Just did my eTax thing for the 07/08 financial year. Looked like I was in for a pretty big refund for a minute there.
Then I remembered I had a HECS debt.
…did I say ‘refund’?
Archive for the 'Australia' Category
Sometimes I get a bit riled up and do a bit of a dissertation on some current affair or other. It’s usually something that’s been in the media a while, usually to saturation point and I get a bit sick of that and feel compelled to share my oh-so-unique insights on it.I would do this more but I usually just can’t be bothered; I’m not quick enough on the uptake to get my thoughts into some coherent form. This happened with the Bill Henson thing and it was a bit of a post script when I actually got around to writing something. Even then it was a bit half-arsed.
But the issue has raised its head again after Art Monthly published a very tame image on the cover of a young girl who had no clothes on. A bit of a publicity stunt probably but they say it’s in protest of the furore that ensued after Henson’s work was confiscated from a Sydney gallery.
So I’d like to make two points about it while it’s still relevant. And they’re my opinions, which you can feel free to disagree with if you want.
The thing that annoyed me from the beginning about the whole debate over the images in question is that the frame of reference by which we were being asked to view the images was through the eyes of a paedophile. I don’t think it’s fair to impose a standard on the whole of society because a very small percentage may get the wrong idea about something. I don’t want to have to ask myself whether a p/phile would get his rocks off whenever I look at a picture on a wall. Who else would I have to be worried about? What would a murderer think? What would a foot fetishist think? What would a Liberal voter think? What would a [insert religious following here] think?
A fellow blogger made the point that nasty p/philes get off looking at ads for bathers in the Target catalogues. Yet there’s no call to ban department store publications. If the result is the same gratification from a fetish, why does one depiction have calls for it to be banned and not the other? People are becoming frantic whenever they see a bit of under-18 skin, almost as if they’re afraid p/philia may be contagious and they might catch it if they look at bare kiddy bums.
The second point I want to make, related to this is the way politicians try to speak for the entire population on a moral issue. Now, the PM, from what I’ve seen in my admittedly limited exposure to interviews on the topic, has at least prefaced his comments by saying they’re his personal views. He said Henson’s images were ‘revolting’, from memory. It’s a shame he feels that way. I’d hate for him to see my daughters’ bums and say they’re revolting. How can you say the depiction of a certain thing is revolting yet not say the thing itself is.
Anyway, Mr Nelson, who doesn’t even represent a majority of Australian voters since his party lost the last election (a fact they still seem to be having trouble coming to terms with), has said Art Monthly is sending a “two-fingered salute to the rest of society” as if it’s AM against Dr Nelson and his loyal, every-single-person-in-the-country posse.
It’s pathetic. I wish politicians, who are elected largely on their economic credentials, would just shut their fucking mouths (sorry, Gordon Ramsay is on TV right now) and leave the moralising to those qualified to impose their morals on society at large. By whom, I mean no one.
First there was the Australian version of the American version of Idol. Then we had Ice Skating with People Who Have Been On TV, which nobody watched because we don’t really ice skate much in this harsh, hot land of ours. This was followed by Dancing with People You’ve Heard Of and So You Think You Can Dance Even Though You’re Not Famous, the rules of which were slightly broken by Rhys “Elf” Bobridge, who was already a professional performer, having appeared in a TV series and in sellout live shows all around the country. He got away with it though by being famous only to girls under the age of eight.
But I digress. TV networks are scraping the barrel of the performance/knockout genre, with Seven recently subjecting us to Battle of the Groups of Bad Singers (I mean if I wanted to see amateurs who can barely sing, doing bad numbers that were neither written nor arranged for ensemble performance, I’d go to an eisteddfod).
So, in an effort to play my part for the discerning viewer, I’d like to pitch some suggestions to TV execs. We can discuss terms later.
- So You Think You Can Write A Novel, in which contestants must write a new chapter every week, to be read out in front of a screaming crowd and panel of judges. Of course, each chapter must be edited to fit into the 90 seconds of performance time given to each contenstant.
