Grey Nomads

Posts Tagged ‘australian labor party’

We were back in Brisbane just a week when the Welsh, Red-Crested Back-stabber (Prime Minister Julia Gillard) called a Federal election. It gave us just enough time to update our electoral details but not enough time to form a new political party. I had planned to contest the next election under the banner of the “Grey Nomad Party”. This will be the first election where the average age of the politicians is lower than mine. I feel the need to stand, if only to increase the average.

With so many Grey Nomads roaming around Oz it’s about time we had some decent representation.

I had plans to conquer the GFC, unemployment, the housing crisis, and Global Warming, to name just a few of the pressing issues.

With a rapidly aging population I was sure of winning some votes with my initiatives. Not all were original but perhaps it will be first time anyone had been so politically incorrect as to actually admit to them out loud.

As neither of the major political parties have actually come out and said what they stand for I thought I’d beat them to the post. So here are a few my intended policies:

Everyone over the age of 55 who is still working and owns their home outright, would be given a $200,000 credit (offer limited to one per household). Bugger giving everyman and his dog $900 to send straight to China or Taiwan in return for a shonky wide screen TV, or handing out bucks to insulate homes and electrocute young apprentices.

The credits would only be doled out if the recipients agree to quit work and either sell their home or rent it out for at least two years. They must then spend the credits on an Australia made caravan or campervan or mobile home and a fuel-efficient car or 4×4, one that runs on gas or used cooking oil. Having travelled to some very remote towns in the outback I have discovered that each and every one has at least one greasy spoon truck-stop diner, one fish and chip shop and one Chinese restaurant. So there is a guaranteed supply of used cooking oil.

This single initiative would cure most of Australia’s ills. It would free up jobs held by old farts that have not kept pace with technology, for the younger generation to jump straight into, as they already know everything. It would put thousands of homes into the rental market overnight. It would also bring employment to the outback, not only in the tourism industry, but in the shops and allied services too.

Then every citizen would be given free public transport vouchers. All buses would be replaced with natural gas busses such as those made in Brisbane. Overnight the pollution and traffic congestion in our major cities would evaporate while thousands of jobs would appear for bus drivers and engineers and technicians who design and build these buses. Parking police may need to retrain as bus drivers, but hey; that’s a small sacrifice to make.

I’d bring back nurses aids and offer a non-university based nursing course for all those who are missing out on their true vocation simply because they are not cut out to be university students. I’d make the patients the priority in health care.

On a similar vein, I would make psychometric analysis compulsory for all students in their last year of primary school and then, using the results, steer the students into an academic or trade based senior school according to their ability. It’s a waste of everyone’s time and resources trying to push round pegs into square holes. In the real world not everyone is a genius; no matter what their mother thinks. Having kids struggle to achieve a university degree simply to appease their parents’ ego, when they are not academically inclined, is not helping their self-esteem especially, when they fail. It is also a waste of taxpayers’ money when they ultimately drop out. Some kids would not benefit from staying in school beyond year ten when all they really want is to learn a trade. I would bring back technical high schools and increase apprenticeship funding to offset to costs and encourage more businesses to take on a budding tradesperon.

I would cancel all university courses that didn’t provide the graduates with a potential to become income earners. No more “I have a PhD in African Bongo Drumming…. Do you want fries with that?” Currently many are using our universities as expensive childcare facilities for their over indulged teenagers who don’t know what they want to be when they grow up. Let them grow up first. If they don’t know what they want to be by the time they leave high school, then perhaps a couple of years of national service might give them time to think about it while contributing to society instead of botting off it.

For truly gifted children, scholarships would be awarded for all levels of education. Also, to encourage them to reproduce they would be entitled to heavily subsidised childcare when they marry. The more educated a person is, the fewer children they produce, and sadly the inverse is also true.

If the politician were not trying to be so politically correct they would have noticed the “dumbing down” effect of our social security system years ago. Under my government, the cradle-to-grave social security recipients would not benefit by breeding like flies. More than two kids would result in a reduction in their handout not an increase. The rest of us limit our family size to match our financial ability to support them, the only people who have more than 3 or 4 kids these days are the ones living off taxpayers. Couples working for a living should be the ones encouraged to have more children. I would give them free childcare and paid maternity/parental leave for 6 months.

