Neither big nor clever!

4 Responses to Neither big nor clever!

1. Miss P says:

   November 25, 2010 at 11:11 pm

   I can only dream of this occurring in this country. We seem to be so laid back that the pollies can screw us side-ways and we won’t move an inch.
2. @ndy says:

   November 26, 2010 at 12:02 am

   Yeah… I mean, I dunno. Who knows what the future may bring? I don’t. I mean, apart from death.

   Anyway.

   It used to be — or legend has it — that workers elsewhere looked with envy at Australia. There was even a rational basis for it: for a brief while, I think in the immediate post-WWII era, various official indices revealed that levels of economic inequality in Australia — the gap between rich and poor — were lowest in the Western world. So, y’know, the richest only had an income maybe 10 or 100 times more than the poorest. Or something. Now it’s quite silly how much CEOs are paid. And that’s disregarding the fact that income =/= wealth, that wealth is not distributed only or mainly among individuals but rather institutions, that much private wealth (capital) has foreign ownership, or there exists a transnational ruling class or blah blah blah. Otherwise, yeah, leaving aside a small matter of (attempted) genocide, on many other scales, and going back a little further, late nineteenth and early twentieth Australia was relatively progressive, various governments introducing laws and establishing institutions of the sort that have ensured both a relative degree of equality but also (and moreover) a degree of social peace that’s being placed under increasing pressure as the miracle of neoliberalism comes unstuck. Given (White) Australia’s history, much of this rising discontent can still be directed at greedy, grasping foreigners/eternally ungrateful blacks, but for how long racism and xenophobia can act as a brake on more direct and rational responses to economic ‘crisis’ remains to be seen… Also leaving aside, of course, a growing ecological crisis which seem to be generating an even moar hysterical response on the part of elites and the chattering classes (radio shock jocks, tabloid hacks and other wealthy mouthpieces).

   In which case…

   One day The Kids are gonna stop wrapping Aussie flags round their heads and start using them to think instead.
3. Piltdown says:

   November 27, 2010 at 1:09 am

   The boy in the photo may be neither big nor clever but I bet he got layed that night.
4. @ndy says:

   December 9, 2010 at 7:41 pm

   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/8190379/National-Union-of-Students-secretly-urged-Government-to-make-deep-cuts-in-student-grants.html

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