NSW government slugs pensioners extra 18%

It has been a while since I posted here, but that doesn't mean I have gone away. Just been working on my wallpapers site & some other projects that have left me a little time-poor. But I do feel the following outrage is worth breaking into my routine, as it is plainly a case of the New South Wales government ripping off society's most needy people.

Being on the disability pension can be a struggle to make ends meet. It is especially tough at the moment as Australia has the highest grocery inflation rate in the developed world due to the decade-long nationwide drought, topped off by large drop in the Aussie dollar making what were cheap imports more expensive. A pensioner on a fixed income can't always buy Australian - we have to buy what we can afford, even if it means cheaper imported items, and those items have really climbed in price recently.

I am fortunate that I was assessed as being eligible for state-government owned housing back in 2003 - the rent is 25% of my pension, but that still leaves things very tight, especially when the gas, electrity & phone bills arrive (usually due at the same time too).

But it seems that my landlord, the financially bankrupt NSW government, is also morally bankrupt.

Today I was shocked to find out that my water usage charges billed by the Housing NSW are to be increased by 19% in one go (well, 18.75% to be more accurate). That is for water that Housing NSW can provide no verification of me using, as I have no individual water meter for my apartment. So I, a single man who uses very little water (one load of washing every week or so), am paying the same water usage charges as 3 people in the flat downstairs. On top of that, I have in the past year had water saving devices installed in my flat, so I should be rewarded with a reduction in my water usage charges, not a 19% increase.

To make things even worse, this is the 2nd or 3rd rise in water usage costs in the past 18 months. At the rate Housing NSW are increasing this slug on society's most disadvantaged people, by the end of the decade I will be paying more than 50% of my pension back to the government as rent and water usage.

I still believe that charging tenants of unit blocks for individual water usage is illegal. There is only a water meter at the entrance to our block, and this single meter covers usage for at least 9 apartments (could be 18 as there are several individual buildings on our block of land). So how can Housing NSW work out how much water I have used when there is no way for it measure how much goes to my apartment? Why should a single pensioner like me pay the same water usage as a family of 4 living in an apartment downstairs, or the man who does clothes washing for his friends to earn a little extra cash? He does 3 loads of washing per day - that would be my week's usage in a couple of days.

Hopefully some legal-eagle pensioner will mount a legal challenge to this immoral cash-grab from society's poor. Governments have to learn that you can't slug people for using things that you cannot prove they have used. And increasing charges by nearly 20% in one go (from 3.2% to 3.8%) is completely immoral.

At a time when the federal government is stating that pensioners are doing things very tough, its New South Wales state counterpart is increasing the amount it takes from their pensions without a valid reason. There is something very wrong indeed with that!

The really sad thing is that we are stuck with this inept Labor government for another 2 years (next election in March 2011). They have just gone from crisis to crisis since the last election in 2007, and seem to be desperate for money, no matter where it comes from and how hard it hits those on fixed low incomes. Sadly the Liberal (conservative) Party are not a viable alternative - their policy is to privatise public housing, and I could never, ever support that.

It looks like I will again be voting for the Greens next election. They seem to be the only party left which has a social conscience. 10 years ago the Greens were called radicals, but now they have won the hearts of those who are tired of getting hammered again & again by the 2 major parties in Australia, which have been taken over by economic rationalists who have no idea about the real life struggles people on fixed/low incomes go through each day to survive.

Thanks for reading.

Is TIVO 108 years behind the times?

Whoever created and approved the new TIVO ad for Australian television obviously knows nothing this wonderful country. It seems to me that TIVO is stuck in the year 1900, before we gained independence from Great Britain.

Why on Earth would they use the English national anthem "Land of Hope and Glory" as the theme for their advertisements down here? It reeks of ignorance by the makers of TIVO - I really could not see myself buying a product from a company that still believes Australia is part of the British Empire, 107 years after we gained independence from Great Britain.

Still, I guess advertising people aren't the smartest people on the planet. But it astounds me that no-one at the ad agency or TIVO was able to pick up that playing the English national anthem to represent it as being true-blue, dinky-di Aussie would be extremely insulting to Australians, who have great pride in the independence of their nation.

I guess wonders will never cease. I suppose it could have been worse though - the day the Star Spangled Banner gets used to represent Australia is the day I move across the Tasman to New Zealand.

Thanks for reading.

Should World Youth Day be cancelled?

My last post was about the New South Wales government's massive crackdown on civil liberties for the duration of the Pope's visit, including the implementation of laws more Draconian than those used during last year's APEC farce. I'm sure you remember it - that was one where "Osama Bin Laden" aka the Chaser comedy team was waved through several security checkpoints until he was outside George W. Bush's hotel. Well, after listening to this morning's news, I'm just wondering if the Pope and New South Wales government might be best advised to call off World Youth Day this year. While I initially strongly supported the event, I think it has now reached the stage where the best course of action would to either call it off, or move it to a remote area far away from populated centres.

Why have I changed my mind? Because I don't believe a visit by someone which is intended to celebrate freedom of religion and diversity of cultures should actually result in the implementation of a police state with rule by decree. Which is what we now have here in Sydney. There are now 600 separate public sites in Sydney where police can forcibly remove people without any reason, and 40 areas where no protest action at all will be permitted. Anyone wishing to protest will have to apply to police a week in advance, and have the police approve their banners and T-shirts (sounds like China or the former Soviet Union more than Australia).

