It’s been an interesting week in the whirligig of fun that constitutes my understanding of feminism.

Tony Abbott came out in favour of paid maternity leave!

I get that he’s chasing the vagina vote, and we should expect all kinds of ridiculousness from politicians in an election year, but could he seriously think that this ill-conceived (yuk yuk) plan is really going to work?

Even us poor women understand that a government needs to be able to sensibly manage an economy. Abbott apparantly can’t manage a sensible walk in the bush.

Dear readers, what you are witnessing, before your very eyes, is the evolution of a writer.

A few weeks ago I decided that I would try my hand at writing a political article, based around the backdrop of Insulationgate. The trouble I found with writing about politics is that there is never a clear straightforward issue to write about.

PETA.  I have heard that this estimable (excremental) organisation are calling for a ban on all animal sourced products, starting with wool from sheep, alpaca, and all the other animals whose fleece has stopped humans freezing to death for millennia.

PETA have even included in their stance those slightly odd home knitters who spin thread from the dog hair found in their vacuum bags. This does seem a little extreme, even for a group of, let’s face it, mainly American nutters.

Let’s, for argument’s sake, get a posse together and go back to 2004. We’ll track down Mark Latham and knock him to the ground as he walks up Garret’s front path. Someone can sit on him for a bit while we send someone else off to have a quick chat to Bob Brown.

I am such a man. I am such a manly man. Surely I am the manliest of men to ever walk the Earth. Why you ask? What has caused this celebration of hirsutey goodness? Well, it takes a real man to admit his mistakes and I have made a mistake….a bit. Maybe not really a mistake, maybe just jumped the gun. In fact, maybe, with all available evidence at the time of writing I was correct and all my opinions and assumptions were brilliant. After all, hindsight is 20/20 and that is how all judgment calls are judged.

It’s gotta be an election year. One, politics is getting interesting again and, two; the talking heads are starting to populate our television screens with an increasing frequency. So far, as I said above, it’s being interesting. Even with only light campaigning there have been plenty of gaffes, and foot-in-mouth disease seems to be highly contagious. Roll on election 2010.

Depending on which side of the fence you sit, it’s been a tough few months for those poor folk pushing the theory of climate change and global warming. First up some pesky hackers broke into the mail server of the University of East Anglia in Britain, stole some rather embarrassing emails and posted them everywhere for the world to see. (Before you all start groaning softly to yourselves, silently wondering when Andrew Bolt starting writing for the Tribune, I would like to say that I am not a climate change sceptic, but trying to pretend that these colossal cock-ups didn’t occur only discredits climate change protagonists, we need to recognise it, address it and move on to the overwhelming evidence that climate change is occurring, and while the reasons for it are incredibly complex, human activities play a significant part.)

So, last week we had our National Day of celebration (or invasion if you are Aboriginal) and once again we’ve had an extra long weekend of bogons running around in Southern Cross / Australian flag inspired apparel along with what is becoming an almost annual debate regarding said flag (and yes I know I have a Southern Cross tattoo but that doesn’t necessarily make me an immediate candidate for bogan fuckwit status.....just means I have a soft spot for my country and I like tattoos).

Okay, you can thank me later. I, through nothing more than a willingness to help, have saved you people an hour or so of your precious time. How you ask? Well, I have read the entire draft Regulation Impact Statement on the introduction of Euro 5/6 Emission Standards into the Australian Design Regulations. If you wish to read it yourself you can find it by clicking on this link.

Tony Abbott is a tool of the highest order, but I find myself in a position of actual defending the little prick, and I hate it.

...but this time 4 will do it.

After the leadership spill last year Miranda Devine declared that “the women of the twitterverse, the ABC and Crikey.com agreed Abbott's election was a disaster”.

A disaster? Maybe, but not one without an amusing side. Tony Abbot as PM would indeed be disastrous, but Tony Abbot as the leader of the opposition could prove to be quite a boon for the nation, if not for the government.

