~ in our dry cellar

Let me apologise for harping on the federal election, but the whole thing is looming like a big black cloud over everything at present. Hanging, indeed, like the Sword of Damocles.

I know what the pollsters and the bookmakers say, but there is still a chance that the reptilian fiend will be returned to power. Or should I say the grotesque misshapen puppet who jiggles hideously with his hideous fellows to the whims of his hideous, hideous wife.

Or ought I say - with apologies to T S Eliot - the hollow man, the stuffed man, headpiece filled with straw, whose dried voice is quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass, or rats’ feet over broken glass in our dry cellar.

I hate it that this… vile, heartless, uncompassionate individual is still in a position to stress me out like this.

I hate it that in all probability, there are people out there who pay no heed to the legal travails of Mohammad Haneef. To the legal travails of Mamdouh Habib who at the hands of ‘Australian servants’ was ‘the victim of atrocities fit for a concentration camp, including being tied to the ground while a prostitute menstruated on him’.

And to the skein of cowardly lies that was the children overboard affair. To the man who today said he would allow nuclear power in Australia ‘if the economy demanded it’. The economy. The economy. Excuse me, but shouldn’t that be 'the imminent catastrophe of global warming'?

And to the architects of the GST that taxes rich and poor alike. To the architects of Work Choices. To the greedy plutocrats from the leafy suburbs who revile the union leaders whose calling is to speak for those who only have a voice if they speak together, for the masses disenfranchised by those very plutocrats. To the fatuous Chris Corrigan who, with the support of leading liberals, tried to break the MUA with his hired goons.

And to Tony Abbott who bulldozed a planned safe injecting room in Sydney by calling on his friends in the Catholic mafia. Archbishop George Pell spoke to future pope Joseph Ratzinger, [who at that stage was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,] who obediently threatened to expel from the Church the dignified order of nuns who had planned to operate the room.

And to Kevin Andrews who trod out the euthanasia laws in the Northern Territory, who fought against stem-cell research and RU-486. To the men who aborted the heroin trials in Canberra with extreme prejudice. To the Prime Minister’s advisory panel on drugs, headed by the ignorant and intolerant Major Brian Watters, possibly the most calcified and backward looking voice on the subject available.

And to Kevin Ruddock. And to Amanda Vanstone.

And to the arsehole whose twee vision of Australia in the fifties – with no drug addicts, no homosexuals, no sophistication and governed by the regiphiliac Menzies - led him to fatally and arrogantly sabotage the referendum on the republic …

I’m sorry to regurgitate all this stuff. It’s sickening, I know, but it frightens me that there are people out there who will offer their vote to this… man.

And, well, just shoot me, please, if he gets reelected.