Horse 3404 - On Senator Lidia Thorpes (in)Famous Outburst

"You are not our king. You are not sovereign.

You are not our king. You are not sovereign.

You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back. Give us what you stole from us - our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people. You destroyed our land. Give us a treaty. We want a treaty in this country. You are a genocidalist. This is not your land. This is not your land. You are not my king. You are not our king.

Fuck the colony. Fuck the colony. Fuck the colony."

- Senator Lidia Thorpe, to King Charles III

This outburst from Senator Lidia Thorpe to King Charles III, has made more of a pointed and directed statement than many many years of platitudes which meant well and did nothing, and undirected cries which have also done nothing. The immediate lie perpetrated by Sky News, Nine Ent Co., Seven West Media and the ABC, was that Senator Thorpe interrupted proceedings. We know that this is untrue because not only was the video there for all to see but the media demands that we reject the evidence of our own eyes and ears. The truth which is there for all to see, is that she waited until the official proceedings had concluded and waited for a quiet hush to descend upon the crown in the room. 

Yes, Senator Thorpe's comments were rude. However, as someone speaking on behalf of first peoples in Australia, rudeness is but a trifle in comparison to the directed genocide which happened in this country (starting at the charge rate of ninepence per head), the dispossession of land, and the trampling of original sovereignty which happened. If you have a problem with the word "fuck" but 9no problem with the systemic killing of people, then you are demonstrated ghoul whose moral compass was flushed down the toilet some time ago.

There are some interesting things of note about Senator Thorpe's outburst. The first thing is that she has a legal right to do this:

https://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/act/consol_act/bor16881wams2c2306/s5.html

Right to petition

That it is the right of the subjects to petition the King and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal.

- Section 5, Bill of Rights Act 1688

When people tell you that we do not have a Bill of Rights in Australia, they are either ignorant or lying. We have at least the Bill of Rights 1688, the Scottish Claim of Right 1688, and various schedules in several pieces of legislation which includes the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Convention on the Rights of the Child; which are not just conventions which have been ratified but they have been accepted and passed as pieces of legislation at law. Under Section 5 of the Bill of Rights Act 1688, Senator Thorpe has the express right to petition the King. Although she may have used language from a vulgar tongue, the politeness or impoliteness of language pales into insignificance in comparison with the claims of genocide, dispossession and the trampling of original sovereignty which she is holding out.

However, the outburst contains a problem at law, which although directed at the right person, is materially untrue. That is the use of the word "you". Who is "you"? It should be apparent to all that Charles personally did not genocide anyone. He has not personally stolen anything. He has not personally destroyed the land. I do not know to what degree Senator Thorpe is personally blaming Charles for the actions of the people who came before him. 

This is where the lovely legal concept of The Crown comes in. The Crown is that legal person, which both contains and owns the state. The idea of a separate legal person is what underpins the entire of corporate law and the Crown is Corporation Sole. The Crown has one share. The Crown owns itself. The Crown can not sell its share. Charles is not the Crown but the King; which means that he is in fact the current occupier of the office which acts as agent for the Crown. There are loads of rules surrounding that office but it should be noted that Charles as King is actually separate from the Crown as legal entity. Perhaps the most stark demonstration of this in action, was when Parliament also acting as agents for the Crown appointed the High Court at Westminster Hall to indict Charles I for tyranny. When Charles I's head was separated from his body on Jan 30th 1649, although he ceased to be the agent for the Crown, the person of the Crown did not die with him.

The fact that a corporate person does not die when its shareholders do, should be immediately obvious to anyone who has ever owned shares in a listed company. BHP and the Commonwealth Bank do not die when their CEO dies. It should also be immediately obvious to anyone who has ever owned shares in a listed company that not only does the company outlive the shareholders but that a corporate person has all kinds of legal abilities including to sue and be sued, to own real and unreal property, to appoint agents, and to enter into contracts.

This is where  I do not know to what degree Senator Thorpe is personally blaming Charles for the actions of the people who came before him. If Senator Thorpe is directing her comments to Charles III as King acting as agent for the Crown, then "you" is correctly attributed but if not, then not. If incorrectly attributed, then Senator Thorpe has made the same mistake as the United States Declaration of Independence, which apart from stating many things which are materially untrue, attributes those things to the person of King George III with many "He has" statements.

This same mistake was repeatedly made and owned, either through ignorance or racism (or both) during the referendum on The Voice To Parliament when a repeated refrain by opponents was that they shouldn't be held responsible for what happened in the past. The Persons who should be held responsible are the persons of the Crowns of the several states and the persons of the Crowns of the Commonwealth. Just like we can and should hold other corporate persons responsible for the things that they have done and even sue them for damages, not only can we and should we hold the Crowns responsible for the things that they have done, but that may very well mean equitable restitution for damages. James Hardie was taken to the Dust Diseases Tribunal many times; especially over its actions in Wittenoom. 

As for Senator Thorpe's demand for a treaty, although there are opponents to this who claim that the Crown of the Commonwealth can not enter into treaties with its own people, the treaty making power never specifies this.

https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Senate/Practice_and_Procedure/Constitution/chapter2#chapter-02_61

The executive power of the Commonwealth is vested in the Queen and is exercisable by the Governor-General as the Queen's representative, and extends to the execution and maintenance of this Constitution, and of the laws of the Commonwealth.

- Section 61, Australian Constitution Act 1900

As part of the executive functions of the Governor-General per Section 61, the Crown of the Commonwealth can enter into treaties with literally anyone it jolly well wants to. Section 61 provides no direction nor disability as to whom or what the Crown can enter into treaties with.

The Crown of the Commonwealth can enter into treaties with its own people, and the various State Constitutions are such that they practically have plenary powers; which means that they can also enter into treaties with their own people. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a straight up liar.

I also find in interesting but not unexpected, that Senator Pauline Hanson as self-appointed spokesperson for the 1930s, not only claimed that Senator Thorpe should be removed from Parliament for taking either invalid oath and was therefore ineligible to sit in Parliament, but also claimed that First Peoples should count as a foreign power.

As for the first of those claims, that is for the High Court to decide (which I suspect will be thrown out as a vexatious case); but it does kind of invite speculation about whether or not any and all people who want Australia to become a republic are also ineligible to sit in Parliament.

The second of those claims if we take it at face value, actually concedes the point that if First Peoples should count as a foreign power, then a Treaty absolutely does need to be discussed and concluded. Senator Hanson by default admits that she represents a foreign hostile power; thus confirming every single one of Senator Thorpe's outbursts as a valid complaint.

Aside:

I personally think that we should retain the monarchy in Australia. Yes I will confess some liking for the very big community which is the Commonwealth but by itself, that's no reason to do anything. No, the reason why I think that we should retain the monarchy in Australia, is that the alternative which will we be given is one in which the Grand Poobah will be elected.

Whatever the replacement for the Governor-General is, the people of Australia will want to elect them. Whenever you elect someone, that automatically implies a mandate for that person to act. The problem is that I do not really want that person to act. As it stands, the only time that anyone can remember the Governor-General acting was in the sacking of the Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam. The part that of that story which is frequently neglected is that Governor-General stayed on Rupert Murdoch's estate on the weekend of October 4th and 5th 1975. This happens to fall right in the middle of the duration of Kerr's letters to the Palace which begin on August 14th.

I have no doubt that as Kerr was by that stage, a drunkard, and a very weak minded individual, as evidenced by his blithering in the letters to the Palace, that his mind had been made up for him by either Rupert Murdoch or Malcolm Fraser.

The very obvious danger about electing that same position, is that instead of having someone unsure about their constitutional powers and being loath to used them, we will now have someone with powers defined and a mandate to use them. I can guarantee that those powers can and will be weaponised to sack future governments which have been duly elected by the people. I hate that.

Horse 3398 - Australia's Part In Bombing Beirut

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZO8-XXf0ek

Lebanese officials say 22 people have been killed and 117 others injured in Israeli airstrikes on central Beirut yesterday evening.

There was no warning issued before the strikes which hit residential buildings in two densely packed neighbourhoods in Bachoura - a small Shia area in the capital.

This is the third time Israel has launched air strikes on the city outside of the suburb of Dahieh, where it has struck repeatedly.

Media outlets, quoting security sources, suggest the apparent target, Wafiq Safa, survived. Safa is a high-ranking Hezbollah official and close ally of Hezbollah's former long-term leader Hassan Nasrallah. 

Neither the Israeli military nor Hezbollah's media office have commented.

- BBC News, 11th Oct 2024/

Well I will.

Hamas, Hezbollah, the IDF, and Benjamin Netanyahu are all evil and I hate all of you. The quicker that all of these things are dismantled, that Netanyahu is exiled to the Marshall Islands, and the quicker that the endless cycle of death comes to an end, the better.

I will comment. My country has blood on its hands. We helped supply the bombs.

In a week which saw the Israeli Defence Force lobbing rockets and bombs at both Gaza and Lebanon, and which saw Sky News Australia's Sharri Markson meet with the co-morbid Psychopath and Sociopath In Chief, PM Benjamin Netanyahu (this man has no remorse for his actions, no empathy for the people that he has stated that he thinks are vermin, frequently displayed criminal tendencies, and whose moral compass was burnt to a crisp so long ago that he consistently shows no regard for right and wrong and ignores the rights and feelings of others), we have to come to the conclusion that not only is every single word coming out of both sides of parliament in Australia unreliable, but we are joyfully complicit in war crimes. 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/11/us-made-munition-used-in-israeli-strike-on-central-beirut-shrapnel-shows

A US-made munition was used in a strike on central Beirut that killed 22 people and wounded 117, according to an analysis of shrapnel found by the Guardian at the scene of the attack.

