I’VE seen politicians cut from every cloth of incompetence do their best to stuff things up for the farmer.
And by and large they are pretty damned good at it.
From the end of the super bounty to our current malaise with woke wankers on both sides of every Parliament, beholden to Greens who wouldn’t know a farm if it jumped up and bit ’em on the backside.
Now my own state – better known as the state of chaos – is being taken to a new level by a Premier who can’t even make it safely down two steps.
Take a look around our part of the world.
Such as the wine industry and what’s happening there after China smacked our world-class growers out of the ballpark.
Barley trying to reach China’s one billion-plus citizens has to cop an 80 per cent tariff.
And a swag of meatworks are still frozen out of the lucrative trade with the Asian heavyweight.
Timber also got the chop, and even the high-end lobster lurk was given the boot.
Again, agriculture pays the biggest price for our hard-to-follow foreign policy and posturing.
Then, on one of those rare nights when I had actually knocked off early enough to catch the news on the telly, what do I see?
Yep, our little Chairman Dan, head down, scurrying through the airport for a trip to Beijing and beyond.
So what do you reckon the little bugger was up to? Because he didn’t tell anyone not speaking Mandarin.
Well, the old Whacker has been having a think about that, and for those of you around my age, it had the whiff of Khemlani. I’m sure you younger readers can learn a bit of your own history on your tap, tap, tappers but in a nutshell it was a nutty plan by some Canberra tools to secretly borrow $4 billion (and this was 1974) to prop up the federal finances.
You can see where I’m going here, can’t you?
But I’m not the one who has gone there, Dan did. And, in typical Dan style, no one seemed to know what he was really up to.
As best I recall, the man doing his best to drive Victoria into bankruptcy cannot legally borrow money. So we’ll assume that’s not the reason he was there.
However, I would need advice from some senior silks on whether he can let some foreign investor, such as his good friends in China, take on more of the massive debt racked up on Dan’s Big Build, and remove a significant interest hit on the state’s balance sheet.
Kind of a Clayton’s loan.
Pure speculation on the Whacker’s part, but when I started screaming about dodgy financial doings back in the 1970s no one would initially believe any Australian politician would try that hard to deceive the voters of Australia.
But Dan’s enthusiasm for political innovation has known no bounds, and while the bumbling clowns of the Coalition keep bouncing off their party room walls – and each other’s egos – he pretty much has free rein.
He was probably on his little iPad as he winged north, still chuckling over the latest shambles imploded by the lacklustre Liberals, whose faceless ranks seem more determined to win the factional fights than any election any time soon.
It’s got so bad even yours truly is thinking he might have to put his hand up to try and sort them out. But if you start mixing with them, and their even more useless public service, it makes them think they are almost as important as they think they are.
But if recent weeks have shown us anything, it’s that thinking is still not a prerequisite for Parliament.