As stated yesterday, members of the public will be liable to arrest, strip-searches and $5,500 fines if they do anything that a police officer thinks is annoying. What is annoying has not been defined - it is up to the individual police to interpret that new law.

Now the NSW Police have started a concerted program of intimidation and harassment against various organisations. Gay leaders all around Australia have received phone calls from police, and interrogated about their plans for the WYD period. They have been asked who they will be associating with, where they will be staying & what they will be doing. One lobbyist said that he now fears his phones have been tapped.

Even victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests have been told they are not welcome in Sydney during that week. Police have told leaders of support groups for sexual victims that they will not be allowed anywhere near major Sydney locations such as East Darling Harbour, Randwick Racecourse, Hyde Park and St Mary's Cathedral.

So now, the backlash has started. Australians have always had a very healthy disrespect for authority, and we will not take a backward step if we believe authorities have gone too far. And thus I now come to my reason why I think the World Youth Day should be cancelled or at least moved to another location.

Initially about 125,000 pilgrims from overseas were expected to attend WYD. However, going by the number of visa applications, it is looking like the figure could be as low as 70,000 overseas visitors. That would not have been a problem - after all, less pilgrims means less strain on public services such as transport. It was anticipated that there would probably be around 20,000 protesters in Sydney during that period.

But now the figure on the number of protesters expected to be in Sydney that week has been dramatically revised. So many people are disgusted with the harsh crackdown on freedom and implementation of police rule during that week that commentators are predicting possibly half a million protesters arriving in Sydney to make their view known. That will be an extremely interesting situation.

This means that we may be looking at a figure of 5 protesters for every pilgrim. Originally protesters were expected to be limited to the gay rights groups, victims of clergy abuse groups, anti-Catholic/religion groups. But now there will be lots of people not associated with any organisations making their way into the city to make their feelings known to the Morris Iemma-led NSW government.

Will Sydney be able to cope with this massive influx of protesters? I don't think so. For APEC we flew in police from all over Australia to assist, and even had the armed forces involved. As far as I am aware, similar arrangements have not been implemented for the Pope's visit. Sydney will be chaotic, full of angry people, and things will most likely flare up at some stage. The security arrangements as they are now will not be able to protect pilgrims from protesters, and there will be complete transport system gridlock.

Sydney-siders have had it with the state government. Over the past couple of weeks we have experienced transport chaos, with major highways closed for hours, our busiest road tunnel closed during peak hour (a computer crashed), major railway problems, and a fleet of buses taken off the road after experiencing brake failures. On top of that we are now told we are no longer welcome in our home city, and may be strip-searched if we wear a T-shirt that makes a statement someone disagrees with.

I have had enough, and the people of Sydney have had enough. If the Premier could take his head out of his backside for a few minutes, then he might work out that, instead of having a peaceful visit by the Pope, by bringing in these Draconian laws without consultation he has changed the situation to one where violent riots in Sydney are much more likely.

And that is why the World Youth Day in Sydney should be called off. The new laws have created a situation where the pilgrims will not be welcomed to this great city, but will instead see the violent side of Sydney at possibly the worst its ever been.

More reading: Priest slams World Youth Day crackdown

Thanks for reading.

Do you know an annoying person? Send them to New South Wales for punishment!

I am sitting here shaking my head in amazement. I thought I lived in a democratic nation that respected freedom, but I've been proven wrong in the strongest possible terms.

Believe it or not, the totally inept and useless government of my state of New South Wales (NSW) has actually made it a crime to be annoying! There is no description of what annoying is, but if the police think you are or might be annoying, you can now be strip-searched and fined $5,000.

The reason for this crushing of my democratic rights? The useless Catholic World Youth Day (WYD) being held down the road from my place this month. Although I initially supported my city of Sydney hosting the occasion where the Pope will be in attendance, now I just wish it would piss off and be a nuisance somewhere else.

The hosting of the event is costing the taxpayer a bucket-load of money, and since NSW appears to be flat broke, the tens of millions of dollars spent on the conference for little or no financial return really could have been spent on something that will benefit the people of this state. Crikey! We really need something positive here - the Morris Iemma-led government just seems to unleash a new disaster on the people every day of the week.

The anticipated attendance of pilgrims is now expected to be way below the original estimates, and the organisers are at loss to explain why. Duh! Young people are not idiots. Why would anyone want to come to Sydney in the middle of Winter to camp out on a wet racecourse in cold tents? Whoever decided to hold the WYD in the middle of Sydney's Winter needs a brain transplant. They obviously have no idea at all.

Anyway, back to the original topic of this post. Apparently the state government is worried about people annoying pilgrims by talking about or doing things that are not in line with Catholic dogma. So, to protect the poor pilgrims from anything that may challenge their strict ideals, it is now an offence to do things that are annoying. That could be anything from wearing a pro-choice shirt or badge in an area of the city where pilgrims may congregate to activist groups handing out condoms in an attempt to bring attention to the AIDS crisis in Africa. Even gay couples holding hands or kissing (perfectly legal until now) could be considered annoying and be arrested. Whatever the police in attendance at the time think may be annoying will be an offence- we just don't know what constitutes annoying behaviour. My Mum frequently nags me to clean my room & that sometimes annoys me - should I have her arrested?