All incomes under $20K would be tax free, over that, there would be a flat rate of tax for everyone, rich and poor. Single income families will be allowed to split the income between the two partners and for every child they have, there would be a substantial tax deduction.

No able-bodied person under 21 would be eligible for unemployment benefits. Parents will be made responsible for the kids until they reach their majority. Then, if they still can’t find a job after their 21^st birthday there would always be the option of conscription. Both military and civil service would be offered to anyone unable to find a paying job. If you don’t want to enlist, you can always learn to drive a bus.

The single-parent benefit would be scrapped. You breed them; you feed them. The government would provide free childcare for all single parents so they can get jobs like the rest of us working mothers have done for years. We coped, so can you! With the above-mentioned initiatives, there would be plenty of jobs to apply for. Try learning to drive a bus.

This country has too many bureaucrats so I would reduce the levels of government from local, state and federal to just local and federal only. I’d cut out all the states and have just the one country, Australia; after all, we only have a mere 25 million citizens. This initiative would make the national curriculum and a national health care system a foregone conclusion with just one foul swoop of the red biro. That would also free up at least three Wednesday nights in winter for improved television viewing, as the “State of Origin” football series would become obsolete. There are, after all, only so many times I can bear watching a bunch of gorillas chasing a bundle of pigskin around a field whilst using it as an excuse to pound each other to a pulp, for an obscene amount of money.

We are such a complacent nation that the government had to make voting compulsory for fear we would all head to the beach in preference to the polling booth on election Saturday.

We Australian’s are so excited by this election that last week’s ‘Great Debate’ between the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition had to be rescheduled. It clashed with the final episode of ‘Master Chef’, a cooking show where contestant can be voted off the island for flambéing when they should have sauteed. They feared no one would tune into the debate so they brought it forward. Of course those who did watch it were bored to tears anyway, as it was less stimulating that watching the paint dry. The only thing people can remember of the whole event was that the Prime Minister has big ear lobes and the leader of the opposition has wing nut ears.

With only three weeks to go before the election, the campaigns have hit fever pitch. We are now being subject to hours of tedious political commercials each night, as the major contenders spend our hard earned taxpayer dollars to berate their opponents, over all manner of media, without actually enlightening us to their own policies.

So if you’ve lost your appetite for the major political parties, vote “one” for the Grey Nomad Party, I need a better retirement package; I’m sure $600K per year offered to all retiring Australian Prime Ministers should just about pay for a lifestyle to which I could become accustomed.

The changing winds and shifting sands of ones fortune are often caused by man-made errors in judgement, others by nature, sometimes it is by the decissions thust upon us by bureaucrats or worse still a committee thereof, but in Australia they are also likely to be created by the impact of an introduced species.

In the Australian vernacular “Back of Bourke” implies a very remote location. In the past four weeks we have been to the back of Bourke and beyond.

Six months ago, on Christmas Eve 2009, the town of Bourke was in the midst of one of it’s longest and most sever drought in years. The flat lands around Bourke had been in the grip of drought for almost 10 years. They were on the verge of evacuating the town as the sadly depleted water supply had all but dried up.

The next day, Christmas Day 2009 up to 100mm of rain fell as an Ex-tropical Cyclone tore across bringing the heaviest rain falls in a decade to centres including Nyngan, Coonamble and Bourke.

The big wet has brought good fortune to many in the outback. Apart from the obvious benefit to the farmers, almost every country town is booming from the influx of domestic tourism. The rains have encouraged many people to visit the outback to see the Darling River flowing again. The region has experienced an increase of over 30% in tourism.

Visitors are flocking to see South Australia’s Lake Eyre full of water and combining their voyage with trips up the Darling to NSW towns such as Lightning Ridge, Broken Hill and White Cliffs, and with visits to national parks such as Paroo-Darling, Gundabooka, Mutawintji, Kinchega and Mungo.

I made a poor judgement when I decided we would spend the night in Gundabooka National Park just 40km south of Bourke. We had spent the day enjoying the marvellous vistas of the red cliffs and gorges and thought we would camp in the park for the night. Of course when I made the decision I was unaware that it was to be the coldest June day in over 100 years and after we departed the campfire we had shared with two other travellers, Ken and Len, for the confines of our caravan, spent the rest of the night shivering. Although we had climbed into our beds fully clothed we could not keep warm. Being a National Park, we were forbidden from firing up the generator to power our heater and awoke to discover the temperature outside had plummeted to minus 4.1 degrees C and was minus 0.4 inside. But spare a thought for poor Ken and Len who had spent the night in tents.