So, after nearly 30 years as a live music venue, The Tote in Collingwood, is closing its doors. The reason given by the licensee is that, after huge new licence fees have been imposed, he simply can’t afford to run the business anymore.

You know those people, (usually celebrities), that you’ve never met but still hold in high regard. For my money, Bruce Willis is one. Bruce is the epitome of cool. It seems that he would be as comfortable having a beer in the dingiest of pubs as he would walking the red carpet of a Hollywood blockbuster premiere. I have never seen or read an interview that left me thinking he was a bit of a tool. The way he handled his and Demi’s divorce and her subsequent marriage to Ashton Kutcher left me in awe; safe to say that I had a bit of a man crush.

..so of course I don’t have anything else to think about.

Thank God for Mia Freedman and her blog. If it wasn’t for her I would never have heard about My New Pink Button, which is a wonderful new product for women whose lady bits are just not quite that perfect shade of pink.

If indeed it ever started for Metro Rail. The results for the past month are in and there is no improvement in the Connex run system. Funny that. I thought new stickers would fix everything.

Don't know if you've seen Sherlock Holmes yet? Not a bad flick, but the name was a little dull. Might I suggest:

Rudyard’s Kipling’s poem ‘If’ floated across my field of vision recently. The preponderance of calligraphied copies on suburban toilet walls detracts from it a little, but it remains a beautifully written vision an ideal man, if a rather isolated and uncommunicative one.

After the age of ten I was never really into Christmas. I just couldn’t see the point, generally we’d all leave our comfortable house and head somewhere, we didn’t really want to go, to talk to people that we spent most of the year trying to avoid. It made no sense. As I got older Christmas became more and more like attending a strip club. It was ridiculously expensive and at the end of it you walked away feeling more than a little disappointed.

Well It’s Come To This……

“OH MY GOD!!”

The cry from beloved was so full of anguish that it made me look around for attacking ninja, the kids to run for cover and for the fish to continue swimming unconcernedly. What the hell?

I ask what is wrong and got an answer I could never have been ready for: “I’ve just agreed with a Robyn Riley article.” No, I could never be ready for that.

I read the article shortly after this and found that I too also agreed with it. The world will never be the same. Ms. Riley has written about the recent ban on jumps racing, and how it will mean the death of thousands of perfectly healthy horses.

As published in Crikey:

I like Nick Xenophon, I like him a lot. He’s like the anti-Steve: an independent senator able to keep his head above water as he swims through the senatorial swill.

His attack on the tax free status church of Scientology last night was laudable, and long overdue, but did not go nearly far enough.

I know that my articles are usually about cars and car related topics but bear with me. This is important.

My father-in-law buys the Sunday Herald-Sun every week. I’m serious. With no explanation whatsoever he plonks it down in the lounge room every Sunday after he comes back home from drinking coffee at one of those cafes and disappears back to his room to watch Sunday TV shows; all this while I’m either asleep or trying to keep track of The Simpsons plotlines on Fox 8, usually +2. Because of this I am normally guilty of flicking through said paper whilst wondering aloud why the thickest paper of the week takes the least time to read.

The asylum seeker debate seems to have been taken over by the hysterical right screeching about thousands of terrorists flooding to our shores with the fixed intention of strapping on a suicide vest and blowing up our kindergartens; and the equally hysterical left demanding that the entire 15 million benighted inhabitants of UN refugee camps should be immediately flown to Australia and given a free plasma screen TV and a laptop.

In all the shrieking, some of the basic facts seem to have been lost, so, with not a great deal of research and nothing in the way of expertise, I would like to debunk a few of the more erroneous claims:

As you know, I’ve always had something to shout about when it comes to the AFL. Many many Tribunes ago I crunched the numbers for a season and put in plain terms how the League was running things for the benefit of a few teams (well, one team: Collingwood), and absolutely fucking most of the rest, but in particular the weaker ones.

So, the 2010 draw is out, and before I launch into it, I have to give some credit for the things they appear to have got right. The timing of Round 22 games is not yet set, allowing a fair break before the finals. Good. The Grand Final rematch isn’t buried in the Season Opening hooplah, instead we wait until Round 13; hopefully the Saints and Cats will both be as blistering as they were this year and the game will deliver.

