Latter Day Banjo

I remain furious at the corrupt mismanagement and billionaire toadying of the worst government Australia has been forced to endure since Federation. This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

Paying the price in truth

The Liar Cheats and Hides This week, [someone], [someone else] and [another person] cover [topic]..... Toxic boys club, corruption, misogyny, climate crisis denial, suspected fraud, embezzlement and protection for rapists, cult religious groups influencing government ideology, mining industry influencing government decision-making, a Prime Minister who denies knowledge of wrong-doing ... #votehimaway #voteMorrisonout This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

Cancerous to social justice and democracy An insidious local virus is laying much of Australia even lower than the other well-documented global one that just makes you sick. Some of us test negative to infection, but we have all been dangerously exposed to Scovid-19. This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

Come on, Aussie, Come on, come on Good luck with one nice speech providing a panacea for 230-plus years of murder, theft, exploitation, marginalisation and paternalistic brow-beating over First Nation peoples’ failure to seamlessly fall into line with a European capitalist societal model that was diametrically opposed to every aspect of a forty-plus millennial culture centred on Country and of family groups that connected to land and its ancient Dreamtime. Or changing one word in the National Anthem. This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

The best religion money can buy Not only do our current political masters in Australia favour us with trickle-down economics, there are trickle-down ethics that trickle down from the big end of town right to the gutters, and flow away in the refuse and shit, never again to trouble us. This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

This is take 2 of my self-appointed PM speech, after I discovered a major blooper on the first try ... (the previous podcast) I have appointed myself Prime Minister, after my army of progressives declared peace on the poor and overthrew the incompetent, corrupt Morrison regime. Here is my victory speech. This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

I have appointed myself Prime Minister. This is my victory speech. Be patient. At the end, I channel my inner Julie Andrews. My fellow Australians, here is something about how and why I am different to the recent, newly overthrown and imprisoned demagogues and multi-billionaire oligarchs who divided us as a nation – tribe against tribe – never paid tax and lived the high life at our expense. This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

Lest We Forget Let's be thoughtful during the week of most solemn global commemoration, that of Remembrance Day. In the minute’s silence we will dedicate this week to those who have fallen, let’s think about declaring a lasting peace, in this world, and backing it with our actions. This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

Contemporary Australian politics fails to acknowledge the outrage that was the Armenian Genocide and shuts its eyes to what prominent QC and international human rights lawyer and author Geoffrey Robertson calls An Inconvenient Genocide. Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan has revived the pan-Turkic ambitions that date back a century or more to the Ottomans, who were responsible for the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians between 1915-23, with the appalling attack by Turkish-backed Azerbaijan on the independent Republic of Artsakh, which is populated mostly by ethnic Armenians. There is a greater agenda at play here, a renewed effort on Turkey’s part to crush Armenia, utterly ignored by our mainstream media and only noted in the non-Murdoch press and on SBS and the ABC. This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

Autocracy Good, Democracy Bad, this is the singular rule ... as we flounder about, deep in pandemic, mired in recession, with neoliberal shitfuckerist rulers imposing their autocracy on us proles in the interests of no one at all, other than themselves and a few billionaires with room in their off-shore tax havens for some more ill-gotten gains. This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

The most corrupt and self-serving government in Australian history deregulates industry, erodes job security and ignores expert warnings over Covid-19. It grants unaccounted carte blanche to map our post-Covid economic recovery to the hand-picked National Covid-19 Co-ordination Commission, a bunch of gas industry exec mates. And then there is the aged care debacle. Morrison and his henchmen descend to new depths of deviousness and disregard for the well-being of most Australians. This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

Fourteen months into the spread of the virulent disease SCOVID-19, here are some thoughts on 'mean and tricky' neoliberal shitfuckery ... This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

This week, [someone], [someone else] and [another person] cover [topic]..... Despite his frantic cash splash (three quarters of which is to already well-off businesses), Morrison still entertains the fantasy of 'snapping back' to the New Year mentality of a small budget surplus, punishing the poor for being poor and rewarding rich donors with favourable tax breaks, a kind of normal where he rules by ad slogan, controls the narrative and benefits from a tame opposition, most of whom are in the pockets of the same oligarchs he serves. This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

With two years to go before any sign of relief, Coalition Shitfuckery since Morrison Steven-Bradbury-ed Turnbull has taken Australian democracy down to new lows in how dislocated the political system is from the people it is meant to serve. This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

Scotty from Marketing, Scomo, Smoko, or as I like to refer to him #CorruptCharlatanShitFingersMP, the worst Prime Minister in Australian history, inspires a new linguistic word stem: Scomo. This episode walks the listener through the etymology of it, as well commenting on Morrison's overlord Trump and the example he sets for the free world and how our leader has managed the bushfire calamity. It closes with some thoghts on where we might like to go next and an alternative version of the current national anthem. This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

The Prime Minister is a leader with direction, stability and certainty. Unlike Labor in the Global Financial Crisis a decade ago, Morrison reminds us that the Liberals are Not Panicking, even if there are a quarter million more unemployed than in 2009. He may soon reveal policies, which may involve having them. But it’s not the right time, even though the cricket distracts us from the slow death of democracy. This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

When will Morrison interrupt his thoughts and prayers and listen to the concerns of ordinary Australians? Not today, it seems. We are right to question his Pentecostal faith, because with his fossil fuel sponsors, he stays 'on message', conveying a bare-face lie that everything is fine, while the Coalition’s failure to address carbon emissions and open favouritism towards outmoded coal mines will be the Devil that leads us to ruin.

