By Kevin Healy
What I'm about to say is going to stun you: there are some people — dangerous, fanatical Communist hard-left people within the governing party, both members of parliament and subversive trade union leaders — who are threatening to split from the party over a matter of great principle.
These people claim — and this is the shocking bit — that this government, or, to put it more succinctly, our federal and state governments, are right wing. They even claim these governments have sold out their traditional working-class base.
These subversive elements claim the governments have failed in industry policy, in eradicating so-called draconian anti-union laws (how else do you keep the greedy unions under control), in uranium policy, on the environment generally, in redistributing income, in concentrating on making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
Shrewdly, after a bit of an oppositional wheeze in the general direction of those policies, the parliamentary left and these trade union renegades overwhelmingly endorsed the policies. You see, they know that if they are there to fight on against sell-outs, the left will be far better off.
But they are threatening to split over the most principled question of all: who gets to keep their well-paid parliamentary bums on the well-paid parliamentary seats.
Which is no easy question, seeing that the governing party knows that after the next election it's going to be struggling to have enough seats to even form an opposition. At least everyone left — by that, I mean remaining — in parliament will be a shadow minister, several times over, I suspect.
They are threatening to split unless certain people stay on the soft seats, so that when they get there they can argue that they can't do anything because if they did they'd lose their seats and wouldn't be able to not do what they're now not doing.
Meanwhile, the government brought down an industry statement which provides trillions so industry can become meaner and leaner and shed lots of jobs. "We must have less people doing the same amount of work or more, or we can't compete", our great and beloved Prime Minister Nuclear Hawke explained. "We must have a leaner, meaner economy, allied to our great compassion for the unemployed. That compassion is exemplified by the fact that our policies are creating more and more of them, necessitating a departmental clampdown on the worthless, useless bludgers."
Nuke also devised a grand plan to save the environment. "We have to woo the mining and forestry industries by giving them open slather, and we have to woo the green vote, I mean the green preferences, by making them think we're not giving them open slather. So that's our policy", he told an enthusiastic cabinet.
Conservation spokesperson Philip Tame was not fooled by the prime ministerial doublespeak. "We are very angry and won't buy that", he up and we won't promise to give you our preferences until a whole week before the next election", he threatened, the threat almost drowned out by the cacophony of drills and chainsaws.
The Birmingham Six were released after a mere 16 years for something they didn't do, and in my opinion should have been turned around and placed straight back in their cells. Did they show the slightest gratitude to the fine British justice system which released them? No sir, no madam, depending on which sex our listener is. No, they expressed bitterness and resentment. Real criminal types, obviously: no respect for the law! Or, as one British policeperson stated when it was put to him that police procedures were a bit awry, "They are free because of good detective police work".
Finally, Georgie Bashed warned Thatdam Insane not to use helicopters to slaughter innocent people. "I can advise him that it's much better to use Tomahawks and smart bombs and all those fabulous toys we used to slaughter hundreds of thousands of fleeing defeated young Insane-is-Hitler-raq boys", Georgie advised.