by Gregor Stronach 

I love it. Some weeks, there are so many excellent topics to write about, I barely know where to begin. And there’s so much to write, that even the usual boring preamble will be cut short this week. But I must mention that this week is a red-letter week for Australia, with the formation (yep – I made it up) of a new award for journalism. I’ve called it ‘The Lassie’, and it’ll be awarded to journalist who does the best job of ‘wagging the dog’ at any given time throughout the year.

At the end of a 12-month period, I and a panel of experts (my mates, up the pub) will decide who will take the soon-to-be-coveted Golden Lassie Award. The winner will be mailed a soup bone, and held up for ridicule. Awesome.

Also: reading back over this before publication, I realise that this week’s column is a lot angrier than I set out to make it. But, because I’m over deadline and basically lazy, it’s going in as-is. Deal with it.

Anyway…

1) The Federal government is a Parliament of Whores

“You can get it voting Liberal. You can get it sitting in church. You can get it holding down a blue-collar job. Matter of fact, I’ve got it now…”

I speak of the feeling that I’ve been repeatedly and violently assaulted by our Federal Government. This week has been a dead-set bellringer for conservative politics, with a raft of issues all coming to a head in Federal Parliament. Best of all was the manner in which our ‘democratically elected’ leaders who like to roll up their sleeves and ‘fight for democracy’ because we live in a ‘democracy’ very neatly truncated any form of debate on these issues.

It’s little wonder the ALP was left looking like a paper tiger – with roughly seven and a half minutes to cover each topic this week, our left-wing political heroes failed to register even a blip of opposition. Because they’re weak and pathetic and out-numbered. Which is no excuse. There are ways to stifle the flow of business through Parliament, and while the ancient art of the filibuster hasn’t really taken off in Australia, a half-hearted attempt to grind the whole sorry show to a halt should have been undertaken.

But, as a result of the Coalitions outright majority in both houses of parliament – a gift you bozos gave them – we have seen unprecedented attacks on people who simply can’t afford to be attacked – workers, single mums who don’t want to be workers, those ‘lazy disabled folk who do nothing but sit around all day in their cushy chairs’, immigrants – you name it, they’ve been given a Christmas kicking by the government.

But that doesn’t mean that The Coalition should be smiling too broadly this Christmas – because in a perverse kind of way I’m hoping that the changes they’ve bullied through Parliament do end up making Australia a worse place to live. That way, the intellectually-crippled battlers in the ‘burbs who voted Liberal at the last election because they were scared into doing so by racist politicians who have appealed to the basest instincts of their constituents will come to understand that just because they’re not fond of immigrants doesn’t mean that they have to accept shithouse working conditions and expensive donuts for their one bright child who scraped into University.

2) Righteous indignation makes me feel better about stuff

I have one phrase for the people behind the violence in Sydney at the moment – you fuckers disgust me.

I don’t care which side of this ridiculous pissing contest you’re on, you’re all fucking morons for getting involved in the first place.

I’ve spent the past three days of my life reading through as much information as I could before sitting down to write this, and I’ll be frank – it was originally going to be a spray against the ‘Aussie’ contingent that rose to the top of the gene pool like a poorly-timed turd at a swimming carnival.

However, that would simply make me as bad as the rest of the folks who have an opinion one way or another on this… and, as far as I can tell, no one knows who started this whole sorry mess at all.

It is, essentially, a tale as old as the hills – two very tribal groups have come out swinging, each one accusing the other of starting the conflict.

To be frank, I don’t care who started it. What I do care about is how it gets stopped. Mob violence is not the answer. Bashing people in the street is not the answer. Destroying the property of ordinary, hard-working Australians – regardless of their race or religion – is not the answer.

So – maybe an impassioned plea from a non-committed observer could be the way to sort it all out. However, I doubt even the combined negotiation skills of Australia’s 150,000 Buddhists could quell this one – but it’d be fun to see them try.

Oh God, it’s so easy to point the finger at someone and blame them for the dramas, and the list of likely candidates is a lengthy one. Do we blame the government? Do we blame the population? To we blame religion? Do we blame the manufacturers of surfboards or small-but-powerful Japanese cars?

I really don’t know, and at this point of the game, I’m beyond caring. I do know that there’s going to be much more violence this Sunday, so I’ll do the only thing left to the ‘responsible’ citizens of this country who aren’t interested in fighting.

I’ll microwave a bag of popcorn, turn on my big screen telly, and watch the brawling erupt on TV.

Hell – let’s make a drinking game of it.

Every time you see an Aussie bloke with his pants slung so low you can see his undies, drink a beer.

Every time you see a Lebanese man giving the finger to a TV crew, drink a beer.

Every time you see a cop fucking up the application of a wrist-lock on a suspect, drink a beer.

