Monday 31 March 2014

to the Great Australian Circus of Democracy

Sir Shane of Wombat
Sir Shane of Wombat



Pictures from the Melbourne Flower and Garden Show but otherwise it's all Wombat Droppings or Low Down Politics in Oz.





My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the Great Australian Circus of Democracy where all have according to the High Sheriff, George “Sneer” Brandis, “The-Right-to-be Bigots” and right-wing thought-bubble-tanks with charity status like “The-Coots-With-Queer-Ideas-From-a-Parallel-Universe” (who really wrote the18C script) are running the country for their unknown and faceless backers and pretend journalists and commentators like “Blot-On-The-Landscape” are free to write and spout whatever they wish.


Dyson Cartoon
Dyson Cartoon
My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, you are herewith advised that laughing with intent to infect Parliament is hereby forbidden as is addressing the Speaker Bronwyn “Kerosene-Pompador” Bishop as “Madam Speaker.” Notwithstanding these strictures on behaviour Chwissy “The-Whyne” Pyne, the “Perfect-Prat-of-a-Prefect” has Royal leave to label anyone he likes ”Potato-Head”, “Sooks” or whatever other grown-up epithet he solely finds amusing and appropriate as discourse.

7News,  Flower and Garden Show Exhibition Building, Melbourne
7News,  Flower and Garden Show Exhibition Building, Melbourne
My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, amidst much joyful celebration, the “Red-Tape-Repeal- Day” sideshow kicked off with the momentous proclamation that herewith e-mail shall henceforth be termed email and to much applause from Senator Cory “Bestiality” Bernardi’s paddles clapping together, was the order that Mules and Bullocks will no longer be used for defense….. or any other purpose. Unfortunately the Business Council didn’t see in these cost savings, measures sufficient for their needs and is asking for the repeal of all onerous taxes which impede growth of their personal wealth and that workers penalty rates, minimum pay rates, sick leave and annual leave be abolished to further assist in their primary aim.

Kenny the Dog
Kenny the Dog... whom you really wouldn't like to share a seat with.
My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, Hear Ye, Hear Ye, a proclamation from Senator Matthius “Horse-Shite” Coorman, (stand-in Clown for Arfur “Spiv” Sinodinas who is trying to explain to an Inquisition matters about excessive re-numeration and unfortunate choice of friends) It is announced that forthwith Financial advisors will only have their own personal financial interest at heart; that there is no need to disclose ongoing commissions and that Medibank Private be sold to build a road…. or something.

Ode to a Chip by Michelle, Shirley and Wilma
Ode to a Chip by Michelle, Shirley and Wilma

My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, be upstanding for an announcement by the Duchess of Diplomacy, Julie “Death-Stare” Bishop. It is announced that there is no need for Australia to attend an international enquiry into war crimes in Sri Lanka as there is no possibility that the patrol boats we gave to Sri Lanka could possibly be used to harm human rights. And that no importance is attached to the fact that Sri Lankan Navy personnel are showing admirable free-market spirit in running the biggest of their country’s people smuggling business.
The Scotsman and his Dog
The Scotsman and his Dog
The Grasshopper, Flower and Garden Show, Melbourne
The Grasshopper, Flower and Garden Show, Melbourne
Bucketing along
Bucketing along
Spring and Victoria
Spring and Victoria
Pacific Black Duck
Anas supersiliosa or Pacific Black Duck
My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, we, the humble citizens serfs of Bundaboong South welcome you Sir Peter and you Lady Lynne into our town and hovels accepting that it is not fit for the likes of the Great Leader and recent boat arrival 5265617 “Rabbutt-The-Hun” but plead that you as proxy’s for his magnificence, accept our grovelling swearing of fealty to the realm of Abbott, Freedom Sage Timmy “Twat” Wilson and the royal court, the IPA. 
yours  obsequiously
Sir Shane of Wombat 
Kt. Errant of Scribe.

Tuesday 25 March 2014

to The Ballan Autumn Festival 2014

G’day Possums,
Here we are at the Ballan Autumn festival again.

The theme this year was “The 70’s.”


The event was well attended with around 30 more stalls with all the usual activity and events and performers.




Ballarat City Band
Ballarat City Band
 
Girls with their Dogs
Girls with their Dogs
Vintage Cars
Vintage Cars
Salvatore
Salvatore
 
Steam Driven Hay-Baler
Steam Driven Hay-Baler


Fuck off we're full
F.. off we're full... and there were some other inappropriate comment.

