Got a cigarette, brother?

"The political scandal over Wollongong Council exposes a culture deeply ingrained in the Labor Party, from its grassroots to the very top. It is a demonstration of how Labor's longstanding network of mates can go wrong when combined with the toxic mix of power and large sums of money."
Sulusinszky and Norrington

"We are returning to the pre-Howard era where logic and reason and facts are discarded as totally inappropriate and racist."
Janet Albrechtsen

"If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
George Orwell.


"Got a cigarette, brother?" they ask as I walk past.
"Sorry mate," I reply in almost a single word, sorrymate, as after the official apology everybody says sorry now. People, standing in the cold at 6am waiting for the crowded bus to take them to their rotten day in a lousy factory, are fed up with paying taxes to support all the nonsense, fed up with the abuse, fed up with the privileging of sections of the community based purely on skin colour. They're sorry alright. As in, I'm sorry you keep dealing so close to our house. I'm sorry you've trashed all the houses down the blocks; 30 years ago all the neighbourhood used to come and stare at all the beautiful houses the government was building for the aborigines, now they've all been vandalised, almost all of them destroyed.

I'm sorry you keep calling us white cunts when we walk past. I'm sorry you keep robbing the tiny little Asian girls, dragging them along the street by their handbags. I'm sorry you don't go out and get a job and stop living off everybody else, because I know it's not good for you. And I'm sorry you've developed a sense of grievance and hatred fostered by white lefties, the Left Green, the Socialist Left, becasue I know it does you more harm than good. I'm sorry so many taxpayers are fed up with getting up and going to work to pay taxes to support and entirely tax payer funded lifestyle, all in the name of commmunal living and indigenous pride.

None of it makes sense anymore. I feel like giving them a lecture. You should give up cigarettes, they're not good for you. Instead of bumming fags in the street you should stand up proud; the cigs will only blacken your lungs and make you feel sick, leave you smelling of stale tobacco and contribute to an early death. In no other era would multinationals be allowed to addict millions of ordinary people to their poisonous chemicals, making them sick and leading to their early death, all for the almighty dollar. But threats of an early death, promise of a longer life, means nothing here.

And the politicians bend over to help the multinationals; spending hundreds of millions of dollars chasing down heroin importers while cowtowing to the tobacco industry. All for the taxes; greed and immorality. But instead of the lecture I just walk past, "sorrymate".

I've finally done it. My son Sam is desperately trying to get his hours up before he goes for his driving test. He's only got to get up 50 hours of supervised driving, he's almost there, over 45 anyway; but the law has just been changed to make it 120 so they're not going to be too inmpressed if it ticks over 50 on the way to the test. So we drove out to Newport; and went and checked out the house where I grew up all those years ago. My father paid 150 pound for the block, which was once a rubbish dump; and built the house. Now it's been completely renovated and turned into a double story dwelling. My father sold just before the property boom for $135,000. The new people said they paid something like eight times that. She was there, Susan, the new owners, and they were very welcoming, as my brother Warren had reported.

Much of the ground floor was open plan; it was all very smart, resembled nothing like the house I used to know. All around the same thing had happened, wave after wave of money and reconstruction had left few remnants of the way it used to be. The Macs house was still there, small, wooden, the ones who used to give us glasses of milk and biscuits and where we used to love to hang around because they were nice to us and we loved their cage full of budgerigards. The steep concrete driveway which had seemed so totally enormous when we raced our carts down it; was barely longer or steeper than an average drive. Joan's house was still there. I had a terrible crush on a girl who lived here, 40 years ago, I said to someone as they got out of their car. He laughed. I wasn't laughing at the time, I was mooning around terrified, wondering what on earth to do.

The glooming terror that I felt in confronting the place was gone; wealthy houses were jammed along the hillside; the bush where we used to roam now gone. The valleys used to be full of palm trees; allowing my greatest moment as a child, when I set the entire valley alight; fire engines everywhere, houses under threat. In terrible trouble; again. Beaten black and blue, again. But it was worth the thrashing, I loved that moment, the fire engines everywhere, the flames leaping from one tree to the next, the smoke, the chaos, the danger. They knew I existed that day.

Things were so much better then, the thought came unbidden, the whole of life was before him and he wasn't old.

I grew up in a silent war, I said again, this time to the new owners. I never heard my parents laugh, I never heard them cry, I never heard them argue. There was just this terrible silence. The huge besa block shed my father built, as big in those days as the house itself, was still there, but repainted and even it renovated. It doesn't sound like you have very good memories of the house, the owner said. As in: we love it here, we've just paid more than a million dollars for it, this is our family home and we never want to leave. It was all to do with my parents, I always liked the house, I lied. I didn't get on very well with my father, and I remember walking down this road crying just days after my 16th birthday. I never came back, not in all these years.

And now I've been there, and some terrible cycle has ended. Thank the lord; the cosmos, the passing of time.


THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/i-did-nothing-wrong/2008/02/23/1203467451888.html

Tripodi: I did nothing wrong

PORTS and Waterways Minister Joe Tripodi hit back at his critics yesterday, saying he played no role in securing a $200,000 government job for his Labor mate Joe Scimone.

But he admitted he felt the "weight of responsibility" for the crisis in which the NSW Government now finds itself.

Mr Tripodi said he hoped any investigation into Mr Scimone's appointment would be concluded quickly.

"There have been media reports that this could be resolved as early as this week and I sincerely hope this is the case," he told The Sun-Herald.

"Of course I feel bad the Government is in this position but I maintain I did absolutely nothing wrong. I had no role to play in his appointment and it would have been improper for me to do so."

Mr Tripodi said NSW Maritime, which appointed Mr Scimone to the job, had confirmed that he had played no role in the appointment, even though NSW Maritime falls under his portfolio.

Mr Tripodi said he had been unaware of the Independent Commission Against Corruption investigation affecting Mr Scimone at the time he was appointed.

On Friday, Premier Morris Iemma said he had asked ICAC whether it should conduct an independent investigation into the appointment.

Mr Iemma said Mr Tripodi "insists" he had nothing to do with the process and his gut feeling was that he was telling the truth. If Mr Tripodi wasn't he would be sacked immediately, the Premier said.




http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/the-early-word-hard-times-for-hillary-clinton/

The Early Word: Hard Times for Hillary Clinton

By Sarah Wheaton

Friday was a rough day for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as she sought to dispel speculation that her closing debate remarks amounted to a concession amid the death of a police officer escorting her campaign – all while Senator Barack Obama was stumping around South Texas, one of her strongholds in the state.

The Times’s Michael Luo reports on others who are suffering from her campaign’s troubles – small vendors in the New York area worried that their fees will go unpaid.

At The Chicago Tribune, Jim Tankersley writes that Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio could be her “last, best hope” there. The Boston Globe’s Susan Milligan looks at Mrs. Clinton’s firewall of working-class voters in Ohio, “who say they don’t want to hear fancy words about changing Washington; they want to know exactly how the next president is going to bring jobs to their struggling communities and make sure their children have health care.”

The Chicago Tribune analyzes Mr. Obama’s stump speeches and finds, among the platitudes, just as much policy as the other candidates have, and Nedra Pickler of The Associated Press previews possible Republican attacks against him if he becomes the Democratic nominee.



James.