Righto, that’s the good things, now let’s quickly examine what they’ve done. As we all know, the TV networks have ponied up nearly $200 million a year, so they have a bit of a say in which teams play and when. However it seems that, when it comes to scheduling games for ratings and therefore revenue, the networks are the only stakeholder that’s considered.

The Liberal Party really have learnt how to tear apart a good foundation haven’t they? The once solidified, unbreakable, unbeatable political unit, united behind their geek in glasses, now seem a shambolic mess, unable to work out who they should be deifying.

Why do we have to put up with the bizarre rantings of a man who has so obviously passed his prime? Today, somehow, Wilson Tuckey managed to get both feet in his mouth and still spout the most offensive and ill-considered crap I've heard for some time.

You may have seen Brendan Nelson’s farewell to his electorate  last week. So did Crikey and they decided to have the Crikey Army say their own special good bye to Brendan.

This was my entry, which didn’t win (poo!) but did get a special mention. The winning entry is here but it’s not as good as mine.

''Another great challenge of our age is asylum seekers. The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst.”

Myf Warhurst wrote a piece in the Age the other day that made me really sad.

She wrote about excited she was when she was told that Matt Preston had named a cravat after her and the subsequent devastation she felt when she discovered that said cravat was called the Myf because it was “short and slightly wide”.

Having been flamed in the past by climate change deniers, and more recently by fundamentalist christians (no, these people don’t deserve a capital “c”) and, having seen what can happen put the loony left, the lunar right and a bunch of Jesus freaks in a blender, I approach the subject of Senator Fielding with not a little trepidation.

They call it commercial TV for a good reason: it’s full of commercials. For this reason, as well as the fact that the internet gets me stuff when I actually want it, I stopped watching a long time ago.

Okay, I know Americans like to have opinions and like to shout them very loudly to anyone who will listen (kind of like me really, hehehe!) but I’ve really got to take issue with Harry Connick Jr, Oprah Winfrey and any other American media whore who sticks their nose in the air and whines about the Jackson Jive sketch on Red Faces during this week’s edition of the Hey Hey It’s Saturday reunions. You have leapt past an undeniable truth and jumped on a minor issue, you short sighted morons!

We’ve published a couple of stories about our whippets on this site. The story about how Owen inadvertently caused Justin to charge, frothing with rage and vile obscenities, at Eric Bana in a public park was probably the most popular, but there have been others.

Well, a few weeks ago Phoebe the Whippet was hit by a car. We opened our front door and she ran on to the road before anyone had time to stop her. The driver that hit her saw her run out, but was going too fast to stop in time.

Having completely stuffed up the naming of its God-awful-sounding cream cheese and Vegemite in a jar, the carbon blobs down at Kraft have reissued the naming competition with a list of six options for us punters to pick from.

I'm no fan of Jetstar. I think they should be held to account for the shocking service standards they set and consistently fail to meet. I don't think they are efficient, clean, or comfortable; I don’t even find them comparatively and consistently cheap. But having watched the news tonight I found myself having to jump into their corner. A most disturbing and uncomfortable place indeed.

When did we get some politicians with some balls (Bronwyn Bishop excluded) and why wasn’t I informed?!

First we had Barnaby Joyce threatening to cross the floor on certain issues but never really coming to the party, then Stephen Fielding (UGH!!!! VOMIT!!!) threatening to cross the floor, but only to blackmail both sides of parliament into bowing to his agenda. Now we have a real hero who has done it once and vows to do it again, just because it’s the right thing to do.

Fev is no stranger to fuck ups involving alcohol, let’s face it. That thing in Ireland, that thing in Prahran, that thing with the dildo, that thing the other night at the Brownlow. Gee whiz, a big fit young man who’s a star in a rampantly male industry, at one of the blokier clubs in the competition has a tendency to act like a dick when full of gas. Who woulda thunk it?

