buggery.org

but conjunction 1 used to introduce a phrase or clause contrasting with what has already been mentioned.

It’s just one tiny little word; three innocuous-looking letters. But what power rests in that word.

Gay couples will be given the right to nominate their partners as beneficiaries for superannuation, the federal government has declared. This is the same federal government that has already voted down countless bills designed to enable people in same-sex relationships to access their partner’s retirement savings in the event of death. So why the change of heart?

It’s all in the magic word: but.

Gay couples will get superannuation rights, but the same bill will change the Marriage Act to define marriage as ‘one man, one woman, and no poofters’. Gay couples will get superannuation rights, but the same bill will contain provisions to outlaw overseas adoptions by same-sex couples. “Here’s your money, you pervert, now hands off the kids.”

By my reckoning that’s one tiny step forward and two almighty steps back. You can have your dead boyfriend’s hard-earned money, but you can’t have legal recognition of your relationships, and you can’t have kids.

Are we supposed to be dancing in the streets? Exactly how freakin’ dumb do they think we are?

One government source said last night that critics would find it harder to attack the changes as homophobic because the bans on adoption and marriage were counter-balanced by the superannuation reforms.

“It’s not a gay-bashing exercise,” the source said.

Hello? The bans are “counter-balanced” by the super reforms?

This is one “critic” who won’t find it at all difficult to attack these changes. They are mean-spirited, cynical, insipid, hateful and homo-fucking-phobic as all get out. It’s a gay-bashing exercise of the worst and most cynical kind.

What we’re witnessing here is a government staring down the barrel of defeat and prepared to do anything to avoid it. What crikey.com.au yesterday called “the Howard government death rattle”.

The government stinks. We know it, they know it, and they know we know it. Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Medicare, university funding, refugees, political rorts, Kyoto — they’re covered in excrement and they stink.

John Howard is hurtling towards political oblivion, and when the chips are down, Howard reaches for the wedge. He’s got plenty of form on that and no-one plays the wedge like the short man. Three years ago, the Tampa sailed onto our horizon. Howard turned the misery of the 400-odd miserable wretches the Tampa plucked from the sea into a political shell game for his own benefit. This year, he’s unlikely to be so lucky, so he has to find someone to bash at home.

Face it, kids: we are this year’s Tampa.

Thirty years ago today, a short, awkward, deaf, monarchist, 34-year-old [cricket] tragic mummy’s boy became Federal Member for Bennelong. By all accounts it was the most exciting thing that John Winston Howard had done since moving out of his mother’s house. Two years earlier.

Today, that same short, awkward, deaf, monarchist, 64-year-old [just plain] tragic warmonger, our own Dear Leader, celebrates thirty dirty years of pubic lice public life.

In recognition of this momentous occasion, and in the hope that the 31st anniversary will never happen, buggery.org is pleased to reprint the seminal front cover of the [now defunct] Nation Review for 28 April 1977. The short man had only been an MP for three years at the time, but clearly he was already making an impression.

Prime Minister, on this special day, let me be the one to give voice, if I may be so bold, to the special wishes of an entire nation. As you move forward to ignominious defeat, irrelevant dotage, and the harsh judgment of history, please accept this simple expression of our esteem. It’s just one word, but we hope you’ll take it on board, and hold it close, always. Continue reading →

“This is the budget that brings home the bacon.” That’s not Peter Costello last night, that’s Paul Keating in 1988, in another memorable pre-election federal budget.

This year’s budget isn’t so much bringing home the bacon as handing out the Pork. A bazillion dollars worth of tax cuts (but only if you’re earning more than a grand a week) and another bazillion dollars worth of “family packages” (but only if you belong to an officially sanctioned, government-approved, heterosexual, two-parent, 1950s-era ‘family’).

And for the rest of us? Well, the headline on Christine Jackman’s column in today’s Australian says it all: Single and childless? You’re screwed.
Continue reading →

Mark Latham’s plans to put the republic back on the agenda are encouraging, sensible and logical:

• If Latham becomes PM later this year, in 2005 we will have a plebiscite on the question “Do you want an Australian Republic?”
  • If that passes (and it certainly will), in 2006 we will have a plebiscite on the proposed model(s) for a Republic;
    • Then in 2007 a final constitutional referendum to adopt or reject the preferred model.

The plan is simple, leaves the voters in charge of the process, has -plenty of time for informed debate and discussion, and proceeds logically from each stage to the one following.
Continue reading →

Next: Republican Party campaign ads from the Madison Avenue offices of Pavlov & Pavlov:

Instead of asking the subject — a Democratic voter — what he thought of the use of Sept. 11 images in the first Bush campaign commercial this year, the researchers noted which parts of his brain were active as he watched — and that they were different from the parts that had lit up in earlier tests with Republican voters.

The researchers don’t claim to have figured out either party’s brain quite yet, since they haven’t finished this pioneering experiment.

But they have already noticed intriguing patterns in the way that Democrats and Republicans look at candidates.

Researchers zeroed in on 9/11 images and their particular effect among Democrats on the amygdala, the part of the brain that responds to threats and danger…

“The first interpretation that occurred to me,” one scientist conducting the test tells the NYT, “is that the Democrats see the 9/11 issue as a good way for Bush to get re-elected, and they experience that as a threat.”

(Drudge)

“In the past four years, America’s national debt has reached an all-time high,” the ad’s narrator said. “And who’s responsible? You are. You’re sitting there eating a big bowl of Fritos, watching TV, and getting fatter as the country goes to hell. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

(New Negative Campaign Ads Blast Voters Directly, The Onion 2004-04-14)

Just in case you thought he might have changed his mind, John Howard has “reaffirmed” his opposition to gay marriage.

It’s not about intolerance, Howard told ABC Radio in Adelaide, apropos of absolutely nothing except the opinion polls and the forthcoming federal election, it’s about “stand[ing] up for certain benchmark institutions”.

So, just to reiterate, here is the news from the Federal Government of Australia:

• Abortion is bad. Teenage promiscuity is bad. (Abbott, yesterday)
• Thousands of Muslim terrorists are amassing off our northern coast. Terrorists are bad. Muslim terrorists are especially bad. (Downer, yesterday)
• Gay marriage is bad. Children should have two parents, of different sexes, and they should be married. Gay adoption is bad. (Howard, today and last week)

Caddie, pass me that wedge!

Mark Latham, meanwhile, is bushwalking in the Styx Valley with Bob Brown, hundreds of miles from the nearest radio or TV set. Lucky bastard.