People arrested for being annoying or irritating may be subject to strip-searches, and fines of up to $5,000. What a crazy world we live in.

I think the funniest thing is that the route the pilgrims will be taking to the racecourse goes directly through the areas of Sydney where pilgrims are most likely to encounter eccentrics and "annoying" people. The government idiots forgot that the pilgrims will be walking through the middle of Sydney's gay & lesbian community, and also through large public housing areas where they are very likely to encounter eccentric and/or mentally ill people. I always find the 5 minute walk to my local shops interesting - the pilgrims will find the same walk quite confronting if they encounter the same people I regularly say hello to.

What I was thinking is that someone should organise a "National Day of Annoyance" to be held in Sydney at the same time as World Youth Day. People attending will have to wear annoying clothes (maybe Hawaiian shirts), and do annoying things like listening to heavy metal, rap & hip-hop music. Hopefully 100,000 or more annoying people will turn up (there is no shortage of annoying people in Sydney, so it should not be hard to outnumber the pilgrims). That would make the WYD very interesting - how will the police handle having to arrest and strip-search 100,000 or more annoying people?

I guess these Draconian laws are just another example of how the completely inept Iemma government has lost touch with reality. And to think that I voted for that mob last election - what a let-down they have been to the Labor faithful. It is about time the Governor of my state decided that the current government has lost the confidence of the people, dismissed Iemma and his useless bunch of cronies, and called a new election. I don't think the people of New South Wales will be able to withstand 3 more years of blunder after blunder.

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Which of these creation theories is true?

I was watching a very good interview with Sir David Attenborough on television last night, and one question he was asked was his opinion on creation versus evolution. His firm belief is that evolution is the only way human beings could have come about. He also talked about the variety of creationist theories, and gave a few differing examples from different cultures. If he is wrong, then which of the following creation theories is right?

1. A teal flew over the primeval waters but could find no place to land. The Mother of the Water raised her knee above the water, and the teal made a nest on it. It laid six golden eggs and one iron egg, and then it sat warming them. The heat became so intense that the Mother of the Water twitched her knee. The eggs dislodged and broke. The earth formed from one half of a shell, and the sky from the other half. The sun formed from the top half of one yolk, and the moon from the top half of the white. Stars and clouds also formed from parts of the egg.

2. In the beginning, all people lived in darkness in the lower world. They held a council and decided to send someone above to find whether there was another world. First they sent wind. Water had covered the earth originally, but the wind rolled it back, and land appeared. The people next sent up Crow, but Crow stayed to eat the dead fish that had been exposed and didn't report back. They sent Beaver next, but he stayed to build dams in the streams and didn't report back, either. Next they sent Badger, who reported back that there was dry land up there. The people next sent four men to prepare the world above, which was flat and empty. These four men chose one named Mirage from whom to make things as we know them now. They formed Mirage into the shape of a ball, and of that ball made all things of this earth. Those people went around making hills and mountains, lightning and springs, etc. Then the people of the lower world ascended. First the animal and plant people came out. They moved around the edge of the earth clockwise, and different tribes stopped at different places. The real humans came out after them and likewise migrated to different places. Sun and Moon were originally with the people, but they later went ahead and separated.

3. Naareau the Elder created the earth, but the sky and the earth clove together with darkeness between them. Naareau the Younger, with a spell, created a slight cleft between earth and sky. He created a bat and told it to look around. The Bat reported finding a Company of Fools and Deaf Mutes. Naareau crawled in the cleft and, with the Bat as his guide, went to the people. Naareau told them to push up, and the sky was lifted a little, but they could lift it only so high. Naareau summoned Riiki, the conger eel, and told it to push up on the sky against the land. While Riiki pushed and Naareau sang, Great Ray, Turtle, and Octopus tore at the roots of the sky. The sky was pushed high and the land sank. The Company of Fools and Deaf Mutes were left swimming in the sea; they became the sea creatures.

4. A great being in the sky moulded some mud into the shape of a man. The great being then blew onto the mud, giving it life, and thus man was created. When man fell asleep, the great being removed part of his body and made a woman from it.

5. In the beginning the earth was a bare plain. All was dark. There was no life, no death. The sun, the moon, and the stars slept beneath the earth. All the eternal ancestors slept there, too, until at last they woke themselves out of their own eternity and broke through to the surface.

When the eternal ancestors arose, in the Dreamtime, they wandered the earth, sometimes in animal form - as kangaroos, or emus, or lizards -- sometimes in human shape, sometimes part animal and human, sometimes as part human and plant.

Two such beings, self-created out of nothing, were the Ungambikula. Wandering the world, they found half-made human beings. They were made of animals and plants, but were shapeless bundles, lying higgledy-piggledy, near where water holes and salt lakes could be created. The people were all doubled over into balls, vague and unfinished, without limbs or features.

With their great stone knives, the Ungambikula carved heads, bodies, legs, and arms out of the bundles. They made the faces, and the hands and feet. At last the human beings were finished. Thus every man and woman was transformed from nature and owes allegiance to the totem of the animal or the plant that made the bundle they were created from -- such as the plum tree, the grass seed, the large and small lizards, the parakeet, or the rat.

This work done, the ancestors went back to sleep. Some of them returned to underground homes, others became rocks and trees. The trails the ancestors walked in the Dreamtime are holy trails. Everywhere the ancestors went, they left sacred traces of their presence -- a rock, a waterhole, a tree.