So, Dennis Ferguson is going to be run out of town again. l and in the wake of this we have the predictable public slanging match between the civil libertarians and the redneck vigilantes over whether Ferguson ought to be allowed to roam freely through primary school dispensing sweeties to all comers, or summarily put to death by stoning/burning/hanging/insert your favourite form of public lynching here.

Oh wait! They are sometimes the same thing.

Ron Boswell is outraged and, damn it, so am I!

We are, though, outraged for different reasons. He is outraged because the Australian War Memorial sold sponsorship rights for their daily closing ceremony. I am outraged because he thinks that it is ridiculous for an organisation to seek private sector funding rather than beg the government for money.

Those avid readers of the Daily Shout will have joined me in nodding their head (and maybe holding a fist aloft) while reading Jane's lament about the lack of credible journalism with which we are faced on today’s newswires.

Dear The Age, 

I’ve read you since I was a kid; I’m forty now, so of course I’ve changed, but so has the world.

In the past couple of years I’ve started to devour online media, and you, from being my starting-point, have slipped to becoming an occasional click for sports news (though the little paper and many others do it so much better) and the weather.

Who's to Blame? Politicians or The Press Gallery?

So, Question Time this week has, depending on your point of view, either been rollickingly funny Canberran WWF, or a farcical shemozzle of childish political point scoring.

Did I miss a meeting or did I fall asleep?

During a recent conversation with Editor Jane that it was decided that I am virtually impossible to offend. This because she had been instructed by a friend to ask me whether she had inadvertently offended me the previous day.

I wrote a piece a few weeks ago about why women don’t subscribe to Crikey (online news and commentary website that appears to be the last bastion of independent, objective journalism in Australia), but recent events have got me wondering about why more people, male and female, don’t subscribe to Crikey.

Last week I was surprised and horrified to discover that roughly half the people I know haven’t even heard of Crikey, and that a fair proportion of people who do know it hadn’t looked it for months. These are informed, interested and shouty people who love a good debate and rarely accept anything at face value. They’re getting their information from the ABC, The Age or The Australian at best, and commercial TV stations or the Herald Sun at worst.

The time for apologies is over. Sandilands, your 15 minutes is up and your services are no longer required. In short FUCK OFF!

Sandilands is rapidly becoming more of a focus for my rage than Andrew Bolt, which is an amazing achievement considering I don’t listen to Sandilands and I do go out of my way to read Bolt (just to maintain the anger, not for any other reason – please!).

Last week, Professor James Anaya, the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Rights, came to Australia to review the circumstances of indigenous Australians, particularly in relation to the Northern Territory intervention. His full review is yet to be released, but he put out a preliminary statement that you can read in full here

The statement was nearly 2000 words long, but the phrase seemed to capture the most media attention was: “the tremendous suffering (experienced by indigenous people) at the hands of historical forces and entrenched racism”.

Blogs and comments on news sites went OFF, with everything from desperate pleas for help and understanding, to vicious flaming and racially based abuse (from both sides of the debate).

The simplest search through the internet shows that indigenous populations all over the world are severely disadvantaged; it’s appallingly, tragically, heartbreakingly sad. No-one should sit back and be ignorant or apathetic about this issue.

Poverty, disease, abuse, suicide, alcoholism, mental illness, disintegration of family groups, destruction of cultural values and disproportionally high mortality rates are universal themes for every group of people whose native lands were colonised during European expansion.

Almost every country involved has tried some forms of reconciliation, aid, treaty, intervention, some-other-name-for-the-same-thing to change the circumstances of their indigenous populations. Some have had minor successes, but no-one has really made any significant inroads to these problems. And every time another scheme fails, someone is there to point a finger and talk bitterly about racism.

Racism is blamed as both the cause indigenous people’s suffering, and the reason it cannot be alleviated.

Especially when you have none!

It was with much hilarity tonight that I read an article about polling results published by some money-worshipping mob called Essential Research.

Oh. My. God.

This popped up at me when I was on some innocuous dictionary site this morning.