The strike on Thursday night hit an apartment complex in the densely populated neighbourhood of Basta, levelling the apartment building and destroying cars and the interiors of nearby residences.

...

The Guardian found remnants of a US-manufactured joint direct attack munition (Jdam) in the rubble of the collapsed apartment building on Friday afternoon. Jdams are guidance kits built by the US aerospace company Boeing that attach to large “dumb bombs” ranging up to 2,000lbs (900kg), converting them into GPS-guided bombs.

The weapons remnant was verified by the crisis, conflict and arms division of Human Rights Watch and a former US military bomb technician.

“The bolt pattern, its position and the shape of the of the remnant are consistent with the tail fin of a US-made, Jdam, guidance kit for Mk80 series air-dropped munitions,” said Richard Weir, a senior researcher in Human Rights Watch’s crisis, conflict and arms division, after viewing a photograph of the fragment. The Mk80 series encompasses three classes of bomb, the smallest of which is 500lbs and the largest is 2,000lbs.

- The Guardian, 11th Oct 2024

The whole Mark 80 class of dumb bombs (yes, even the IDF's propaganda which says that they were using smart bombs was a total lie), has been in use since 1946; and started to see active service in the Korean War. The current Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAMs) are  also relatively dumb bombs; which the IDF has been deploying on civilians who have been defending themselves with tents and thoughts and prayers. Thoughts and Prayers are nominally useless against JDAMs, which is handy for the IDF as they continue to pummel the every loving cuss out of ordinary people until the streets flow with so much blood that Benny gets to have a chuckle.

Meanwhile, if you do even the most basic of perfunctory research, you find that Australia has played its part in the ongoing genocide of civilians like the pathetic little lap-dog that we are.

https://www.flightglobal.com/defence/australias-ferra-to-continue-jdam-er-wing-kit-production-work-on-powered-jdam/155505.article

Boeing and Australia’s Ferra Engineering have signed a memorandum of understanding related to further Australian production of Joint Direct Attack Munition Extended Range (JDAM ER) wing kits, and will explore applications for a powered version of JDAM.

The MoU will see Ferra continue to produce the JDAM ER wing kit, with the partnership to be extended through 2028, says Boeing.

- Flight Global, 24th Oct 2023

Boeing are famously going through something of a reputational poo-brown patch; with doors and engines falling off their planes in mid-flight, and their Starliner space capsule program having so many missteps that it even failed at being a ferry service to the space station this year. Nevertheless, Boeing are still about to mysteriously get their people killing programs working like a well oiler meat grinder.

So what is Australia's part in this? Why not just ask Boeing?

https://www.boeing.com.au/news/2023/boeing-ferra-expand-precision-aerial-munition-partnership

BRISBANE, Oct 25, 2023—Boeing [NYSE: BA] and Australia industry partner Ferra Engineering signed a Memorandum of Understanding to continue production of Joint Direct Attack Munition Extended Range (JDAM ER) wing kits. The agreement also includes the intent to explore applications for Powered JDAM(opens in a new tab) — a long-range, low-cost and mass-producible JDAM derivative capable of travelling upwards of 300 nautical miles.

Brisbane-based Ferra is Boeing’s global supplier of the 500-pound JDAM ER wing kits. Under the memorandum, the partnership will be extended through 2028. The partnership aligns with the Australian Defence Force’s commitment to enhance sovereign weapons capability under the Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance (GWEO) Enterprise and aligns with the AUKUS security partnership goal of advancing  trilateral defence capabilities.

- Boeing, 25th Oct 2023

I wonder what Ferra think of all of this:

https://ferra-group.com/capabilities/logistics-sustainment/

Ferra understands the need to provide higher value products and solutions to our customers. As part of our advanced manufacturing process, our role in the product life cycle doesn’t finish once the production product has left our organization.

Ferra has the capability to manage inventory and logistics on behalf of our customer. This has been delivered in a commercial and military environment.  

- Ferra Engineering, retrieved 12th Oct 2024

Now bear in mind that the identified shrapnel in Beirut is a piece of the Boeing JDAM; which means that as Ferra Engineering is Boeing's global supplier of the JDAM ER 500lb wing kit, that it had to have been made right here in Australia.

Isn't it funny. When Joe Hockey yelled at the auto-industry and told them to go away, they all did. Making cars in Australia is simply too hard. However, making parts and pieces to kill brown people? Well Australia is all for that because apparently it aligns with the AUKUS security partnership goal of advancing trilateral defence capabilities and enhancing sovereign weapons capability. Remember under the terms of AUKUS, we're not allowed to service our own F-35 aircraft but Israel is allowed to home-brew their own. Also under the terms of AUKUS, as the pathetic little lap-dog that we are, when Big Brother America wants to bomb the cuss out of brown people, we don't question it but comply like an evil evil little sycophant except that as a nation we're actually too stupid to even seek any kind of advantage. 

This is where your tax dollars are going. While America possibly is on the verge of lurching to the right as Donald Trump has repeatedly declared to deport people on day one, and as Israel actively pursues Benny from Cheltenham's personal goal of turning many thousands of people into chunky marinara because he must find joy in the suffering an deaths of people, what do we say? Nothing. Australia yet again has no foreign policy.

Horse 3354 - Eleventhly, Peter Dutton's Nuclear Energy Plan Is Stupid

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-20/nuclear-dutton-coalition-unanswered-questions-beak-rules/104000664

Yet when Dutton and his colleagues stood up before the media yesterday, they outlined a policy with many questions unanswered — including, most crucially, the actual cost of their nuclear rollout. The Coalition says it will reveal the cost down the track. But to leave unanswered such a crucial detail when the entire debate is centred around the cost of energy leaves the policy vulnerable and impossible to critically assess.

- Patricia Karvelas, ABC News, 20th Jun 2024

When an 18 year old schoolboy became the face of a push for nuclear power in Australia, my immediate suspicion was that there was something suspiciously suspicious about this. When Leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton, made an announcement that it will be Liberal Party policy to have seven nuclear reactors in Australia by 2035, my immediate suspicion was that not only there was something suspiciously suspicious about this but that his benefactors like Gina Rinehart must probably own a uranium mine. When the Minerals Council of Australia also came out in favour of have seven nuclear reactors in Australia by 2035, my immediate suspicion was immediately quashed because I know know that there is nothing suspicious about this and that this is just pure raw naked business speaking.

However, the entirety of the 'debate' being pushed by the Liberal Party and their handlers at Sky News, is almost entirely a disinformation campaign which runs on nonsenseleum. Nonsenseleum is apparently a renewable resource as Sky News seems to be able to mine virtually limitless quantities of the stuff.

Therefore, in true Socratic fashion, let us ask: 'What is Nuclear?'

In the most basic terms, the world has not progressed much beyond the steam age. A steam engine works by setting a thing on fire, usually rocks, and then using that fire to boil water to turn it into steam, which we then ask to do work. A coal fired power station works by setting a thing on fire, which are rocks called coal, and then using that fire to boil water to turn it into steam, which we then ask to do work by spinning turbines which we can then use to make electric. A nuclear power station works by having spicy rocks which are always on fire, which are radioactive rocks called uranium and plutonium, and then using that nuclear fire to boil water to turn it into steam, which we then ask to do work by spinning turbines which we can then use to make electric. 

However, as fun as nuclear power is, there are a lot of things that the nuff-nuffs in the Liberal Party have either missed or are deliberately not telling you.

Firstly, despite what the Minerals Council of Australia wants to tell you, nuclear power is NOT renewable. Just like anything else which is in the ground, there is only a limited amount of stuff which is readily accessible. The spicy rocks in a nuclear reactor come from various uranium oxides; which are actually a finite resource. They will run out at some point.

Secondly, as steam engines, coal power stations, and nuclear power stations, are all basically kettles with spinny things attached; which we then use to make electric or do work with, then they need water to put in the kettle. The problem is that nuclear power stations need a lot of water. Therefore nuclear power stations must be located near large bodies of water. This poses a problem. Perhaps someone at the Liberal Party, maybe even cosplay cowboy Senator Matt Canavan could tell the city boys, Australia is an arid country. This means that water resources are limited. I know that if you are Barnaby Joyce that you can sell 80 Megalitres of water for a cheeseburger and a box of goon, but for everyone else who lives in the country, the fact that we do not have lots of water everywhere in Australia is a very real reality which makes itself known to be a very real reality, quite a lot of the time.

Thirdly, although there are such things as molten salt reactors which will sort of self-shutdown when they stop being molten, salty sea water is not generally compatible with nuclear reactors. The Fukushima Nuclear Reactor which went into meltdown and then shutdown, shut down because all the salty sea water from the sea got in there. That's really handy if you want to stop a nuclear reactor from reacting and stop making electric but most of the time, you do want it reacting and making electric. That means putting a nuclear in Australia not near the sea; which is easy because Australia is big but bad because Australia doesn't have other water where there is no sea.

Fourthly, the thing about building nuclear reactors is that they are very expensive to build. This is not necessarily a problem if you are just starting out building a whole country because you have just been bombed to the nines in a great world war (or bonus round in a second world war), but if you are not, then being expensive is bad. It is worse if you are a country starting from scratch. Not many people have that kind of money and private investors are unlikely to stump up the capital. This means that generally speaking, nuclear power plants rely heavily on government subsidies; which is bad if you are the Liberal Party and you have just spent 80 years trying to convince everyone that government shouldn't own anything ever, because communism will eat your babies and turn the white people into mutants or something.

