TRUE OPINION: After a few weeks away travelling the regions on his whimsical tricycle, satirist and musician Kieran Butler is back to admit he was wrong: Australia isn’t f*cked. It’s even more f*cked up, in way more ways, than even he thought.
Reg Mombassa sang a nifty little tune with Mental As Anything called ‘Troop movements in the Ukraine’ two and two score years ago. It’s a half-arsed anti-war song, but the core message is informed by a well-worn Australian perspective regarding geo-political instability. That sentiment would be best summed up as: “The f*ck this is gonna affect my life while I’m all the way down here”.
Mombassa sang, “I’ll worry about motor car accidents, cancer and the politics of rootin”. He went on to make millions of dollars with his artwork for Mambo, most of which celebrated suburban Australia, and what Mombassa called “The Aristocracy of the Normal”.
It seems like six years ago that Scott Morrison was whipping up lies, fear and hatred of the Chinese by yelling in Parliament about Manchurian candidates. Now, he’s a proper war cunt and all that. He told Putin to “back off” and a whole bunch of other stuff about Australian values. Putin must have been dead set shitting himself.
It seems like only five minutes ago that former PM, Tony Abbott, was telling us he would shirtfront Putin. Like a proper loud mouth Aussie bloke, he sent a woman to do that in the end. That woman was Julie Bishop.
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Putin mocked her about the shirtfront comment. Bishop recalled that “a KGB agent had no right to be so charming and respectful”. Really Julie? You know that the KGB is the Russian MI6, right? James Bond is MI6. You know that, right? Methinks Julie was Jonesing for some bare-chested, horse ridin’, Putin-esque, Daniel Craig, Bond-style action.
For the rest of the world, Australia is the joke they are all heartily sick and tired of. They know we are in a holding pattern until China takes over – and finally makes a decent of job of everything Australia consistently fucks up.
We’re slow. We’re stupid. We burn fossil fuels like Grace Tame punching cones a decade ago. Then we lie about how we cut our emissions to an empty room at climate change conferences. We’re now constantly on fire or under ten feet of water. We are incapable of mitigation against climate change because we vote for lying, corrupt, rapey turds that promise to abolish taxes on carbon.
Australia is the only country in the history of the world to vote for a change of government who promised to repeal a carbon tax. As soon as a house burns down in a bushfire zone, or ends up under water in a flood plain, we stubbornly rebuild it exactly where it was because of Aussie resilience and the ANZAC spirit. Nobody seems to remember that the ANZACs got slaughtered in a turkey shoot – or whatever people in Turkey call a lay down misère.
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I heard a woman on TV say that her flooded town was like a “literal warzone” at the exact same time Putin turned Kyiv into an actual war zone. That sort of parochialism is what defines Australia in the eyes of the rest of the world. Reg Mombassa found it endearing. It isn’t.
I was in the UK in the 2000’s. I watched comedy audiences piss themselves at jokes about how Australia hid around the corner during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. We’ve been a laughing stock for years. Our racism is legendary. We’re renowned for our off shore concentration camps, penchant for refugee torture, dabbling in genocide and pretending we count for shit.
Australia is irrelevant. But it has been strangely influential for all the wrong reasons. For instance, Tony Abbott was a dry run for Murdoch to work out how to elect Trump. Trump paved the way for Putin. We can always take credit for that. Morrison is second rate Trump. Yet, he is still approved of by 42% of the Australian population. Let that sink in.
As one natural disaster or belated state of emergency rolls into the next, Australians appear to think we’re due some sympathy for suffering at the sharp end of the climate apocalypse. Bible-bashers like Morrison and his Hillsong cult love that line “you reap what you sow”.
Ironically, in Australia, you can’t. It’s all under water.
I keep hearing there is an election due in a month or so. I doubt it. The polls are supposedly quite devastating for the incumbent LNP government who are simply not good at anything but lies, rape and corruption. It’s one fuck up after another. They are simply useless. Yet, 45% of Australians would still vote them. They seem to tolerate this level of uselessness. It must remind them of themselves.
The Australian media class lends credibility to this rag tag bunch of garden-variety retards and psychopaths, by pretending this human centipede of intellectual degeneration that masquerades as a functioning government, is normal
I watched #spinsiders the other week in order to get angry enough to write this. I wasn’t disappointed. Peter Van Onselen seemed to have finally realised #australiaisfucked and looked sad. Katharine Murphy was still hoping Morrison would become the PM she first dreamed he could be. Raf Epstein was quoting Vladimir Lenin: “There are weeks when decades happen”.
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For a split second it seemed as though they might have hit on some truth: That the tectonic plates of geo-political power are shifting and that in recent human history, this usually means a world war. That the world faces an existential crisis… It was not to be.
All of sudden we were watching David Speers fellate that Goebbels-faced fuck, Peter Dutton, who lurched from trying to be a bigger war c*nt than Morrison – Dutton knows the leadership is not entirely out of his reach, but my tip is still Josh Frydenberg – to saying he is scared of a nuclear war.
Dutton said: That we were living the 1930s, that funding lethal weapons are a productive activity, that he aims to defeat Russia, that he wants peace, but that China have nuclear weapons so be very afraid, that he really loves Chinese Australians, that space is a new frontier and that there were nuclear subs he was gonna start building soon.
These are the ramblings of halfwit who makes Putin look intelligent. However, David Speers just stood there and listened like this wasn’t fucked up. He then rejoined the panel. They did the same. Nobody said: “That cunt is completely insane”.
They all are. Morrison pontificates about the outcome of the war in the Ukraine like it’s a pre-selection take down in the NSW Liberal party. He expects to be taken seriously saying Australia stands up to bullies and fights for democracy. He fear mongers about an “arc of autocracy” and “a transactional world, devoid of principle, accountability and transparency.” Sounds like the Australia Morrison and his government have been creating for nine years doesn’t it?
It should be extraordinary that the Mayor of a flooded out town needs to hit up the Governor General, David Hurley, to complain that Morrison is using disaster payments to sandbag and pork barrel in the run up to the election. It isn’t. It is par for the course.
Another of Hurley’s contemporaries in the Army, Lieutenant General David Morrison, was famous for saying “the standard you walk past is the standard you accept”. When Hurley walks past this particular standard and does sweet fuck all to mitigate against what is the worst federal government in Australian history, he will become a true Australian hypocrite.
Morrison and his government should not even be a half chance to re-elected. However, cynics like me will not be surprised if Australia re-elects them later in the year. Besides, even if the ALP somehow fluke a win, they can’t fix Australia. It’s f*cked. You’ll have to wait for the Chinese to sort it all out.
This is the best missive Mr Butler has done yet!