There are many, many other theories about how the Earth and mankind was formed. Can anyone really say that any of the above are correct? Just food for thought.

I thought Sydney was under a terrorist attack!

I'm still shaking as I write this. It's just gone past 6am here in Sydney, and I am thinking back to just how scary it is to be awoken by a huge booming sound at 5:40 in the morning.

I really should be used to it by now. The big crashing sound that woke me long before sparrow-fart this morning wasn't an explosion - it was just my ever-considerate Sydney City Council doing it's regular (3 to 4 days a week) task of waking up long before sunrise what is probably the most densely populated residential street in Sydney.

Redfern-Waterloo (often referred to as Red-Water) is Sydney's major public housing area. At the far end of my street we have three enormous tower blocks housing well over 1,000 elderly, disabled and sick people, and I live in one of a string of 3-storey "walk-up" blocks of units, housing probably another 500-plus residents. There is no commercial activity at all in my street (aside from a couple of small corner stores).

But someone in Sydney City Council decided a year or so ago that my 99.9% residential street and the surrounding ones (also all public housing tenants) is a major commercial area on a major arterial road (we get one car every 5 minutes or so) and moved the garbage collection from during the daytime (which residents appreciated) to collecting the rubbish between 5 and 6 am when the traffic is quieter (and most people are sound asleep).

So every 2 or 3 days the 1,500+ people in my street get woken long before 6am by what must be the noisiest and slowest garbage collection service in Australia.

This isn't one of those garbage collection services which comes and goes within 5 minutes. Oh no - here you are looking at 20 or so minutes - long enough to ensure to that, by the time it is over, you will be so wide awake that you cannot roll over in bed and go back to sleep.

You see - we don't have regular garbage bins here. We have huge metal rubbish skips. If I am fortunate enough to sleep through the noise of the rubbish collection service as it does the blocks of flats further down the street, then the rumble-CRASH-rumble as one of the waste-collection men rolls our big bin out of it's alcove, across the footpath, over the gutter (that's where the huge "BANG" happens) and out to the middle of the road to await the truck that empties it, is sure to wake me up. That's what happened this morning - I was startled awake by the huge boom of the metal skip jumping the gutter. It really does sound like a small explosion - certainly enough to startle a sleeping person.

I could probably go back to sleep after that initial collection task, but once awoken I then have to listen as the truck does its business further down the street and with ever-increasing volume approaches my residence. When it arrives, the serious noise starts. The men shift the rubbish skip around on the road until it lines up with the truck, and then the truck lifts the huge skip and tips the waste into the truck. That requires a huge revving of the engines to get the power to the hydraulic lifters. And to make matters worse, the truck operator then "shakes" the rubbish skip a few times before it is noisily lowered back to the ground, and wheeled back across the road, over the gutter (another big boom) and placed back into the alcove to await the next pre-dawn collection in 2 or 3 days time. The truck then loudly revs again as it compresses the rubbish.

This morning I looked out my bedroom window while the loud operation was in progress, and it was noticeable that I saw the lights in 5 other apartments all go on at the same time. Obviously, just like me, those aged and disabled pensioners also can't get back to sleep after all of the noise.

I think the worst thing for me is that I am by nature a night-owl. I usually can't get to sleep before 1 or 2 in the morning, and being woken every 2nd or 3rd day after only 3 or 4 hours sleep is really starting to have an effect on my health. I took my Mum out for Mother's Day yesterday, and she commented on the bags under my eyes. I just told her that I can't get more than 2 good night's sleep in a row any more, because Sydney Council wakes me before sunrise every couple of days. And what really pisses me off is that they even collect the rubbish before 6am on weekends and public holidays. Being woken regularly at 5:30 on Sunday mornings isn't much fun.

What I cannot for the life of me work out is why Sydney City Council suddenly changed the status of my area from high-density residential back-streets to commercial premises on a major arterial road. We have been a residential area for well over 50 years, and the garbage collection worked perfectly well during the daytime for my first 4 years of living here. It's just in the last year that things have changed and the council has decided to make life intolerable for those in the population who are most in need of rest due to age and/or illness.

I spoke to a neighbour recently about how bad the noise from the Council has become, and she told me that a few tenants had rung the Council to complain about the change in garbage collection times. But they were fobbed off with the excuse that the council was entitled to collect rubbish at any time, and the impression was given to her that it was not so much about the need to collect rubbish in residential backwaters at night due to traffic congestion, but rather it was a council staff rostering and overtime issue that meant the poorest, most densely populated suburb in Sydney would for now on have it's rubbish collected overnight.

All I can say to Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore is that she needs to pull her finger out. Many of us here voted for her because she is a compassionate, caring person who we thought would put the residents of Sydney first. She really needs to demonstrate to the residents of Red-Water that she does care about them, and start letting them go to bed at night without the constant worry that they will be woken up by her staff long before 6am the next morning.

Thanks for reading.

A bitter old man wreaks his revenge on democracy

It looks like Australia's former Prime Minister, a man so despised by the population that he wasn't just thrown out of office at the last election - he was also thrown out of Parliament, has spent the past 3 months planning his revenge on the people of Australia who used the democratic process to oust him. And he has chosen the lowest of low methods - running down his country while on overseas speaking tours.