Fifthly and speaking of turning babies into mutants or something, where do you put the spicy rocks once you are finished with them? The spicy rocks in a nuclear power station do not stay that particular kind of special spiciness forever and need to be put into a bin. We do not currently have a good enough bin for  the storage of radioactive waste. Australia does currently produces low-level waste when it makes nuclear medicines (one of the ironies being that you can cure some radiation with other different radiation) but there's not a lot of the stuff. Australia's only real nuclear medicine nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights, currently does store nuclear waste at its own facility but as with every temporary measure, every temporary measure is always effectively permanent until a more permanent facility is completed. 

Sixthly, and related to fourthly, if private capital is not capable of stumping up the cash to build seven nuclear power stations, then government capital must be used. This is fine if they were to remain in government hands but given that the only Liberal Party policy which has been permanent is to sell every single thing in government hands that they possibly can to their criminal friends, then we must assume that the seven nuclear power stations including the ability to generate nuclear weapons absolutely will end up in private hands at some point. Why should we trust the character of people whom we do not yet know? 

Seventhly, where exactly would Australia store nuclear waste from 6 or 7 reactors? It's bad enough trying to convince the NIMBYs to put houses for people, from whom they might accidentally catch poverty from, in their backyard. Who wants nuclear waste from 6 or 7 nuclear reactors in their backyard? No-one.

Eighthly, although the spicy rocks do not stay that particular kind of special spiciness forever and need to be put into a bin, they still remain dangerous to human health for thousands of years. Australia can not just bury those spicy rocks in the ground because of a thing called the Great Artesian Basin. It is Great, which means that it is big. It is Artesian, which means that there is water under the ground from which most of the people not on the edge of Australia get their water from. It is a basin, which means that it is a big thing of water. Burying those spicy rocks under the ground in Australia, means that we would be poisoning the water supply for a very long time. When I poison the water supply; now everybody dead, then oops.

Ninthly, although the spicy rocks do not go boom and send spiciness everywhere most of the time, most of the time is still not all of the time. Events like Three Mile Island, or Chernobyl, or Fukushima, do not need to happen very often for the consequences to have very very long tails. If events like the disaster at Bhopal didn't involve spicy rocks and still are having consequences 40 years later, then a disaster which does involve spicy rocks will last longer. Also related is the fact that there are nefarious and nasty people in the world, who might want to make your spicy rocks go boom and send spiciness everywhere. I do not know what a directed terrorist attack on a nuclear power station would look like but I do know that you can't hide or move one very quickly. 

Tenthly, as it stands nuclear power stations supply about 11% of the world’s electric. Given that we are running out of other fossil fuel sources, that will put demands on Australia's uranium resources very quickly; an as nuclear energy is nominally about can be up to six times more expensive than renewable energy sources, this seems like the timeframe of 2035 is in fact too late to make any kind of discernable difference to get ahead of the future building costs.

Eleventhly, although the Liberal Party doesn't accept that climate change is a thing, insurance companies already think that current Liberal Party policy is complete junk. I tend to believe insurance companies who have a vested interest in spinning a profit due to contingent risks, than cosplay cowboys who can only see as far as the 2025 election. The awful truth is that due to the increasing impact of climate change which is in fact happening now, this means that rapid transition is needed. Even if we accept the Liberal Party's timeline, this means that the seven nuclear power stations are due to be completed in about 11 years' time. Development of renewable energy sources is happening now. The reason why the Liberal Party doesn't like renewable energy goes all the way back to the question at the beginning of this piece "does Gina own a uranium mine?" If the answer is "yes", which it is, then any and all sensible renewable energy policy must be destroyed immediately and forever.

As jack of no trade and master of no trade, and just an accountant which means that I have applied OCD to tell you what is wrong with your stupid proposal, when I can write a piece with the word 'eleventhly' in it,  then it is really really really really... stupid. Don't let an 18 year old be the spokesperson for your campaign because you look like a dill. Don't let Peter Dutton be the spokesperson for your campaign because you look like a dill. Look, just don't do it. It's dangerous. Stay Safe. 

Horse 3340 - The Right Hates Education Because The Kids Might Learn Enough To Talk Back

When I was standing in line at the bank on Monday to deposit some cheques, Sky News Australia was on the telly and Rowan Dean who is the Editor in Chief of The Spectator magazine in Australia, was having something of a preaching session about why the universities in Australia which are currently the site of considerable protest against the war in Gaza, should not only be defunded as public institutions but that there should be some new institution for teaching conservative values to students. He appeared to be calling for a specifically conservative business school, in the same way that something like Australian Catholic University might teach Catholic values to its students.

I can understand why Mr Dean should object to students having any kind of voice at all. As the Editor in Chief of The Spectator magazine in Australia, he is effectively the Australian agent for the very British tory establishment. When you consider that previous Editors in Chief of The Spectator magazine in Britain have included Nigel Lawson and Boris Johnson, who were then installed in the very heart of government at Westminster at Number 11 and Number 10, then any kind of voice against what The Spectator must be silenced. "Conservative values" has displayed by The Spectator magazine included open praise for the angry mustachioed German man from 1935-1938 until things went a even bit to unpleasant for The Spectator magazine.

Universities in particular have often been a thorn in the side of people in power. Not only do universities represent a kind of third place, but the age of the students is such that they still have the vigour and anger to be able to make coordinated protests. Also, as university is a period in one's life before someone enters full-time work in a lot of cases, university students are doubly blessed with not just vigour and anger but that most precious of commodities, time. Coincidentally, the other period in people's lives when they have a lot of time is in retirement; which is what talk-back radio and Sky News Australia have built their preaching model on.

Recently, one of the dog-whistle clarion cries which appears to be a coordinated effort across the Anglosphere by the Murdoch press, is the yelling that there is too much immigration. Of course rabid racist xenophobia is nothing new, but this latest effort is nothing more than a cover to convince middle and lower class people that the reason why rents are going up is because of the immigrants and not because of a deliberate degradation of public housing and a concerted chronic lack of investment in public housing. They will of course mention nothing of the fact that the propertied rentier class is making money hand over fist but when this is pointed out, blame is then put back on 'the market' instead of the housing policy in the first place.

At the same time, we have Universities selling education at massively inflated costs to foreign students; also because of a degradation of education and a concerted chronic lack of investment in the labour stock of the nation. This is of course deliberate. The people who own and/or control capital, want to keep their little cabals of ownership and control to themselves; so any kind of ladder upwards, such as a decent wage, home ownership, tertiary education, must be removed or destroyed.

If the twenty-first century has told us anything, it is that everything that the Lost, Greatest and Silent Generations fought for, and paid for with the lives of more than 100 million souls, can very easily be stolen away and has been done so by the Baby Boomers and the top half of Generation X, who inherited everything, were given the highest real wages in the history of the world, and are now parasitically stealing the work of Generations X, Y, and Z, in the continued maintenance of the lifestyle they didn't have to work for.

All of this means to say that the horrors of the twentieth century, which produced a very brief period of economic paradise for a wider range of people, also known as Les Trente Gloriueses from 1945-1975, were an anomaly. It was only because so much physical capital was destroyed that that happened. What the late period of the twentieth century and the opening three decades of the twenty-first century should remind us of, is that the people who own and/or control capital, want to keep their little cabals of ownership and control to themselves, and that what is going on is nothing more than a reassertion of that condition. This was, is, and always will be, the central project of Empire.

The project of Empire, which has always been the same project but rebranded occasionally, is the exercise of raw naked power for the purpose of the exercise of raw naked power. It matters not whether it was the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Greeks, the Romans, the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Olmecs, the Mongols, the British, the French, the Germans, or the Americans, the goal of every empire has always been identical.

There are in fact two massive problems with the project of Empire. The first is the fact that on the way to exercising of raw naked power, factions within the Empire will compete to eventually become the top of the stack. Sometimes this resolves itself via factions, or parties, or families, or corporations. Capitalism is not anything particularly interesting, other than a slightly different collective ownership program; which is designed to maintain raw naked power in those few select hands. There were some interesting experiments by means of communist revolutions but they actually end up in mostly the same place; which is factions competing to eventually become the top of the stack.

So when I hear Rowan Dean on Sky News Australia, banging on about how there needs to be new institutions for teaching the leaders of tomorrow, which aren't infected by wokism or leftism, I believe that his intentions are genuine. It isn't very often that you get a peek behind the curtain and see raw naked power actually parading around in no clothes, but here we are. 

This might sound ridiculous now but once upon a time, universities were centres for learning. It was at universities that people learnt how to think, learnt history, learnt about the arts, and learnt the useful sciences. Somewhere between about 1870 and 1914, when it was decided that the way that you controlled empire, and this included both the British Empire and emerging American Empire, that the corporation and not the estate would be the basis of rebuilding the world into the next phase of the project of Empire. Probably the last war to be played out, with the training from the playing fields of Harrow and Eton, was the First World War. By the Second World War, economics had built itself into the excuse generation factory for capitalists and mercantilists and after the war, the great chasm of capitalism and communism was a useful narrative; when in actual fact the mechanism for owning and/or control capital looked practically identical on either side of the Iron Curtain.

