By Kevin Healy
An extra quiet week — just a Stalinist coup in Russia, a capitalist counter-coup in Russia, a compassionate and economically responsible federal budget, great news for Johnny Pain and Jolly Robb on the Tricontinental front until they picked up the Lord Rupert of Wopping Sin and discovered it wasn't great news after all and ... and ... oh yes, just another major chemical fire over the working-class suburbs, followed by just another major chemical fire over the working-class suburbs.
How encouraging, not just for us but for the whole world, that the forces of goodness, decency, democracy, freedom and more particularly capitalism and market forces, the great qualities of our western society, scored a great comeback over the forces of evil and hatred and non-market forces. That was the federal budget.
The budget was also a victory for common sense over getting overexcited or panicking and doing something silly like trying to cater for social need, for the victims of the past several budgets and the economic disorder those budgets tried to order. Just eight years after being elected on a promise to make an attack on unemployment a priority, and with unemployment soaring at its highest for eons, they've made it an even bigger priority.
John Carin-for-them said an odd million or so Aussies would be placed on a rather leaky balsa raft — it's the best they could do in hard economic times — in the middle of Bass Strait and left to their own devices. But here's the compassionate bit: they would be charged a concession fare for the ride, and given a three-minute crash course in swimming underwater.
On that little coup over in the Soviet Union, which had the media, and particularly the ABC, having unsatisfactory little orgasms all over the place, what a choice we had. The good old Stalinists staging their last-ditch stand, or the forces of goodness backed by the world's progressive leaders, Georgie Bashed, John Minor, Hellmight Kool, and even non-world leaders like our great and beloved prime minister, Nuclear Hawke himself. It was like elections here: you knew that, whatever the result, it wasn't going to be good.
Just one week after Boris Letsin declared himself emperor, decreed he would rule by decree, he has emerged as the most democratic friend of the New York stock exchange, the very epitome of freedom itself in all of Russia — if not, dare I say it, the Soviet Disunion.
And I did prick up my ears and tune in more closely to those invaluable insights by the minister for going overseas all
the time when it's safe and being a perfectly good little prefect, Good Evans. Good Evans began making a most thoughtful, analytical and incisive speech on the matter sometime Tuesday morning, and the latest word from the Canberra press gallery is that it's pretty certain — not totally certain, because it's difficult to be absolute in these matters of state and diplomacy, but pretty certain — that Good Evans is getting very, very close to the point he wants to make.
And of course it's all very well for these silly working-class people out in Footscray to complain about all these chemical fires — and, my word, don't we all sympathise and just wish we could do something to assist them — but, realistically, in the real world, where can you put these bloody things? Certainly not in those suburbs where the owners of the chemical factories and depots live!