Happy Chooks lay better when they’re in a happy environment. Chook research laboratory, ( chronically underfunded) at CSIRO Werribee.

Dear reader, another scintillating piece from our man from the chook-pen Paddy O Caermeda esq, in which he opines on the state of chooks, chook sheds, the wide O-pen range, (not a bad pun that one) and the family barbeque. Do you have a barbecue?. Our readership would be fascinated by your suggestions of what constitutes the perfect barbecue. As a matter of fact they could be submitted to the P.M as an ‘Ideas Boom’ sugggestion, and who knows, perhaps manufacturing (on a small scale) may yet return to our shores..  Hmmmmm… probably not, but Paddio would know what to do about it. Doubtless!! Read on, and be amused.

Typical Small scale Free Range Chook producer.

When I was a kid we had a productive back-yard. One third was a veggie patch we had an apple tree with four different varieties, a peach tree, a lemon tree, and a chook pen. Just about everyone in the street had fruit or nut trees as well as veggie patches. Surplus was traded, if you needed something you asked, and the chooks ate the scraps and produced fresh eggs. I remember them well, peering as a toddler at their beady eyes and scratching claws. They seemed happy enough, and one day I let them out – creating chaos at a family barbeque which given the amount of beer already drunk turned into a good humoured chook race. I guess they were free range.

A non free-range environment for humans. 100 % designed by professional human designers.

Today in their wisdom, those leaders who make up COAG decided that the legal definition of Free-range is 10,000 chooks to a hectare. That’s one chook to one square metre. I think they are taking their definition of free from the rule book for detention centres. They are less unanimous about the Exciting Times proposal from the Prime Minister to devolve income tax collecting and have the States pay for public schools. The Victorian Premier caught the mood nicely when he said to call it a thought bubble was to dignify it above its station.

Are we really that stupid? Does Malcom Turnbull really think we will buy this as the solution to a funding shortfall for hospitals and schools written in to the forward estimates in the disastrous and yet to be passed first Hockey-Abbott budget? Is the unravelling of Federation the way to fix this?

As a merchant banker outsourcing is a first response. Make the States pay for what they want. Never mind that Tasmania has possibly more social welfare beneficiaries than taxpayers or South Australia has a dwindling working population. And as for the egregious suggestion that State education is a State matter but Federal Funding will still go to the Catholic and Private Schools the less said the better. If this goes to the election they should lose. The cross-bench senators should pass his so called election trigger and then pick his budget to bits, destroy his uncertain hold. If he gets his way then I will be planting the veggies and building the chook pen.

The barter market is the only way to go as the taxes pile up, and disadvantage becomes ever more entrenched.