A Shambles From Coast To Coast

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Scenes from Ian's 50th birthday party.

"NSW is a national laughing stock. In the 1980s it was corruption that made NSW a laughing stock. This decade the state is a national laughing stock for everything. NSW is in the political and bureaucratic wilderness in terms of talent. The state deserves a wooden spoon for, among other things, economic performance, infrastructure, health and planning.

"If the Liberals are to win government at the next NSW election, the changes must start at home. We need to change the dysfunctional organisational structure of the party as a first step to changing behaviour, to enable the kind of positive decisions that win elections. We must become a genuine broad church able to take the middle ground of politics.

"There is some denial regarding the performance of the Liberals in NSW. The party has faced a Labor Government that has gone from fair, to poor, to simply hopeless - the worst ever. The Government has failed on integrity and effectiveness. Despite this incompetence, the Liberals have won just two seats from Labor in 17 years. We have dismally failed the test described by Bob Hawke: if you can't govern yourselves, you can't govern the state."

Nick Greiner in the SMH


Nothing works, that was what he had concluded. Nothing was as it seemed, from coast to coast. Government rhetoric spewed out, pretending that the world made sense. But in so many ways, nothing was as it seemed. While he struggled to form ideas into words, to transform pictures into a linear sequence, there was a deeper disconnect. Nothing rang true anymore. All the things society once held dear had been eroded or entirely destroyed. Work hard, be frugal, the voices from the generation that had lived through the Depression, didn't work in a culture where splashing around money, flashing around in a black, grey or silver Audi, that all of it was the ultimate status symbol. Being decent, honorable, having integrity; all of that just made you a laughing stock.

All the giant things had been betrayed by journalists who never looked beyond the surface. The state religion of multi-culturalism, invented specifically to erode the mainstream anglo culture, was regularly pushed as a success. The manifest tensions were ignored, or relegated to talk back radio; dismissed by the so-called chattering classes as nothing but racism from a pack of rednecks. Yet there were, you only had to open your eyes, enormous tensions. They're like a nest of flies buzzing in the kitchen, a black seething horde, says a voice on talkback, shocking for its brutality. But in a more sane way, it's not hard to find Islamic groups in Sydney preaching the overthrow of the government and the coming of the caliphate; speeches given in a mix of English and Arabic in rented, that is publicly funded, town halls.

The Sydney Morning Herald ran a story the other day: the white flight, about how parents were taking their children out of public schools and putting them into private or Catholic schools, leaving the public institutions as a repository for the under classes, aborigines, Muslims. It was the first time he could ever remember that venerable publication touching on the subject. Finally recognising that things weren't as wonderful as they would like them to be, that Australia was not the wonderful, vibrant, diverse, oh that word diverse, multicultural paradise that the government wanted us to believe it was.

So many other belief systems were in serious jeopardy. Work hard. Yet the government splashed out billions upon billions of dollars to people who don't work; using that over-worked euphemism, low income earners, to signify welfare recipients. Orwellian language as at its height. The Fair Pay Commission. You've got to be joking. The company executives award themselves ever more spectacular multi-million dollar wages while calling for wage restraint. Single mothers won't have to work if they can't find a job that pays substantially more than the dole, yet hundreds of thousands of people are working jobs that don't pay much more than the dole when the cost of getting to work is taken into account.

The despised Child Support Agency, another Orwellian named institution, ravages the lives of almost everyone it touches; yet where are the stories in the mainstream press. The government quietly removed its legal obligation to operate "in the best interests of children", knowing full well it did no such thing. Where were the stories? Want to know how many Christian churches are vandalised each year? Whistle Dixie. Want to expose the bleak, systemic dishonesty in our family law system? Whistle Dixie again. Nothing works, nothing.

A parking cop hands out a ticket worth two days pay, and wonders why the public hates them. Get a proper job dog, they hiss, and they puff up, this is a proper job. No it's not. All around the world, study after study has shown domestic violence not to be the gendered crime that feminist extremists paint it to be, lock 'em up, throw away the key, men! More sexist than any almost any man could ever be; chivalry dead under the deconstructionist assault.

Courtesy is dead, chivalry is dead, and now common decency is dying on the shore; its fellows, common sense, unity of purpose, personal courage, all thrashing in the shallows like stranded whales, struggling to breathe, doomed. He held occasionally unfashionable views, it was better to remain silent, but he couldn't help railing briefly in the dying light. The ordinary wage was not enough to live on anymore. Getting up and going to work didn't have the dignity of purpose it once had, not when it left you unable to pay the bills, unable to cope. God bless you, a voice said, although he was tired of all the cultish higher power crap that surrounded him. God bless you, everything will be alright.

He wasn't so sure. He just kept saying the same thing: he was glad he'd bought his shack in the country, the farm as he grandly referred to his four acres. He needed an escape hatch, to flee this rotten, dysfunctional place.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23381935-662,00.html

THE SLAUGHTER of hundreds of eastern grey kangaroos in Canberra is being used by the Japanese to undermine Australia's anti-whaling crusade.

Japanese television and radio yesterday covered a protest over the culling of up to 500 kangaroos at Belconnen, in the north of the nation's capital.

