By Kevin Healy
A week when problems began to be solved for True Blue Aussie workers — and for those True Blue Aussies who don't work because there aren't enough jobs for them, through their own greedy fault, of course — thanks to a brilliant package devised by the government, the ACTU on behalf of all those greedy workers, and the business class to get the country back on its feet.
In a moment of genius, they devised a scheme to pour money into the pockets of all True Blue Aussies: a wage freeze. "We will pour money into the pockets of those whose pockets are already bulging with it, and they will get so full that some of it will fall out and trickle down onto all the people", announced the world's greatest worst former treasurer Paul.
He was strongly supported by none other than one of the terrifying true red Aussie atheistic communist union leaders, George Dumbbell. "Making sacrifices and cutting wages hasn't worked", George said with his normal pensive depth, acquired in a few years' Marxist study at the Labour College. "There are more unemployed than ever. So obviously, workers will have to take more wage cuts, make more sacrifices, and not selfishly expect to get paid just because they are fortunate enough to be in the workforce." George promised to explain more of his brilliant theories when he got back from lunch at the quiet little intimate restaurant on the corner.
This theme was also taken up in an in-depth economic analysis on the new, revamped 7.30 Rapport when a Dandenong factory owner pointed out he couldn't compete because the Chinese could make a garment for $1 and his factory couldn't make it for less than $4. Quite obviously, the answer lay in his workers taking a 75% wage cut and adjusting to a few sacrifices in the interests of national recovery — like sleeping in the gutter, not clothing their kids and going without non-essentials like food. "With so many in the dole queues, we can always replace them when they pass away from starvation and exposure", the factory owner explained.
Meanwhile, the Middle East bits and pieces talks received a setback when the nomadic Palestinians demanded the right to decide for themselves who should represent them, when everyone knows that that decision lies fairly and squarely with Zion and the United States of the World. "People with no rights and no country have no right to demand rights", Georgie Bashed exploded angrily. "If these talks fail, we now know who to blame. We've done all we can." Zion said it could never accept the Palestinians deciding who should represent them. "Next thing they'll want to keep all that land we intend to take off them", said Prime Minister Sham-here.
In Manila, Imelda Makeup was most upset that police actually put her in a cell and fingerprinted her on currency manipulation charges. "If this can happen to a Makeup, it can happen to anyone", she said. "In my day it just happened to anyone."
And, on a topic close to the soul of every reader, there was that court ruling on the ordination of women priests. As Ballarat Bishop John Hazyhead said, it was disappointing that the question of sexual discrimination had been introduced into this most spiritual and nd, more diabolically, into a mere temporal court. "It has nothing to do with sexual discrimination", his lordship preached. "It's simply that men are men and women aren't."