Is it….I…I’m in the highly unusual state of being almost lost for words…The “Before” picture… by implication, the terribly unsexy stomach…I…well… she’s PREGNANT!!!!

Some nights, while you’re sleeping the fail fairies come and sprinkle fail dust in your hair, so no matter how hard you try, everything you do the next day will fail. Epically.

This morning I woke up (late) shouted at the children for not doing something I had told them I would do while they were in bed, stepped on the dog, forgot to feed the cat and drove half way up my street with the hand brake on, while cursing the car for being so crap and unreliable.

Then I got to work, email a Very Important Client apologising for the delay on their impotent issue, and ascribing said delay to the fact that I am so busty at the moment.

So I thought I would escape into Twitter for some light relief. In my first tweet of the day I managed to accidentally suggest to someone that dogs should crap in their ear (which they shouldn’t) because he owns a purple poodle (which he doesn’t). This, mind you, was directed at the most welcoming and friendly of all the tweeple I’ve met on Twitter. Apology attempt implied that it was all his fault for posting such a link (which it wasn’t and he posts lots of very interesting link, which I truly enjoy).

So, realising that interaction with the virtual world was an increasingly bad idea I decided to take myself out for some medicinal muffins.

The weekend assault in Melbourne of Sergeant Brett Ward was just another in the endless stream of assaults by drunks on each other and on police every weekend in the city. It has, yet again, brought calls for mandatory prison terms for those who assault police, and tougher mandatory sentencing for the various thugs that populate the public consciousness for the moment.

I’m not usually one for the feminist rant. As I’ve said before I think the gender wars are over, women won (here in Australia at least) the right to make their own choices about pretty much everything and now it’s time to just get on with it. Complaining that we are not exactly the same as men or how unfair it is that we now have to deal with the consequences of our choices is, by my lights, totally anti-feminist.

Which is why, when someone sent me this picture, I was surprised by the hackles it raised.

Are they also selling No Fat Chicks  bumper stickers to go with it?

PETA give me the galloping shits. It may have started with a good idea, and who could possibly argue that animal cruelty is anything other than horrific, but they’ve really reached the lunatic, man-made, high carbon-footprint synthetic fibres, fringe now.

Not only do chicks who eat hamburgers belong in a box with thrill seeking vivisection clinic tourists, they’re also contemptible fatties who should all have sand kicked in their face at the beach? Pah! I’d like to see the whole lot of those pallid PETA vegans out on the African savannahs, waving placards at hungry leopards and wailing about how they’re being cruel to gazelles.

Also, am I the only one who thinks vegetarianism is an eating disorder?

So, apparently women don’t blog about politics?

Crikey editors and writers have been tweeting and blogging about it all morning. Why don’t women get involved, subscribe, comment or blog about politics to the same level that men do?

Oh for God’s sake! I know the pollies and the Herald Sun both function on the supposition that the voting public is incredibly gullible, but really, apart from electing the Rudd the first time, what did we ever do to make them think we’re THAT stupid?

The story of the Balibo 5, Australia-based journalists murdered by Indonesian troops in 1975, and the subsequent murder of another Australian journalist, Roger East, is the subject of a new film by Robert Connolly. (I haven’t seen it yet, but I plan to in the next couple of days, and will write a review either here or in the September Tribune). Before I've even seen it, however, I've had cause to get Very Angry.

I don’t watch morning TV, and there’s a couple of good reasons for that.

Firstly, because it’s SHIT, secondly because I have too much to do, thirdly because I listen to Radio National (actual journalism) and, most importantly, because it’s SHIT.

Normally I like the Health Report, it’s interesting, well presented and well researched. It rarely gets me shrieking imprecations and throwing things at the radio.

The Tribune, and by extension its editors, are all being dragged kicking and screaming into the new millennium. 

Our little paper publication got whacked up on the internet; after years of casting scornful glances down at Facebook from our firm position on the luddites high moral ground we’re now regularly facebooking from our iphones; and we finally got the email version of the mag going out every month (Sign up! Sign up! Box to the left!!!), so we thought we were done.

