ink marks on a blank page Sunday 10th May

Our federal budget day looms on Tuesday, not that it will bring any surprises as most of the details have been carefully leaked to the media over the last few days. The treasurer is a chap who like the three main players in this Government appears to have completely mastered the art of talking whilst the mouth is full of marbles and under water at that. The whole of the cabinet can mouth the same mantra of rhetoric at warp speed, and really have been able to spin at force ten of the cycle. For some weeks now the top movers and shakers in Government have been flogging themselves ragged to sell just how wonderfully conservative and fiscally responsible they are, at the same time though they have been handing out cash to all and sundry like drunken philanthropists. Poor old OZ is going to be in debt forever and three days, the legacy of their largesse will be carried by the grandchildren of this generation.
Okay so I'm not an economist, who has to be when there is at this moment the country is saddled with largest national debt ever and theGovernment of the day can't even tell us, the people, how they will manage their way out of the fiasco. The only thing that they can actually say forcefully is "Why haven't the opposition been putting forward their policies". Got news for the Government, the opposition aren't actually wielding the reins of power, you lot are.
We are relatively well off here with a very stable banking system, there once was a lovely big surplus in treasury as well, we still have stuff to dig up that folk need and we beat the New Zealand team in the rugby test, so all is not so bad in the land down under.

Just made myself an espresso,cut a wedge of home baked fruit cake then sat down if front of the TV . Not much of note flickering away on the lcd, puerile offerings even on the public channel that I normally watch. So I turned to the commercial lot, even worse there. One of the commercial stations had a really slow cops and killers show,on one,football (oz style) another,a more juvenile USA cop shoot 'em up, last also very least was a chat show run by 30 something folk who all spoke in shouts with lots of face gestures. One segment on the chat thing was a young fellow who looked as though he had been dressed by the op-shop doing a voice over to a filmed piece on the philosophy of fate. The only thing interesting was the title , but perhaps I show my age here as all the 30 somethings laughed their collective heads off. Never like to get on stage about age either, you are each and everyone of you all sorts of age. I am 67, love being that, cannot wait to be 68 then 69 etc etc etc. My generation had all been married for years with children when we were thirty, not saying that was a good thing, but it was different times with a different set of values. Here in OZ we had lived an insular sort of life for years even as far up to the Vietnam war, the normality of life hadn't changed much for most of us until after that conflict had been and gone. Lots of young Aussie men and women had been to wars all over the place as far back as the Boer war but had come back here then just picked up as nothing much had happened. Perhaps it was the tyranny of distance from anywhere that was anything that isolated us, or was it just in the national physche that we were who we are and that made us different ,willing to stay the same. Folk from OZ travelled far and wide doing all sorts of things but they always came back and then settled back into being parochial Aussies almost as they stepped off the plane. Just about every jouralist who interviewd any visiting famous o/s person as they stepped off the plane asked this question,"What do you think of Australia?" There was a famous incident in Melbourne when Frank Sinatra was asked a bunch of really fatuous silly questions, he got very upset with a female journo then called all Australian female journo's "$20 Hookers" The local transport union got so incensed they refused to allow Sinatra's plane to take off. We really didn't appear to be very cosmopolitan at that point but life here moved on allowing us to gradually catch up with the world. So we are now at our place in time where on a per capita value we have almost as many murders per thousand as London, drink more beer than the Germans, become alcoholics as fast as the Russians, rack up credit card debt at a rate similar to Americans, have the same rate of obesity in major cities but thankfully we now smoke less per thousand than almost all Western Democracies. We have devoured the American way of life so well most of our children know more words of the American national Anthem than their own. A survey was conducted recently where the respondents related more to Barack Obama than their own Prime Minister. Hey, but who could blame them,that man is charisma. One thing that we must stop doing as a nation though is having our movers and shakers fly o/s, get sold the latest snake oil(that dont work), then come back here to install it to be the next great hope only to see the wheels fall off two days later. Grow up OZ, we can do our own version of snake oil!

Indeed so Hortense, news wise it is a mighty poor week. you rightly point out too m'dear that most of the budget has been leaked out. That might make a mockery of the journo's all getting locked in a room with no communications to read the budget papers, then when the doors get opened all run to file their stories at the same time, so as not to spill the beans scoop wise an all.
As if! Yes I do agree Horty, the treasurer is a sort of smarmy looking fellow at that, the sort who when he was at school would tell the teacher on you before you did stuff,then swear he didn't.
Sorry about the trip to Cocolat old girl, no movies this week either.Still Mothers day lunch was pretty full on, the call from daughter was great, life is good init.