Tool Of The Week - Gerard Henderson

The increasingly erratic Gerard Henderson took time out from being paddled by his chums down at the Sydney Institute this week to fulminate against people being paid a living wage.

This will not do, thundered Henderson, who continues to believe that only good looking chaps from decent schools should be allowed to speak in public.

Henderson was railing against the Harvester Judgement, the one piece of social policy that stopped Australia from becoming another Argentina.

This deranged sociopath was foaming at the mouth in the Sydney Morning Herald this week because someone dared celebrate the foresight in a bloke called Higgins deciding a hundred years ago that people were born to live, not just to make rich men richer.

Not that we’d expect Henderson to grasp this, the bastard has never done a day’s work in his life. Preferring to fellate any nutjob roaming the land with a baseball bat looking for working people of an independent bent to belt.

He sucked up to Howard as if that grubby little rodent was capable of doing anything more than fixing his own breakfast.

He cheered for WorkChoices so that bottom feeders could pay teenagers $3 an hour legally under Howard’s laws.

He doesn’t like Harvester because he believes that Government’s should pick up the tab if people aren’t being paid enough to live. Yet this is the same pea brained onanist who believes in that miserable piece of government-sanctioned thuggery, welfare to work, which is doing exactly the opposite.

It is also curious that this dalek-like acolyte of the market sees the state as picking up the bill that his tight a#se huddle of degenerate losers down at the club aren’t prepared to pay. He is obviously a frustrated socialist.

This creep likes to paint himself as an academic, but in reality he has all the intellect and social utility of a broken sewer main, but is not nearly as pleasant. He is an intellectual coward - the sort of insecure martinet that likes to think he can bully people into believing his rather bizarre worldview.

This soaring Tool Of The Week, like his toilet trading pal Tony Abbott, believes it is better if you and I get treated like a shovel than be treated with dignity. He believes it is better that we get paid three-fifths of naff all rather than the poor employer be forced to pull their son out of Riverview.

Henderson is one of those useless loops that think employers should only have to pay what they can afford to pay. Let’s take this logic to its conclusion. I, as a consumer, have only $58 for groceries this week. So how about I load up my trolley with over $200 worth of goodies and when I get to the checkout say, “Well, I only have the capacity to pay $58 so, taking the advice of Gerard Henderson, I am only going to pay that”.

Quite rightly I’d be marched out of the store by a security guard, as Hendo should be marched out of Australia's consciousness.

Jerks like Henderson need to wake up to the fact that we live in a society made up of people, not businesses, and that if democracy is to mean anything it needs to serve the interests of human beings first and that narrow section of society called the business community second.

And he needs to stop it, or he will go blind.

Core Business

More foaming at the mouth from our Tool Of The Week Michael Costa, who has suggested that unions should get out of the way of his plan to sell us all down the river regarding power privatisation. In a unique take on logic and consistency Costa has suggested that unions should concentrate on their 'core business', which he describes as looking after wages and conditions. Well, if protecting the livelihoods and working standards of everyone who uses 240 volts in their day-to-day lives isn't core union business then I give up. And this advice is a bit rich coming from the bloke who decided that, when he ran the union movement, it's core businesses should include property development, financial management, think tanks, hiring useless spin-doctors like the North Shore carpetbagger Peter Lewis* or selling out public sector workers and even the public transport industry itself. Costa is worse than a clown, he's an incompetent clown, whose legacy to this state is abysmal. And if Curly thinks that putting everyone in the state's sensitive nether regions in a G Clamp is either smart or of economic use to anyone then the man is more deranged than we first thought. When will the state of New South Wales stop having to pay for the fact that poor little Michaerl Coista was picked on in the playground in Newcastle all those years ago. * - Another stunning contribution from that impotent carpetbagger, Peter Lewis, who has managed to shake down working people across NSW through his McCampoign vehicle Essential Research, who have found out what visually impaired Freddy could have told them for free - people think electricity privatisation stinks like five day old fish. Nice one Pete. What's your next trick? You gonna find out what direction the sun comes up in morning?

