by Quentin Cockburn
Happy families.
There just aren’t so many happy families around these days. Take the Hancock’s. You’d think Lang leaving all those billions for the grandkids would make them all deliriously happy for life. Not so I’m afraid.
Gina
Gina, doesn’t like it, she reckons the kids can’t be responsible enough to keep the family enterprise going. She tells the kids she got rich and powerful through bloody hard work. Inheritance is like that, it bequeathes the nobility of struggle to the recipient. The kids say ‘bollocks’. Gina lost this round, but she’ll appeal, and the whole thing will drag on for another few years. She wanted to keep it quiet, but the spoilt little bastards went public. That’s the thing about families, they like to keep scandals quiet.
Seth Blatter has had another victory. I heard his daughter on the radio, ‘Seth is not interested in money’. Good on him, I know he gets paid billions for just being a decent bloke and after a trillion years in the job, you can’t expect him to know that everyone else in FIFA, from the pencil sharpener to the ball pumper is more bent than Cardinal Pell’s crook. But we all know with Vladimir and his unqualified support (Russia scored the 2018 world cup) and some other bloke in Qatar, won the rights to the cup in 2022. That’s nothing to do with money. Vladimir is a decent bloke, bit like Tony. He’s got principles, and he’s not afraid to let us know that’s the way it is.
Now before you think I’m going cranky on people with foreign sounding names there’s the Clintons, who seem to be pretty happy on keeping it in the family and the Bush’s.
W
Good old George junior and George Senior, and their latest, Jeb, is set to give the presidency a red hot go! They’ve certainly helped us sort out Iraq. Those bloody ungrateful bastards, going crook on us now we’ve given them democracy. At least they’re better off than under Saddam. He was an evil bastard…. And that’s the thing we don’t have in Australia yet, real political dynasties, but I reckon if there was a Johnny Howard junior he’d rocket to the lodge. Though we do have second tier Beazleys, Hunts, (get the pronunciation right, there’s a silent ‘C’) and Bowen’s, they’re not a touch on the Bush’s. Just think of it one family all on their own have sorted the Middle East out good and proper…possibly we’ll be involved in one way or other for the next two hundred years, and that’s being optimistic..
But the truth is, you may envy Frank Lowy and his kids, the Myer dynasty, the Packers, the Murdoch’s, the Beesens, but I ask you… Are they happy? Does having all that money and that well earnt right to pay no tax, make no contribution to the broader Australian community working for them?
C’mon think hard and deep. They’ve got more money than they know what to do with. But they aren’t happy! Just like Hu Jintao, and his family, there’s perks in running China, and siphoning off all that money into Melbourne and Sydney real estate but it doesn’t make you any happier. Perhaps that’s why there’s a whole lot of people who want to start afresh on Mars. Now that’s lateral thinking, no happy families on earth, lets go to Mars, and a one way trip to boot, and who’s the beneficiary? Mankind? Science?
Nup!
Reality Television. You see this demonstrates how far we’ve come. One small step, a giant leap has become reality telly. We really are the inheritors of the universe. We’ve earnt it. If you don’t believe me just ask Gina. She can afford it, and possibly buy the whole red planet. I believe it’s 100 percent iron ore. On second thoughts, don’t. There aint no rocket big enough to get her there.