Just as long as you had a shower afterwards, your memorable first shouldn’t do too much damage.

Slightly off-topic and onto the said purpose of the demonstration:

The Leonid Brezhnev Prize for Economic Excellence has to go to Treasury and to Social Security for their brilliant work in neglecting to tidy up their sloppy tax-collecting procedures but instead creating a labour shortage in some farming areas by cracking down on grey nomads earning a little money to pay for their caravan trips by picking fruit and vegetables. Bloody brilliant! It stands to reason, employing 457-visa workers to take their earnings out of Australia must boost the Australian economy, mustn’t it?

And what’s this I hear about Veterans’ Affairs cracking down on pensioners for doing too much volunteering? Quick Norm, get back onto the lounge, crack a tinny and switch the TV on …. they’re on to you!

Anyone having trouble making end meet while living on a pension might like to look at Lorikeet’s list at comment No.25 on Andrew Bartlett’s topic “‘average’ incomes” at http://andrewbartlett.com/blog/?p=2021#comments

those protesting taxi-drivers have got a lot to answer for!! They should be ashamed of theirselves. What have they unleashed?

Next Dr Nelson’ll bring cans of dogfood into the Chamber along with fizzy kiddy drinks and PINK champagne, or perhap some ciggie butts he found in some 3am gutter. Does he SNIFF the gutters? Are there QUOKKAS in the gutters? Is Ted Baillieu an evil Communist who lounges around at Portsea? These are the burning questions of our times; and the press is doing a superb job in laying it all before us for our sober judgement and due consideration.

What did PJK mean by “throwing the switch to vaudeville?

http://www.liberal.org.au/about/documents/MoreSupportforPensioners.pdf

The Howard announcements copied by Rudd can be found here

Just so you know I wasn’t making it up!

Cheers

On “The Insiders”, today, the panel strongly agreed that something had actually been done for pensioners in the recent budget. Of course, it was Wayne Swann’s problem for not having “sold it”. No mention of the journalists role to “report it”.

Australian established media is dangerously crappy as you say, Graham Bell, @39.

PS I warned about this on Monday. I had so hoped he wouldn’t go through with it…

Maybe they can perform their arsehat stunts together and save us some pain?

Nice theory, but it winds up costing a lot more -

Oh no it doesn’t.

A narrower example would be with Veterans’ Affairs pensions - where by putting ALL war veterans on a form of income support, such as Service Pension modified so as to allow some real and unpunished participation in the workforce, would actually save money for the economy as a whole. For a start, the Rorts-for-Rich-Doctors system of determining pensions would vanish [and help ease the doctor shortage] and highly-trained public service and statutory authority personnel would be released for more productive duties in places where they are desperately needed …. and that is only one of the huge savings that would be made by having a fairer, simpler and more efficient system.

Andrew Bartlett [the real one - on 28]:

This is why I am disgusted at calling Australia a “democracy” [wtf??] while we have an oligopoly news media that resembles that of a dictatorship …. I’ve been in a few and that is no exaggeration. Democracy cannot function without the free flow of public information. We are fed a diet of infotainment and advertorials and whatever “news” manages to slip through is so filtered that it deserves an evaluation of C3 or lower.

Why the hell should our elected decision-makers have to perform monkey-tricks just to have an issue brought before more than a few dozen citizens? While at the same time, the “news” media is chock-a-block full of the stupid antics of useless bimbos and dimwit ‘celebrities’ that we don’t want to hear about.

If we nationalized the news media, we could not possibly be worse off!

b.t.w., hadn’t noticed any change in the quality of your blogging at all since the election; did I miss something?

However it also means an early election (and thus earlier extinction if unsuccessful). If the 2007 election had been a double-d, FF would still have not won in Victoria (but might have been in the mix in SA and maybe one other state).

Leinad - I’m not sure if that’s what I’m saying. People can do stunts if they like - major or minor parties. I’d prefer a slightly more discerning media coverage, and a willingness to ignore empty photo ops from all quarters. But the media have to sell papers/get ratings too, and I accept that earnest dissertations of solid policy solutions is never going to grab the interest of most people, so I don’t expect things to change.

Most stunts are harmless (incl the one that’s the subject of this post), and the people doing them have to weigh up for themselves whether they think they’ll do themselves more harm than good.

Although I do wish the media wouldn’t let party leaders get away with empty photo ops done SOLELY for the TV news shots during election campaigns using the excuse of releasing a dot point style policy.

(Thanks also Kim - or whoever does these things - for deleting (the original) comment 5. (although I did only ask for a change to the commentors’ name - makes some of the following comments appear a bit odd deleting the whole thing - not least Sam C’s at the (new) 5). I’ll be fielding slurs and cheap shots on that thing for the rest of my life I imagine, so the more times I can actually have a mildy correct version of reality appear on the ever-Googleable intertubes, the better.