I think that it is reasonable to believe that the factions who want to exercise raw naked power purely for its own sake, would want to eject universities from public funding and from the pipeline of producing people who might be capable of leading nations. As it is, as far as the people who own and/or control capital are concerned, the reason that universities currently exist is as a certificate giving and almost semi-vetting process to make sure that the right people get into positions of power and excluding the people that don't. The idea of the university as learning centre is utterly pointless to the people who own and/or control capital because the Arts are only of use if they can sell tickets, the Humanities serve no purpose whatsoever, and the useful Sciences are only useful as far as they are able to produce technicians who can operate the machines of production. 

The war in Gaza is a problem for media outlets like Sky News Australia and The Spectator magazine because just like in times past, although they can paint the two sides as goodies and baddies to appease their funding donors, we have long reached the point where the moral dimension and the amount of blood spilled is horrendous. In calling for a new institution for teaching conservative values to students, what Mr Dean actually wants is for the students who currently exist to shut up and put up and get out of the way of business' ongoing project of Empire. The way that you can silence an opposing voice is to dismantle it; which is what Mr Dean is calling for.

Horse 3320 - Have A Sook, Toyota.

https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/infrastructure-transport-vehicles/vehicles/vehicle-safety-environment/emission-standards

The current minimum noxious emission standard for new light vehicles in Australia is ADR 79/04, which is based on an international standard known as Euro 5. The current minimum noxious emission standard for new heavy vehicles is ADR 80/03, which is based on an international standard known as Euro V, with vehicles meeting equivalent US or Japanese standards also accepted.

For heavy vehicles (trucks and buses over 3.5 tonnes), a new ADR 80/04, based on the Euro VI (Stage C) requirements will apply to newly approved heavy vehicle models supplied from 1 November 2024 and all new heavy vehicles supplied to the Australian market on or after 1 November 2025.As with ADR 80/03, vehicles meeting equivalent US or Japanese standards will also be accepted.

- Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts, at 22nd Mar 2024

The Albanese Government is currently trying to change the emissions standards and fuel consumption standards for new motor vehicle sales, primarily to bring us in line with Japan. This seems to me to be an entirely sensible policy, as Japan adopted Australia's safety standards with regards Side Impact Protection Systems some time ago; so normalisation with Japan is a good idea. Japan itself already adopted the Euro 6 emissions standards and the EU has also just recently adopted Japan's fuel consumption standards. In theory this should mean that there is little if anything to do when a car is imported into Australia. In theory it should be easier to get a landed product here.

In practice though the biggest whingers against the plan have been Ford and Toyota; likely because they have the biggest to lose in terms of potential profits. For a while now the Ford Ranger and the Toyota Hilux have sat atop the sales charts. As Ford and Toyota are multi-national corporations, of course they will offer the cheapest and lowest quality product that they can get away; and in the case of Australia that means quality just a cut above mediocre. The Thai-built trucks that Ford and Toyota choose to dump on Australia are in no way reflective of the quality of the workforce but rather the quality of the materials and IP being put into them. As they are only required by the current Australian Design Regulations to build cars to Euro 5 specifications, then that's all that they will do; the overarching reason why automakers can lower quality vehicles on Australia, is that Australia being an island nation with no motor manufacturing industry of its own to speak of, amounts to a captured market (because the very tory Abbott Liberal Goverment's policies in 2013). 

https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/toyota-urges-labor-to-put-brakes-on-clean-car-plan-20240228-p5f8cd

The country’s top-selling car brand, Toyota, has urged the Albanese government to slow the pace of new car emissions standards, saying it is too ambitious, will cause price rises and reduce the range of vehicles available.

Toyota, which sold more than 200,000 cars here last year, including the number two model, the Hilux, issued the statement at the same time new industry analysis laid bare the size of the challenge facing importers.

That analysis finds few models in the current domestic car fleet meet the standards, meaning the task of changing the make-up of cars sold in Australia to meet the new standards will be significant.

- Financial Review, 28th Feb 2024

Nevermind the fact that Toyota already meet Euro 6 standards in Japan, so suggesting that the "task of changing the make-up of cars sold in Australia to meet the new standards will be significant" is quite frankly complete bunk; as evidenced by their own website.

https://toyota.jp/hilux/

Owing to the fact that we have a hideously rightest broadcast media in this country, and an electorate which is rationally and irrationally self-interested, then any proposed changes to the standards if they result in cost increases, will be railed against as if they were the Devil incarnate. Discourse seems to be mainly centred around the proposition that Albanese Government is trying to take people's trucks away and that trucks will become more expensive, in spite of the evidence before their own eyes that owing to the fact that we do not have a motor manufacturing industry in Australia any more, the real cost of motor vehicles rose by 35%, and I note that Toyota themselves have removed the Toyota Hilux WorkMate from their lineup. Again, this is purely a profit driven decision and has nothing to do with government policy.

The most visible consequence of the then Abbott Government actively killing the motor manufacturing industry in Australia, was a very rapid shift to light trucks like the Ford Ranger, Toyota Hilux, Isuzu D-Max et cetera. This is in addition to the SUVification of everything. Perhaps the most emblematic evidence of a successfully killed the motor manufacturing industry in Australia, is the introduction of the the Chevrolet Silverado and Dodge RAM as massively massive brodozers for cosplay cowboys. The first and obvious problem with this is that they weigh about 500kg more than the traffic they replaced, and cause nearly triple the damage to other road users in terms of property and personal damage. The second and obvious problem with this is that not only do bigger things work more efficiently at doing damage, as they are light trucks they aren't bound by the relevant Australian Design Regulations with regards pedestrian safety either. All the work done in improving road safety has been undone in three years.

Not only are the kinds of people who buy these things likely to be more aggressive on the roads, and more likely to underpay their staff, they're also less likely to be actually doing work in these brodozers. A hundred thousand dollar brodozer is itself an expensive investment; that invariably means that they then get dressed up with nice wheels and body kits and never visit work sites. A truck with chequerplate boxes, or metal pull down sides, with dents in the side, is very obviously a tool to be used for work.  A chromed garage queen is not. Nevertheless, as more than three-quarters of new vehicles are currently bought with ABNs, then this means that about a third of the expenses of those vehicles, including depreciation, are written off on tax. This means that the same knaves who underpay their staff, also rip off the taxpayer as well. It figures.

Scruitinising this though is a difficult job. Mtor vehicle registrations a task for State Governments. Income Tax and Company Tax are within the remit of the Federal Government. There is no sharing of data. There is not cross-referencing of data. The best that we can do is the ATO's anonymised data set; which because it quite rightly removes loads of detail, can only give you general details in the aggregate. Furthermore, one of the problems with the ATO's anonymised data set is that although you can get general details for Motor Vehicle expenses, and even Occupation Codes, actually mapping the two requires opening up individual tax returns which is not an option, and the actual details for each Motor Vehicle within a tax return sit inside a text field which means that you would never be able to get generalised data anyway. 

The state motor registry offices and the data held by insurance companies would be of no help either, since although they are concerned to the finest detail about every vehicle in question, for tax purposes and insurance premium purposes, the only distinction about what vehicles are used for is if they are 'private' or for 'business'. State motor registry offices can not tell you how a vehicle is used, since they do not actually care and have no ability to check the genuineness of what they have been told. 

The open and yet unstated lie about Motor Vehicle expenses generally in Australia, is that heaps and heaps of people don't really have genuine Motor Vehicle expenses. What they have is a Motor Vehicle and a business and they choose to run the expenses of that Motor Vehicle through the business as a tax minimisation strategy. Again, the Australian Tax Office doesn't actually care about the specifics of any given motor vehicle, so they aren't concerned about delving into the the specifics of any given motor vehicle's use in a business. They only keep broad data ranges and actively audit anything which exceeds those broad data ranges. Even if they did, it would not be unusual for a Plumber to have Motor Vehicle expenses relating to a work truck. Here's the fun thing though: the ATO has no idea what a 'work truck' actually is, since they only keep the details for each Motor Vehicle within a text field inside a tax return.

Anecdote is not evidence but in evidence's complete absence, this will have to do. An ex-client of ours who runs a series of franchise gyms, had a very expensive two-door low slung Italian sports car which he ran through the business for tax purposes. In principle there is nothing wrong with choosing any car that you like and in fact the ATO does not care what car you have but if you are running a Hubrisa Aurii and choose to run 100% of the expenses through the business, the ATO will suddenly take interest. I mention 'ex-client' because he left us after we refused to run his personal mortgage through the business as an expense (largely because this fails the Section 8 ITAA 1997 deductibility test) and we later found out from his friend that he had been audited by the ATO and the results were not pretty. 

Now I mention this because although anecdote is not data, it is instructive as an object lesson. In my experience as an accountant for more than 500 clients, when you ask people to submit anything like a Motor Vehicle log book to verify what proportion of expenses are in fact business expenses, more often than not you end up with clients flap into a mild panic and they have to donkey up a log book; which has been more than likely been invented there and then and isn't genuinely genuine. As the ATO believes literally anything that you tell them, they are fine with it; as long as the expenses fall within the broad data ranges. If what you tell them is not believable, they can and will use any means necessary to bring someone into compliance; which includes trial by financial exhaustion and/or prison. 

