"Lateline and Tony Jones are up for a Walkley Award. Nothing could be more disgraceful in Australian journalism. The fact that this program has been nominated undermines the Walkley Awards … I think it is an absolute disgrace that he is invited here for the media awards on Saturday night." Syd Stirling, Deputy Chief Minister, NT Legislative Assembly, 19 October 2006.
At one of the COAG working party negotiations that I attended one state representative remarked that there was no point giving any funds to the NT because they wouldn’t deliver the goods and that the close-the-gap target could be achieved by focusing on the Indigenous population in the eastern states alone. Let’s not make this chilling black humour a reality.
“You’re a fucking Indian mate. Have a respect for our country … speak English. It’s our country. Australia mate. White people. You’re not white." “Mate you’re from fucking India. You’re from India mate. You’re not even fucking white. You’re boat people.”
As Rothwell notes, the good tax-payers of the Australian south-east fork out around $4 billion a year to keep the NT running. Divide that number by the 220,000 people in the NT and the figure is around $18,000 per head. "Thanks and it is your shout!!"
One rusted-on CLP member told Crikey this morning, “The brains are all on the backbench, the fuckwits are running the party”.
The LNP, convinced of its electoral invincibility and drunk on its own ideological Kool-Aid, had turned itself into the political equivalent of a suicide squad.
I won't take their shit anymore. The NT education department has thrown everything at me—legal cases, angry letters, kicked me out of my house and job, tried to bleed me dry with legal costs and I had to move to another state to do the job I love—but I'm still standing and I can laugh at them now.
Welcome to the worst day of your life. The bottle-o is closed and all you have left is some cheap champagne that Aunt Betty left behind after one of her rare visits yesterday/last week/month/year and that no-one has dared to drink because it was crap. What to do? First, get a mango, then ...
"The journalists say they are satisfied with the good reception given to the special issue in June [this year], which recalled the death of former Secretary of the Communist Party Enrico Berlinguer. It happened thirty years ago, when l’Unità had a circulation of almost two hundred thousand copies.”
Chips Mackinolty writes from Palermo on the Sei isole in un mare di morti. The six islands in a sea of death refer to Sicily and Lampedusa, but as well to Christmas Island, Nauru, Manaus and Australia itself.
