Howard stuffs big, fat, pregnant cat back in bag

“Some people will believe us, some people won’t, that always applies in election campaigns, but we do not have any plans to further change the industrial relations system.”

• Prime Minister John Howard

One wonders if those who “will believe” will be the same people who believed the PM’s non-pledge in the 2004 campaign not to introduce a further wave of industrial relations “reforms” that became known as WorkChoices.

Or maybe those who “will believe” will be the same people who believed the PM would act “in the national interest”, regardless of election non-pledges, by introducing a further wave of industrial relations reforms that became known as WorkChoices.

When Finance Minister Senator Nick Minchin told the H.R. Nicholls Society last year that a further wave of IR reforms — beyond WorkChoices — was needed, this was excused by Government spinmeisters as “a personal view” that was not necessarily representative of the Government’s thinking. That Minchin expressed “his” view as a prominent government front-bencher was apparently neither here nor there.

So, in the game of Alice-in-Wonderland croquet that is contemporary Australian politics, maybe Labor could “get away with” excusing Peter Garrett’s change-it-all gaffe — or non-gaffe, as the case may be — as merely expressing a “personal view” that was not necessarily representative of the Government-in-waiting’s thinking: “We are a broad church,” etc.

Incidentally... if Labor is “anti-jobs” because it opposes (or, at least, says it does) the Government’s IR platform, then is the Government “anti-jobs” because it introduced a “Fairness Test” as an antidote to the electoral poison of Australian Workplace Agreements?

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The first (and last) time I ate my earwax

In the wake of the political scandal of Kevin Rudd eating his own earwax in Parliament, I thought I’d disclose a personal anecdote, which may or may not illumine this apparently shocking incident.

A long time ago when I was a young adult — okay, a long, long time ago — I was sitting reading a book, when I was suddenly irritated by an infuriating itch inside my ear.

I gingerly probed my ear hole with my little finger to soothe the source of the itch, then noticed that the nail of this little finger actually had an overly sharp edge that threatened to break the skin where I was scratching.

Absent-mindedly I then took that little finger to my mouth with a view to filing the edge off of it with my teeth — as one does, with no scissors or other specialist implements within convenient reach.

Ble-e-ecchhh!! I realised with deep revulsion that a trace of earwax had hitched a ride on that finger into my mouth, and its acrid flavour overwhelmed me with nausea.

Quite seriously, I can’t believe that anyone would habitually eat that stuff out of their own (or anyone else’s) ear.

Having only seen the incriminating Rudd footage once, I really can’t remember whether the expression on his face was a surprised grimace, or one of a furtive, stolen, secret pleasure. My own experience would suggest the former.

One day I may review that shocking footage, but for the moment my mind is occupied with more pressing political questions — such as, whether I should wait until election night to chill a much anticipated bottle of vintage champagne.

You see, as I may have mentioned elsewhere, I bought a bottle of bubbly on the eve of the 1998 election, with which I had planned to toast the lower-lip tremors of a single-term Prime Minister.

Nine years down the track, and not only have I “never had it so good”, but the Howard Era has yielded me a really fine bottle of vintage champagne!

But one can’t have one’s vintage and drink it too, so I really feel It’s Time! for the incumbent Prime Minister to give up the electoral ghost, so to speak, and let me enjoy my bubbly, at long last.

I do have other arguments, but at this time I find the above to be the most compelling.

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