Now you and I and everyone knows that deep down, the amount of donkeying up of log books for Motor Vehicle expenses is practically endemic because the only people who would actually care about the truth at the time, are nerdulent geeks with OCD and the number of nerdulent geeks with OCD in trades, is exactly nil. Tradespeople generally want to do the job of their trade and thanks to everyone's inherent drive for selfishness, the ethics of donkeying up a log book for Motor Vehicle expenses is always thrown out the window. Morals are character qualities of poorer people because the kosmos decrees that you do not get to be rich if you are stupid enough to hang on to them. And even if the ATO were to run an audit on this specific aspect of whether or not a brodozer is used for business, the ATO does not have the investigation tools to determine how a vehicle is used. A truck looks like a work vehicle to people who do not really care about what a truck is actually used for.

The underlying moral problem is that Motor Vehicle expenses can and are used by people as a rort. The people who actually suffer as a result of businesspeople donkeying up of log books for Motor Vehicle expenses, are you and I, the taxpayer. It is strange that when people find an advantage, even if it is illegal, even if it is morally dubious, that defending that advantage becomes a matter of entitlement. Businesspeople who are engaged in running dodgy practices will even try to beat you with the line of argument that whatever vehicle they drive is a matter of personal choice, as if that were some moral ringfence of glory. This is at the same time when they receive tax incentives for an illegal act.

It is insanely obvious what is in fact a genuine work vehicle and what is not. Something like a Toyota Hliux with fold down metal sides is very obviously a work vehicle. A Dodge RAM which has low profile tyres and mag wheels and which has very obviously never ever left the black top in its life, is very obviously a garage queen owned by a cosplay cowboy. Push any line of enquiry though and what you find out pretty quickly is that instead of towing a bobcat, what people actually want a Dodge Ram for is towing boats, caravans, and horse floats. Towing those things is good and fine but we all know that those things are not business expenses. What we find out pretty quickly is that we the taxpayer effectively fund about a third of people's private entertainment.

This is what lies at the heart of the problem. The hideously rightest broadcast media in this country already hate the existence of government, and the current Albanese Government is on the other political football team. We have Dictator Dan, Palace Chook, and Airbus Albo on one side, and policies which actively caused suicide on the other but that's fine because those people do not matter. The cosplay cowboys who drive brodozers, are more likely to vote for their political football team. They are the good guys; including if they manslaughter pedestrians and cause increasing amounts of property damage but all of that's cool in the name of profits, right?

Horse 3308 - Dunkley By-Election: Labor Retain

https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/HouseDivisionPage-29778-210.htm

31,532 - BELYEA, Jodie (ALP)

29,877 - CONROY, Nathan (Lib)

4,997 - BRESKIN, Alex (Grn)

As I write this, the results for the by-election in the division of Dunkley, look very much like the Labor Party will retain the seat; with Jodie Belyea winning 41.02% of the primary vote, versus former Mayor of Frankston Nathan Conroy with 38.87% of the primary vote. This by-election was not the result of a member resigning but by the death of sitting Labor member Peta Murphy who had been battling breast cancer for 13 years. So unlike other elections where the previous member was unpopular and/or left in disgrace, this by-election was held in a fairly neutral environment. 

Jodie Belyea winning 41.02% of the primary vote, which is a swing of 0.05% to Labor is so slight as to be statistically unimportant. It is so small that the by-election actually tells us nothing about Labor's chances of retaining government in 2025. I personally think that there will be an early budget in March; with the election taking place on or about the 17th of May 2025; which would be an ordinary House and Half-Senate election.

Nathan Conroy was in fact a fairly popular Mayor for Frankston; which meant that he could and did run a pretty positive campaign. However, if you had been watching Sky News, reading either The Age or The Herald-Sun, then you would be forgiven for thinking that this would be an absolute walkover for him. The obvious question is 'what went wrong?' and the answer is 'nothing really'.

Except:

https://twitter.com/sussanley/status/1763060889765515496

If you live in Frankston and you’ve got a problem with Victorian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor.

If you do not want to see Australian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor.

Send Labor a message.

- Sussan Ley, 29th Feb 2024, 15:37pm (on X)

Sussan Ley, the Member for Farrer and Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, decided to turn this into a racist dog whistle campaign. Trying to stoke the fires of irrational fear by blaming "foreign criminals" when we all know that she really means 'black people' but is too craven to bring her actual racism into the light, is quite frankly despicable.

There probably will be a lot of commentary about 'who really won' the by-election as though this were some gnostic set of runes that nobody can read but the thing about a an election is that it is really ridiculously easy to determine who won. We have the numbers. The person with the most votes after all the instant run-offs, that is the person with more than 50% plus 1 of the votes has won the election. You don't need to clutch pearls, look at bird entrails, read tea leaves or wave burning leaves over your head - the person 'who really won' the election is the person who WON the election.

However in dissecting why the Liberal Party lost the seat when their candidate was actually quite affable and seems like a nice chap, then this moment at thirteen minutes to four in the afternoon, which is time enough for news bulletins to pick up their sound bites, the exact moment that the Liberal Party lost the seat.

At this point, Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, made her intentions clear that she intended to court the racist vote for her own political ends, and rather than mere blaming the Labour Party for this or that, turned this into a 'wink wink nudge nudge black people' moment. Sussan Ley as an openly racist knave, tried to dog-whistle and the people of Dunkley responded by telling her party where to go.

If you drill down into the numbers as they stand, the Labor Party retained its primary vote. The Liberal Party can try and pretend that it has had a successful campaign but all that they have in fact done, is pick up votes from the absence of Pauline Hanson's One Nation and the United Australia Party. I do not know how you can pretend that a 6.82% gain is a success when the corresponding loss of 7.70% is from parties who weren't even running. What that actually says is that 0.88% of the population or 709 people, would rather vote for an empty chair than you.

If there is a lesson to be learned here, it is that trying to use American advisors and American strategies to push American-style misinformation in an Australian context, is a road which puts you on a hiding to nothing. Yes, there was a time and a place when demonising asylum seekers and blaming immigrants for the woes of the country did work but that was back in 2001. American advisors which suggest that a winning political strategy which involves energising their base, is in the third decade of the twenty-first strategy, a losing one. 

The take-aways from this election are that the Labor Party has gone nowhere because boring government is good government. The Liberal Party only increased its primary vote because the further-right-wing sections of the political spectrum fielded zero candidates. The Greens having lost 4% of the vote are going AWOL in the public imagination. And weirdly, the fact that we have an Animal Justice, a Libertarian, and a Victorian Socialist who together polled 5.48% of the vote would suggest that the fringes of the electorate are fracturing.

Curiously, I suspect that Ms Ley is either delusional, drunk, or just openly lying to the Australian people:

https://twitter.com/sussanley/status/1763882241892270580

The people of Dunkley have sent Anthony Albanese a strong message and it's not ‘Happy Birthday’, it's 'do something about the cost of living crisis.’ A swing of this size at the next election would see us win 11 seats from Labor. This is a terrible result for the Prime Minister.

- Sussan Ley, 2nd Mar 2024, 20:01pm (on X)

I actually do have a spreadsheet and can calculate this. 

Ms Ley is in fact correct, a swing of this size at the next election would see the coalition win 11 seats at the next election. By my reckoning, they would increase from 55 to 66 seats. Also, a swing of this size at the next election would see Labor pick up two seats, taking them from 77 to 79. The Greens would lose 3, Centre Alliance would lose their only seat, and there would be 7 independents.

I still fail to see how retaining a seat is a "terrible result for the Prime Minister". Perhaps someone can explain that to me.

Horse 3305 - Private Education Is A Veblen Good, So Why Must We As Taxpayers Pay For It?

https://www.heraldsun.com.au/victoria-education/student-background-the-big-difference-between-private-and-public-school-results/news-story/35f531679417cb03def4b571913b6035

Despite some charging almost $50,000 a year, a new study has found that education at private schools is nothing special in comparison to government and independent schools.

- Herald Sun, 9th Feb 2024

This isn't the first time that 'a new study' has found that education at private schools is not any better at delivering educational excellence and results than public education.

https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s13384-021-00498-w

No differences were evident after controlling for socioeconomic status and prior NAPLAN achievement. Using longitudinal modelling, we also found no sector differences in the rate of growth for reading and numeracy between Year 3 and Year 9. Results indicate that already higher achieving students are more likely to attend private schools, but private school attendance does not alter academic trajectories, thus undermining conceptions of private schools adding value to student outcomes.

- The Australian Association for Research in Education, Inc, 2nd Mar 2021

Okay, so maybe this is a recent phenomenon...

https://www.theage.com.au/education/fourth-study-this-year-confirms-private-schools-no-better-than-public-20141110-11jlgn.html

The fourth study this year has found Australian private schools produce no better results than public schools, when students' socio-economic backgrounds are taken into account.

Stéphane Mahuteau and Kostas Mavromaras, academics at the National Institute for Labour Studies at Flinders University, conducted the latest study, which found a strong and positive association between the socio-economic status of a student and their test scores. The core result of the paper is that, after controlling for a number of school and student characteristics, "school quality does not depend directly on the sector of the school". The main determinant of the higher raw test scores observed in private schools is the higher socio-economic status (SES) of students attending private schools, the report found.

- The Age, 10 Nov 2014

...no, it isn't.

I shan't bore you with repeated studies which happen again and again, which prove exactly the same thing because the further that we go back into the past, the less relevance they have to modern schooling. Suffice to say that in looking through newspaper archives, I have found roughly the same thing being reported roughly once ever three years going back all the way until 1974. That's fifty years of telling us exactly the same thing; namely that private education despite its expense, provides no actual educational benefit to the children who go there.