As the crow flies, less than 300km south-west Bourke lies Wilcannia; a town that has seen an enormous shift in fortunes, it has benefited little from the boom in tourism, many drive through without stopping. Wilcannia had a rich and vibrant history. Once known as the “Queen City of the West”, it was the third largest shipping port in Australia boasting a population of over 3000 and 13 pubs in its hay day.

During the boom years of the 1880’s sandstone was quarried locally for the beautiful buildings many of which still stand today albeit in varies states of disrepair. Just over 120 years since those heady days, virtually the only people left in this dilapidated town are the remnants of the original inhabitants.

The traditional Aboriginal population, the Barkindji people have been calling vast areas in and around Wilcannia home for some 40,000 years. They had lived in sync with nature preserving their environment and resources. Their world was turn upside down with the arrival of the white man. A large percentage died from illnesses that arrived with the white man; illnesses to which they had little or no immunity. Many that did survive the illnesses suffered annihilation at the hands of the settlers. The remnants of the once great tribe were placed in Missions where they were taught white-man ways. Those still living in the area today have lost their traditional way of life and been left to fend for themselves in this now derelict backwater.

Our arrival in Kinchega National Park, South of Menindee, coincided with the winter solstice. The waters were still flowing into the Menindee lake system, which is now 85% full after a decade of laying empty after little or no rain, though much to the chagrin of the residence down stream, little has been released into the river system.

Kinchega-Kars pastoral lease covered 800,000 hectares and extended all the way from Menindee to Broken Hill.

In 1861 Robert Gow headed north-west from Menindee in search of new grazing country. Parts of the west Darling plains and ranges that Gow explored later became Kinchega station. He crossed wide expanses of saltbush, herbs and grass. This ‘wilderness’, predicted Gow, ‘will become a land flowing with milk and honey … this enormous tract of country I have been examining… is fit for occupation and is well supplied with pasture. Horses, cattle and sheep will roll in fat if they can get water’.

At the time, he was probably unaware that two years earlier, across the border in Victoria, the pompous fool, estate owner Thomas Austin, wanting a bit of sport, released Twenty-four European Rabbits onto the unsuspecting native flora and fauna.For years, a flourishing wool industry bloomed at Kinchega. They built a substantial shearing shed, “built to last a life time”

However between 1894 and 1899 the number of sheep shorn in the district plummeted from 136 000 to 31 000. It had taken just 45 years for those 24 rabbits to bread like….well, like rabbits and infested the station eating them out of feed in what was already lean years. The majority of the sheep starved to death.

The Kinchega station has closed and a large portion was handed over to the NSW National Parks in 1967 and although it has been over 33 years since the last clip the woolshed, which has stood the test of time, still emits the unmistakable scent of lanolin.

Australia has the dubious reputation of having sent 23 bird, 4 frog, and 27 mammal species into oblivion since European settlement of Australia. It is worth making special mention of the three great human-introduced killer species: the European rabbit, the European Red Fox, and the domestic cat. Although many other introduced species have played a destructive role, so far these three have been far and away the most significant.

South of Menindee on the dirt road from Pooncarie we had a yarn with a station manager who we met while we were parked on the side of the road to have an espresso. He has seen the station weather years of drought. Surprisingly we learnt that another introduced species, the feral goat, was the only thing that kept the station afloat during the tough years. Brought into the country with the first settlers they are now estimated to number over 3 million mostly in the semi-arid west. This station of over 58,000 hectares musters over 1,000 goats a month, and ships them off shore, predominantly for the overseas meat market.

More recently another introduced species has reeked havoc in Australia. The Welsh, red-crested, pinched-face, back stabber introduced in the mid 1960’s. It has turned out to be like a cuckoo in the nest of the Australian Labor Party and has caused the demise of the former Prime Minister K.Rudd. Luckily the only specimen in the wild is a non-breeding female so should be easier to contain than the dreaded cane toad.