Brisbane’s liveliest columnist are in your Indie!

Don Gordon-Brown co-founded The Independent in 2001 when he returned from sub-editing on various metropolitan mastheads in London only to realise no sensible news organisation here would ever think of giving him a paid job. He co-edits Australia's longest running satire newspaper, The Bug, that would have celebrated its 20th birthday this year if there were only enough advertisers to pay for a hardcopy edition. He was unlawfully victimised for his trade-union beliefs while working at the Courier-Mail in the late 70s and early 80s, which has made him somewhat bitter and twisted in old age, and was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2006 by Jschool for his contribution to independent journalism.

---

Seeing red

A Wickham Terrace psychiatrist the Army sent me to once because I didn’t like a lot of my officers declared after the very briefest of sessions that I had a dislike for people in authority.

What a fucking wanker, I thought at the time. Obviously got his degree from a Kellogg's corn flakes packet because he didn't get me to lie on a couch or anything. Clearly he didn't have a bloody clue what he was talking about!
But now I'm not so sure. Julia Gillard has been in the top job barely a month, and fair sauce of the shake bottle, I've just about reached the stage where I'm hoping the Mad Monk sends her into political oblivion come August 21.
For someone who has been singing the Ranga's praises for some years now, who really thought that when it came to having a nose for political nous, she was clearly overqualified, and who offered a silent prayer just about nightly for the proverbial political bus to clean up the dreadful Kevin "I'm from Queensland and I've been no help" Rudd so she could get the chance to strut herself in the top job, how has it come to this so quickly?
Was the quack right so many years ago? That I simply don't like her now she's in charge? Personally, I'd like to think it has much more to do with a very reasonable reaction to her latest piece of political stupidity and/or cowardice than any psychological disorder I may or may not exhibit from time to time.
Nothing turns people off a politician faster than when they hear palpable rubbish spewing from their lips that should have sent absolute alarm bells ringing deep inside their brains.
Whatever spin doctor thought up the idea of a citizens assembly of 150 randomly selected Australians on climate change should now be folding how-to-vote cards for the party's candidate in whatever is the Coalition’s safest seat. I hope it's the back of Bourke somewhere. But that's their punishment. What do we do about a political leader who actually embraced the hare-brained scheme and thought it had some merit?
She got rightly mauled in last Sunday night's TV debate when she tried to defend it, and Abbott's stinger line "We've got a citizen's assembly and it's called Parliament" will resonate to polling day.
Just like Anna Bligh's current unpopularity is largely based on her proven inability to reject spin doctors' lines when they are truly awful, Gillard has followed suite with an absolute zinger!
Doubt it about Bligh? She was the one who, after the government had copped a hefty late cancellation fee for a departmental soiree that was on the public nose, declared the government had not lost money because they would make it up somewhere else.
Hello, Anna! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!!!!! Your brain heard nothing whatsoever? A loss is a loss is a loss, dear Premier.
Then when she was forced to abandon that awful North Bank Project in Brisbane’s CBD, she came up with the woeful “but people want us to do something there” line. Hellooooo, Anna? Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!!!
Heard nothing at all, sweetie?
Yes, people wanted you to do something. Put in a couple of barrel loads of white stones, run a rake over it, tidy up the place a bit, maybe whitewash the columns of the Riverside Expressway. Not build crap a third of the way out into their river! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!!!!! Nothing, Anna? Nothing at all?
Still, that’s Anna for you, her instincts honed at the chalkface that was the Peter Beattie “Spin Before Substance” School of Politics.
But back to Julia, trying to convince us that a randomly selected panel of 150 average joh and flo bjelkes ... I mean blows ... can be packed in an auditorium, forcefed tidbits from climate change acceptors and somehow regurgitate a policy suitable for Australia to follow on the greatest moral issue of our time?
Voters throughout this great brown racist land of ours are spot-on to be truly concerned that when this stupid, stupid idea was suggested to her, there was absolute silence in the cranial space deep down below her stylish reddish fringe so suited to a women’s magazine cover spread.
Absolute silence. Not the deafening Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! the rest of us heard straight away when confronted with a policy-delaying gimmick instead of real leadership on an issue crucial to all our futures.
We deperately need leaders with brains that can sense ... and reject .... political claptrap the second it's put to them.
Gillard has shown us she doesn't possess that gift... and it’s left her permanently damaged.
Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!
Nothing, Julia? Nothing at all.
That makes you a deadset red-hair-brained Dingbat!