See also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/27552

Me think the honour of Dame bestowed by Tony the Weasel upon Quentin Bryce was pay-back time... But then the new Dame may be happy with the cortege, the title and the pomp. I am not so sure. So far in her life, Quentin Bryce has appeared to be egalitarian, feminist with a tinge of republicanism — all with a sense of respectful duty for all. In another week she might have had the opportunity to tell Tony to shove it up where it hurts, but she is too polite and too respectful of protocoled processes to do so.

After defeating the unholy Knights of the ALP, King Abbott took out his broadsword and bestowed titles upon the deserving. Truly peace had been returned to the Abbottlands, writes Ben Pobjie.

And so the King Abbott, warrior-priest lord of all the land, stood before his people and declared that from this day forth, all worthies of the realm would be granted titles suitable to their standing and distinction.

"Come forth!" he bellowed to his loyal courtiers. "Come forth and receive the blessings of your king."

Reaching into his royal bathers, he pulled out his mighty broadsword and prepared to grant his divine favours upon the deserving.

"I dub thee Sir Joseph of the Coffers," said the King to the first of his men, laying the blade upon his shoulders. "May you sally forth to shield the kingdom from drunken sailors and budget emergencies wherever you may find them."

"And you I grant the title Sir Christopher of the Pine," he went on, touching the sword delicately to the frail shoulders of the next. "Your sigil shall be a squawking chicken, rampant, and you shall stand ever vigilant to safeguard my people from the threat of unparliamentary language."

And so the process went on. Sir Brandis of the Lawgarden; Sir Erica of the Drone; Sir Morrisone the Boatslayer; all the way down to Dame Julie Idleshanks, who was given the most sacred task of all: to not say anything too stupid.

Once anointed, the knights of the Abbott took their oath: to forever be defenders of freedom, truth and markets; to seek out and destroy enemies of the crown, the dragons of political correctness, the serpents of organised labour, and the cockatrices of excessive regulation in the financial industry.

With one ferocious blow of his dread sword Menzies, Sir Robb of the Ledger cleft in twain the legendary Red Tape of Rudd, and a mighty cheer went up from the assembled masses, who had lived too long under the thumb of the unholy Knights Of ALP - it was said that any man who learned what the letters stood for would perish.

And so the Knights of Abbott set out to discover what honour may await them. To the north rode the bannermen of Sir Malcolm, under his flag bearing the device of the Turning Bull. There they would find many dangers, battling with sword and axe in windy mountain passes to sever the broadband cables of the warlocks and free the people from the tyranny of inefficient telecommunications projects.

To the south rode those freedom-loving knights who had pledged fealty to Sir Andrew of the Bolt, or as he was known throughout the land, "Brittlefinger". In the strange outlands of the New Racism, these brave warriors would face constant peril from the dishonourable attacks of the bizarre heathen folk who live in those parts, who are forever casting spells upon the righteous to make them ashamed of their own history, and who, although pale in hue, yet still work their dark magic upon grants committees.

The King Abbott was glad indeed when Sir Andrew rode back into the Vale of Canberra, his banner, blazoned with its much-feared crest of two crying kittens supporting a glass jaw on a field of petals, and presented his sovereign with the head of Affirmative Action, a beast many courageous men had perished attempting to slay.

Sir Morrisone, of course, rode west, and did battle with the deadly Queue Jumpers Of The Waves, who seek to entangle men in their webs of lies and are reputed to wear the taxes of their enemies as trophies. But not for nothing was Sir Morrisone dubbed Boatslayer, and he and his doughty band that day put many a boat to fire and the sword, driving the savage Queue Jumpers back into the sea and keeping the Abbottlands free from all those who would seek to improve their situation by means of flotation. On the beach, Sir Morrisone burnt a protection visa as an offering to the Gods of Orderly Processes.

And naturally to the east rode Sir Cory St Bernard, known far and wide as the holiest of all the Abbott's knights, and beside him rode his faithful friend and companion Sir Christopher of the Taser, who had won much fame at tournaments through the realm by suing his opponents' lances before they could reach his shield.

Sir Cory ventured into the lands of the Covered Coven, a band of powerful witches who entrance good Christian men with their excessive clothing. With Sir Christopher's brave assistance he did defeat those pagan wenches, and ventured even further, to the land of the puppies, where both Sir Cory and Sir Christopher did many daring deeds of which they were somewhat reluctant to be especially descriptive when they returned home.

But on that homecoming there was feasting, and carousing, and songs were sung of the many feats of this doughty band of righteous men, who through the strength of their steel, the trueness of their aim and the goodness of their hearts, had won victory over the darkness that had threatened to engulf the Abbottlands in modernity and diversity.

And the King Abbott blessed them, and counted himself lucky to have at his service such fearsome and neo-liberal knights, and he called to his daughters to join him at the feasting table, and there he did declare them to be pretty all right sorts, and there was much agreement. And Abbott and his knights sang lustily God Save the Queen, and drank deeply of the ale, and the women smiled as they did the ironing, and there was peace and light upon the land, and nevermore in all the free kingdoms was there heard the croak of the Green. Truly, the Golden Age of Chivalry had come to pass.