Faces
Faces and chips....and hair


The Belles Of Hudson's Hotel
The Belles Of Hudson's Hotel



The Pony Tail
The Pony Tail: better Ballan than Queensland for them...


Shane at Lal-Lal Photo Group
Shane at Lal-Lal Photo Group Light tent... a solid show.

The Cyclists
The Cyclists


Federal Minister Catherine King
Federal Minister Catherine King... we were not even-handed ...I didn't photograph the Liarbrils, as I couldn't think of anything polite to say.


The Parade
The Parade ans other events...


D & M Traders
D and M Traders: style, style, and more style...


The Art Show
The Art Show was good, hung well in theme, Chris Canning the judge. 



Wombat Droppings or Low Down Politics in OZ

“Rabbutt-the-Hun” faced the media role-playing “I’m the Caring Leader on the Spot” saying, “There was Hope. Hope, there was hope,” that the Malaysian Airliner might be found and spinning that this statesman-like charade might divert attention from Arfur “The Spiv” Sinodinas’ unfortunate circle of friends, renumerations, donations and work choices. Although, when questioned on climate change “Rabbutt-the-Hun” hasn’t an cogent answer apart from The Eric “Vichy” Abetz inspired, “Travail, Famille, Patrie” of clearing old growth forests on World Heritage sites with underpaid unemployed so you can plant Pine trees.
“Rabbutt” cannot dare admit that if he’s wrong and climatically we all go to hell in a hand-basket, then he’s as criminally liable as is a military officer accused of war crimes committed under his command; as are the so-called “think tanks” who push misinformation and promotion of environmentally damaging technologies and practices.

Are the Liarbrils affordable?

Bernie (I-like-a-Queen) Finn, (Tardis State “Where-All-Goes-Backward” Liarbril) runs off into the same la-la land inhabited by Geoff “Fiddles” Shaw (ex Liarbril) as he opines that Paedophiles and Rapists are using abortion laws to cover their crimes, causing Pretend Premier of Tardis State Dennis “Inutilus Rusticus” Naptime to ponder implementing Finn’s other idea of bringing back the death penalty.

How affordable are the Liarbrils?

Split Enz band members deny any familial or intellectual link to Bernie and re-migrate back to the Land of the Long White cloud.

Can we really afford the Liarbrils?

Liarbril Senator, Arfur “The Spiv” Sinodinas joins “Princess” Fiona of Young in providing clearer evidence of how mentally corrupted our Federal Government is.  In removing legislation that mandated financial advisors had to primarily have the best interests of their client at heart, “The Spiv” joins the Kafkaesque slogan circus of “Climate Change is Crap”, “Job Loss is Liberating”, “The Age of Entitlement is Over”, “Black is White and Up is Down”, “Humanitarianism is Whimpy”, “We’re-Not Liable for Anything and We’ve got the Legislation to Prove it,” “Manufacturing is Pointless”, “Women of Calibre are Welcome” “Fracking is Good” and “Nuclear is Green” and now the new Georgie “Sneer” Brandis classic: “We’re entitled to be Bigots!”
“The Sneer” seems to forget as Attorney General that many of our laws exist to forestall physical retaliation for perceived or real slight and is a more civilized way of dealing with matters. But then, he’s a Liarbril and from the “Far North” so peculiarities in his critical thinking are not really surprising. Like his friends “The-Coots-With-Queer-Ideas-from-a-Parallel Universe” (the IPA), less than formed concepts of society and civil behaviour are de rigueur in these life-types.

Joe “Cereal, Toyota, GMH, Killer” Hockey was inclined to disagree and reiterated that “the Age of Entitlement” is over. No-one was listening…again!

Are the Liarbrils affordable?

Cardinal George “Graceless” Pell want public money to help defray payments to victims of church abuse… perhaps he could get it from the hundreds of millions spent on Catholic schools?
Henry 2 of England rolls in his grave….again.

How much longer can we afford the Liarbrils?