I said all this to our Digital Marketing Guru one night over a bottle of wine, expecting praise and plaudits. But no, he smiled pityingly at me and started talking about tweets and online communities and multi media communication and a whole of other stuff I didn’t understand.

Well, I’m game (and I’m not too old, I’m NOT) so I stagger bravely onwards.

The Tribune is now on Twitter (@kingstribune) which, my guru tells me (more pitying smiles) is not the same as being able to use Twitter. Do stuff with it, he tells me. Join conversations and participate, he says.

So I log in again and stare at the screen.

Apparently Kevvie’s people have reminded him about the internets again (“hey, ya big moonfaced git, there’s an entire generation out there that don’t give a toss about your latest sound bite” “Noooooooooo….pay attention to MEEEEE!!! Look at MEEEE!! Listen to MEEEE!!”).

Michael Jackson’s dead.

I guess you probably know that.

So, ok, well, how are we supposed to feel about it?

His music was ok, I danced to his songs in the 80s’, but let’s face it, anyone who danced in the 80s would have danced to Michael Jackson at some point, so I don’t think that qualifies me as a fan.

Pretty much everyone by now would have heard about Albanese’s Latham jibe in parliament yesterday, unless of course you’ve been hiding under a rock, sick to death of petty political mud slinging and wishing like hell that someone would drop a gigantic cowpat on the lot of them (in which case you should just scroll down and read the snake thing).

Grubby, childish, desperate, pointless. No, Big Brother’s not coming back for another season, I’m talking about the OzCar fake email stoush that’s currently got our nation’s Parliament and press fully occupied, digging through buckets of swill and gleefully paddling about in it, spraying the rest of us with its worthlessness and venality.

There’s been a bit of media squawking lately about Prince Charles getting involved in the permit process of a building development in London. Apparently His Boringness wrote a letter to the owners of the building development (the Qatar royal family) complaining about the execrable design of the proposed new building and asking them to put a stop to it.

And it seems there’s still honour among royals, because the Qataris agreed and fired architect Richards Rogers – responsible for inflicting the Millennium Dome and Madrid's Terminal 4 (above) upon the world.

To add insult to injury, the Qataris then passed the architectural design job on to Prince Charles' Foundation for the Built Environment, who will hopefully not turn the project into an LSD-flashback-inducing love child of a mutant 70s ashtray and an art installation from the Jeffersons’ new condo.

LOOK what those demented despots at Qantas have done now.

There they were thinking it was all terribly funny and amusing to go throwing thousands of snakes at us from the skies and now look at what’s happened. Lonsdale St is infested with black snakes.

And where is the public outrage? Where are the blogs and the protest marches and the outraged segments on Today Tonight? Is everybody really too busy moaning about swine flu to notice that there are snakes in Myers? IN MYERS?!?!? It’s like being unexpectedly eviscerated by a tiny helpless kitten!! How can there be snakes in MYERS??? That’s where you go to try on boots and perfume, not where you go to be attacked by marauding hordes of wild black snakes.

And people are LAUGHING about this!! How is that funny?? Children, poor wee innocent babies, go there, how is it funny that Qantas and Meyers are sicking deadly snakes onto them? What kind of twisted lunatic would find that FUNNY????

The dogs informed me when I got home yesterday that, because the back door is broken, devils got in and possessed the big comfy cushion on the gay couch, so they had to kill it. A lot.

They assured me that these were different devils from the ones that possessed the bean bag last week.

This morning after son (Luke, 12) had bounded out of the car, Bella (9) told me this: "Luke put Spoor (sp? some kind of choose your own adventure internet game?) on my computer and I made a world called Bellatopia and I'm the Princess-Queen of Bellatopia and it's ALWAYS my birthday even on Luke’s birthday and I made some fluffy things to live there and they're called FluffyMuffs and Cuddlepies and they're sooooooo cute and when I'm finished building Bellatopia I'm going to make a world called Lukeville and there will only be one thing living there and he will be called Numb-Nuts"

So, does anyone remember the scene in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang where Robert Downey Jnr turns to the camera and talks about how much it sucks when movies telegraph the ending: “why was that in the movie, gee, YOU THINK IT WILL COME BACK LATER MAYBE? I hate that, a TV’s on talking about the new power plant, hmm I wonder where the climax will happen; or the shot of the cook in the Hunt for Red October”.