Mr Howard, in his first public speech since being booted out of office last November, chose a right-wing extremist think-tank in the USA to vent his spleen against the people of Australia. He criticised many of the new Labor government's policies, and strongly suggested that Australia will experience higher unemployment now that his extreme anti-worker industrial relations laws will be overturned. Worse still, he said that businesses will have a lot more industrial relations problems.

And that was only a small part of a bitter speech that ran for an hour - goodness knows what else he had to say (bitch) about the country he once used to govern. It really is embarrassing to see a man like John Howard, once held in esteem by much of the world, turn into a crazy old ranter who thinks only of ways he can damage the country he ran only 3 months earlier.

Howard has thrown the long-time traditional protocol of former leaders not criticising their country when on foreign visits out the window. This protocol exists for very good reason. It is to ensure that embittered former leaders do not try to damage their nation by making it look bad in the eyes of other countries. It seems that John Howard has no love at all for the country that made him, a nondescript suburban solicitor, into Prime Minister for 11 years. We paid his salary for over 30 years while he sat in Parliament, and are still paying him a large pension. He owes the people of Australia respect for the opportunities they have given him. Instead he has given them a big a big poke in the eye and blown a huge raspberry at them.

After John Howard's radical speech, a question now hangs over Australia. Will foreign corporations take his bitter words seriously and starting for other countries to invest their money in? Will that planned move to open a large manufacturing plant in Australia suddenly be cancelled out of unnecessary fear due to Howard's rant? Is John Howard on a one-man mission to send Australia into a recession, just for the sake of his ego?

I always believed that, no matter which side of politics you support, respect should always be given to former leaders, whether from the left or the right. After all, they were elected by the people to the distinction of heading their nation. I'm now seriously questioning that belief.

Perhaps the best thing for all of us would be for John Howard to drop dead from a heart attack in the middle of one his extremist, hate-filled speeches. It would satisfy his thirst for publicity to drop dead in front of a crowd, and the people of Australia would be better off as we would no longer have this bitter old man jetting about the world with the intention of making his country look as bad as possible in the eyes of foreign governments and investors.

--

Revenge is always the weak pleasure of a little and narrow mind. (Latin: Semper et infirmi est animi exiguique voluptas Ultio.) - Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenal)




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You know you're Australian if ...

You know you're Australian if ...

1. You know the meaning of the word 'girt'.

2. You believe that stubbies can be either drunk or worn.

3. You think it's normal to have a leader called Kevin.

4. You waddle when you walk due to the 53 expired petrol discount vouchers stuffed in your wallet or purse.

5. You've made a bong out of your garden hose rather than use it for something illegal such as watering the garden.

6. You believe it is appropriate to put a rubber in your son's pencil case when he first attends school.

7. When you hear that an American 'roots for his team' you wonder how often and with whom.

8. You understand that the phrase 'a group of women wearing black thongs' refers to footwear and may be less alluring than it sounds.

9. You pronounce Melbourne as 'Mel-bin'.

10. You pronounce Penrith as 'Pen-riff'.

11. You believe the 'l' in the word 'Australia' is optional.

12. You can translate: 'Dazza and Shazza played Acca Dacca on the way to Maccas.'

13. You believe it makes perfect sense for a nation to decorate its highways with large fibreglass bananas, prawns and sheep.

14. You call your best friend 'a total bastard' but someone you really, truly despise is just 'a bit of a bastard'.

15. You think 'Woolloomooloo' is a perfectly reasonable name for a place.

16. You're secretly proud of our killer wildlife.

17. You believe it makes sense for a country to have a $1 coin that's twice as big as its $2 coin.

18. You understand that 'Wagga Wagga' can be abbreviated to 'Wagga' but 'Woy Woy' can't be called 'Woy'.

19. You believe that cooked-down axle grease makes a good breakfast spread.

20. You believe all famous Kiwis are actually Australian, until they stuff up, at which point they again become Kiwis.

21. Hamburger. Beetroot. Of course.

22. You know that certain words must, by law, be shouted out during any rendition of the Angels' song 'Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again'.

23. You believe, as an article of faith, that the confectionery known as the Wagon Wheel has become smaller with every passing year.

24. You still don't get why the 'Labor' in 'Australian Labor Party' is not spelt with a 'u'.

25. You wear ugh boots outside the house.

26. You believe, as an article of faith, that every important discovery in the world was made by an Australian but then sold off to the Yanks for a pittance.

27. You believe that the more you shorten someone's name the more you like them.

28. Whatever your linguistic skills, you find yourself able to order takeaway fluently in every Asian language.

29. You understand that 'excuse me' can sound rude, while 'scuse me' is always polite.

30. You know what it's like to swallow a fly, on occasion via your nose.

31. You understand that 'you' has a plural and that it's 'youse'.

32. You know it's not summer until the steering wheel is too hot to handle.

33. Your biggest family argument over the summer concerned the rules for beach cricket.

34. You shake your head in horror when companies try to market what they call 'Anzac cookies'.

35. You still think of Kylie as 'that girl off Neighbours'.

36. When returning home from overseas, you expect to be brutally strip-searched by Customs - just in case you're trying to sneak in fruit.

37. You believe the phrase 'smart casual' refers to a pair of black tracky-daks, suitably laundered.

38. You understand that all train timetables are works of fiction.

39. When working on a bar, you understand male customers will feel the need to offer an excuse whenever they order low-alcohol beer.

40. You get choked up with emotion by the first verse of the national anthem and then have trouble remembering the second.

