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.