There is an old adage which says that 'Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result'. When it comes to education in Australia not only do we have multiple studies which prove that private schools do not provide better educational outcomes but we also have decent modelling which demonstrates that private schools don't actually save taxpayers any money either:

https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2020/03/16/myth-busted--private-schools-don-t-save-taxpayers--dollars.html

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rnn0w1nWYreOMRSsDfzt4n8KXHaGbw2h/view

Given all of this, why do we do it? Why do we as a nation deliberately choose to spend public monies on private schooling, which is by nature exclusionary, when it produces no educational benefit and actually has negative financial benefit? Because politics is a demand driven system and parents demand that they get to send their kids to private schools which are subsidised by the taxpayer. If this was any sane commercial market, it would be quite rightly seen as open corruption and there would be a Royal Commission into it. 

The question then is, what do parents get out of private education? As private schools still charge private fees, parents obviously think that they derive some kind of benefit because as at least semi-rational beings, they want something to show for their many dollarpounds that they have parted with. If it is not better educational outcomes then they must be buying something else while claiming that they have the moral right to demand that we the good and fair people of the Commonwealth pay a second time when we already are obligated to provide public education.

What I think is going on, after having worked in legal and legal adjacent workplaces such as the law courts and an accounting firm, is that what parents are actually buying when it comes to private schooling for their children is in fact a Veblen good.

American economist Thorstein Veblen in his 1899 work "The Theory of the Leisure Class" noted that there were certain kinds of goods such as artwork, jewellery, watches, yachts, and the relatively new fangled invention of the motor car, actually had an increase in demand as the price went up. These things were purchased because the person who bought them, perceived an increase in displayed status. Quite literally these goods were 'status symbols' and the term that Veblen used to describe them was 'conspicuous consumption'. The whole class of goods in turn would eventually be come to be known as Veblen Goods as a result of his work.

The weird thing about Veblen goods is that they appear to violate the basic law of demand, which states that quantity demanded has an inverse relationship with price. That is, that as the price goes up, people want less. Imagine a Mars bar. If they are $2, you might only want 1. If they are $1, you can have 2. If they go up to $2.30, you might not want any. Veblen goods don't do that. If the price goes up, people actually want more of them. These are not normal things. In fact, Veblen likened the purchase and display of things for conspicuous consumption to that of the tail feathers of a peacock. These things were bought precisely because there was an emotional appeal of their exclusivity; which the majority of the population simply would not or could not purchase.

Human beings are otherwise semi-rational electro-mechanical meatbags who economics assumes are looking to maximise their happiness and/or utility with the things that they purchase. Veblen goods are less about satisfying raw utility and more about maximise people's happiness. In making someone more exclusive and important, the purchase of a Veblen good actually makes them believe that they have purchased something of high quality that is out of reach for others. In turn, they then believe this is worth the premium they pay.

Generally speaking, when a particular good or service has a higher price, consumers will assume it to be of better quality; including when that is untrue and simply not the case. As I have demonstrated a repeated interest in motor cars, then my prime example of this is BMW; which has a reputation for pushing out technology way too early and being notably unreliable. Likewise, people generall perceive that the Toyota Hilux is of better quality than the GWM Cannon; even though maintenance costs prove this to be untrue.

The exclusivity of Veblen goods is also useful because if something is perceived as difficult to purchase or expensive, and the majority of the population will not or cannot purchase them, then this might actually increase its attraction to those for whom status is important, because it is now even farther out of reach for the average consumer.

The thing about private schools is that precisely because they charge fees, this acts as a barrier to entry. School fees actively keep out those students whose parents can not afford to pay. Granted that there are occasionally a few scholarships and other conditions where some parents are exempted from paying either entirely or partially, but these are not the majority. Scholarships for private schools are generally only awarded to students on academic grounds where the presence of the student actively bolsters the school's academic standings in official reporting, or those legacy cases where a school might have been started as a ministry of a church and there are still some vestigial appendages which exist.

Private schools can and will eject a student for poor academic performance. Private schools can and will eject a student for behavioural reasons. This means that these students are placed back into the hands of the public school system; which also has the added benefit of bolstering a private school's academic standings in official reporting. 

It is true that some parents will buy private schooling for their children because of some perceived advantage in behaviour of the students. It is true that some parents will buy private schooling for their children because of some perceived advantage in extra-curricular activities such as a music program, a sports program, or other non-core program. However, there is not an insignificant proportion of parents buy private schooling for their children because of the imparted economic signal that going to a private school provides. A Higher School Certificate with the name of a private school on it, is an advantage when that child who is now 17, 18, or even 19 and 20, applies for a job. A Higher School Certificate with the name of a private school on it, is an advantage in professions like law, finance, banking, and other managerial positions. That Higher School Certificate with the name of a private school on it, is undeniably an economic signal that the person who has it, is not riff-raff.

Remember, Thorstein Veblen wrote about 'conspicuous consumption' of goods because the person who bought them, perceived an increase in displayed status. A 'status symbol' is not just an abstract concept but a physical embodiment that the person who has it, has been approved (or approved themselves) as having acquired status. Purchasing a Higher School Certificate with the name of a private school on it, is the purchase of status for one's child.

The moral question which practically nobody wants to answer because they have to confront the fact that this is ugly, is why the general public should be forced to subsidise the purchase of what amounts to status symbols and economic symbols for the privileged few? Moreover why should be forced to subsidise the purchase of what amounts to status symbols and economic symbols for the privileged few when those same privileged few have rejected public education, which the general public is already obligated to provide?

I find it utterly maddening that the excuse of 'choice' is used as a cudgel to beat the general public with, in order to justify perpetuating the public subsidy of a Veblen good. Admittedly it is very good business to show favoritism to rich people and look down on poor people but the commonwealth is not a business but a commonwealth. What is the point of a nation? Suppose there was someone in very expensive clothes and with valuable gold rings on his fingers, and at the same moment someone else comes in who is poor and dressed in threadbare clothes. If make a lot of fuss over the rich person and give them the best seat in the house but say to the poor man, "You can stand over there if you like or else sit on the floor" then this just looks like sycophancy. Why do we need to do this as nation when all it results in is further social stratification? 

"The accumulation of wealth at the upper end of the pecuniary scale implies privation at the lower end of the scale. The members of the leisure class planning events and parties does not actually help anyone in the long run. What results from this behavior, is a society characterized by the waste of time and money."

- Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)

Madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result... why do we do it? Moreover why must we pay for a thing when as a society, it benefits a few at the expense of the least well off?

Horse 3300 - We Can't Have Nice Trains Because Nobody Wants To Pay For Them

A client of ours who had recently come back from a trip to France, made two comments within quick succession where you could say that one has begat the other. In the first instance she complained that France has lovely high-speed trains and that the government should step out of the way and let private enterprise build them here. In the second instance, she complained about having to pay "all this tax" despite the fact that a great deal of her income is taxed at the rate of 0% because of the superannuation rules; which means her effective tax rate is in fact lower than mine.

I do not know if you want to take the philosophical argument that taxation allows government spending, or that government spending happens and that taxation retires the debt which exists by virtue of the government having already spent the money (I do not care if you are Hayekian, Keyneisan, Friedmanish, or an MMT bro') but it seems to me that if private enterprise wanted to build high-speed rail in Australia that they would have bent the arm of government to do so, and given the fact that we now have toll-roads swiss-cheesing their way left, right, and criss-cross across Sydney, that government would have been happy to throw many billions of dollarpounds at them in order to do so. We have not high-speed rail in Australia because there is no political will to do so. We have not high-speed rail in Australia because there is no commericial enterprise which either has the ability to raise that kind of capital nor that sees the commerical benefits in building it. At best we have commerical freight rail which wants to freeload off of public-built rails, some highly effective suburban rail in the major cities, and mostly anaemic not-very-high-speed rail in Australia.

Let's be honest, transportation in Australia has always been a hilariously stupid joke, told by second-rate business people, to a third-rate electorate, resulting in fourth-rate infrastructure. We don't have high-speed rail to speak of. We don't really have anything resembling world-class motorways. We have a few airports which are all owned by merchant banking corporations. The vehicles which we run over those pieces of infrastructure are also the result of a hilariously stupid joke. Although we have a few custom coach builders who build buses, some trains and assemble trams, we have no automotive industry to speak of. We can't even build our own ships and/or submarines despite living on an island.

We are not allowed to have a lovely high-speed train network, not because government needs to step out of the way and let private enterprise built them here but rather, that government has been deliberately made mostly derelict and private enterprise simply refuses to build what is not profitable for them. Actually, this can be said with every single piece of major wide-scale infrastructure in Australia, where physical connections were necessary; be it road, rail, gas, electric, water, sewerage, telephony, internet, et cetera, that the only reason that any private enterprise has any of these things at all is because governments of the past built them and the current tories who now own them, have inherited them them after paying cents in the dollar (if that) for them.

Elsewhere in the world, other nations are obviously better at us than this. The TGV, or Train de Grand Vitesse, came about after the oil crisis of the 1970s and France set about building itself a high-speed rail network with the intent of future-proofing itself against other oil crises. SNCF is a government owned and operated rail company. France is pretty sharp when it comes to state owned companies, and it speaks volumes that the largest electricity provider in the UK is EDF which is Electricite Direct France. Even before Brexit, tory governments in Britain brexited the British Government from Britain.