41. You find yourself ignorant of nearly all the facts deemed essential in the government's new test for migrants.

42. You know, whatever the tourist books say, that no one says 'cobber'.

43. And you will immediately forward this list to other Australians, here and overseas, realising that only they will understand.

--

For the previous comment on a Users imagination, this is 2001, we're not supposed to have imaginations anymore, we're all locked in our houses & spied on every minute of our lives by the government. Never tell your best friend he has a Vivid Imagination, or you'll find him dead the next day. - Blue, on rec.arts.int-fiction


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Australia formally apologises to the Stolen Generation

I have literally been in tears of both happiness and sadness this morning. What Kevin Rudd did today in our national Parliament marks a momentous day in Australia's history. A formal, unequivocal apology to our indigenous population for 70 years of harsh, racist national policies which included the forced removal of children from their families for no other reason than the fact they were black. These forced removals occurred all the way up to the 1970's - and many, many of this nation's proud indigenous people have suffered greatly.

I count myself very fortunate to have been born white in Australia. Although my childhood was a struggle, and my family was dysfunctional, us children never feared being taken away from our parents who loved us greatly. If I was an Aborigine, the story would be completely different. For the traditional owners of this vast continent, family love and good parenting was not enough to keep your children. If you were black, your children were taken away to be "assimilated" into the white population. The fallout from this policy of forced removal of children on the basis of race has been a huge stain on Australia's reputation. Many of those taken away never, ever saw their families again, and even now they do not know who they are or where they come from.

Because Aborigines were not considered to be citizens until after the 1967 referendum, in many cases there are no birth records or any other details which will help stolen children find their families. They are lost generations, not knowing who they really are, where they come from, and what their heritage is. And it has hurt the victims deeply. Broken mothers, suffering never-ending grief at the loss of their children. Children who were often taken from loving families and sent to missions where they were sexually abused and treated as slave labour. Naturally, many of these children went on to lead wasted lives, turning to drugs, alcohol and suicide to relieve the pain caused by unjust government policies.

Today the healing can start. Although many of the Stolen Generation have now passed away (especially the mothers), many, many are still around, and they have been fighting long and hard for decades to have the Australian government recognise the fact that the forced removal policy was wrong and destroyed the lives of a huge number of people. The new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, did that this morning as the first official piece of government business under his leadership. The text of the apology:

Today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history.

We reflect on their past mistreatment.

We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations – this blemished chapter in our nation’s history.

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.

We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.

We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.

For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.

To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.

And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.

We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation.

For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written.

We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians.

A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again.

A future where we harness the determination of all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity.

A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed.

A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility.

A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.

The Prime Minister then went on to explain why the apology was given, including a heart-rending tale of one of the victims (which had most of the public gallery in tears). All-in-all it was great speech, with no conditions or disclaimers - something that sounded very much from the heart, and with a huge amount of sympathy for and empathy with those who suffered during those 7 decades.

The Opposition Leader, Brendan Nelson, supported the apology, but disappointingly turned a day of recognition of our Aboriginal people into a tribute for Australia's soldiers. I don't know what he was thinking of, but he definitely damaged the solemnity of the occasion, and worst of all he tried to justify the past policies as being of good intentions. On a day of saying sorry he could have done a lot better, and left partisanship off the table for a while. The Aboriginal people watching on big screens around the country at one stage turned their backs on him - a very strong insult.

But I think Nelson was trying to placate those in his conservative team who are vehemently against any apology. He's in a tough position - the leader of the Opposition is more often than not a short-term job. Still, he could have stamped his leadership on the first sitting day, and he didn't. I personally think that Brendan Nelson is a man who does feel sorry for what happened - it's just that he's got a bunch of hardliners sitting behind him, all itching for his job.

Now is the time to move on. The national government has said sorry - it must back that up with action to improve the lives of our poverty-stricken indigenous people. Kevin Rudd has proposed a bipartisan "war cabinet" led by him and the Opposition Leader to try to get equality of life for Aborigines. Let's all hope that this time it succeeds - too many attempts in the past have failed. But I think this time is different - for once it seems that the government is genuinely going to work with the Aborigines, not yell and scream at them like past governments have done. The thing I saw today, which I have not really seen before, was a genuine respect from the government for the traditional owners of the country. And respect goes such a long way in building trust and bonds - I think this might be a new era in Australia's history.

It was interesting to see who attended the apology motion today. Former Labor PM's Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke & Paul Keating were watching on. So was former conservative PM Malcolm Fraser - a tireless fighter for human rights and the Aboriginal cause. So all of the Prime Ministers from 1972 to 1996 turned up. But the noticeable absence - the PM of the past decade, and the man who refused to say sorry, John Howard. I guess his era is over well and truly - the man was a relic of the 1950's, and he still can't bring himself to admit that terrible injustices were carried out by his country during his lifetime. Last night on the radio a caller said that Kevin Rudd will go down in history as one of our greatest Prime Ministers, while John Howard will be marked in the books as irrelevant. I think that person will be correct.

Now we have to address the compensation issue - something very contentious. I think compensation should be paid - otherwise it is racism all over again. White people expect to be compensated when something destroys their lives - why are so many arguing against compensating black people for the total destruction of their lives caused by bad government policies? If we can afford to give $30 billion in tax cuts, then we can afford to reduce the tax cuts a bit and set aside the money to compensate the Stolen Generation for their deep hurt and suffering over many years.