Ben Pobjie is a writer, comedian and poet with no journalistic qualifications whatsoever. View his full profile here.

http://www.independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/tony-abbott-bill-shorten-and-dame-quentin-bryce,6315

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

MARCH 25, 2014

Hishamuddin Hussein, Malaysia’s defense minister, said satellite data analysis has led officials to concentrate the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the southern Indian Ocean.

In recent days, the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines jetliner has focused on blurry satellite images and other sightings of objects floating in the desolate reaches of the southern Indian Ocean.

So far, none of the objects have been retrieved or identified. They could be aircraft wreckage, but even the officials leading the search for Flight 370 acknowledge that the objects could be something else. And that something else, people who study marine debris say, could be just about anything.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/26/world/asia/search-for-missing-flights-wreckage-is-hampered-by-a-sea-of-detritus.html?hp

Is it a coincidence that I've sometimes called our Tony "Tony Detritus" for being a bit devious while appearing straight? Sure, I make such claim in the spirit of the jester seeing his master being a bit loose with the truth... In the case of Tony, the truth is so loose that the porkies rattle and have become so enormously fat that they should be roasted...

 But Tony is still trying hard to get people to love him... (or hate him, if they are on the "wrong" side of politics). He will be a ruthless bastard to some people, especially workers and victims of racial abuse (via George — using one of his cronies to do the dirty work), while he wants to be loved by showing he cares...

Meanwhile, another of his acolyte/followers washes his hands of a dreadful asylum situation on Manus Island by passing the buck to the PNG government... A heart of gold: Tony is seen everywhere in the bloody media as the front man of the search for "hope" (only in regard to the plane MH370)... 

Well, Tony, if the plane has dished into the southern ocean as many people believe, THERE IS NO HOPE... No way is anyone going to find any survivors... There is no hope. Finding wreckage is not a hope...

The only thing we could find in about two or three years time is what happened to plane when it went to its watery grave. And a search like this could cost in excess of $100 million with a 10 per cent chance of success. This is not hope. Hope of what?

Hope would be that the investigation got it all wrong and the plane landed safely in Woopwoopland south of Somalia or in Yemen. 

It appears whoever took the plane on its last mad journey knew where the worse place to find anything of the wreckage would be...

 Please stop parading like a know-all King Canute... Canute is though to have been deluded, though some new analysis suggests he might not have been, but was loony on his way to become a sociopath bordering on psychopath... or was he a lunatic good at spinning yarns while giving lollies to the little kiddies.... He has the same cred as Santa Clauss, who incidentally does not exist. You may not know this yet. Don't hold back the tears.

Some would say that Tony Abbott’s response to the retirement of Dame Edna Everage is a political masterstroke.

The Keeper of the Budgie Smugglers & Protector of Tall Poppies has surely done our nation a great service by creating an enduring monument to pretention, which could prove to the greatest boon to public entertainment since the invention of the stocks.

Can’t wait to see Sir Peter’s top hat & tails rendition of Sir John Kerr’s ‘big day out’ at the Melbourne Cup!!

It was William the Bastard who introduced the pompous idea of chivalry and titles. Have we found our modern-day imitation not in England, but in Canberra? Mungo MacCallum writes.

In using the idea of knighthoods as a grand distraction, the finely honed 11th century mind of Tony Abbott is simply following the lead given by the inventor of the concept, William of Normandy.

After invading Saxon England in 1066, William the Bastard, as he was known (an appellation some have also applied to his Australian imitator), needed something to do with his victorious army commanders, so he invented the concept of chivalry, which merely meant that those rich enough to own and maintain horses were entitled to be regarded as a kind of junior nobility. Not, of course, ranking with the big landowners, but in a class above the peasantry.

This was supposed to confer upon them responsibilities as well as rights, but of course it did not work out that way; untrammelled power seldom does. Most of those who failed to grab some land of their own became effectively men of the road - highwaymen above the law, who lived by rape and pillage, talents they brought to perfection during the crusades.

Magna Carta did more to legitimise the system than to control it. The "parfit gentil knight" somewhat ironically depicted by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales, loyal to his king and dedicated to the ideal of courtly love (which in practice usually meant serial adultery), was the desired model, but it was seldom realised outside the Arthurian legends.

Over time the knights, like the rest of society, became gradually civilised since the title, unlike that of the real nobility, was not hereditary, and it could be, and was, bestowed at will to loyal followers of the king as a reward and bribe for services. Its advantage was that it gave the recipient kudos and precedence, standing him out from the mob. Its value was one of pure snobbery, and so it remains pretty much up to now in present-day England.

As the monarch's power declined, awarding honours became the plaything of the politicians, who unashamedly used them to solicit party funds. Labour governments affected to disapprove of the practice, but never seriously considered abandoning it. And inevitably, as England gained an empire, it spread to the colonies; English aristocrats were seen as natural leaders, both as administrators and also as military commanders, often with predictably disastrous results. In Australia, with few aberrations, the colonial and later state governors were drawn from their junior ranks for some half a century after Australia became nominally independent.

