crankyqueenslander.com

Yes folks, I got a speeding ticket. On Christmas Day. This event proved to me without a shadow of a doubt that our masters, who we keep voting in, do not have our wellbeing at heart.

If the government wanted to improve our lives, it would instruct police on days like Christmas Day to pull over motorists and caution them, only booking the ones driving like madmen, which I saw plenty of on the way home.

If the government was serious about road safety, it would fix the roads. Instead, it places a single 80klm sign on a lonely stretch of 100klm highway, changing back to 100klms barely a kilometre further down the road, and simply waits until a schmuck like me misses the sign, and gets nailed.

Never mind that I spent the entire holiday break searching for speed limit signs and setting the cruise control. Never mind that I was passed countless times by actual SPEEDING motorists. Never mind that I was almost killed when a bus driver decided to change lanes over the top of a car I was following (thankfully, I leave a safe gap, and had enough time to slow down).

Oh, and never mind the fact that I was pulled over in a clearly signed 100klm zone, and told I was speeding. If you are going to pull these sneaky tactics, at least have me booked in the 80 zone you claim I was speeding through!

So I hope our government overlords had a festive Christmas, with their chauffer driven cars and tax payer funded champagne breakfasts. The rest of us continue to do it tough.

Merry Christmas to all my readers, all 2 of you! I promise to make more of an effort in 2009 to bring you quality rants. In the mean time, don’t imbibe too heavily, and see you all safe and sound in 2009!

Check out Joe Ludwig’s media statement regarding the alleged stellar effort of the Child Support Agency in making parents cough up for the welfare of their children.

Joe, you are so far out of touch with reality it’s a joke! Sure, a large number of parents have been robbed blind by the CSA, and that’s nothing to be happy about, but you also forget about all the parents who dodge their responsibilities all together by hiding their income!

This is one of the few issues I believe would benefit from a proper, in depth inquiry, as a better system must be found to address these two key problems in the current system;

Firstly, the amount of child support payable should NOT be adjusted based on the parents income. A child of a worker at Big W does not deserve to be treated as less valuable than that of a rich executive. It’s time to set a standard for the minimum level of acceptable care, value that, and make the parents pay that amount.

We also need to solve the problem of parents dodging their responsibilities; Once we have a fixed amount of support calculated, we demand that all parents pay it, regardless of their income. If they want to play hide and seek with their income, force them to do it for the rest of their lives by keeping track of the debt, indexing it for inflation and adding interest to it. Instead of waiting until their kids are 18 and then living the good life, these people will be forced to pay.

I’d go one step further too; Forth those parents who apparently cannot be bothered to generate the income required, the CSA should pay the custodial parent the money, which might motivate it’s staff to more properly investigate how it is that the non custodial parent has plasma TV’s, Playstations 3’s and other luxuries, but no income to pay child support!

Seems our esteemed leader Mr Rudd is searching far and wide for ways to make our lives just that little bit more miserable, and right before Christmas, has found a great one.

Plans are afoot, as noted in the Courier Mail, to force landlords to retain tenants against their will. Basically, once you rent a house to someone, you’ll be stuck with them.

Currently, landlords are generally entitled to give notice to their tenant to vacate the premises, but Mr Rudd believes this is causing homelessness. Apparently, if you evict someone from your home, they can’t find another one.

It’s about time the Labor party stopped meddling in Australians every day affairs. If a citizen owns a house, they should be free to rent it, or not to rent it, as they see fit. It is, after all, their house!

I often find interesting reads over at Violent Acres, and this recent post is no exception. If you can get past the profanity thrown in here and there, it makes a great point. I’ve always liked the writing style over there, pulling no punches and telling it how it is. Let me know what you think.

Brisbane Airport Corporation is a very greedy company. You only have to look at the millions of dollars profit it is raking in from every direction, watch it sell off airport land to the highest bidder, and go there to pickup a loved one to feel the sting of the BAC profit machine.

While I have no problem paying to park in the car park when I am taking people to the airport, I have a problem paying to pick them up.