- Gardening With The Stars: a bit like the celebrity segment of Burke’s Backyard, only competitive, with contestants having to produce a crop of veges, plant a native garden, and strike a fruit tree from a cutting
- Australian Flirt in which the judges and presenters are probably more likely to win
- Battle of the Abstract Impressionists. A group of painters must produce a work based on a subject of the judges’ choosing each week. Bonus, adults-only episode screens after 9.30 pm in week six. Yes, life drawing
- Train Surfing with the Stars. I’m really excited about this one. Given the risky nature of the activity can I suggest we get Daryl Somers, Sam Newman, Will Anderson, the Australia-wide presenters of ACA and TT. Oh, and the cast of Home and Away
- So You Think You Can Sleep. Surely it would be better than those late-night infomercials. Who wouldn’t want to see the semi-final, in which a travel agent from Queensland loses out to production assistant from Tassie after a Horlicks-related lactose-intolerance-causes-late-night-farting-and-insomnia incident
- Chess with the Stars. Riveting viewing, this one. They’d have those special clocks. Sandra Sully would be an early casualty, finding it mentally taxing having to think more than one move ahead
- So You Think You Can Whittle: these twelve rocking chairs on this porch… will eventually become one
- Self-immolation With The Stars. There’s just not enough kerosene really, is there.
What have you got, people?
So where was I? Yeah, that’s right, I went to Melbourne then came home and sort of just fell asleep.
Melbourne was great. Good to be back in my home state. I don’t know what to make of myself sometimes because I don’t often feel very Australian and despite, or probably because of, my football-filled youth, I can no longer stand the sport, or the constant news coverage it gets, or the nugget fans (nugget fans being a majority sub-species of fans in general; I know there are some quite normal, respectable, educated people who are not nuggets but are, paradoxically, football fans) who can talk about nothing else. Yet I still feel some kind of connection with Victoria. I’m not sure if it’s the landscape, the people, the weather, or the fact that, unlike South Australia, it doesn’t have it’s head stuck up its own arse (just my crude way of saying that South Australia is way too parochial, introspective, isolated (not only geographically) hostile to external influence (especially from Victoria) and has an inflated, ‘we’re as good as the other states’ complex that the other states don’t have because they’re not secretly worried that they aren’t).
So yeah, there’s that.
And I seem to have realised just how deeply entrenched I am in my current rut. Not enjoying the job and have had a sick kiddie, which means waking up at all hours of the night and being generally very tired, which kind of sucks. I’ve never had the SADs (the lack of light thing) but am wondering if there might not be something to it this winter.
And I’ve been shocked to notice how vague I have been of late. Only last night, after a day of staring blankly at a screen, I put in my headphones, stepped outside, and while crossing the road, forgot to look and stepped out in front of a motorbike. Then, as I was getting on the train, I put my ticket in the validator… and forgot to take it out again.
Where the fuck was my brain?
It’s not often I feel compelled to devote a post to a bus journey but the trip from Avalon airport into the city was an absolute doozie.
I’ve long had some kind of weird fascination for bus drivers, specifically coach drivers. On every school trip we went on, we’d call our bus driver Barry. The name just seemed to fit. I think we actually surprised a few of them by getting it right. But growing up in the 80s, when plane travel was still very much the domain of the elite, and living in a town that had its only rail service suspended, coach travel was in its heyday, with reclining seats, curtains and, on very special coaches, a VCR on which you may have been lucky enough to see such gems as Splash, Mr Mom or something equally as sanitised starring Robin Williams or Michael Douglas (of course, you’d see them on a television which was invariably attached with some kind of RF lead to said VCR; I can’t imagine a load of coach travellers being excited by watching the heads of a top-loading VCR spin around through that little translucent window. “Oooh, Tom Hanks is in there!”).
Back then, coach drivers had that air of professionalism; they were, after all, ‘Captains’ of their roadcraft (as opposed to aircraft or seacraft). They had the tanned skin, the winning smile, the carefully blow-dried hair, the neatly pressed and over-starched shirt, and yet, like their truckie cousins, they still wore shorts to work.
I think our driver from Avalon to Melbourne must have been one of those shiny Coach Captains of the 80s as he was eager to point out some of the places of interest between the airport and the city, along the lines of:
“Out here at Avalon, some of the scenes from Mad Max were shot.
“We’re currently travelling on Highway 1, which circumnavigates Austraya. Out to the right is Point Wilson, where they test all the ammunition.
