosses’, as they had now become, could gain access to the skills the newly educated brought to their enterprises.

Yet the thinking remained much the same. Subsistence wages for the workers.

Eventually, throughout the industrialising world, workers became organised and despite a number of bloody encounters between the workers and the paid enforcers of the will of the Bosses, a Trades Union Movement gathered momentum and eventually became a political force.

In the twentieth century politics became a fight between organised ownership and organised labour.

Now, in the twenty-first century we are living through another major change in the political balance.

Because of the success of both the Bosses and the Workers, the natural balance of the world has changed and we are now faced with changes in the climate which are both man-made and potentially cataclysmic.

The Workers and the Owners are suddenly on the same side because that is the world all our leaders, both left and right, know. There is an inbuilt conservatism among the leaders of both. And those leaders, in the main, are older people. They can no longer see past the next election cycle for this is where their power lies. The old Tory Club is dying off; literally!

Yet a majority of electors are now in the younger generations. The generations which will live through the consequences of previous generations’ thoughtless drive for individual wealth.

Here in Australia, there is a major divide between the climate change denying Right and the reluctant to change Left. The Right-wing voters in the younger cohort are changing faster than their equivalent cohort on the Left. Sometime soon, possibly within a decade, we will see the right wing of politics, Liberal, Nationals And the Right of the ALP, completely collapse as its adherents die off. What we will be left with is an interesting mix.

The Bosses will move their support to the Left and so strengthen them for a while. At the same time, many of the younger people will move to environmentally friendly political groupings. Probably the Greens unless a new, similar group appears. The important background events will be the continued rise of anarchic Social Media and the demise of the Big Business-owned Mainstream Media and the continued climate catastrophe.

The Political fight in Australia and probably throughout the Western World, will become a fight between Organised Industry and Organised Climate Changers.

Industry will organise to, as they see it, protect Industry and the Economy and keep the world of humanity running as it always has..

The Climate Changers will be fighting to reverse the heat death of humanity.

Why the Libs Think They Lost

The 60 page report by Brian Loughnane and Jane Hume into the loss of the election by the Coalition was released today.

Amongst the fluff of charts and statistics and personal opinions about polling, what was really interesting was what was NOT said or reported on. In a 60 page report there should be room to talk about the bleedin’ obvious!

There was talk about women (33 mentions) and ethnic or multicultural groups especially the Chinese (16 mentions). Yet there was only one mention of climate change (p36); only two references to religion (Pp 16 & 40 – each time as a reference to ‘religious liberty’) and a single reference to ‘integrity’ (p36).

I don’t know that we, the common Aussie, are allowed to remember as far back as the Morrison years (3 mentions only) yet I seem to remember that integrity was one of the electoral problems for the Coalition.

Along with the fact the Morrison had magnanimously refrained from shooting women and had assisted in covering up bad behaviour towards women by his associates and staff, often with our, taxpayer’s, millions!

Then there was the Hillsong problem. It seems to have totally by-passed those who did this report that the electorate is no longer a religious herd. In fact the numbers who profess a religion in Australia has been falling for decades and is now on the brink of becoming a minority!

As a Proud Woke Aussie, I see this report as doing nothing for the future electoral success of the Coalition.

That is stating the bleedin’ obvious!

How Was Optus Hacked?

The Government is being very quiet about the responsibilty for the OPTUS data hacking.

They kept the old landline rules when the mobile phone era began – you needed 100 points to get a land line, therefore you needed 100 points to get a mobile.

The difference was that landines were basically Government run (Telecom) and so they knew that simply sighting those documents was all that was necessary – and there wasn’t a space to record all the details on a database – cos there were none! It was all paper.

Then mobiles appeared and the old rules were applied (cos Government regulations) even though the mobile companies were NOT run by the Government.

So suddenly, with the advance in technology, the documents were being scanned and saved to a database no one had thought of as existing when the original rules were set. Once you have a big enough database it will always attract the criminal elements.

So the fault goes back to the Government!

Not any single Government. It was the Governmental Bureaucracy which was in charge of dealing with Government Acts, Legistlation and Regulations. The Public Service which also acted as the Memory of the Government.

Those Bureaucrats knew everything about how the system worked. They knew its strengths and weaknesses.

Then Governments began to dismantle the Public Service and there went the Bureaucratic memory.

The data being demanded and discarded became data which was keepable in databases at about the same time and consequential problems were not seen because those who would have known about them had been moved on to non-public service jobs.

So the fault was an unseen consequence of Malcolm Fraser’s cost-cutting which has continued to this day.

But it is easier for what remains of the Bureaucracy to blame Optus for the system failure in the biggest ‘Look over there’ exersize in some years!

Our elected representatives still haven’t a clue about the real causes because there is no Public Service Memory to tell them!

Morrisonites!