A Small, Fat, Furry Thing

All guinea pigs are interested in politics and have their own political views. Badger for example, like his hero Margaret Thatcher believes that greed is good (As evidenced by the size of his butt.), Ronald Reagan wasn't senile for most of his second term and that Augusto Pinochet should have been given a Knighthood. Whereas I hold somewhat more liberal views. I'm particularly liberal with distribution of my bush chocolate for instance. This deep seated political interest inherent in all cavies stems from the time when the Incas held sway in our native Peru. A private members bill put forward by a member of the Inca parliament proposed that it should be compulsory for every family in Peru to eat a guinea pig at least once a week. A heated debate followed. I say "heated" advisedly because the heat was coming from three hundred cooking fires prepared by the honourable members in anticipation of the inevitable "YES' vote.

Still on the subject of politics it appears that our dear Prime Minister's greatest enemy (Other than the Kevin Rudd - her own Foreign Minister.) is Julia Gillard. Just before the last general election she told the nation that there would never be a carbon tax on mining companies in any government she leads. Then straight after the election she changed he mind and introduced a carbon tax. Trouble is she then allowed the opposition party to convince the electorate that the tax was to be levied upon them rather than the mining companies. She should have taken a lesson from John W. Howard.  (The W stands for Winston by the way - Just so that we all know where he stands on the Republic debate.) He said that there would never be a Goods & Services Tax before the general election. Then Hey Presto! before the next electoral term was up we had a Goods & Services Tax. Quite right too. It was what the country needed and if he'd promised it before the election nobody would have voted for him. However, he certainly didn't allow the opposition to dictate the debate afterwards. The same applies to the carbon tax. It's good for the nation, but all of a sudden Ms Gillard is as popular as a porcupine in a condom factory for introducing it.

Now she's done it again. To retain power at the last general election Ms Gillard needed the support of a number of independent MPs, one of whom required a promise from her Australian Labor Party (Why Labor, not Labour by the way? We're not yet the fifty first state of the USA despite Mr Howard's nose once being  firmly wedged up George Dubya's bottom passage.) that they would introduce legislation to limit poker machine gambling. Julia made this promise, won the independents' support and so remained in power. Now she's reneged on that deal saying that there isn't enough support for the reform bill to pass through parliament.

Obviously she knows that more than half the members are in the pocket of the casino/gambling lobby, but all this has done is given the Liberal opposition party more ammunition. Why not introduce the bill anyway and test the numbers. That way, if it did fail to get through you could blame the opposition. Or are you in the pocket of the casino/gambling lobby too Julia? Still, what do I know? I'm just a small, fat furry thing who's testostricles drag along the floor when I run. Kind of like Bill Oddie.

Finally today, I couldn't help but notice that the newspaper lining the bottom of my cage had a "Letters to the editor." page jam packed with people whinging that Australia has become a "nanny state." It's apparently a nanny state because drivers are forced to wear seatbelts and cyclists to wear helmets. Well, listen you lot. When you crash your car and fly through the windscreen at one hundred and ten kilometres an hour or fall off your bike and smash your dumb heads on the road, who do you think pays for your three months in hospital, your electric wheelchair, all the other special equipment and your twenty four hours, seven days a week carers that you need because your brain is so badly damaged that you can neither walk, nor wipe your bottom passage? Yep. That's right - my staff and all the other tax payers. So, try to spend less time whining about "nanny states" and more time considering the possible consequences of not buckling your seat belt or wearing your helmet. You might want to start wearing a cricket protective box too because next time I hear someone complaining about this I'm going to run up their leg and bite their dangly bits.