HoWARd is described as behaving like he is drunk with power in the Senate. I agree. When drunk, many men become licentious and promiscuous looking for someone or something they can have sex with… pulse and consent optional. On one such drunken, power fuelled rampage John and Brendan bought the promisekeeper Steve Fielding a Long Slow Comfortable Screw Up Against the Wall. And Steve drank it.

I am beyond surprise at how cheaply Senator Steve Fielding sold his vote to allow the government to have their Higher Education Support Amendment (Abolition of Compulsory Up-front Student Union fees) Bill 2005.

Lyn Allison’s push for changes to existing legislation must have really had the numbers in parliament and I now understand why the conscience vote wasn’t prioritised for this year. HoWARd (and Nelson) had to have something bright and shiny to offer Steve. Family First is clear about it’s policy on abortion.

It seems HoWARd et al have tired of the old Senate slut Barnaby, and a new rentboy has emerged in Steve Fielding.

Steve Fielding – we know what your are and now we know what you are worth.

I’m going to rejoice when the conscience vote finally comes and all sorts of people remember the self-determining women that are their mothers, sisters, nieces, cousins, girlfriends, wives and mistresses.

Then it will be Steve who? Family First what?

A Senator who can’t or won’t be accountable deserves to be irrelevant.

Original image from here

Last night GetUp hosted a meetup in Sydney.

I went along. There were less people than I would have thought could be attracted to a movement such as GetUp in Sydney.  Admittedly, we were half an hour late and yesterday was an unseasonably grim, rainy night.

What surprised me was the age demographic. The GetUp team were the youngest people in the room by decades. The where-are-the-youth theme informed my entire evening. We listened to David, Jeremy, Toby and Lachlan.

Coming in late, I’m not sure what we missed, so by the time we were broken into groups of eight to brainstorm ideas for making GetUp bigger, better and faster, my contribution came down to ways of engaging youth in the alternative political debate. I have grand desires, but few ideas.

Inspired I take it upon myself to do some qualitative research.  I seek out the 20 year old girlchild.  For the 2.3 minutes that I had her attention she tells me that,

"Placards and protesting and feminism and left-wingedness is just so 80’s…Young people don’t care mama." 

"Why don’t you care? What has to happen for you to care? What would radicalise you?" I ask.

Girlchild’s answer, "Can I use your car?" 

It’s about getting their attention.  Now how do we keep it?

  

Images scanned from last nights meetup handout 

Meeting with 19,999 like-minded people. 
Belmore Park, Sydney Australia.

Click for full size sedition! 

The poultry industry has called for John Howard to eat duck in public to highlight the message that Australian poultry is safe from bird flu.

John Millington, the manager of Luv-A-Duck at Nhill in Victoria, says the Prime Minister should follow the lead of other countries in reassuring consumers.

“The prime minister in Turkey, he ate chicken salad at a traditional dinner to break the daily fast of ramadan, and that was really to show his confidence in the control efforts by the authorities in Turkey. So what we need now is our prime minister to do the same thing. Sit up heartily to a duck dinner.”

While our PM sits down to one formerly feathered feast, why not two?

I propose that a more suitable dish to be served to our PM is crow.

Adding weight to the groaning table of his statements that have been proved wrong is WorkChoices and the Anti-terrorism Bill 2005.

“Truth is absolute, truth is supreme, truth is never disposable in national political life” – John Howard, 25 August 1995.

Image from here