As the poet Hilaire Belloc put it in his evocation of one such, Lord Lundy:

We had intended you to be,

The next prime minister but three,

The stocks were sold, the press was squared,

The middle class was quite prepared.

But now ... imagination fails!

Go out and govern New South Wales.

And the idea caught on in the so-called classless society. Not only did Australian politicians gratefully accept knighthoods conferred by the mother country, with increasing independence they began to recommend their own supporters and followers for a similar honour - conferred by the palace, of course. Conservatives loved the idea; Labor premiers and prime ministers were more cautious, but they were not above using the system when it suited them.

Billy Hughes even insisted that an old political enemy, John Forrest, already a knight, should be elevated to the peerage as Lord Forrest of Bunbury in order to get him out of the country. Perhaps tragically, perhaps ironically, Forrest in fact died at sea on his way to Westminster to take his seat in the House of Lords. But generally Labor politicians eschewed imperial honours for themselves and their colleagues.

There was even an attempt to set up a particularly Australian peerage. In 1853 my own illustrious but eccentric ancestor William Charles Wentworth, who gloried in the name "The Native Son", put such a proposal to the New South Wales Legislative Council. It was laughed down by the radical Daniel Deniehy, who, after proposing that Wentworth's friend John Macarthur should be dubbed Earl of Camden with a rum keg emblazoned on a field of vert as his coat of arms, concluded that he found it was difficult to classify the mushroom order of nobility proposed by Wentworth.

"Perhaps it was only a specimen of the remarkable contrariety that existed at the antipodes. Here they all knew that the common water mole was transformed into the duck-billed platypus; and in some distant emulation of this degeneracy he supposed they were to be favoured with a bunyip aristocracy," Deniehy suggested, to prolonged laughter and applause. This, of course, is the system that Abbott is accused of reviving.

In 1975 Gough Whitlam effectively dumped imperial honours in favour of the Order of Australia, and although Malcolm Fraser briefly revived knighthoods within the new order, Bob Hawke dumped them - it was thought forever. Even the ultra-monarchist conservative John Howard recognised them as an anachronism. But now, some 30 years later, they are to be restored in all their irrelevant pomposity.

And it provided Abbott not only with a distraction, but a useful wedge; one of the first recipients is to be the mother-in-law of the leader of the opposition, Bill Shorten, who has joined the general chorus of derision emanating not only from the left, but from some of Abbott's own team, who are not happy about having this latest brainstorm being inflicted on them without warning or debate. The retiring Governor-General Quentin Bryce, fresh from proclaiming her republican sympathies, is to become a dame, and her incoming successor Peter Cosgrove a knight. According to Abbott, the ennoblement is to go with the job from now on.

Previous G-Gs, along with all the other recipients of the Companionship of the Order of Australia, for a generation the country's highest honour, are thus effectively downgraded, as are all officers and members of the order. But hey, it's a great wedge. Abbott would probably not like to be reminded of it, but here again he is following the lead of a predecessor.

In 1976 Malcolm Fraser persuaded the Queensland Labor powerbroker Jack Egerton to accept a knighthood, causing ructions throughout the party. Its leader, Gough Whitlam, commented: "This is the most inappropriate conferral of the title since Queen Elizabeth I knighted Sir Toby Belch."

Shorten is unlikely to say anything as unkind about his mother-in-law. But Abbott must be hoping.

Mungo Wentworth MacCallum is a political journalist and commentator. View his full profile here.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-31/maccallum-the-ignoble-history-of-knighthoods/5355706

To gain office, Bill Shorten has been urged to emulate Tony Abbott’s successful strategy of three word slogans, character attacks and barefaced lies — but will he do it? Alan Austincompletes his stunning series.

[Read Part One]

[Read Part Two]

FACTS AND FIGURES published byIndependent Australia and elsewhere lead to one unpalatable but unavoidable conclusion: Australia is in the grip of powerful organisations which lie and cheat to achieve their objectives.

And they lie about what those objectives are.

The fledgling Abbott Government has already broken more than 25 commitments which were well within its power to keep.

That’s more than three a month.

There were only about three such avoidable broken pledges in the entire six years of the Rudd/Gillard governments.

This series on blatant lies – a category of moral failure far more damning – has documented an even greater disparity.

Since last week’s article, Tony Abbott has concocted another lie regarding finding Flight MH370’s black box.

His tally is now 31.

This brings list of blatant falsehoods by a major party leader for the past 20 years to:

• Labor: 2
• The Greens: 0
• The Coalition: 54+

Clearly, it is not just Coalition leaders who lie routinely to advance their cause.

John Howard’s ministers Philip Ruddock and Peter Reith initiated the Children Overboard lies — used to devastating effect to win the 2001 election.

read more: http://www.independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/is-australia-run-by-compulsive-liars-part-three-will-bill-lie-like-tony-to-be-pm,6418

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One of course does not have to be reminded that the MMMM led by a fantastic porkying Uncle Rupe helps those lies to get into our heads as if it was buttermilk sauce...