Open Letter to Tony Abbott

[DH is stewing over Tony Abbot's juvenile gloating in the columns of the Sydney Morning Herald of Wed "The budget delivers, even for single poets" http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles/2006/05/23/1148150250816.html in which he tells us, contrary to the bleedin' obvious, that apparently we never had it so good.]

 

Dear Tony

 

Being as how I’m a 50 something heterosexual working parent who can’t stand poetry, you can imagine how that saucy little beast, Don John Howard, is always a-courting after me, dangling his tax incentives in front of my nose, flashing his wad of bills at me, enthralling me with tables of figures and calculations that at the end of the day always seem to add up to $7, or the price of 2 Macburgers, in my pocket.

What kind of girl does he think I am? Must think all the big numbers he pulls out of his hat, and the dazzling gold coins he extracts from my ears,  blind me to how much my standard of living has actually declined since he and his miserable crew got into power.

Who do you think you’re kidding Bud?

Of that extra $4664 ($8858-$4194) per annum, you reckon I now have,  (and has that figure been adjusted to the price of bananas recently?) I now spend $2600 extra on medical insurance that I was forced to take out when your government ripped Medicare to shreds.

May I suggest to your MacBrain constituency that the $7 a week tax savings they drool over in their MacSuburbs have been extracted out of their children’s teeth, thanks to the lowest act ever perpetrated by an Australian Government: the withdrawal of funding to free dental services to school children and low-income earners.

May I suggest that the $7 extra a week hardly compensate for the thousands they must now pay for private education for their childen since your government’s rob-from-the-poor to give-to-private-schools education policy sucked our public schools dry?

And is it a pure coincidence that while government debt is at an all-time low, private debt and bankruptcy has skyrocketed and the middle-classes are cannibalising their mortgages just to pay for the self-same private education.

All your government has achieved is to privatise its debts like you’ve privatised everything else. .

Did I say mortgages?  Nice work if you can get a foot in the door.

Do you think we will be so distracted by your pathetic attempts to foment civil war between Balmain and Blacktown that those 68% of people who reportedly would prefer social service to tax cuts are fooled. Nothing divisive about you, mate.

Well, I’ve said it before and I’m proud to say it again. I’ve still never met anyone who’ll admit to being greedy enough to vote for you. And I have connections Balmain to Blacktown to the Beecroft Bible Belt.  But there you go. I guess some people can’t live with the shame of voting for an extra $7 in their pockets while your government puts children in concentration camps, terrifies us into giving up our protection against becoming a police state, bad-mouth its own scientists when they talk about global warming. Err - until yesteday … hullo … suddenly when it comes to profiting from uranium and building nuclear power plants we have a global warming problem after all!

Well, I’m so disgusted by those crypto MacLiberal voters that I for one am coming out of the closet.

Yes, I admit it!  I am the “The Elite” that you love to revile. Yes. It was me all along! Yes. I’m the one that loves a latte, have a degree, and work for a pittance in the public sector, while living high on the hog of the disability allowance of $43 a week I shamelessly bludge off the taxpayer to pay for my childs extra needs.

And to clinch it, I happen to live in Balmain. Yes I know how envious you are. So why don’t you come up and see me sometime, Big Boy, and we can have a good old chatter in my luxurious public housing townhouse,. Don’t worry, you’ll soon get used to the piteous wailing of  the 200,000 poor buggers still on the waiting list who press their noses up against the window crying “let us in, let us in”. At least when they.re not out there pushing rents through the roof, thanks to your Governments exacerbation of rent inflation by cutting off funding to public housing.

Just make sure you don’t trip over the Rolls in the garage, (so much a feature of public housing life these days, if our past housing minister is to be believed}. We’re buttering them for our next fundraising sausage sizzle so that our school can buy some colouring in pencils for our kids.

Earth to Planet D'OH. Come in Team-Leader.

Darlin' I've rung you half a dozen times in the last three months,but I havent heard your voice since before Xmas.  How come you never return my calls??? Is it something I've done? Are you mad at me? Pick up - I know you're out there somewhere. Dont be such a stranger!

 

Do the people who answer the phone at Planet D'oH actually pass on messages? Does the budget run to paper and pencil? Does the computer they peck away at actually connect to anything?

 

It's a mystery!

FURIOUS! DH loses days work as contractor fails to show up. AGAIN!

DH is FURIOUS! And she just KNEW it in her bones. She took a day off work because contractors made an appointment to come today to do some kind of inventory on the repairs needed. She had that feeling of tragic inevitability this morning, so she dialled her local office to check.

 

Can you believe how this office works?????

 

The local office knows N-N-N-NOTHING. .

 

They do not know what contractors are scheduled to do what when.

 

There is no-one they can ring to find out. They simply have no idea.

 

Poor buggers. You have to feel sorry for the workers in the frontline administering this nightmare - no doubt understaffed, undertrained, undervalued and underfunded.

 

 

DH wants your advice. Shd she give up her private health insurance?

DH has been clinging onto increasingly exorbitant private health insurance cover by the fingernails.

But for the 3rd time in 6 months, she couldnt afford to meet HCF's direct debit this month. There goes another $35 in bank dishonour fees ... (See NCOSS report on how the poor pay more for everything through late fees)

 

Should DH give up health insurance? She had to go in for a standard surgical procedure a few months back. Her specialist wanted to charge her about $550. As DH gets top cover, she thought, foolish mortal that she is, that she had no worries and could lie back and be pampered in St Vincent's Private. This is the first time, since the abysmal Howard brought in semi-compulsory private insurance, that DH has tried to use her hospital cover. What a shock awaited her. HCF only refund about $80. So after spending thousands over the years on private cover, DH found herself back in the public hospital queue. What's goin' ON????

Budget surplus extracted from our teeth

Costello and Howard can gloat about their huge budget surpluses, but isn't it bleedin' obvious that all they've done is privatised debt? We used to have private savings and public health and dentistry. Now the middle classes are eating up their credit cards and cannibalising their mortgages, while the poor can't even chew, thanks to the lowest act of all by the Liberals, their ruthless decision to cut funding to dental services. And so much for interest rates not going up! Though DH is delighted - one of the advantages of not having a mortgage, is that now instead of earning 2 cents a year interest on her Commonwealth Savings account, she'll earn 2.0003 cents.

Great budget - unless you want to live somewhere...

DH reckons Senator Kim Carr is one of the good guys of Federal Labor. So she knows he wont mind if she rips off some of his speeches to give you some simple facts. Like this. Despite Treasury's own forecasts (hardly rocket science!) that housing affordability is getting tighter, this budget provided

not one new dollar to support homelessness or related crisis services; and

not one new dollar for the Commonwealth State Housing Agreement under which the Commonwealth provides funding to the states for public housing.

Those few extra tax dollars won't last the next rent hike, for those of us who dont have a snowflakes of owning a house. At least we can thank our lucky stars we dont have a mortgage!