Every time you see a news reporter flinch mid-sentence because something moved near him, drink a beer.

And every time the news anchor says the phrase ‘worrying scenes’, ‘escalating violence’ or ‘racial tension’, drink a beer.

If you’re not drunk out of your skull by 7pm Sunday, email me or see a doctor – there might be something wrong with your liver.

3) I’m not easily shocked, but holy hell...

Sorry to harp on about this stuff this week, but in my pursuit of providing an informed opinion (yep – there’s a first time for everything) I stumbled across a few things worth mentioning.

The mainstream press has seized on the presence of the Patriotic Youth League, who – from my own research – appear to be a poorly organised group of hyper-nationalists dedicated to the purity of the white race and the systematic murder of the English language. For a run down of who they are, Google them – it’s worth it just for the spelling mistakes and poor English.

Good luck trying to join them, though - To stop ‘infilterators’ and people who have been ‘afilterated’ with other political organisations, prospective members will need to supply details, such as their mailing address, name, age and one can only assume a family tree showing a pure bloodline all the way back to Adam and Eve (who, by current white supremacist definition, were “wogs”, by the way…)

Anyway – bagging the PYL isn’t a new sport – plenty have gone before me and no doubt there’ll be a few following behind, so I’ll leave it there… except:

Being the ardent supporters of Freedom of Speech that they are, I’m sure they won’t mind me saying that they’re a pack of cunts with profoundly flawed ideological views who wouldn’t know what ‘national pride’ is, if it stood up in their porridge and hit them on the nose.

4) Channel Ten likes to make the news, not report it

This week sees the birth of a new award, one that I hope will catch on. Called ‘The Lassie’, the award will be handed out to the media outlet / journalist who does the best job of ‘wagging the dog’ in their reporting of events.

Now, we all know that Sundays are normally a slow news day (last weekend notwithstanding, of course). So when Sydney-based Channel Ten reporter Frank Coletta saw an opportunity to keep Ten’s head of news happy, he took it.

It was blatantly irresponsible reportage of events, and I’m fairly certain that had the Federal Government’s new sedition laws not been watered down, Mr Coletta could well have found himself in the soup.

His crime: reading out, in full, the text message that is supposedly doing the rounds at the moment, imploring the ‘lions of Lebanon’ to meet at a particular place, at a particular time, with the intent of committing violent crime.

That’s not news, Frank. It’s publicity.

Congratulations to Frank for winning Australia’s first Lassie – for services to the community in the promotion of impending civil unrest, just to make the news. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that Coletta himself will be at the specified place, at the specified time, with cameras rolling – and it’ll be all the more spectacular because he’s told everyone where it’ll be on.

Onya Frank! While you probably won’t win yourself a Walkley for covering a story that you’ve helped inflame, I don’t doubt for a second that there’s a healthy Chrissy bonus somewhere in it for you.

Worthy of a special mention is everybody’s favourite simpering nanny, Alan Jones. Jones’ career highlights include getting pinched by the London Bobbies while trawling for rough trade in a West-End park, passing off slabs of The Navigator by Frederick Forsyth as “leaked US and Russian Intelligence”, being found in contempt of court, defaming such luminaries as NRL Referee Bill Harrigan, and a host of other shit I can’t be bothered typing out.

Anyway – Jones’ well-documented racism has earned him his special mention in the inaugural Lassies, after he tried to take credit for organising the ‘show of strength’ – his words, not mine – that led to the lynch mobs at Cronulla on Sunday. Well done, Mr Jones. You should be very, very proud.

Dear Readers, your homework for the week: email me with your nominations for Lassie Awards – as many as you like. Send ‘em through to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or leave a comment at the bottom of the page.

5) Whitney Houston is really the living dead

Recent photos have emerged confirming reports that Whitney Houston has, in fact, been spending too much time getting wasted, and not enough time making sure her doors were securely locked against rampaging hordes of zombies.

The end result? Whitney has clearly been ‘turned’, to borrow a phrase from the enormously talented director, George A Romero (a man whose films in the ‘slow zombie’ genre both thrill and delight me, even though I’ve seen all of them about a thousand times. Each.)

The photo here doesn’t do her justice. However, it’s unlikely that a lens smeared with nine tons of Vaseline would do her justice either. From beauty, to horror show – all you need is crack cocaine, enough money to keep buying it and enough to keep paying the doctors to keep you alive.

Bless you Whitney – you’re an inspiration to us all.

I dunno what to write here to cap this all off – the hype and hysteria I’ve been reading this week to bring this column to you has seriously done my head in. I’m appalled at the reactions of some, amused by others and I cry for the future of the country when it’s deemed by the government to not be an issue of racism – proving once again the John Howard’s denial that he is himself a racist is based on a flawed understanding of what he’s being called.

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