Groetjes vrienden,

My mother used to feed a family of magpies in her backyard in Nunawading.  Like clockwork a monogamous pair of magpies used to promptly present themselves early in the morning to partake in a breakfast of kitchen scraps.  In Spring they’d bring their children along to join in the feast.

The magpies would reward my mother with a sonorous improvised concert.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYEYc8Ge3nw

Looking out her kitchen window at the ample leafy backyard she would proclaim:

‘Australië is het beste land in de wereld/Australia is the best country in the world

Maar/BUT: There are some people in Canberra who are doing their level best to spoil it!’

…looking out my kitchen window…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hE2NH4W-M9w

Now, I don’t blame the people of Canberra any more for the mean-spirited avaricious policies emanating from there than I blame the people of Snowtown for the bodies in the barrel nor the people of Moe for the murder of a toddler, but I do despise the conga line of leaders and cronies who are spoiling my adopted country.

Our present Prime Minister Scott Morrison elicited my displeasure from the outset. Yesterday for the first time in his incumbency he sprouted something I agree with:
To send in the army to assist with drought relief would deny locals the jobs to do this themselves.

In 2007 the Intervention was foisted on NT Aboriginal communities.  A plank of the Intervention was the compulsory medical checks of children aimed at detecting evidence of alleged sexual abuse.  Because of a civil libertarian outcry the medical checks were made voluntary.

Wendy was told by someone who’d worked in Yuendumu clinic during the preceding seven years that not a single case of a sexually transmitted infection had been detected in Yuendumu for children under the age of thirteen.

The army was called in and ‘volunteer’ doctors with no experience in remote Australia turned up at a rumoured salary of $5,000 per week.  The doctors were billeted in tents and catered for by military personnel.  Years of available data of medical checks carried out by Yuendumu organisations were ignored.  The military caterers did not buy their supplies from Yuendumu shops.  Millions were spent on this initiative, very little trickled down to the Yuendumu economy.

So, good on ya Scott Morrison, credit where it is due, you miserable bastard.

Tot de volgende keer.

Frenk

PS- a song from my childhood…. Añoranzas…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYei_BKOOGE

Not to mention Oscar Alemán….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTQiVVt7yvE