Tool Of The Week: Costa The Crazy Trot

Tool Of The Week and economic whiz kid, Michael Costa, culminated a long career of nutjob politics with a masterpiece this week - a privatisation proposal that reads like a suicide note.

The Privatisation of power in NSW is obviously Michael Costa’s cry for help.

Here is an incredibly disturbed man, wandering freely through corridors of power, bent only on self-destruction - and this time he’s taking us all with him.

The Privatisation of NSW Power assets - going by the guide of, say, every other jurisdiction in Australia or the known world - will be an unmitigated pain-in-the-sit-down-apparatus, if not regional scale disaster, for most, if not all, sentient beings. It will torpedo any chance of New South Wales maintaining a first world electricity system.

This act of public policy self-immolation crowns the public life of a man who has been obviously mad since he was sprouting Socialist Workers Party gibberish back in High School.

Of course, the Privatisation is just a ruse, a kind of brandishing of the weapon in the public space - it throws many into fear, if not panic, but he hasn’t started shooting yet.

The problem with Michael Costa is that he needs a hug.

But this hard-arsed Cypriot ever had time for hugs; he was too busy being a ‘tough bloke’.

He was a tough bloke when he dropped out of his scary-bourgeoisie university life and entered his homo-erotic fantasy world at Garden Island, working as a rigger and helping the logs over at the Federated Ironworkers Association talk themselves into irrelevance or the Australian Workers Union (which is pretty much the same thing).

He carried that tough bloke persona right through his days in the eighties as a trainee Train Driver - when he never did quite get to understand how to drive a train, or living in Emu Plains - but managed to nobble the militant leadership of the train drivers union in his ‘spare time’.

From the train driver’s union to his rise to be secretary of the Worker’s Parliament, the Labor Council, his record is an outstanding one. One of qualification, fixing, nobbling, deal making, haranguing of rank-and-file, and sausage fingered diplomacy.

If his job was to marginalise and prostitute organised labour in NSW he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

He appointed such star performers as Michael Gadiel (who marries for a living) and contracting out ‘communications’ to that unctuous, wannabe lad carpetbagger, Peter Lewis.

John Robertson changed more about the union movement in NSW than the name when he picked up the pieces afterwards.

While Unions NSW goes from strength to strength, our Tool of the Week prides himself on posturing his small minded, dumb-as-a-box-of-hammers, try-hard red-neckery as a type of anti-politician. Unfortunately it delivers the sort of policy outcomes that leave the very people purports to speak for bent over the bonnet with their pants around their ankles.

His ‘elevation’ to the NSW Ministry is a fine example of the Peter Principle in full flight.

This incompetent log enjoyed election day baiting a female greens booth worker with former NRL Player Mark Sargent as muscle.

Real brave, pal.

But the man who put ‘maniac’ into ‘megalomaniac’ left no doubt where his political sympathies lay come the recent Federal Election, bragging that:

“I struck up a reasonable relationship with people from [Liberal MP] Bob Baldwin's office; we got on very well. We were offering each other water and other benefits but I will not tell members what they were.”

Here is a trot who has gone on a political trajectory in life that started in the hard left, moved through the labour movement and is now off having a pipe with right-wing nutters like the Liberal MHR for Paterson, Bob Baldwin. The only problem being that Curly got stuck in the NSW Cabinet on his way through, and decided he liked the Living Away From Home Allowance. You’ll need a crowbar to shift this log now.

The thing about Costa is that he’s stuck in an eighties tribal siege mindset of those members of the NSW Right that were never too bright to begin with anyway.

While he likes to spin the smart spiv smartarse persona, the reality is he’s an insecure little joker, way out of his depth, that thinks that he has to keep being a bastard to have any sense of meaning in his life.

After all, he’s a big fan of cars, and we all know about men who like fast cars.