When they are flying out, I like to go into the airport and see them off at the gate; I like to enjoy an overpriced coffee and slice of cake with them while we wait for the boarding call. I don’t mind helping the BAC make money while this happens.

But when I am there to pickup someone who is flying in, I just want them to phone me when they have their bags, and drive round to the pickup point, have them jump in, and we go.

I don’t think I’m alone in this feeling, but the BAC wants to sting us all for some parking dollars.

They could do something to meet us halfway though. How about creating a small area, about the size of the Kingsford Smith Memorial site. Setup two or three rows of angled car spaces, such that a car can pull in from one side and pull straight out the other; Set this up for people like me who want to sit in our cars for 10 minutes until our passengers are ready.

Now, why not charge $1 for the privilege?  Have a cash only machine on the boomgate that lifts it to let you in for a buck. I’d be happy with that.

This just in via the Australian; Bureaucrats still don’t know how to teach kids to read and write. While they continue to flap about wondering what to do next, we continue to pump a generation of kids through our school system that can barely read and write.

The solution is simple, and should be implemented immediately;

Step 1; Define minimum learning outcomes for all school grades. Ensure teachers are fully aware of what they are being paid to teach the kids (and that might require the watching of less movies at school), and test the kids to ensure the teachers are doing the job.

Step 2; Identify the kids that are, for whatever reason, struggling with the basics, and setup after school tutoring classes with specialist teachers who can help.

Step 3; If kids really struggle, hold them back a year. There is no point sending them on to more complex studies when they don’t understand the stuff that came before.

Step 4; Pay teachers what they are worth; If one teacher can teach even the slower students to the minimum standard or better, then they should be paid more than a teacher who cannot.

There are probably a hundred other good ideas that will never happen in our socialist society, such as requiring parents to attend parent teacher interviews regularly. When I visit my son’s teacher at this time, she is usually just sitting there twiddling her thumbs, because many parents don’t even book an appointment, and of those that do, many don’t show up.

Perhaps that could be a good place to start; Holding parents accountable for their children’s education as much as the teachers?

I can’t help but think that drawing attention to the pre election talk of Kevin Rudd’s communist leanings and love for communist China would make me seem like a bit of a sensationalist, but I can’t help myself.

Word through this past week that Kevin and his crack team of legislators are going to force all Australian ISP’s to censor the internet, blocking permanently web sites that they deem inappropriate.

They are using the word “illegal” to determine what sites will not be visible to Australian eye’s, but that is just a nice way to make most people feel like this is not a problem.

Take a look at China. They use the same rhetoric about their censorship efforts. They block stuff that they say is illegal, but we all know their definition leaves a great deal to be desired, at least by freedom loving western standards.

The fact is that Australia is supposedly a free country, and we should not be subjected to mandatory censorship. We all have it within our power to perform our own censorship on our own internet connections, decided what is best for ourselves.

It’s time to get in touch with Minister Conroy and voice your disapproval now!

Suggested Reading;

Ars Technica | Crikey

I read recently about the alleged extreme fire risk with the building that houses the Kindercraft centre at City Hall in Brisbane.

What wasn’t explained was what this fire danger was. Are they allowing the kids to experiment with matches? Do the staff enjoy a cigarette inside the building? Are they using flammable liquids as play toys? Why is it that this building is a terrible fire risk, and any other building isn’t?

Every childcare centre I have ever been in is full of things that burn, why aren’t they all fire traps?

And lastly, if it is such a terrible danger, why is it only a danger because there is a childcare facility there? The tenor of the article seems to imply if we filled it with adults they would be just fine.

There are probably very good answers to these questions, it’s just a pity the courier mail couldn’t devote a column centimetre or two to explaining them.

While we all hope that Channel 10 has finally realised that serving up tripe like Big Brother serves no purpose other than to relegate the station into insignificance, we also hope the courier mail can choose its words more carefully;

Also discerning for Ten was how it started this week.

Perhaps an english scholar can correct me, but ‘discerning’ doesn’t seem quite right in the context; I would have thought ‘disturbing’ would have made more sense.