Cheers, Petals,
Shane

Monday 17 March 2014

..to rally round

..to rally round 
G'day Possums,


Shane at Rally
Shane at Rally


Melbourne Rally 16-4-14
March in March Melbourne Library 16-4-14

Estimated at any where from 30,000 to 50,000 people united in one thought; Their detestation on "Rabbutt-the-Hun" and the Liarbril and Notional Parties appalling policies.


the gang
the gang
 Some of us met by arrangement and we also  ran into others so we coalesced into an informal ramble and chatted with others on the way 



Australia wide there were over 100,000 on the streets giving a protest voice to the return to medieval fuedalism that this Free-Market rabble are determined to retreat to.







rally signs
rally signs
There were a multiplicity of causes indicating just how much is under attack.. the environment, wages and conditions, privatisation vs public ownership, asylum seekers, public transport and just plain honesty.


characters
characters
The rally was non aligned politically, organised from a Tweet and then on Facebook...  quite an achievement.





There was a commonality of concept throughout the rally


Eureaka Flag
Eureka Flag at Treasury Place
Melbourne Police and demonstrators
potential for drama
and the photo-bombers...

Wombat Droppings or Low-Down politics in Oz

The free-market forestry of Abbott’s anti-intellectual biblical myth; the Romantic clarion-call of the farmer tenderly massaging the land to gently produce its cornucopia….. a falsity, a distortion, a side-show mirror image which clouds the reality of Old Growth forest being turned into wood-chips for Japanese cardboard.

Aaron Lane (Coot-With-Queer-Ideas-From–a-Parallel-Universe…IPA) wrote a fantasy piece in support of “Rabbutt’s” drivel.. saying that privatising the forests will save them ecologically…in an article not only factually incorrect “…provides tens of thousands of jobs…” try the Bureau of Statistics next time Aaron, about 3000..and of silly philosophic fantasy “fundamental principles of property rights that individual who own property take care of it”…Hmm like the private businesses who are wrecking the Amazon forests… It’s hard to believe that these people are actually paid to think this stuff up…and present it as fact, it’s only a time wasting and futile exercises of making noise for its own sake pushing the selfish agenda of the free market.  Propositions whose only validity is that we are using a common language. This prat has also suggested that the Arts not receive any Taxpayer funding… a sure sign of his lack of education and cultural poverty

In pretend premier Dennis “Inutilus Rusticus” Naptime’s words and cabinet, “That…. talented minister I want by my side…” Mary “Snaaarrrl” Wooldridge of Inhuman services, says that the 600 jobs that have been defunded from her portfolio during her lackadaisical tenure have had no bearing on the number of “at-risk” children being actively and successfully preyed upon by paedophiles. Giving her now well rehearsed stock answer to everything, “I know things aren’t perfect but three years ago the last Govt. left a mess we are desperate to work on but we’re moving in the right direction at this point in time and soon, after dialoguing and going forward with all the stake-holders, we will be on the same page and within the right protocols and workable parameters we will spend the same money over and over again.”  And SottoVoce, “…creating a completely privatised welfare system where you wont be able to blame me for anything, F*****S!”


I've said for a long time that the Wonthaggi De-Sal Plant will provide water for a Nuclear reactor... some questions need to be asked.

This country is in the crisis that Rabbott-the-Hun always claimed that Labor was causing. The reach of the mendacious ideology of this corrupt rabble is astounding. Their fascist-like mentality in tearing away conventions and of passing legislation to protect themselves from what they obviously know would come back to haunt them, kafka-esque. Unless there is a double dissolution or a revolution they will manipulate the system to stay in power forever. Mrs Wombat and the Joeys will be MiM… in spite of the Govt of the”Tardis State” , (Where-All-Goes-Backward) passing anti-assembly legislation at 1:00am in the morning.

Julie “Death Stare” Bishop opines, needlessly, that the ABC is not projecting a suitable image into SE Asia. The “Ugly American, Phone-Hacker” Murdoch could provide a more accurate version of Austraya to the Asians by beaming in re-runs of Big Brother, Celebratory Splash and animated re-enactments of his newspaper’s phone hacking files.

"His Royal Tightness"  George Brandis fresh from deciding who is worthy of a “Gong” is now providing directives to the Arts council as to who is talented enough for a grant. In the genre of creative writing it is doubtless that Brandis will favour Andrew “Blot on the Landscape” Bolt whose fictions he has enjoyed for many years. Other more realistic, documentary or journalistic genres will have to fend for themselves as not playing the tune paid for, the Piper’s have had indicated  that their talents only confuse the National Voice, the One People and the One Leader!

cheers petals,
Shane

Sunday 9 March 2014

...down the gurgler

Down the gurgler…

The Saturday Paper
Shane reading the new one...

 We have shot some more ballet stuff... here are some outakes

Emma, Gypsy
Emma, Gypsy
and this send-up by William....


