Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Gerard Henderson, Piers Akerman, and life at the cracked record ball ...



(Above: examples of a cracked record. The top one is easy to spot, but for the bottom one you have to look for a cracked edge. Sure it means all you have to do is skip the deformed, derailed first part of the grooves. And sure you miss vital information at the start of the tune, but that's the nature of a cracked record).

Today's column on Gerard Henderson has been cancelled, owing to a deep sense of ennui, tedium, and existential boredom.

For the (cracked) record, Henderson manages three mentions of John Howard, the first in his seventh par, and otherwise produces for the (cracked) record his usual rote recycling of his views on the young and the unemployed, which can best be summarised as an account of the many ways the economy needs more check out chicks and retail hands working for starvation wages. Unless they happen to get work as kitchen hands or domestic servants.

You can read in Fair Work laws are not helping the young and other unemployed how the evil federal government is standing in the path of the god given right of entrepreneurs to screw young workers to the bone as a form of self-improvement for the bone lazy idlers as well as doing great things for the economy. Throw in a couple of million for banker and real estate in Sydney can start booming again.

I think I could recite in my dreams - oh alright my nightmares - Henderson's standard cracked record on the plight of small business, without ripe young things to pluck.

The evidence indicates the re-regulation of the labour market has not reduced - and probably has contributed to - unemployment among unskilled Australians. This is not surprising since the reintroduction of unfair dismissal legislation is a disincentive to small businesses taking a chance with low-skilled workers, whether young or mature.

This is of course code for small businesses taking on low-skilled workers as waiters or bar hands, withholding entitlements, not paying full wages, calling them in for an hour or so as it suits, or otherwise screwing them royally, with or without a suitable jelly, depending on whether the young worker might complain or there's someone to hand who might care, or even do something about it.

Manufacturers of KY jelly are already lamenting a potent loss of income.

The Prime Minister and his colleagues are busy bagging the opposition finance spokesman, Barnaby Joyce. They should listen to Peter Walsh, the successful finance minister in the Hawke government, who warned last week the MUA's recent industrial victory could lead to a wages breakout of a kind that devastated Gough Whitlam's Labor government in 1974.

Oh dear, somebody else indignant about the bagging that Barnaby has been copping? It's not just Tory Maguire saying leave poor Barnaby alone?

So what about Peter Walsh, that sage and insightful man? Not above raising Gough Whitlam's government as a boogey man. Yet again. Boo! Ha, got ya.

Would it be this Peter Walsh?

At a campaign meeting in rural NSW during the 1980 general election, Walsh answered a speculative question about the possible introduction of a capital gains tax by a Hayden Labor government. To employ Abbott's formula, Walsh was "honest and authentic".

But the consequent speculation led to a political debacle as the Coalition claimed Labor would tax the family home. Ultimately, this contributed to Bill Hayden's defeat.

As veteran NSW Labor senator Tony Mulvihill put it at a subsequent party post mortem: "Peter Walsh chased a loose ball outside the off stump.
(Stephen Loosely, Loose lips could sink Coalition ship).

Ah yes, but that was back in the day when Peter Walsh could match Barnaby Joyce, before he learned to imitate a clam.

These days he makes Barnaby Joyce sound like a moderate.

Because these days, you see, Peter Walsh can be found here campaigning relentlessly like a cracked record at the Lavoisier Group? On and on about climate change, and how it was so much better in his day, and how the world is falling apart, and so on and on and on ...

What is it about cracked records? Why do they go on and on hitting the same crack, and skipping the rest of the record?

Then it occurred to me that young people probably don't have a clue about cracked records. Because they were in their prime back in the days of the 78 rpm shellac discs which could actually crack. After the LP came along, skips in tracking were mainly due to scratches. Pretty hard to scratch an mp3.

But I can think of no finer example of a cracked record than Piers Akerman as he gets heated up again, like a rather large balloon or blimp in Camel gas and other warmist nonsense.

I have recently proposed a thesis, that should it be accepted as a viable subject, will conclusively prove that global warming is due in its entirety to the hot air emanating from the fat owl of the remove. Yep if we could just stop all the carbon emissions spilling from Akker Dakker we could avoid that 'great big new tax' and enter a new ice age.

Akker Dakker is indignant that methane produced by domestic camels will be part of calculations for a nation's carbon footprint, but not feral camels.

Shocking! And I hear that scientific emissions from domesticated respected scientists won't be counted either, whereas the farts and belches coming from the wild feral ranting in Akker Dakker's column will be included in the total amount of hot air vented on a yearly basis. What a perversion of truth and justice.

No wonder global warming is a fraud! When you distort the figures by including Akker Dakker's emissions, suddenly Australia becomes the biggest emitter on the planet, per capita or in toto.

Now the cynics and frauds and smug bastards amongst us will no doubt ask what makes Akker Dakker such an expert on the science of global warming, able to regurgitate opinions, views and insights on a cracked record daily basis.

It seems that he was asked to leave one school, and then didn't complete his final exams at another, and then began a career in journalism at The West Australian, before turning into a foreign correspondent, and becoming an editor. (you can read a lot more here at his very own wiki).

Sssh. Since science is a fraud, what use would anyone have for science, unless they're fraudsters?

As Dennis Hopper once famously noted in Speed:

A bomb is made to explode. That's it's meaning. It's purpose. Your life is empty because you spend it trying to stop the bomb from becoming. And for who? For what? You know what a bomb is, Jack, that doesn't explode? It's a cheap gold watch, buddy.

So it is with cracked records. Delivering the bombast.

Where a record is made to play, so that we can hear all kinds of different melodies, tunes and lyrics, a cracked record is made to repeat. That's it's meaning. It's purpose. Over and over.

There's simply no point in trying to stop a cracked record. Life is empty if it's spent trying to stop a cracked record from carrying on like a cracked record.

Sure life is also empty for the cracked record.

But they enjoy the sound they make.

Otherwise why would they keep on doing it?

Spin that platter again Mr D. J. We's in a groove, and we's gunna stick to it ...

2 comments:

  1. I'd pay to read this blog. Don't tell Rupert.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yair, just think of all the spiritual angst it saves me from not having to rationalise, in the spirit of unprejudiced equality, not reading the Hendersons, Akermans, Dolts and Devines, et al.

    Cheap at twice the price.

    ReplyDelete

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