I guess it will come to the choice between money and morality. Let's do the moral thing this time, even it does cost the taxpayer. It will be a change from the hardline, money-means-everything policies that ruled Australia under John Howard's rule over the past decade. Australia can afford to pay compensation - the only things that will stop it from happening are greed and selfishness by those who could afford to be generous to those who have suffered greatly.

Anyway, I'm going to have a big smile on my face all day today. The apology has been a long-waited, momentous occasion that really will go down in the history books.

More reading:

Kevin Rudd's national apology to Stolen Generations | NEWS.com.au
Kevin Rudd says sorry - National - smh.com.au
Stolen Generation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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“I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.” - Mahatma Gandhi

Back to blogging.....

Sorry I haven't been blogging lately - I've been preoccupied with building my new website (50,000 FREE WALLPAPERS) over the past few weeks. It's been a lot of hard work, but I wanted to make a "real" site, not just a bunch of messy HTML pages, and I think I've very much achieved that. If you are after some nice backgrounds for your PC's desktop, please stop by & check the site out.

Now the hard work is over and it's just a half hour or so each day to update the site, so I'm going back to doing something I haven't been doing much of (if any of) lately - putting my opinions on the 'Net. And today is the perfect day to do it - a new era in history has just been written into Australia's history. Read about it in my next post.

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If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat - Mark Twain

2 free ways to massively increase your site hits

It's frustrating isn't it? You have a fantastic site that you know people will want to visit, but you just can't seem to get the traffic you think it deserves. Of course, you could pay to advertise it, but why pay when you can get lots of hits to your site for free? Here are 2 free methods I am using to get more visitors to my site.

The first is adgridwork - Free Online Advertising. adgridwork is a free reciprocal advertising network. You display ads from other member sites on your site, and your ads will be displayed on other sites. You get displayed on more sites if people click the ads shown on your site, so it is best to have them displayed in a prominent location (I've got them displayed on the home page of 50,000 FREE WALLPAPERS, so every visitor sees them). adgridwork is very reliable, you can have multiple sites, it has site categories, and for those with raunchy sites it also has an adult sites section. I've received a lot of hits to my sites via adgridwork over the past year or so that I have been using it - I strongly recommend it for both small and large sites.

The second way to get free hits to your site (and this one can get you more than a million hits in just a month) is FreeViral - One Million FREE Guaranteed Visitors. FreeViral is a type of (legitimate) viral marketing. When you join up with FreeViral, you are required to visit 6 other member websites. Once you have done that you will be given your own signup page which you can refer people to. The more you sign up, the more your own ad appears on other FreeViral signup sites, and the more traffic you will get to your site as people click your ad link on those sites. I think it could be a very effective free way to generate loads of traffic (I just signed up today - that means 6 other people got site visits from me).

The really good thing is that both adgridwork & FreeViral are not time-consuming ad programs. All they require is for you to put links and banners on your site - preferably where visitors can easily see them. With FreeViral you can also advertise the link to your signup page, which is a great way to get quick signups and your referral count up.

But what if these services are too slow in getting your traffic to the levels you want? You might have something special on your page that you want lots of people to see immediately. Well, here are a couple of not free, but still very cheap, methods of generating lots of instant hits to your site. They are both paid-to-click (PTC) programs, where people get paid a cent or so to visit your site for a set time period (usually 20 to 30 seconds). Because they don't get paid until the time is up, there's a very good chance that they will view your content & stay on the site. I've been using PTC the last few days to promote 50,000 Free Wallpapers.

The 2 PTC programs I use to generate quick, genuine hits to my site are WordLinx & ClixSense. Creating an ad is very simple on both sites, and you are looking at about $6 to buy 500 hits to your site (it gets cheaper if you buy more). Ads can be targeted to demographics and regions, and you can even pause your ads (great for if you want them to run at a certain time of the day). Both have good referral programs, and the other great thing is that, if you want to spend a bit of time viewing other peoples' ads, you can place your ads for free! Just as people get paid to click on your ad, you also get paid to click on their ads. You can either wait until you have enough in your balance to claim a cash payout, or you can use the money you earn to purchase your own ads. As well as getting a lot of traffic cheaply from these two sites, I have also found a lot of interesting sites by viewing other members' ads.

With the PTC programs I do recommend that you pay the small upgrade fee, as you get a huge amount of benefits. Referrals pay more, you have more choices for your ads, and with WordLinx you get a free ad run each month that pretty well covers the cost of the membership fee. And upgrading means that you get more ads to click on and earn money - many people choose to show their ads only to people who are proven buyers, and the number of extra ads you can click on offsets the small upgrade fee you pay.

I hope you found these tips helpful. I've found these 4 services to be great for generating traffic to my site using a minimal or zero amount of money. They are really useful for small or personal sites which don't have an advertising budget, but just want more people to know about their site. Of course, big sites are welcome to use these services too.

adgridwork - Free Online Advertising







Cross-posted at: 50,000 Free Wallpapers Updates

Visit my new site - 50,000 FREE WALLPAPERS!

50,000 Free Wallpapers is now open!

