“He knew he was loved”. Big Business Loved him.
CANT AVOID IT. IT’S WALL TO WALL.
Double, quadruple, octuple double page spreads!
Every now and again we feel compelled to go against the grain. It’s not some form of adolescent angst that compels us to rant. Nor is it that God ordained right to oblique exceptionalism that drives good Queenslanders to want coal, despoliation and rapine rather than idealism.
But this compulsion belongs to something much deeper. The need to take the piss, and revive that corpse of irrelevance they used to call “Larrikinism”.
They loved him in the NT.
Before Australia became a supine rusk of insecurity. Before cultural cringe and managerialism had leached the very last atom of self assertiveness and replaced it with the entropy of nothing. Before, we were told by our leaders of what we could achieve as individuals before we were told why we couldn’t.
Only casino operators may dream
Only banking executives may require ambition
And only hedge fund managers may dare think of the future.
We have come to this.
And though it may seem contrarywise, unkind and petty, we’d like to put the responsibility for being a supine, obsequious cowered rusk of our former selves to the greatest Prime Minister who ever said he was the greatest prime minister ever. R.J.HAWKE.
He’s been DEAD an MONTH and still he’s front page news.
HAWKIE gave us compulsory Superannuation so that we may never ever be radical again.
He opened up the floodgates to ensure a few miners became FILTHY RICH!
HAWKIE took away free tertiary education.
HAWKIE tried the citizens card on us, years before facial recognition
HAWKIE famously and hubristically pronounced that ‘no child shall live in poverty’.
Hawkie did the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Royal Commission and achieved…. NOTHING!!!
HAWKIE, eschewed the Menzies tradition of getting his mates to stump up money to buy his house, by becoming one of the MATES! Ask RICHO?
HAWKIE the mates mate. He had mates in big business., Hawkie could always turn a profit if his mates were involved. On the racetrack, enterprise bargaining, or shagging hosties. HAWKIE was always on top,
It was HAWKIE, who became a very ordinary Prime Minister once Keating had left the front bench.
Not a great role model for husbands, but then he was such a lad. Still holds the beer drinking record.
Everyone loves a winner.
And who could begrudge him.
Since Introducing enterprise bargaining, and the accord the union movement is almost dead and wages have stiffed.
Introduced university fees, and turned places of learning into visa factories
Famously spent shitloads on sport so that we could be leaders in cricket, swimming and millionaire yacht races.
But most famously he’s had the longest ever funeral oration. He’s been dead a month and yet HAWKIE is still on the front page.
The Australian, (The Catholic Boys Daily) loves him.
Which made us think, HAWKIE is a GREAT LIBERAL, and possibly the greatest ever DLP Prime MINISTER EVER! Bigger even than Tony Santamaria.
Pissed his missus off to marry Kylie from Neighbours. How down to earth is that!!
Only bloke with balls enough to tell Frank Sinatra to piss off. And a special thanks from the East Timorese for allowing Gareth to stitch them up good and proper with real- politic so that Richard Wilcottt could tell them all to “GO AWAY AND DIE”!!
All of these things HAWKIE did, and still, (this is the biggest part), to tell us he was a man of the people.
And the people love him. Cos he told us so.
He had a special relationship with the Australian people. Cos he told us so.
So what ware we going to do about it?
Sadly though, he was unable to afford the plastic surgery that kept his missus looking like Barbie.
We shall spend this entire week in tribute to our Greatest recently dead Prime Minister EVER!
On our annual pilgrimage to the Deep South we’d zoom through Bordertown.
A prominent sign proclaimed “Bordertown, the birthplace of Bob Hawke”
It took a few years for us to realise the sign had been quietly removed.
I suppose they’ll put it back up now.