Hello Gristlers! and welcome to Chewin’ the Gristle, the week’s political bits that we found hard to swallow.
This week’s Gristle is dedicated to the King and Queen of the prom, Pauline ‘Oxleymoron’ Hanson and David ‘The Swain’ Oldfield after Pauline revealed in her new book that they engaged in horizontal folk dancing back in the day. The Swain is about to leave politics for good after his NSW Upper House term finishes with this weekend’s State election. According to The Swain, he is off to ‘develop some assets in the Manly area’ it could be just us, but that sounds very much like an email spam heading. Given his alleged tryst with the Oxleymoron, The Gristle feels he could have chosen his words more carefully.
Speaking of the NSW State election, it all happens this weekend, but Opposition Leader Peter ‘Whitey’ Debnam was engaged in a bit of premature election when he pretty much conceded defeat a week out from the actual polling day:
If this [latest]poll is taken in key seats and if it is correct, then the message is very clear: the Labor Party is going to win the election in a week.
Given his love of budgie smugglers, maybe Whitey needs to take a leaf out of the Swain’s book and develop some assets of his own in the ‘Manly area.’
Around the same time that Whitey was conceding defeat, his education spokesman Brad ‘Dukes of’ Hazzard was out spruiking the Libs latest policy $20,000 per school to install air conditioning. Sounded like a great idea until someone did the maths and worked out that $20,000 would pay for about five rooms per school, leaving the other 20 or so rooms sweltering.
Tthis may seem kind of inequitable, a few lucky kids given a nice comfortable learning environment while the majority swelters in ever-less-comfortable learning conditions, but you have to admire the Libs for their sense of irony. It seems to us to be a perfect metaphor for our whole education system.
Thanks to Sean Leahy
Of course, the issue of classroom temperatures is made more vexing by Global Warming which we all pretty much understand is driven by man-made factors, except if you’re Finance Minister, Senator Nick ‘Flat Earth’ Minchin. Yep, it came out this week that old Flat Earth sent a letter to Ian ‘Clean Up Australia’ Kiernan citing ‘scientific evidence’ that Global Warming was not due to human factors. Seems the evidence consisted of a Canadian newspaper columnist and The Institute of Public Affairs, a think tank with board members from the fossil fuel industry. Scientific evidence doesn’t come much more compelling than that. The Gristle expects that Clean Up Australia Day will be cancelled next year now that Ian has been enlightened.
Meanwhile on the mudslinging front, the Government was kinda wishing they had left well enough alone with evidence emerging that the Prime Minister had attended a fund-raising lunch where internet porn site proprietor, Scott ‘boobies.com’ Phillips, was also in attendance. Of course, Howard said he did not know that boobies.com was there but, hey, that’s what Kevin ‘Charlie Brown’ Rudd said about his dinner with Brian ‘Beelzebub’ Burke. It’s also, incidentally, what we say whenever we’re caught looking at a porn site.
Moving as far off the subject of sexual titillation as possible, it emerged that Amanda ‘Hugankiss’ Vanstone, the self styled bard of immigration, ran up somewhere between 30 and 70 grand on Mandarin language lessons. It may seem strange that the former Immigration Minister would need this sort of training and new Minister Kevin ‘Lego Man’ Andrews certainly can’t see any need for it, but it could come in handy if you were looking for a diplomatic posting to China.
Our Mandy has also specified that she believes all Australian kiddies should learn Mandarin at school. Maybe not a bad idea but at $30-70,000 per child this would have to stretch the education budget somewhat!
Final word this week goes to Santo ‘So Nice They Named Him Twice’ Santoro. When we left you last week, Santo was hanging onto his portfolio and had the support of the PM after he gave the proceeds of his ‘one share deal’ to ‘charity.’ Well, by week’s end, Santo was gone after it emerged that there were in fact a whole bunch of share trades that had not been declared. And the Prime Minister was angry.
But what of the ‘charity’ that Santo donated the profits to when sprung? Well, charity can mean so many things, but the conservative group Family Council of Queensland is certainly not officially classed as a charity. The best bit is that the head of the Family Council of Queensland is Alan Baker, the bloke who put Santo onto the shares in the first place.
Santo Santoro, for services to political satire, The Gristle dips its lid to you. As of next week, Chewin’ The Gristle will be replaced in New Matilda by Santo Santoro’s weekly memoirs certainly much funnier than anything we could come up with!
You can catch the Gristle on Radio 2SER 107.3 in Sydney or on the web at www.2ser.com every Friday evening from 6:00 to 6:30.
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