Sunday, May 09, 2010

Piers Akerman, fake plates, suffering miners, the perfidious Swiss, Colonel Gadhafi, and sandgropers rallying to the Eureka flag ...


I woke up today, and then was shattered, with the news to hand suggesting that the world had tilted on its axis.

The very idea that MasterChef would allow the presentation of camera friendly plates, as if the show was on television, is the kind of stomach churning revelation that threatens the shatter forever the surface of glib fake sordid reality.

This is the kind of scoop that keeps the Murdoch press at the heart of breaking news. When they do a splash, hey it's a big splash. With video! Is there no end to the deep content now available online?

Naturally Akker Dakker aka Piers Akerman aka our very own Billy Bunter, fat owl of the remove, can also spot a fake from a great distance and then in an interminable discourse, denounce the fake.

He's at it again in Rudd raiding our super to pay bills and as usual it's another splenetic liverish dose of two legged Rudd baaad, wonderful top notch four legged WA miners gooood.

But I am grateful to Akker Dakker for this special historical insight:

The Eureka flag, which elements of the Left (and extreme Right) have co-opted over the years, actually flew over the miners’ camp at Ballarat in 1854, not the government barracks. It was raised in protest at petty government fees, not in support of the colonial bureaucracy.

Actually the miners also wanted the right to vote for men (no blacks or women), and the abolition of property qualifications for members of parliament, and payment of members of parliament, and voting by secret ballot, and short term parliaments, and equal electoral districts, as well as the abolition of diggers' and storekeepers' licences, reform in administration of the gold fields, and revisions of laws relating to Crown land and its purchase. (here).

While Akker Dakker might just think of it as a self-interested tea party, the actual diggers had other ideas. But then accuracy has never been of undue concern to Akker Dakker, not when it might take up valuable space best devoted to rhetorical abuse.

Even then, I'm not quite sure what the Eureka reference means. Is Akker Dakker suggesting that the hard pressed corporate giant miners of WA must now rally to the Eureka flag and stage a revolution against petty government fees and taxes?

No, no, he's suggesting the ballot box, rather than bullets, but it seems he's a great believer in regional paranoia:

Western Australians have a deep suspicion of Canberra: indeed, of all that comes from what they call the Eastern States.

What? Including Akker Dakker and his inane rhetoric? Oh say it ain't so, Western Australians, say you love Akker Dakker, and have no deep suspicion of him. He stands tall under the coolibah tree, a Eureka flag in one hand, and a Swan Lager - when it's not an Emu bitter - in the other.

Rally against the apparatchiks and the attack dogs. Time to buy that giant chainsaw and sever the the state along the dotted line, so that it might drift free and float towards Africa?

Sadly, Akker Dakker is just a tin plated colonial, an antipodean clown who can't cut the mustard up against a decent international loon. Thanks the vigilant lads at Crikey, I was directed to Der Spiegel's interview with Mammar Gadhafi, which amazingly enough is headed Spiegel Interview with Libyan Leader Moammar Gadhafi.

Gadhafi's war with Switzerland remains an enduring repository of comedy gold, way more than the devious ways of MasterChef or Akker Dakker railing against Chairman Rudd. It seems the Swiss are the Mafia, and there are dangers in hold a Swiss bank account:

Money is laundered on a grand scale in Switzerland. Anyone who robs a bank later invests the money in Switzerland. Anyone who evades taxes goes to Switzerland. Anyone who wants to deposit money in secret accounts goes to Switzerland. And a large number of owners of such secret accounts have died under mysterious circumstances.

Golly, remind me to steer clear of Swiss chocolate and watches. Who knows, they might contain a dab of curare. But it gets worse, as Libyans and others with secret Swiss bank accounts drop like flies:

Spiegel: ... you are seriously maintaining that Switzerland as a state ordered the killing of these people?