ScoMo claims to speak for the ‘Quiet Australians’ and labels as ‘progressivism’ the ordinary person’s right to free speech, which he darkly characterises as ‘apocalyptic in tone’. He blames Labor, the poor, the globalists, and anyone else who is not rich enough to have his attention as the causes of our nation's economic woes, which he professes to fix, while effectively doing nothing. He has exposed himself as unfit to govern. We want our democracy back.

It’s been a momentous couple of weeks since the United Nations Climate Summit hothouse, with rising political temperatures just about everywhere else afflicted by buffoonish dictators. A couple of them got together recently at the White House.

An ecstasy of conservative-backed writers lavishes on us Orwellian slogans espousing good, old-fashioned Aussie common sense, or, translated: the self-interest of conservative rule, the wealthy and their billionaire media mogul patron saint. The recent death of the great speech-writer Graham Freudenberg coincides with the contemporary vacuum of great policy ideals. Instead, progressive economic and social liberalism has evaporated under the watch of the party the late Sir Robert Menzies founded.

The Banjo sends down some acid rain on the parade of pernicious political indifference and pays a tribute to that tiny titan teenage tactician for zero emission, Greta Thunberg.

Praise be your non-specific preferred omnipotent deity: Section 41 of the proposed new Religious Discrimination Bill over-rides the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Bill. It provides safety for all of us, especially in Silent Australia, a model of special protection both for those of religious faith and even for those of no religion. The faithful can return to their safe place, where they can resume righteous persecution of those who make - shall we say - unsafe lifestyle choices. Rejoice! The Bill enables us to speak our minds, provided our religion says it's so.

‘I believe in a fair go for those who have a go,’ PM Scott Morrison stated during the opening press conference of the 2019 election. But what does he mean by 'a fair go'? And the rider 'have a go'? What does a ScoMo 'fair go' look like? How fair is it? Australia voted him in and now he has a mandate to cut taxes and government to it s bare bones, lock up refugees without trial and favour the wealthy minority over the rest. I, for one, have a have a problem with the Prime Ministerial so-called fair go. Have a listen and ask yourself if you have a similar problem.

Warning: the following content may contain elements of satire. Faith in politicians might seem to be vanishing amongst the Green-Left agony aunties, but all is well. Our esteemed Prime Minister sets a high store in hard work. ‘The harder people work,’ he advises us, ‘the more they earn and the more they get to keep.’ The leaders of our great land are prepared to listen to the constituents who talk sense, just as Rupert explains how it must be for those too thick to get it. Trust ScoMo and the team in Parliament. There's nothing to ee, as they just get on with their responsible fiscal management and what's-good-for-us pragmatism.

‘Where the bloody hell are you?’ In this winter of progressive discontent, it is a question we might well ask as to the presence of warmth, friendliness and freedom. What happened to the egalitarian country of my younger years? An erosion of democratic freedom is happening before our eyes. I am hoping it will pass in the due course of historical tide, but as it does, we need to update our national anthem. I offer an alternative, adapted from Bruce Woodley's well-known 'I am Australian.'

100 Year Nines. Five teachers. An admin that pretends all their kids are angels. A campsite lacking staff, power and equipment. What could go wrong? Would you care enough to risk your neck for a kid who had given you nothing but trouble? How far does a teacher's duty of care go, anyway? Are you sick of your boss requiring you to jump through hoops set by their political masters? 'Duty of Care' is a novella that asks these questions. Listen to a few exerpts and a summation of what it is to be a teacher who does not like the tech-focussed, data-driven, box-ticking direction modern education has taken. Order it https://www.amazon.com/Duty-Care-Jonathan-Gordon-Cocks/dp/1786292343 Reviews https://www.austinmacauley.com/book/duty-care

This episode relates to modern secondar education. It takes the form of a lesson reconstruct, to walk the listener through what a typical Year Eleven English class might look like. It highlights how technology is often more of a tory than a tool to the millennial. It shows teacher frustration in dealing with obstacles to delivering educational content. It laments the passing of an age in which teachers teach. It satirises contemprary obsession with data-based 'proof' that our modern-day methodology is working.

I'm averse to the Murdocracy we live in, and seek to put my Banjo spin the May 18 'miracle'. Token, temporary tax cuts for the workers, and things we aren't getting, like action on climate change, apparently, are 'a fair go' in a Murdocracy. This is the first in a series of weekly takes on life in Australia, for all those who are at odds with the poisonous emissions coming daily from the Murdocrats and might enjoy a verse or two from the Latter Day Banjo.