Hundreds of millions of Australian taxpayer dollars were expended and kilometres of concrete and steel mesh barriers erected to ‘protect’ overseas dignitaries attending the week long APEC summit in Sydney.
This seems a very high price to pay given that as a country we are not at war or even under any known terrorist threat and the only major benefit claimed for staging the event is the adoption by all attendees of some ‘aspirational goals’ to address global warming.
Of course ‘aspirational’ is only code for voluntary or non-binding undertaking or, to put in the now familiar political-speak, another ‘non-core’ promise – i.e. hardly anything to write home about - or more to the point - I’ll believe it when I see it!
Certainly we would, as a reputedly developed nation, have looked extremely stupid if some delegate had actually been killed or even slightly injured but in any event the ABC Chasers’ team achieved that particular goal single-handedly.
So why did we host this extremely disruptive and generally inconvenient gathering of world leaders?
There would appear to be only one plausible explanation, viz: that our Government wished to position Australia as a ‘player’ in world politics and a shaper of policy particularly within the Asia Pacific region.
To that end it would appear to have achieved some success although I suspect a lot of overseas observers would have been surprised or even taken aback with our vintage Aussie display of deriding our government leaders.
Many, in fact probably most, countries consider their political masters with awe … and we would say misplaced respect.
But this concept is totally foreign here with our unique anti-establishment heritage and ingrained sense of being ‘agin the government’ as many of our Irish forbears would say.
Paradoxically it is this ability to freely express our political views (of all colours) which we have taken for granted for so long that feels most at threat when we see armour wearing police purposefully rounding up supposedly peaceful protesters on our TV screens.
The bill for staging APEC was apparently in the hundreds of millions, which frankly the nation can afford (at the moment anyway), but what we can’t afford at any price is the loss of our freedom of speech for all our citizens – including those annoying leftist tree hugging ratbags.
If we are ever asked to repeat the level of so-called ‘protection’ to stage another APEC some time in the future I would say along with many of my thinking country-folk : thanks but no thanks - the cost is too damn high!
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Tis the time for footy fever
It’s my favourite time of year. The NRL final series is on every night of the weekend - how good is that.
And it’s too cold to venture outside to do anything useful – well that’s my story anyway.
At work nothing binds colleagues and friends closer than taking a punt on their favourite sides - what’s more you can often get great odds from people who usually would be thinking a whole lot better.
All in all … a great time of year.
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Premature election
Now that I have your attention - please consider the quandary currently facing John Howard.
He has been grimly hanging on for a much needed change in Kevin07’s electoral fortunes; but even with a highly publicised temporary memory lapse in a New York night club nothing has come even close to a Latham-like self destruct moment for the ALP’s youthful multi-lingual hero.
Howard now has a major dilemma in the sense that he’s deeply aware that he’s so far behind in the opinion polls that even with the well known sizeable swing back to the government of the day (on election day) he still won’t be able to get over the line.
Given that if he goes early he will definitely lose (according to the pollsters) Howard might as well tough it out and just hope ‘something’ happens to deflect the seemingly unstoppable Rudd juggernaut.
With probably the finest honed political skills of any modern day Australian leader John Howard’s date setting will no doubt be closely monitored by the backroom boys in Canberra and all in the press gallery.
But it seems something akin to political Viagra will be needed to get John up this time.
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