It came to mind when we went to see State of Play tonight, in a last ditch effort to stay out of the bar for at least one night.

It’s a good movie - good script, good direction, great acting (even from Ben Affleck, who still owes the world a huge drink to apologize for Jersey Girl and whose head for some reason looked weirdly and distractingly big in this movie).

But why why why all the panning over big corporate headquarters in the opening scenes? Was it just to make sure that there would be no actual suspense in the alleged suspense movie? So no fucker would feel any tension that could cause them to take six months of stress leave and sue the movie studio for 100 billion dollars?

If you’re going to make a suspense movie, why not, I don’t know, leave a little suspense in it??

Column. Hourglass, Apple. Pear. These, according to the people at Kayser, are the shapes women come in. Okay, it’s fairly obvious what each one is, except maybe the apple, but what the hell are they talking about?

Taxes. No one like them, but we all pay (more or less) our fair share. It keeps the tax office off our backs and the water coming out the taps. Apart from the occasional whine about how much of our taxes are spent on social workers for the terminally discontented, we don’t really pay much more attention to it.

It occurred to me the other day, however, as I was chocking the dogs kennel up on my old tax law text books, that tax law is overly and unnecessarily complicated.

There are over 2000 pages of tax legislation - and that’s just federal legislation, on top of that you’ve all the different state tax laws and thousands and thousands of pages of case law and (gotta love a good oxy moron) the many Tax Office Clarifications issued over the years.

Surely this is overkill? Surely this is just a bunch of lawyers and public servants writing deliberately convoluted and ambiguous legislation in order to keep a much larger bunch of lawyers and public servants gainfully employed?

What would happen if we threw out the entire tax legislation as it stands and replaced it with one paragraph:

Big Kev: C’mon sing!! Left my heart to the mappers round Khe Shan. 

Zoran: Vasil, who IS this guy??

Vasil: Hush Zoran. Smile. Is Presidente of Australia.

Big Kev: SING with me…..Well the last train outta Sydney’s almost gold…

Zoran: Presidente? Really? Is not Bob from Accounts?? I was thought Australian Presidente wears stupid abookra hat everywhere? This guy really look like Bob from Accounts, you know, with the hot wife?

Vasil: Shhh, no, is not Bob, this is Kayrudd, he truly presidente from Australia!! He biggest dork in Pacific, but Aussie peoples love him, for his eyebrows and he giving them money to vote for him all the time, so be friendly!!

ALRIGHT!! The Pet Issue is done and delivered (thank you Scotty) so everyone can stop nagging us.

I was going to start working on the Special Edition, but having sort of (ok, not really) managed to come to grips with writing while not smoking, I have now been completely thrown by the whole Snakes on a Plane thing.

Sounds like a joke, right? Or even a stupid movie that someone got Samuel L Jackson reeeeeally drunk and then signed up to star in? Well, you’re wrong, it’s not. Bloody Qantas have apparently LOST four snakes on a plane in Melbourne.

You will feel so much better, they said....

Hah!

Have you noticed that it's been about three weeks since there was any new content on this page? Funnily enough, it's been three weeks since we gave up smoking, and we're pretty sure there's a link...

Yes, we're saving a shedload of cash, and hangovers are less than they used to be, but there's a whooooole lotta downsides to quitting that definitely were NOT in the brochure..

We don't feel physically better, we still wake up every morning feeling like we smoked a whole pack the night before, our digestive systems have gone completely mental, we want to kill each other and anyone else within reach.

Io sono chi siamo, an Italian saying that translates as “I am who we are”.

So, we’re all watching the news and reading the papers, moved and horrified by the inferno that engulfed our state. Everyone wants to do something and everyone wants to help.