As I write this in 2024, we mark the 60th anniversary of the Shinkansen in Japan. Generation-0 or Zero-ken, was built in preparation for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics; which were held as a way for Japan to show that it had reentered the civilised world after making an empire for itself, then losing the empire and symbolically being punished with two nuclear weapons dropped on it. In 1964, Zero-ken had regular operational speeds which touched 210km/h. To the best of my knowledge Australia has had exactly one train reach 210km/h and that was in Queensland and on a specific test run. I know not of any other train in Australia to ever go above 200km/h.

The obvious argument why Australia can not have high speed rail is that Australia is big. That bigness is an impediment to even bothering to try; so we don't. The problem with this argument is that Japan now has a high speed rail network which is vast and extensive, and long, and built over mountainous terrain, and built in a country prone to earthquakes. The actual reason why Australia can not have high speed rail is incompetence and stupidity. I note that the big nations across the Anglosphere all suffer from this impediment. Canada has no high speed rail to speak of. The United States is beholden to the motor car. Australia is just whatever our big brothers say we are.

The weird thing is that some Australians have seen nice trains. We know what nice trains are. I live in a city with double-deck suburban rail cars; which gunzels might not like but I think are pretty excellent. Even here in Sydney, when the electric train network was properly opened in 1926, it wasn't until 1988 that all the lines were fully electrified. Nevertheless and despite the fact that the way found for most of the railways in my fair city is now getting on for a hundred plus years old, the trains that we do have are nice.

Paradoxically it is people like this client of ours who thinks that the government should step out of the way and let private enterprise build nice trains here who through the ballot box, perpetually ensures that that will never be the case. These people are NIMBYs (Not In My BackYard) who object to YIMBYs (Yes, In My BackYard) while the PIMBYs (Please, In My BackYard) get to sit in traffic because railways aren't built. Meanwhile, they get to go on lovely holidays which are mostly funded by tax free incomes and still complain about having to pay "all this tax", where they will then ride on nice trains which other nations have deemed it a good idea to pay "all this tax" to have.

Horse 3294 - Hey Hey, Ho Ho. Ita Buttrose Has Got To Go!

I have heard rumours coming from inside the corporation that Ita Buttrose will at some point in 2024, resign as head of the ABC. What I suspect has happened under her quite tory tenure is that the ABC has been pruned of many things which are vital to it, and then has let other things deliberately wither. Furthermore given that she was picked by a Prime Minister who although probably didn't break the law, was certainly corrupt enough to break its conventions, her unsaid remit (as far as we know) has been one of deliberate degradation of the ABC.

The thing is that we should have expected this. Ms Buttrose came from a wildly successful career in magazines, including being captain of the ship at the Australian Women's Weekly, before retiring to become a mildly lovable elder stateswoman. This would have been fine except that running the ABC is absolutely not like running a business and putting a demonstratively tory leader in charge, has proven that Ms Buttrose knows keenly the price of everything but the value of nothing and certainly not the value of the ABC.

I will suggest that the ABC as an independent broadcaster, which is owned in commonwealth by us the people of the Commonwealth of Australia, can and does have a responsibility to hold the Government of the day to account. For this reason the ABC has been consistently attacked during its 90 years by both Labor, and UAP and Liberal Governments (functionally there has never really been a Federal Country/National Government). However, taking a stance of being merely anti-government and in the current case, clearly partisan, is bad for the corporation (which is the reason why Ms Buttrose was picked by PM Morrison to run it). 

The ABC is an important thing for the Commonwealth of Australia to have, as the commercial media in this country, have backed away from doing actual journalism. Reporting the news with a half-hour bulletin is one thing but the commercial media in this country really does shy away from doing any kind of objective long form journalism. I note that tonight, which is an ordinary night of the week, there is no long form journalism on any of the channels from 7West, Nine Ent Co, Network Ten, or even SBS. Sky News Australia and ABC News 24 are dedicated news channels but even then, Sky News is a passing parade of sycophantic right-wing apparatchiks whose job it is to repeat the current company message of the day until the people who are watching believe it.

I think that the head of the ABC needs to be someone not necessarily with perception and insight but who believes that the corporation should still be there for its bicentennial in 2132. 

The last four years have been particularly bad for journalism in Australia. The number of actual journalists on the ground who go out and collect the news has been decimated. Journalists do not for the most part attend council meetings, or even sit in parliament buildings as much; which means that they do not report on the goings on of government because they physically can not (because they do not exist to do so). The height of the pandemic proved this keenly, where we had a special kind of rollingly boring and yet critical pandemonium, where nobody really knew what was going on but and the press packs were tiny. You can now see the end effect of this in print media, where the number of pages produced by News Corp and Nine Ent Co is padded out by sporked press releases from various business and government departments, and where the columnists who actually do write longer pieces are almost always legacy employees.

Radio fares not much better. Long gone are the days when trains were full of people reading newspapers but even when people are in their cars, at least where I live in Sydney, there really only are three radio stations which have any real news content at all. These are ABC Radio National, ABC News Radio, and 2GB which is a Nine Ent Co station. 2GB is a kind of Sky News Lite, where hosts could very well easily rotate between Sky News and 2GB and nobody would be any the wiser.

To someone in want of sinking a nail, every tool is a hammer. Likewise when it comes to journalism, everything is that wee ickle section. News is News. Politics is politics. Finance is finance. Sport is sport. However, to deny that news or sport or finance is not political, is to deny reality. Finance is a competitive sport where there are losers and mostly those losers are the great general public. 

I do not like the immediacy of reportage inside the Canberra Bubbles as though it was sport but the people who don't like democracy do. If you can reduce the news to just what is going on here and now with no context, then this is excellent at giving people the illusion that they are informed when in reality they are not. Yes it is important but there are many other areas outside the Bubble.

The real irony in the twenty-first century is that although the news cycle has sped up, media space has expanded to infinity because of both the internet and multi-channel services on digital media, that actual journalistic ability has shrunk. There is a flurry of activity when someone in power resigns and then the resulting speculation of who is going to replace them, but when it comes to the actual decisions being made and why they are happening, we get almost nothing. 

The inherent problem with news is that both the news itself and the messages coming from government and business are often completely incoherent. With skeleton staffs to try and makes sense of the floating detritus of events that have happened but aren't quite of themselves actual news, we the general public are very much let down. This is excellent for the people in power, not just in government but also in business because they can act with impunity, safe in the knowledge that nobody can hold them to account because nobody knows what's going on. There is more to the news than simply running around and saying what is happening at this exact minute in time. In fact, in many ways that isn't that vital because the next minute something else is happening, and what we should have all learned from the pandemic and even tracking back well into last decade, is that a slightly longer view on the problems facing the nation is actually what is important. How soon is now? I might be the son and the heir of nothing in particular but even I need a slightly wider brief as an informed responsible citizen to know what's going on.

This last point is why I hope Ita Buttrose either resigns or is fired. It is increasingly obvious that she works not for the betterment of the ABC as a vital public asset, nor the pursuit of journalism as a vital public need. The axing of a central political journalism department and the personal removal o journalists on the say so of outside interested parties who do not like to hear the truth, is bad for both the ABC and democracy in general. I have tiptoed around three serious issues here but it seems that breaking events may force me to tip my hand.

On Monday, the union members who are staff at the ABC, passed a 125-3 no confidence motion in David Anderson as their Managing Director. The ABC Board meets today, and I think that given that various WhatsApp messages and emails, that the wider board has no other ethical choice sack this knave and then formally apologise to every single Australian for their editorial decisions and business actions which have followed (including the sacking of some journalists) in recent weeks in relation to Palestine and genocide.

Now that I think about it, the fact that the staff at the ABC, have sent strong and unequivocal message to their management, is necessary. As the ABC is a valuable public asset, then having it run by incompetent, racist and fully-captured leaders, is unacceptable if not unconscionable. Having the staff say to p David Anderson they have no confidence in him, is not a far step away from the staff themselves saying that they they have no confidence in the ABC. It is absolutely essential that the people who live in a democracy have an actually fair and balanced media.

Horse 3290 - Peter Dutton Calls On Australians To Boycott Woolworths Over Australia Day. Yeah, Nah, Bro' (Pt 2)

 https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/peter-dutton-calls-for-australians-to-boycott-woolworths/video/89d0daa12506aef7fdbb6650ccbf3ab5

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has called on Australians to boycott Woolworths.

This comes after the retailer announced it won’t be selling Australia Day merchandise this year.

Peter Dutton says Australians should be free to decide whether they want to celebrate Australia Day or not.

- Sky News Australia, 11th Jan 2024.

There is no story told in a vacuum. The problem with a story like this is that although it exists today, and although it does not exist in isolation, we never remember the farmer, we only remember the fruit, and we don't remember the inventor, we only remember the boom and the impact going forward.

What else is going on here? Is this merely about Peter Dutton dancing around his annually erected green and gold maypole for pantomime culture warriors to dance around in confected outrage for the benefit of the Angertainment Complex? 

Whipping up anger full of air, is the business model of News Corp and their political wing, the Liberal Party. I suspect that News Corp and the Liberal Party don't actually care about the issue, but are happy whip this up for those sweet sweet advert dollars, or in the case of the Liberal Party, votes.

Why does Peter Dutton want Australians to boycott Woolworths? Why should he care about a supermarket? Well, the answer is in fact quite quite old.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/peter-dutton-moves-to-lock-in-replacement-for-outgoing-liberal-karen-andrew/news-story/8ff3909455fae484f1f999a0eaa3d53c

Peter Dutton is moving to lock in a replacement for outgoing Liberal Karen Andrews within weeks to stave off a likely threat from a teal candidate at the next election.