The outshot is that, unless he gets a size nine in the sit-down apparatus from some more decently minded people around the labour movement - and soon, then our creaking power infrastructure is going to unravel remarkable quickly and inconveniently in the midterm. The good news is it's not too late.

The bad news is that all Fatty O’Barrell has to do to be the next Premier of NSW is put his pants on right way round each morning for the next two and a half years

And as for our Tool Of The Week, well, I hear they’re still looking for train drivers in NSW.

Tool Of The Week: The Nutty Professor

Paul Gollan is one of those bottom feeding caricatures of a human being spewed out by the classical school of economics.

He has an opinion piece in the Canberra Times this week pleading for his beloved WorkChoices to be saved in all but name in the spirit of 'compromise'.

Well, if economics is the dismal science then Gollan is downright murky.

This bottom feeder tearfully asks that employers keep the right to pay kids three dollars an hour.

Now Gollan might think child abuse is OK - and given his many contributions on the subject he has probably already sold his own kids for medical experiments on the basis of maximising rent on labour.

Gollan agrees that WorkChoices was the single biggest issue that led to Howard's defeat (no argument there) but that this only "arguably" gives Rudd a mandate to do anything about it.

Instead the Gollan warns that Rudd risks anger from the business community (read his kiddy fiddling mates), as if they live on a separate planet from the community we live, breathe, work, sleep and play in.

His solution is WorkChoices Lite - WorkChoices in all but name. Expect to hear more bottom feeders like our Nutty Professor start to sell this "solution". All backed up with the garbage economics that equates human life with all the hope, sense of purpose and dignity of a shovel.

Gollan and his shirt-tucked-in-the-underpants mates simply don't "get it".

The underpinning of the Australian way of life has been - until the greed driven layabouts from the corporate sector got their way - that wages and conditions are determined collectively. We either all go forward together or society fragments as it has under Howard, with some people getting ahead at the expense of the vast majority of the rest of us that have watched our standard of living head south for the last ten years.

Until eggheads like the Gollan get it into their heads that markets reduce human life to something nasty, brutish and short we will still have this voodoo economics shoved in our faces.

Of course you're going to create jobs if you destroy collective agreements that regulate things like shift rosters and apprenticeships and allow people to be paid three dollars an hour - that's just great for everyone except for the person with the job, their landlord, the small businesses they're supposed to buy from, the welfare agencies that have to support them, the utilities that expect them to pay bills and the kids that have to grow up in these households made up of Gollan's working poor.

If lunatic theorists like Gollan were forced to, say, clean toilets for a living they might just get a perspective on life that would stop them dribbling this inane garbage.

Tool Of The Week: Have We Got Principles!

"Those are my principals, if you don't like them, I have others." - Groucho Marx.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for the Liberal Party along comes Doctor Brendan Nelson – ex Union Boss, ex ALP Member, ex progressive, in fact it’s probably just best if we think of him as our ex.

The quantum leap in faith taken by the Liberal Party is best summed up by another front-runner for this week’s Tool Of The Week, Tony Abbott, who saw the rise of the good Doctor as an opportunity to announce his own future plans to pick up the pieces after the inevitable train wreck we can all see coming.

Dr Nelson has taken up some very reasonable positions in the past; about gay rights, Aboriginal land rights and education, opposition to mandatory sentencing laws, supporting safe injecting rooms and telling it how it is on the Iraq war (it’s about the oil, stupid).

Indeed, Dr Nelson is a man of principal, but if you don’t like those principals he has others.

Think we’re exaggerating? Sydney University’s vice-chancellor, Professor Gavin Brown, described Dr Nelson as “an example of ambition overriding principal”.

The new leader of the Liberal Party is someone who said that he would feel “comfortable” in the Labor Right.

He has come a long way since Arch-conservative former Treasury secretary John Stone described him as “a political hermaphrodite”; while Greg Barns, former staffer to John Fahey when he was Federal Finance Minister, who described Dr McNelson as “totally manufactured”.