Tokyo Broadcasting System's Australian TV reporter, Hiroki Iijima, said Japanese people viewed the kangaroo cull as hypocritical.

"It's a sad thing. Kangaroos are the national icon for Australia and 400 kangaroos are going to be killed by the Government," he said.


http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/15/2190355.htm

Protesters have begun to gather at the site of a planned kangaroo cull in Canberra.

About 70 people are outside the main gate of the Defence site in Belconnen in Canberra's north.

They are holding signs that read 'no cull' and 'killing fields shame'.

Members of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy have addressed the protest group.

Isabelle Coe says the kangaroo is sacred to the local Aboriginal people.

"We can't have this happening any more, this is one of the most disgusting things I've seen," she said.

The group say they will continue their protest until the cull is called off.

The group has been told contractors are set to go ahead with the cull of the 400 kangaroos within days.

Wildlife Protection Association spokesman Pat O'Brien says they will continue the protest until the ACT Government issues export permits so the kangaroos can be relocated.

"We're here for the long haul, with the help of our Aboriginal brothers and sisters," he said.

The ACT Government granted a licence so that about 400 kangaroos can be darted and then euthanased, because of overgrazing on the site.

The cull recieved international attention this week with a British-based vegetarian lobby group launching an online petition against the killing.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/the-day-an-mp-tried-to-seduce-me/2008/03/15/1205472157857.html


BEN BLACKBURN could not believe his luck when Milton Orkopoulos singled him out for special attention at an end-of-year party in 2003.

"He made me feel special. He gave me attention I hadn't had from someone outside the family. He was someone important," Mr Blackburn said.

For an hour the pair discussed politics before the state MP for Swansea - convicted on Friday of 28 child sex and drugs charges - offered him work experience, which led to paid work, in his electorate office.

"My family thought it was wonderful because I was interested in politics and it would be a good opportunity for me," Mr Blackburn told The Sun-Herald."They trusted Milton and he had a rapport with them. Milton took me out to lunch, bought me cigarettes and gave me attention.

"I knew he was on the way up. He would become a minister, he was a rising star of the Left and he used to talk about becoming deputy premier.

"I thought it was going to be great. I had just finished year 10 - I thought I'd be working for him full-time after I finished year 12."

A month later Orkopoulos supplied him with marijuana and assaulted him during a trip to Sydney to attend a national Labor Party conference.

Before the trip, the MP sent Mr Blackburn an email - later used in evidence in court - advising him to bring spending money for incidentals, including condoms.

When they parked at Parliament House, the MP asked him to open the glove box where he found a pack of condoms and "a stash of marijuana".

They shared a joint on the MP's parliamentary balcony before going to a city motel where they shared a room.

After seeing Mr Blackburn in bed, the court heard that Orkopoulos said: "I don't trust myself, I'm going back to Parliament House."

The next night, in another motel, Orkopoulos talked about homosexual relationships he had had with other men.

"Milton started talking about homosexual relationships that he had had with other men and he particularly raised the issue of a relationship he had had … [it was] Milton telling me that he had performed oral sex on this guy and his wife was pregnant at the time."

Orkopoulos spoke in more detail about a particular sexual act, adding that he was bisexual.

Soon after, he said to Mr Blackburn: "I would love to have you."

He lay down on the top of Mr Blackburn's bedcovers and started rubbing his chest while complimenting him on his looks.

"I flinched and I was absolutely shit scared that he wanted to have sex with me," Mr Blackburn told the court.

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23375199-5001030,00.html

ASHEN-faced and trembling, former State Government minister Milton Orkopoulos was a much-diminished figure as he stood in the District Court in Newcastle yesterday to learn the jury's verdicts on the 29 drug and child sex charges he was facing.

The jury had not kept him waiting long. In a little over a day they'd agreed the ex-MP was guilty of 28 of 29 possible charges, and their verdicts were duly entered.

Hearing the foreman read out the verdicts one after another, Orkopoulos appeared on the point of collapse and he appeared to lean heavily on the dock railing to stop himself from falling.

He was, it must be said, a most pathetic sight.

But not for a minute should it be imagined that Orkopoulos, 50, is deserving of any pity.

By his criminality, he has shown himself to be a monster of absolutely the worst reckoning and it is to be hoped that, when he is sentenced, there is no misguided tendency towards leniency.

For in so many ways, even as vile as they are, Orkopoulos's crimes are worse than they appear.

This is a man who accepted the highest office of public life, who accepted the duties and rewards of a member of parliament, the sovereign responsibilities of a minister of the crown - the sum of which is supposed to add up to a pillar of society, a person in whom it is possible to place absolute trust and unimpeachable confidence.

Orkopoulos accepted all of that - then betrayed it all.

Knowing that people in positions such as his are held to be the embodiment of moral and ethical probity, he used that trust only to further his own wicked intentions, to prey on children for the satisfaction of his perverted and disgusting sexual appetites.

His victims will live with the psychological consequences of his torment for their entire lives. Orkopoulos's punishment should justly reflect that wretched reality.













Scenes from Ian's 50th birthday party.