Gadhafi: The investigations will show this. And this brings me back once again to the phenomenon of assisted suicide. A large number of people have been deliberately eliminated under this pretext. Switzerland maintains that these individuals expressed the desire to take their lives. But in reality it was done to get at their money. More than 7,000 people have died like this. I am thus calling for Switzerland to be dissolved as a state. The French part should go to France, the Italian part to Italy and the German part to Germany. Even Ayman al-Zawahiri …

Spiegel: … Osama bin Laden's deputy …

Gadhafi: … took al-Qaida's money to Switzerland, where it is still located. Switzerland finances terrorism.

Golly, you'd better scrub the place off as a location for assisted suicides too. Did Orson Welles get it wrong in The Third Man or what?

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Peace. The cuckoo clock? Think gangsters and terrorists and a Swiss mafia.

Der Spiegel outrageously suggests that Gadhafi's views have been formed, or distorted, by the way his son was arrested by Geneva police in July 2008 for allegedly beating up two people in his employ, but Gadhafi correctly explains that the Swiss police acted like gangsters performing an act of terrorism on a totally innocent lad.

And Silvio Berlusconi must be pleased that Gadhafi considers him his closest friend in Europe.

There's plenty more to entertain in the interview, but I think Gadhafi has hit on an important point. Gangsters and terrorists use Swiss bank accounts, and so do Western Australian magnates. Remember poor old Alan Bond?

Fourteen years ago, Alan Bond was brain damaged and a broken man. The poor guy could barely remember his name, let alone whether he had $50 million in bank accounts in Switzerland.

I remember him sitting in the Federal Court in Sydney, staring into space for minutes on end, then turning to his interrogator to claim he had forgotten the question. And now he's on his way to another billion dollars.

During the week, Bond made the 2008 BRW Rich List with a fortune of $265 million, putting him in 157th place. (Alan Bond: from jailed fraudster to millionaire).

Bondie recovered his fortune by getting involved in a diamond mine in Africa and an oil well in Madagascar.

But now the deviant Chairman Rudd is ruining the game for honest squillionaires, and if you look carefully in the reporting, you will see Suisse names popping up here and there:

Credit Suisse analysts said that the proposals could force the country's two largest miners, BHP Billiton Ltd. (BHP) and Rio Tinto PLC (RTP), back to the negotiating table on their proposed A$116 billion joint venture to combine their iron ore assets in Western Australia's Pilbara region.

"We are still committed to the joint venture. We are assessing the impact but it is a bit early to say," a BHP spokeswoman said adding there is "still a great deal that is unclear" about the detail of the tax changes....

... Mick Davis, Chief Executive of Anglo-Swiss mining giant Xstrata, said that under the plan, Australia would have the highest taxes on the minerals sector anywhere in the world.

"(It) will result in significant and disproportionate additional taxation on the industry and could well curb the large scale, long-term investments required to develop Australia's natural resources for the benefit of all Australians," Xstrata said in a statement. (both here at Nasdaq)


Ruined, just as Akker Dakker and the Eureka diggers foretold and forewarned. And somehow, the Swiss seem to be involved in the affair. Should the fourth Bourne movie get a new plot and a new title? The Coolibah Suisse Concession?

Never mind, inspired by Akker Dakker and Colonel Gadhafi, here at the pond we can now see a clear solution for beleaguered Western Australian miners, paranoids in possession of all the facts, who understand you can only trust an eastern stater as far as you can throw them. And while these eastern staters are mental midgets, they're quite hefty, living as they do off the fat of the Western Australian land. Meaning you can't throw them very far at all ...

So sandgropers*, it's time to take out a Swiss bank account, and drift off to Africa. If it was good enough for Bondie, then surely it's good enough for all of you ...

Teach those eastern staters a lesson. And remember, Akker Dakker is an eastern stater ...

*Sandgroper
noun:- a resident of Western Australia, after a sand-burrowing desert insect

(Below: a mole cricket aka sandgroper aka desert miner).

1 comment:

  1. One of the best laughs I've had in a long time, great stuff.

    ReplyDelete

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