Chris Bonner, President of the NSW Secondary Principals Council, gave an insight into the intellectual colossus that is the good Doctor when he said that the then Education Minister, criticised practices there was no evidence of, and came up with policy solutions already being carried out.

He voted for the Iraq war, which we were told at the time were because of WMD’s and Saddam Hussein’s cruelty, then it was only this year he made international headlines ‘fessing up it was about the oil.

He also told us earlier this year that there was “no such thing as victory in Iraq”.

Sydney Lawyer and former Liberal Party member Ifran Yussuf, who was intimate with Dr Nelson’s preselection in 1995, said “Nelson had the kind of flexibility that enabled him to both support and oppose identical policy proposals and still sound completely credible. Issues didn’t matter. What mattered was who was listening and how many votes they could swing.”

Mr Yussuf also revealed he had conversations with Dr Nelson where the doctor presumably read something into Mr Yussef’s name and slammed Israel for its ongoing occupation of the West Bank.

Current NSW Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell recalled to the Sydney Morning Herald in December 2005 that when he was state Liberal party director and Dr Nelson was looking to go into politics, the doctor was really only interested in a safe seat.

Mr O’Farrell also predicted Dr Nelson was “capable of going the whole way in politics”.

What qualities make someone capable of going the whole way in politics, Mr O’Farrell did not say, but the ability to change one’s fundamentally held beliefs in the pursuit of power might be one.

It’s pretty obvious that the dedicated follower of fashion has done a deal with the “uglies” in the ultra-right wing of the NSW Liberal Party, re-branding himself as McNelson - the man who will do whatever it takes to climb the greasy pole of power.

And what a fine bunch he has decided to throw his lot in with.

The secretive cult, the Exclusive Brethren was caught out in February giving thanks for Dr Nelson’s support. A report in the Age newspaper revealed a conversation between Brethren figures, including cult chief Bruce Hales, about a meeting with Dr Nelson which resulted in “unexpected recognition” and favourable treatment.

In this case it was an exemption from testing of computer literacy for students in Brethren schools. Given the written threats the Brethren peddled around during the recent election campaign it looks like he gave the god-botherers an exemption from written literacy as well.

Aside from the nut job religious right, Dr McNelson is also making the right noises for the Party’s free-market ideologues.

Despite admitting the electorate had roundly rejected WorkChoices, he says unfair dismissal laws should not be brought back.

Nelson may have presided over cuts to education, supported nuclear power, voted for the Iraq war, screwed up a multi-billion dollar defence purchase and may be back-pedalling furiously on the ALP’s mandate to rip up WorkChoices, but hey, maybe he doesn’t believe any of this stuff.

After all, a man whose principles can bend like a garden hose on a hot day probably doesn’t believe in anything. Maybe he is taking the free-market mantra of ‘flexibility’ and applying it to facts, beliefs and ideas?

It certainly looks that way.

Look forward to an opposition that will show all the backbone of a garden slug, but with none of the attractiveness.

And with lunatic number one, Tony Abbott, waiting in the wings, the good Doctor’s reign is likely to provide much needed comic relief in the Federal sphere before he takes the Liberal Party right off the rails.

If you can't beat 'em

...join 'em. Despite being very cynical about the worth of a citizen journalism, my even greater cynicism about my chances of getting published in this lifetime have led me to join the blogocracy. http://distressedasset.blogspot.com/ I am concerned about where this Rudd business might lead, and whether or not he will act in our immediate best interests. I'm also considering giving a running commentary on the usefulness, or otherwise, in giving a fat rat's clacker about Anyone who says they are here to govern for all Australians has a very charitable view about Piers Ackerman and Ivan Milat. It's also a good opportunity to resurrect that great Friday evening tradition - the Tool Of The Week. Enjoy it - for what it's worth - and pop back as often as you're up for an entertaining inventory of the inspiring cesspool that is Australian politics.