from john passant ….

Let me apologise in advance. It was tacky, and it shouldn’t have been distributed. I said as much sotto voce at the time when I saw the disgusting references to Abbott’s big ears and his budgie smugglers.

But of course I knew it wasn’t distributed. Well, I now know it wasn’t distributed. I was there. And I wasn’t.

It was all just a joke between the owner and … the owner. So he spent this money on an expensive menu for a joke with himself. Of course: hilarious. Well, he is like that… He enjoys his own company, obviously … Yeah, I know. Why didn’t he just tell himself his joke and have a quiet chuckle to himself?

Anyway, I am sorry for what I knew when I didn’t, but I now know when to know to apologise, when to know how to apologise and when to know what to apologise about. I know now that the knowing and its timing are important, and I only wish I had followed Donald Rumsfeld’s advice and known the unknown unknowns. Or were they known unknowns? Or maybe known knows. Nah, the menu was definitely an unknown unknown that I knew about at lunchtime but not at dinner time. So there.

It’s the when of knowing that the great Buddha of menus has revealed.

So I am unambiguously and thoroughly sorry for my sorry apology.

There, was that sincere and heartfelt enough?

And there are likely to be future indiscretions. I won’t be calling Hockey a fat pig anymore because he has had his cake hole stitched up. So I am sorry for not calling him a fat pig any more. Or is it I am not sorry for calling him a fat pig? Or I am sorry I won’t be able to call him a fat pig anymore?

Welcome to what passes for politics in Australia today. This nonsense avoids the real issue – the systemic sexism of Australian society, as is now being revealed clearly in the military where as AAP reports ‘Australia’s defence boss admits there are “systemic problems with culture inside the army” as another sex scandal engulfs the military.’

Boys with guns bring in to focus all that is wrong with our society. They are the distilled essence of racism and sexism because their role is to kill women and kids in foreign lands. To make them better able to do that the enemy is reduced to something less than human. Training them to kill women and children dehumanises them and in their eyes all ‘others’, including Australian women.

Australian politicians from the two major parties are the foot soldiers of capital. They too reflect all the inconsistencies of capitalist society but given the struggles against racism and women’s oppression that have been waged over the last 3 decades, the institutionalised racism and oppression are smoothed over with words, not actions.

Of course we aren’t racists as we rejoice at the death of 60 asylum seekers. See how tough we are. Any votes for us in that eh?

Who cares about women and children from Afghanistan, or Sri Lanka, or wherever they are fleeing from? Certainly not the ‘feminists’ in this Labor government.

We are faced with a fast food political choice on 14 September – between a Maccas Labor Party and a KFC opposition. We won’t be able to survive long on either diet, and sometime soon after 14 September they’ll be force feeding us austerity. There will be no foie gras, just dead ducks all over the place.

There is an alternative to this battle of the fast food political behemoths. It is the revolutionary left, small, isolated from the class, but building gradually and gaining a toehold in the debates of society. Socialist Alternative is part of that revolutionary left.

Check us out if you want a steady and healthy political diet of debate and discussion, of ideas and action, of making sense of this slaughterhouse world.

The Liberal Labor Concensus - A Recipe For Disaster