Other News Yesterday - Installment 2(v) Special Budget Day edition

 

The stakes are being tenderized as the finishing touches are made to Treasurer Friedalot’s pork accounts.  Entrapped raptors are pondering five hours listening to PM Scomite and Friedalot explain how $10 extra a week for poor people is the equivalent to a Lotto win and $75 relief per annum for power is just compensation for theft of $500pa for power company profits.   

It’s a special day in the lock-up where raptors rub shoulders with Junta born-to-rulers and strange officials with the worried look of lost extras on a Star Trek movie.    

By the time the final graph goes up explaining how a surplus to requirement was attained the gathered throng will feel like they’ve lost time in a Twilight Zone which they can never get back.  Autographed drink mats will be handed out at the end of proceedings as a memento to witnessing another ‘day of lost days’ and a reminder not to ‘fuck up the table’.

Budget spending on belts and roads is expected to reach new heights this year, with the latest projection for fast train development to be toward the end of the century, by which time climate change will have seen off any need for trains.  

It’s a wonderful scenario, guaranteed to excite the burghers in their boroughs, especially those benighted souls living in personal fiefdoms of members of the Safe Seats Society.  Their chances of seeing any train, let alone a fast one, are dwindling each year as the votes are counted yet again in favour of the Junta member and his relatives, living and dead.

Action on the climate maelstrom engulfing the planet is not expected this time round, save for a possible subsidy for cheap car washing for commercial fleets and some encouragement to burghers in safe seats to sink carbon.  The methods employed range from burying cattle en masse to planting palm oil trees on clear felled land, brilliant remedial strategies brought to you courtesy of Palm Oil enterprises and Ozmandia Coal. 

The business lobby has been out and about encouraging additional tax relief for anyone earning more the $1m a year, no penalty rates and no increase to the minimum wage as this would lead to the collapse of lifestyles of the rich and famous and an unseemly rush on claiming franking credits.  It is feared the ATO would have no recourse but to sub-contract the whole exercise out to grocery chains like Woolyperks and Stoles to develop a self-serve methodology and report annually.