- The Australian, 31st Dec 2023

From what I understand, Liberal Party strategists are reported as being “increasingly concerned” about the possible startup of a teal threat named “McPherson Matters”.

In a classic move which the Liberal Party pulled off before, by hiring a Public Relations Officer (Scott Morrison), the front runner for preselection from the Liberal Party for the seat of McPherson is a chap called Adam Fitzgibbons.

Who is Adam Fitzgibbons?

https://au.linkedin.com/in/adam-fitzgibbons-40728622

Adam Fitzgibbons is the Head of Public Affairs for Coles Group, Australia's leading supermarket retailer.

- Linked In, 12th Jan 2024.

The idea that Peter Dutton acting as spokes-potato for the Liberal Party on behalf of Coles, is completely expected given that Coles and the Liberal Party go back a very very very long time.

The most recent direct involvement of crossover from Coles to the Liberal Party was in 1992 when, the former chairman of Coles Myer, Bevan Bradbury OA, retired from the chair of Coles Myer Ltd. to take up the post of the NSW Liberal Party President. However, go right back to the beginning of the formation of the Liberal Party and we find that Coles and the Liberal Party are even closer.

Sir Arthur William Coles (1892–1982) "AW", founded Coles Variety Stores along with his brother George James Coles (1885-1977) "GJ" in 1919. Coles Variety Stores would later become the Coles Group, after passing through various iterations, and alongside Woolworths is one of the two largest supermarket chains in Australia.

AW in what I can only gather looks like an act of revenge against Melbourne City Council, ran for the position of Lord Mayor of Melbourne and won it, in 1938. He held that position for two years, and then after his term had ended, used that popularity to run for the House of Representatives seat of Henty in the Sep 1940 election, which he also won as an Independent.

However, sometime during the 1940-1943 term, although AW caucused with the United Australia Party under Sir Robert Menzies, Menzies' increasing vassalage to London, practically exploded the UAP. AW as one of the two independent MPs propping up the UAP/Country Coalition in government since 1940, crossed the floor in parliament. Curtin's Labor Party with the help of the two independent MPs passed a £1 variation budget, thus ensuring supply and handing government to Curtin.

After the war, AW Coles was handed a cushy job as Chairman of the National Airlines Commission in 1946 and returned the favour to the then Chifley Government by practically handing his old seat back to the Opposition. It seems somewhat strange that AW should give his ex-seat in the House of Representatives to a Member of the Opposition until you realise what had happened on that side of the political floor.

Menzies after exploding the old United Australia Party, spent roughly three years in the wilderness. In the meantime, Menzies courted his friend Sir Keith Murdoch at the Melbourne Herald who had given him practically free political propaganda, , and his friend Sir George James "G.J" Coles (AW's brother and Chairman of what was now GJ Coles Ltd.) and helped set up the Institute of Public Affairs in 1943.

Not only did the Institute of Public Affairs send delegates to that opening meeting at the Formation of the Liberal Party on 13th October 1944, but also to the Conference of Representatives of Non Labour Organisations on 16th October 1944, but they parachuted members for preselection upon the formal announcement of the formation of the party held at the Sydney Town Hall on 31 August 1945.

I have only really found vague inklings of a meeting held at the Kurrajong Hotel in Canberra in September of 1944; so I do not know if it was just Menzies and Murdoch or Menzies, Murdoch and Coles who were the three seed members of what would become the party. What we do know is that the Institute of Public Affairs  and the Liberal Party of Australia have been so intertwined that at times you can look from one to the other, and back from the other to the first one; and it is impossible to say which was which. Not only was GJ Coles present right at the beginning of the IPA and the Liberal Party but he became the IPA's president in 1965.

So then, for Peter Dutton, to act as spokes-potato for the Liberal Party on behalf of Coles, and demand that the general public boycott Woolworths, who is Coles' retail enemy, looks completely in line with a poltical party which frequently acts belligerently against its enemies. GJ Coles as one of the original founders of the IPA before there even was a Liberal Party, would have wanted it this way. 

Horse 3289 - Peter Dutton Calls On Australians To Boycott Woolworths Over Australia Day. Yeah, Nah, Bro'

https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-news/politics/peter-dutton-calls-for-australians-to-boycott-woolworths/video/89d0daa12506aef7fdbb6650ccbf3ab5

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has called on Australians to boycott Woolworths.

This comes after the retailer announced it won’t be selling Australia Day merchandise this year.

Peter Dutton says Australians should be free to decide whether they want to celebrate Australia Day or not.

- Sky News Australia, 11th Jan 2024.

Although Woolworths has made a purely commercial decision to stop stocking Australia Day tat due to a lack of demand from customers, the Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, has done his done his banana and looks like a right berk, in demanding that Australians boycott Woolworths. In the editorial opinion of Horse, we think that is it now the duty of every Australian to not only laugh at Peter Dutton but to point and laugh at Peter Dutton for looking like a eight berk.

Yeah, nah, bro'. We're not gunna boycott Woolies because you told us to. Mate, you've got a few roos loose in the top paddock if you think we're gunna to that, Spud. 

Surely one of the great things about Australia is the way that Australians constantly poke fun at anyone in authority. Australia is not like the United States in that we are not stallions led by wolves. Nor is Australia like the United Kingdom in that we are not lions led by donkeys. No, Australia is actually a nation of goats led by dogs. Australians are on the whole industrious and diligent but only up to a point. Australians will pull behind a leader if the circumstances warrant it but they will also equally run everywhere in an uncontrollable rabble. Like a bunch of nanny goats and billy goats, we will bleat at everything, run around aimlessly, and generally make a right royal republican hash of the whole thing.

The problem with the push to make Australians patriotic is that it completely ignores the fact that Australians by nature just simply aren't patriotic. The Australian flag might very well be the national flag but who honestly cares? The actual colours of Australia are green and gold and it must be said that the Cricket Team, the Socceroos and Matildas, the Wallabies, the Kangaroos, and the various Olympic teams, bring Australians together more than any poxy waving of a blue bedsheet with stars on. 

January 26th is not even 'Australia' Day. Australia as a nation was constituted on January 1st 1901; after the people of the six colonies all agreed to the project of Federation. However, the idea that Australia should be patriotic on January 1st is patently absurd. January 1st is already New Years' Day; which means that nobody and I mean nobody even cares a jot about the celebration of the actual founding of the nation. January 26th basically has to stand in for this because as Australia is really a actually of goats led by dogs and as we are only industrious and diligent to a point, then what we actually want is a public holiday.

So in this spirit of being Australian, let me poke fun at Peter Dutton, at Michaelia Cash, at Vikki Campion, at Caleb Bond, at Sharri Markson, at Andrew Bolt, at Rita Panahi, at Rowan Dean, et cetera. What the jinkies are you jackdaws going on about? Do you even live in Australia? I note that the only chorus of accusing people of not being Australian and not submitting to enforced patriotism comes from 'the firm' and the far-right. Regular Australians simply fail to register that patriotism should have any merit at all and in fact, are semi-suspicious of anyone who does think that patriotism should be a thing. Patriotism is a thing which is the clarion of tyrants, of buffoons, of dandies, of knaves, of tories, of killers, thieves and lawyers. Which one are you, Spud?

Particularly for Michaelia Cash who is the Senator for Western Australia and Peter Dutton who is the Member for Dickson in Queensland, I remind everyone that January 26th is actually 'NSW Proclamation' Day. That is the day, in what surely has to be the most boring anime transformation sequence ever, when Arthur Phillip magically transformed from Admiral of the Royal Navy to Governor of a Colony, by reading of Proclamation.

Speaking as a patriotic citizen, because the howling cries of jackdaws, whinnies of jackasses, and the prognostication of jackaninnies told me to, I find any celebration of NSW Proclamation Day to be hollow and vapid. We the good and fair people od New South Wales already know that we are the best; because we write it on our number plates. We are "The First State" and "The Premier State".

Maybe the Senator for Western Australia, Michaelia Cash, wants to admit that Western Australia is a sad sad joke. There is a time difference between Sydney and Perth. If it is 08:30pm in Sydney, then it is 1977 in Perth. Likewise, does Member for Dickson in Queensland, Peter Dutton, want to admit that Queensland is the Florida of Australia, and is propped up by Commonwealth revenues; mostly supplied by New South Wales and Victoria? 

If prayer is the last refuge of a scoundrel, then surely patriotism is the second last? There is something to be said for patriotism but wrapping one's self in the flag is one of those things when if it is voluntary it is acceptable but if it is involuntary it rings hollow. Is it really possble to have compulsory fun? Compulsory patriotism and compulsory fun seems to the sort of thing that East Germany might have done. You will go on the holiday; you will travel Interflug; you will enjoy it; failure to do so has consequences. It is this fun or fist-of-fives approach which seeems common to the whole broadly authoritarian north of the political compass; with Stalin and Hitler seeing eye to eye about. 

Here's the whole problem with enforced patriotism in Australia. We are goats. We think that you being serious is funny. We like making fun of seriousness. Wrapping yourself in the flag and demanding that the rest of do likewise is an instant request to be ridiculed. Patriotism is a thing of tyrants, of buffoons, of dandies, and we will absolutely make fun of you for being tyrants, buffoons, and dandies. We do not run from side to side like brainless sheep but we do run in all directions and laugh at your seriousness like a bunch of uncontrollable goats.