As usual, I had left the radio on during the night and, sometime in the early morning, I heard someone talking about raising the GST to 15%. Was I dreaming? It's what I've been talking about for years, as the GST is the most equitable tax of all to solve the country's budget woes.
By this time I was almost fully awake and, yes, there was somebody who advocated this long overdue tax increase but then came the kicker: most of the extra tax raised would be re-distributed to the "most disadvantaged" to compensate them for the increased cost of living.
What about the rest of us who are awakened at five o'clock by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight the traffic to get to work? Very soon, there'll be more who claim to be "disadvantaged" than those who are footing the bill for their indolence by fighting the traffic to get to work. What then?
Maybe we could learn something from the world's most successful dictatorship.
Then there were those hundreds of thousands of Australians who suffer from "psychosocial"-whatever — the announcer needed two attempts to pronounce it — and demanded to be included in the NDIS's largesse. And what about that Labor minister who claimed a $100,000 New York flight and $600 Paris meals but claimed it was all within guidelines?
Then came the news that it is now officially illegal in Australia to say that men are men after Kirralie Smith, possibly the last Australian brave enough to speak the truth, was fined $95,000 for saying that men don’t belong in women’s sport. She was fined $95,000 and made to issue a public apology just for using the word “he” to describe two blokes who should, biologically and undeniably, be referred to as "he". One of those transgender people she had to apologise to had moved to Australia in 2018 to live with the woman who would become her wife. Guess where she had moved FROM? The USA where Trump signed an executive order banning transgender women from participating in women's sports.
I have just realised why I so much enjoyed living all those years in foreign countries where I didn't speak their language and couldn't understand what they said: because I also couldn't understand what was said on the news — although I also believe that the news then wasn't as insane as it is today. I mean, you couldn't make it up, could you?
P.S. A reader just reminded me that insanity isn't confined to Australia. In 2024 a woman in Germany was given a harsher sentence than a convicted rapist after she was found guilty of defaming him. Maja R, a 20-year-old from Hamburg, called him a “disgraceful rapist pig” and a “disgusting freak”, defamatory under German law. He was one of nine attackers who gang-raped a 15-year-old girl in a Hamburg park in 2020, in a case that shocked the city. She was sentenced to a weekend in jail for her verbal attacks. The rapist was given a suspended sentence and served no prison time due to his age. (And, please, don't even ask me to tell you the rapist's ethnicity as I am not as brave as Kirralie Smith.)