So you think you can dance?
So you think you can dance?
and after the formal shot...

Classically...not!
Classically...not!
Thanks to all for your good work ...


Wombat Droppings

John Roskam Head “Coot-With-Queer-ideas-From-a-Parallel-Universe” (IPA) admitted, that he knew of no evidence that privatisation of the State Electricity Commission (unusual, him not knowing everything), was in any way to blame for the health disaster engulfing Morwell from the open-cut fire that has been burning for a month.
Many years ago I put a friend in contact with economic/political journo Kenneth Davidson who was writing pieces on the poor economic results from Private/Public Partnerships and the dubious benefits of Privatisation of State assets.  This friend an ex-electrical fitter with the SEC, had taken a “package” when it was privatised and then returned ten years later to do similar work contracting across the private/foreign owned electricity suppliers had expressed how shocked he was at the poor state of the infrastructure he found after starting back.
Incompatibility of equipment between sub-stations and poor maintenance from where the first American owners had literally stripped out their profits before on-selling the business to the present Asian owners.
Living rurally, the burrow used to have one or two blackouts a year under the SEC now it’s 3-4; the last being a few weeks ago when we were without power for 13 hours, caused by a transformer fire on a major highway. The most memorable “outage’ was one Summer 5 years ago when our power was fluctuating wildly. We rang our local electrician who had just re-wired the kitchen, and he asked us to go outside and check the pole that serviced our property. We did and observed its transformer crackling and sending showers of sparks down to the dry stubble below. That day would become known as “Black Saturday,” we rang the electricity supplier and told them of the fluctuation and they said it would be four or five days before they could get to us, we then told them about the sparks and the crackling and they arrived in 25 minutes. They also intimated that we should be discreet about mentioning this episode.
Privatisation is for private profit not public service. The Morwell fires have been worse than they should have been because the site has not been re-habilitated as it should have been and its fire suppression infrastructure has been stripped out.
It is interesting to note that it will be the taxpayer, the public who will probably “foot-the-bill” for this fiasco not the privatised owner.

From John Roskam’s Bio: “Working for Don Hayward [the Victorian Education Minister 1992-96] and David Kemp [the Federal Education Minister 1996-01]. You can’t shut several hundred schools [in Victoria] and reduce teacher numbers by 10 per cent without sophisticated leadership and deep, intellectual commitment to policy.” 

“Sophisticated leadership”? “Intellectual commitment”? In order to cripple State education ? To replace language teachers with satelite dishes and T.Vs, then cramming 100 primary students into a single class? Sophisticated, my arse!  If that farce of an exercise (which lasted barely three months) was intellectually sound, Roskam really should seek clinical help. Then his fellow “Queer-coot”, James Paterson pops up with the hysterical notion that Western Capitalism is better at protecting the environment than a “Command” economy! Psst, James heard of Bhophal? Heard of  Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Exxon Valdez, Libby Montana, Gulf of Mexico, and of course you’ve heard of Agent Orange?
Welcome to the parallel universe of the Tobacco, Murdoch and Rinehart mining sponsored IPA.

5000 Qantas workers are to lose their jobs as the airline spirals to earth and four of its board, over four years, waltz away with $54,000,000.00 in re-numeration.

Joe “Cereal/SPC/Holden Killer” Hockey and “Rabbott-the-Hun” are telling us “the Age of Entitlement is over….”
Abbott claimed expenses entitlements for six months in 2013 of $474,707.15. 
Remember Tony Abbott rejected a cash injection at SPC citing workers entitlements are excessive (at just $116,427 in 2013)....
One of the curious benefits of Abbott’s and Co’s ranting about wages and entitlements is to highlight the 150% over common wages executives get…………. not really something they want to have too much made of…except of course Gina “Our Biggest-Miner” Rinehart who has beached herself again to spout more drivel about wages and conditions not being close enough to third world levels for there to be a level playing field.
And now a nice little compare and contrast …the first is Liarbril harridan Senator Michaela Cash http://youtu.be/pXchm5QOyyU and Greens Senator ScottLudlum http://youtu.be/dtqrfiEV8Gs
Michaela Cash to me, epitomises much of the rank nastiness of the Liarbrils whilst you can make your own mind up about the Greens Scott Ludlum

Everything is “… having a conversation…” no it’s not it’s telling you what you’re gunna hear, right!
Cheers Possums

Shane