By Kevin Healy
A week when the country was gripped with the excitement of constitutional reform, and especially the prospect that governments would serve four-year terms. And if that wasn't enough, there was the ongoing soapy about the governing party preselections in Victoria — a titanic struggle, one could say.
The attraction is that anyone who makes it will have at least three shadow portfolios. The entire caucus, if "entire" is the word for the rump that will be left — another bad phrase, that will remain — the entire caucus will be the shadow cabinet.
Must say I was impressed by sister Mary Prude Goward on the ABC, who asked why would you want to knock off a success story like Snappy Tom. Success story: the man who turned health, transport, planning and now the state economy into successive disasters. Well, planning was only a disaster for communities and historic buildings; developers loved him.
Turning west, I must lodge a complaint about those inferences in the press that our great and beloved prime minister, Nuclear Hawke himself, may have known about the odd minor donation — eight or 10 trillion — after a little dinner he attended with Brian Bought, Laurie Conwell and other luminaries of the WA Sink establishment. Or, as Nuke himself said this week, "Laurie who? Brian who? Dinner who?"
The spare-a-quid department this week — the need for this is becoming just a little bit too regular; it's very sad, isn't it — features poor little Johnny Spivvins, who tried to help the national economy by showing the true blue Aussie with the big red heart entrepreneurial spirit, the sort of person market forces know and love, but clearly through factors totally out of his control, like cash flow, is on the scrap heap. Donations, please, to the poor Johnny Spivvins Add and Subtract Steam appeal, care of yours truly.
Speaking of bludgers — which of course we weren't — there'll be a lot more of them following some encouraging signs in the economy this week. Qantarse will shed 5000 jobs, including all its pilots, and lots of other companies are becoming leaner and meaner by shedding most of their staff, cutting wages and conditions of those that remain and demanding twice the productivity from them. Clearly, the ideal lean mean economy will be one where machines do all the work and not one person is employed.
The New Zealand government found the answer to all those bludgers this week. Unless they report to their Social Security office three times every hour proving they've been interviewed for 15 jobs since the last time they were in, they're cut off.
And as another massacre occurred in the freezing heights of Kurdistan, the architects of the brave new world order expressed concern. "We're concerned", Georgie Bashed said on behalf of the UN Security Council. Local proponents of the brave new world order Nuclear Hawke, Good Evans and Robert Raygun added their thoughts on the ng.