“We’re now passing by the town of Little River, pop-y’lation of about 6000. This is where the famous Little River Band originated.
“We’re now passing the Werribee sewerage farm: 10,000 hectares that services the water treatment of Melbourne and the western suburbs. The farm is made up of 10 ponds, one to two hectares each. The first pond is covered and that supplies all the methane that is needed to power the plant.”
[I’ll leave that quote there, partly because he went on so long about it and partly because I’m having trouble reading my shorthand]“We’ll shortly be passing under Point Cook Road. At the end of Point Cook Road is Point Cook Airforce Base, which is now turned into a museum. If you ever get down to have a loogedit, it’s free admission to get in.”
Gold… all of it.
Thanks, Baz.
We had some Arnott’s assorted biscuits at work today. The girl I work with had her first teddy bear biscuit. Ever.
She took it from the tin and said “ooh, these look a bit dodge…” and I said “what, have you never had one before?”
And it’s not that she had been avoiding them all these years, she had just never heard of them.
How do you grow up in this country without ever having heard of teddy bear biscuits?
So, it’s out with the old and in with the new. Yes, it’s hard rubbish collection this week and we’ve put our old Prime Minister out on the kerb. I think it’ll be going into landfill before too long. Someone has already picked up Miss L’s old chair: the one with food stains, drink stains, spew stains, wee stains and, because it’s been in the shed for the last year, mould stains. (I’m sure whoever it was will figure out soon enough that you can’t actually take the cushion off to wash it.)
Nobody has picked up the old PM though. It’s stinky. And about as useful as all those 15″ CRT monitors lying all over the place. Actually, they could be useful: plug a STB into them and you have a small TV. Good for the bedroom.
The thing that slightly disturbs me is the number of Liberal politicians coming out of the woodwork saying Workchoices was too tough. Where were they when they were supposedly representing the best interests of the people in their electorate/country?
I get a sick feeling the more I think about how this country was run on the ideologies of one very smug, xenophobic, culturally bankrupt man. So the economy was strong. But who wants to live in a fucking economy? What happened to society? Community? I don’t think we’d be seeing pigs’ heads on stakes if someone a bit more enlightened and tolerant had been running the country for the last decade. Ditto the Cronulla riots.
It’s like waking up from an 11-year nightmare.
I remember after the last election coming into work on Monday morning and the collective feeling of deflation, defeatedness and just not knowing the fuck what the rest of the country must have been thinking… I was seriously considering a move to New Zealand.
Now, I’m as cynical a gen-Xer as you can get. When it comes to cultural cringe… I mean, I even hate the Australian cricket team. As a thirty-something gen-Xer, I’m old enough to remember Andrew Peacock, frustrated by Bob Hawke and then by Paul Keating, and the Libs looking around desperately, thinking “Shit, who the fuck can we put up as leader now?” They even tried Alexander for a few months before nobody else was available and they had to give it to the short, balding man with the speech impediment.
“But he’s a nob!” I thought.
And I still think that.
And I think, how does someone stay in a seat for 33 years? How complacent can people be? And now, on election night, I still wonder how nobs like Tony Abbott keep getting re-elected. Don’t you ever wonder that?
But despite the ingrained cynicism, I’m a little bit excitedabout the future, though I should say, I have been drinking.
Now I just have to find another job and then all will be right with the world.
I both admire and loathe Alexander Downer. I admire that he’s educated and articulate and very well able to make a point; however I loathe that he seems unable to do so without coughing up a torrent of ad hominem invective.
I was driving home tonight listening to PM. (Not to the PM: to the ABC radio program) With an election on in a minute there was the daily recap of who said what about whom and why that who or whom is not fit to run the country. You know the drill.
Anyway, today Alexander, talking of Mr Rudd, came out with this:
The contradictions in his policies, the platitudes, the clichés that just roll off the lips of Mr Rudd every day, the sort of cocky little smirk with a bunch of clichés and slogans, you know, at the end of the day I don’t think that’s going to wash with the Australian public.
Platitude? Cliché? Anyone?
The budget has been handed down and it looks like I could save the princely sum of $14 on my weekly tax bill!
How generous.
That might cover about half the difference of what I was paying for petrol two years ago.
