Housing affordability? Isn’t that the Elephant in the room?
Dear reader,
We return to our documentary, two noble individuals, Ces and Quent, stuck miles below the desert sands of Maralinga, waiting, waiting ‘refugee-like’ for a determination. For their freedom? That would be too simple. Just waiting to see if …(Godot-like)…after all their struggle, anything makes sense.
( read about it in their autobiography “ Mein Kampfenwagen’, or the bowdlerised version, Jayco’s campervans will be as good as it gets for the two generations of Australian’s who can’t afford a house in any Australian Capital City’).
Having a roof over your head is a luxury many can’t afford, because they’re lazy.
Whether they can emerge into the bright sunlight freed from Australia’s second-most powerful woman Sophie, ‘Is that a husband of mine who has been gifted pre-selection for a safe Liberal regional seat”? Mirabella, and her destiny as Xi’s chosen one to: “Make promise good for inevitable annexation of southern lands for optimisation of twenty-first five year plan’, is up in the air, or buried deep underground.
Five year plans? That’s what state government’s call public-private partnerships, in which the taxpayer always picks up the tab. Who’s tab? Don’t ask, it’s none of our business. That’s what rent- seeking is all about. Business knows best. Just ask Robert Maxwell, allegedly he may be dead, but he’ll tell you about “Life in the fast Ghislaine” and it aint all dead-ends and overpasses. If you’re in it long enough you can run a toll-road. From thereon the lights are always green, but we digress. It’s like asking Exxon and Transurban to pay tax. Which is like asking an Uighur to take back his organ..Or masterplan? It’s all heads up, or heading back to Sophie.
That’s why many Australian’s prefer to “sleep-out’!
So satrap yourself in, and wonder why there aint a Federal ICAC, because after all is said and done, bit like housing affordability, it’s all too hard. And as a consequence it belongs in the other basket. Not the deplorable basket, but the ‘all too hard basket’.
We return to our stygian encounter between Sophie and Dutto..
‘Isn’t that Terry Lewis on the phone”? She laughed as Dutto gave an involuntary flinch. Though Terry had been dead for years, she knew that an instinctive response was deeply embedded in the Qld police DNA. It was like being tasered for jay-walking in Victoria. it was deep and it was intrinsically tied to the cultural norms. What were the cultural norms we hear you say?
Xenophobia, smugness, insecurity, anti-intellectualism, cultural cringe?
Homeless people like to be close to public transport.
Or is it all just the personification of Norm, the good ol days archetype of the ‘Life be in it” adverts, now older than Sandy Stone and more insecure since compulsory superannuation and the looming catastrophe of a twilight spent in a special accomodation home dawns as a Kafkian reality. We may never know. But re-assured, if there’s money involved, Sophie will know. And she’ll make it WORK! It’s a sort of nation-building on a micro scale. And, not to make a too fine a point of it , best left to those who understand how to run government. Though Australia has slipped down the international corruption index, it’s comforting to know that no one in government is unduly worried. Cos being an international index it’s not worth worrying about anyway…
Dutto recoiled, and then countered; ‘ You’d know that Sophie, that’s why your old man has got a shoe-in for a seat in Federal Parliament it’s all about who you know’?
Sophie recoiled at the suggestion that her husband had been slotted into a safe federal seat just on connections. She was about to mention all the public spirited things he’d done since marrying her with Bronwyn. Such as taking out the rubbish, wearing an ex-military uniform on Anzac Day, driving the kids to swimming, looking sombre and reverential at the Shrine, and standing in the queue at the footy, when Dutto opted for a new line.
Homeless people like to be grounded
‘Is it then? You surprise me Sophe, but then you’ve always been full of surprises’,
‘You’ll see’… and for further insult, she spat out… ‘Baldy”.
Such vitriol had no effect on Dutto. In this respect he was impervious. All those years as a Queensland copper had made him harder than tungsten and armour-plate. Call him “Potato-head”, “baldy’, ‘chrome dome’? Anything? And it was useless. Words just bounced off him. In that regard he was just like ‘Fortress Australia’, impregnable. And feared by would-be law- breaking refugees. And the more intellectual and learned your riposte was, he , as custodian of the culture wars and cultural norms he would put you down. Not by a witty riposte, not by a well rehearsed slither of invective, but a flat and phlegmatic NOTHING!
If you make the grade you can afford a home and be eligible for an AO
In the end ‘Dutto’s’ strength was in NOTHING! He was after all the embodiment of the great Australian “NOTHINGNESS”! And for that we should be made to feel GRATEFUL!
If you want to get ahead it helps if you know the right people
But Sophie, as Fair Work Commissioner, would have none if it, and returned his ‘Medusa-gaze’ with a spitting epithet, “ at the end of the day Dutto, you are nothing more than a Queensland copper, and you’ll always be a Queensland copper, and because of that you’re more endangered than the Great Barrier Reef…and I’m the CROWN OF THORNS, and after I’ve finished with you, you’re in for a BIG SURPRISE”!
And if you work hard and know the right people you can buy a home wth harbour views!
What surprise has Sophie got in store for Dutto? Will it be a Pandoras box of trouble or just another surprise of the God anointed kind? Find out in our next exhultative episode, “No Prizes for surprises”, or….. “Surprise party, I had no idea you were actually DEAD’!