Okay folks - if you have been reading my previous posts, you would know that I am having no end of trouble with the hosting of my 20,000 Free Wallpapers site on Blogger. Their computers a couple of weeks ago decided to flag the blog as spam due to the large number of image thumbnail links on it, and despite 2 requests to Blogger customer service I still cannot post any updates to it. It had been reviewed 6 months ago by Blogger and given the green light, so I don't know why their computers flagged it again, since it is obviously not a spam site. (post continues below)

Click here to visit my new site: 50,000 FREE WALLPAPERS

According to Blogger's resumption request page, my locked blog should have been reviewed by a human and resumed within 4 business days. After a week of no action the screen then told me I had to request a review for a second time, and that would take only 2 days. A week after that second request I still don't have access to post to my wallpapers blog (though - fortunately for me - they have left the blog online so people can still visit it).

Anyway, I decided a few days ago that Blogger is too unreliable to host a site that I have put a huge amount of work into. Creating a large site hosting tens of thousands of wallpapers is a time consuming task. It involves getting wallpapers from various sources, sorting them into their different sizes, resizing the ones that are too large, uploading the various galleries to my image host Shareapic - which pays me to share my pictures online, getting the image code, and creating the blog entry to tell visitors and subscribers that the gallery is now online. I currently have about 40 galleries that have been uploaded, but I haven't been able to place those galleries on my wallpapers blog due to Blogger's incompetence. This means I may be caught between a rock and a hard place. If they don't resume my blog, then it will be deleted by them - possibly without a Blogger employee ever sighting it! If they do resume my blog, then the large number of posts I will have to make to get up-to-date may cause it to be suspended by their computer again, as frequent posts are one of the things they watch out for.

So, I decided to use the free space on my ISP's server that came with my broadband account, and move everything on to that. It hasn't been an easy task - I wanted to try a content management system (CMS) to make it easier to update the site without having to create new pages and links manually, but because my webspace is not a "hosted plan", it doesn't have PHP and database support. This wiped out about 95% of my CMS options. I then looked at CMS that could be created and maintained on my own PC, and then static pages uploaded to my ftp site. But I couldn't find anything that really did what I wanted without a lot of hard work, and special modules for my Linux system.

After a marathon session of research and trying various types of software, I decided to go "back-to-basics" and create an easy to navigate and maintain HTML site. I did (still do actually) have a wallpapers site on my ISP's server, but I had ignored it for a few months as it was a huge amount of work to add new wallpapers to. There had to be a better way, and I decided to go for a site that uses frames. I found some great free frameset templates at Technorealm. I downloaded the ones I wanted to try, and then carefully read the instructions on using frames which were included in the HTML code. It was easier than I thought it would be, and I had a nice framed site template working within a few minutes. Now adding a gallery is as easy as adding a link to the index frame page, another to the wallpaper subject page, and creating a quick page with the image code on it. It takes me only a few minutes - a great time-saver.

The new site is also more "user-friendly" than the old one. It is very easy to navigate between pages, galleries open in a frame instead of a new page, there are a lot less ads (just one per page instead of a dozen - gotta get some income, but I think I overdid the advertising on the old site, which cost me traffic).

At the moment I am still uploading galleries, but I do already have thousands of free wallpapers on 50,000 FREE WALLPAPERS. Here's a list of galleries currently available:

Female celebrities:

Abigail Clancy, Adriana Lima, Alessandra Ambrosio, Ali Landry, Ali Larter, Alicia Keys, Alicia Silverstone, Alyson Hannigan, Alyson Michalka, Alyssa Milano, Amanda Bynes, Amber Tamblyn, Amber Valletta, Angelina Jolie, Anna Faris, Anna Kournikova, Ashlee Simpson, Ashley Judd, Ashley Tisdale, Avril Lavigne, Beyonce Knowles, Billie Piper, Britney Spears, Brittany Murphy, Cameron Diaz, Carmen Electra, Cassandra Peterson (Elvira), Cate Blanchett, Charlize Theron, Christina Aguilera, Christina Milian, Christina Ricci, Claudia Schiffer, Daniela Hantuchova, Dannii Minogue, Delta Goodrem, Denise Richards, Dido, Dominique Swain, Elisha Cuthbert, Eliza Dushku, Emma Bunton (Baby Spice), Emma Watson, Estella Warren, Eva Longoria, Eva Mendes & Evangeline Lilly.

Space/Astronomy: Hubble Telescope 1024x768 (around 800 wallpapers)

Cars: Cool Cars, Classic Car Paintings (very nice artworks of classic cars).

I am anticipating (expecting!) that the site will be completed by the end of January. I think it will be a great resource for those who are looking for lots of free desktop backgrounds for their PC.

You can also view the latest updates at my new blog, 50,000 Free Wallpapers Updates, and you can subscribe to this RSS feed: 50,000 Free Wallpapers Updates - powered by FeedBurner. As I am not happy with Blogger's service, I am also running the site updates blog from my space on my ISP's server. Again, no PHP or SQL was a problem, but I found a great little free program for Linux called Chronicle : The Blog Compiler. This awesome piece of software lets me create each blog entry as an individual text file, and when I run the compiler, it produces the blog, including an RSS feed, which I then just upload to my blog's directory on my ftp server. Very, very easy, and it means that editing old entries will be a breeze too.

Anyway, enough of my rambling - I think you will find my new free wallpapers site very much worth visiting. Just click on the link or banner below:

50,000 FREE WALLPAPERS

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I overclocked my printer and now it only prints every second word. That's ok, though, I just type every word twice.

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