Cranky Queenslander

Everyone by now has read about the terrible treatment dealt out to a 14 year old girl on public radio by her mother and radio host Kyle Sandilands. I don’t need to repeat the details here, but I wanted to briefly register my continued disgust with this grub, and suggest we as a community should not tolerate this garbage.

I think this piece at the Herald Sun sums it up for me, and I cannot believe there are enough Victorians that are prepared to listen to the tripe that Sandilands is serving up as entertainment to keep him employed.

Come on Victoria, Stand up for whats right and stop listening!

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 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.

Now I’m reading that the wicked camper folks (who most people would know send out dilapidated looking graffiti emblazoned combi vans into the world) are in trouble with Premier Bligh; Apparently one of their campers has "Save a whale, harpoon a jap" on it.

Big deal. Its a joke. It’s mildly amusing, and generally meaningless, until a bunch of politicians with nothing better to do weigh in and make a fuss, then its front page news.

If Anna is so worried about this comment, she better get down the nearest intersection and start flagging down cars with bumper stickers, because I can assure Anna if she lived in the real world she’d see a hell of a lot more offensive stuff on cars than this wicked camper.

Come on, get a life and get on with important things!

Seriously. Yellow Cabs has had to sack some Muslim cab drivers because they refused to allow passengers with Guide Dogs into their cabs. The good news is that they have been sacked, and nobody is complaining about their rights.

A small win for Australians there, hopefully this is the start of some common sense prevailing. Yeah, I doubt it too.

The Northern Territory’s Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Tony Fitzgerald says the Federal intervention into remote Aboriginal communities should be abandoned and the legislation underpinning it should be repealed. [ABC Story]

Seriously. Tony needs to get out more. Tony needs to realise how nuts things are in many indigenous communities, and realise that if the rest of us are going to consider ourselves moral human beings, we have to try and do something to fix it.

Sure, the intervention hasn’t worked miracles. I doubt anything we try ever will. But there are two types of people in this world. Those who try, and those who do nothing.

I can tell you I’d rather be on the side of the tried and failed than the did nothing and whined about it brigade.

Tony clearly just feels miffed that the fed’s cut out some of his powers, and would prefer that more children were raped and conditions stayed terrible if it means he can have his powers back. Sheesh.

We need to continue to improve on the start that was the Howard Governments Intervention, and perhaps over the next 10-30 years, with constant review and improvement, we can make a difference in the lives of these people.

Or we can do nothing.

Now here is the years best example of Kevin Rudd’s "say one thing, do another" approach to leadership. After months of his party’s constant complaints that "Work Choices" might lead the odd worker to be a bit worse off than they were previously, Kevin comes out and tells us that under his new and improved industrial relations package, workers will be worse off.

Okay, so he said he refused to guarantee they wouldn’t be. By his own standards, that’s the same thing. Why do you think he refused? Because he knows full well that many workers will be worse off. We currently live in basically full employment. Anyone who wants a job can get one, and anyone worth anything can get a better one. So how is it that employers are perceived to have so much power? One reason: Because Kevin said so.

The truth is that Work Choices let employee’s negotiate time off to spend with their family, a higher rate of pay for better quality work, or any other benefit they thought would make their lives easier. But now, we are back to the old style, take what the government says I should give you. Guess what? That’s all you are going to get.

Why is it, for example, that childcare centres, who simply cannot get enough staff (ring one and ask, I guarantee they are looking for staff), refuse to pay any more than the award? It’s because they are not allowed to negotiate conditions with their staff, so they are forced to dole out the same deal to all the staff, some of whom deserve a lot more money, and some, believe me, deserve a lot less.

We’ll just add this to the list of broken or forgotten election promises we’re keeping here at Cranky Queenslander. Rest assured by the time the next election rolls around, it will be a long list!

I am a big fan of Violent Acres. She does have a habit of dropping the F-Word a lot, and while I try to curb my own cursing, I manage to get past it because her irreverent insights into American culture are so spot on.

A recent article about gift giving really made he shout "hell yeah!", so I thought I’d link to it here so anyone reading my rubbish could find something a little more interesting 🙂