WTF is #TeamAustralia: @YaThinkN wants to know #auspol

Graphic courtesy of the talented @TwoEyeHead who has some sheer gold on his site twoih.com

OK I will admit that I have been AWOL from news and social media in recent weeks. Yes, one of those people who have been reduced to the ‘don’t have a bloody clue and should not be given the privilege of voting’ status as they are clueless.

Life just sucks sometimes and the PM’s recent ridiculous faux pas or antics have not been high on my radar lately. I now have great sympathy for those punters out there whose eyes glaze over when anyone starts mentioning the ‘P’ word – POLITICS – at some stages in your life, it just doesn’t matter so much.

Having said that, I have endeavoured to edumacate myself in recent days. I’ve been reading heaps, going back through papers and reading tweets from tweeps who have helpfully given me the heads up on certain things they felt I should know (sincere thanks) in regard to recent current affairs.

So, in summary, this is what I have learned:

• The PM has been jet-setting again, obviously finding it easier to swan about on the world stage than actually do any work here.
• Hockey still hasn’t made many mates in the Senate and his budget hasn’t budged from where he and his cigar-smoking mate left it months ago.
• Bishop has been doing her best to tell us that the trade sanctions Russia is smacking us with are not really the fault of Tony being ‘the man’ in trashing Putin.
• Brandis did the dirty on Bolt and just maybe we all don’t really have a right to be a bigot.
• Morrison has been playing linguistic Twister with the media, when really he wants to say that the esteemed Ms Triggs is full of shit, as obviously he knows best how to be humane to the poor buggers trying to get to our wide brown land. (Sometimes that sarcasm font really is imperative, when will someone invent it???)
• Turnbull has been quietly chatting about media ‘reform’, well we all know what that means, hello … more power to the News Corp Deathstar.
• Abetz informed any poor women who had an abortion back in the day and now have breast cancer that it was probably their fault. Geez on his form I am surprised he was not made minister for Health or Women? Shudder! Just had an awful image of the Salem Witch Trials.
• Dutton is still playing silly buggers pretending to make pretty with the AMA to get his dodgy seven-bucks-a-pop doctor visits happening.
• Pyne, ah he is steadily eroding that pesky equal opportunity to a decent education attitude that has been in place far too long. Luckily the self-entitled educational package is not over the line yet.
• Hunt single-handedly won the race for who can destroy their portfolio the fastest with the approval of the largest coal mine in Australia – Barrier Reef, Reef? What Reef? :(
• Brandis has been on fire, got two bites of the dumb cherry with his Metadata Meta Fail as yeah, we all trust this government to scrape every IP used in the nation ARGH!

BUT however bizarre the above are – and forgive me I could have missed a few highlights, as I said, still catching up here – Team Australia has to be the most weird.

Team Australia? WTF is that? I mean, I understand that ever since Tampa it has been the norm in this nation to scare the bejesus out of punters so that we don’t actually pay attention to the ‘real’ stuff going on right under our noses, but seriously? How the hell can dumping changes to racial discrimination laws morph into indiscriminate data retention and still be connected?

The name Team Australia itself conjures images of Tony Abbott in his budgies, malevolently stroking a big white cat on his lap, screeching:

We want all your interwebz, ALL OF IT! Terrorists! We have to fight all the terrorists! You are either with us or against us!

As I said, I have not been popping my head out of my personal box much recently so I could be reading this wrong, BUT it seems if you don’t want to help combat terrorism by giving the government and the AFP access to all your metadata (and pay for the privilege as the telcos sure as hell won’t be absorbing those extra costs), well, you are just not caring about terrorism and are un-Australian. I am assuming it is safe to infer that the opposite of Team Australia is that pollie favourite ‘un-Australian’?

So … I don’t want any telcos or the government getting their grubby little hands on my metadata so I must not be a candidate for Team Australia. Actually, from what I can see online, not too many, even in the fawning Liberal mainstay of the business community, want the government to access their metadata without due legal process. I mean, even old mate Costello doesn’t have a clue what the government is on about here. Does this mean that Team Australia is the exclusive realm of a minority of Australians?

I am just an ignorant middle-aged punter out in the regions so I could be wrong, though I am starting to think that this PM may achieve what no other politician in this country has ever been able to achieve: Australians being proud of being Un-Australian!

Dunno about you, but merrily traipsing along with the current government initiatives as criteria to be eligible for Team Australia inclusion seems pretty bloody sad to me and it’s not a team I want to be on :(

Then again, what the hell do I know?

Cheers,
Noely

PS: Of course I have not mentioned all the political highlights in recent months, so feel free to edumacate me below, except Lambie’s ‘well-hung’ bloke aspirations, I can cheerfully give that a big swerve ;-)