Zen and the Art of Mistakes

This was a particularly beautiful Zen garden at the Chiang Mai horticultural exhibition. I think it was from Japan. Without the people it was a very striking exhibition, with the square patches of green grass and concrete, the strange wooden cone construction. We bought chicken and rice and I had a Black Canyon take-away coffee and we sat on a bench and watched the crowds, exhausted. There is grime and an ever-sinking feeling; as if nothing was the aim of the game and the grasping for meaning and coherence was long since gone. I just want to be back in Thailand.

The holiday, particularly in Pai, was the happiest I had been in a very long time; and now, back in Sydney, I often wished we were still back there. A brand new three bedroom house with views up and down the Pai Valley, all for $50,000. Ninety year lease. There weren't kingdoms we could expose, tiny little secret valleys where hundreds of years of history had been swept over; when the real world out there passed by, civilisations rising and falling, and the cruelty that was the main stream of history kept falling over, leaving us in this tiny place, secret, hugging one's options to oneself, sacred, but most of all secret.

We were masters of the art; and it all made perfect sense as long as the money kept flowing. It was when the ATMs stopped working and the credit cards ran low; when the debts that we hadn't yet cleared mounted up on top of each other; and the casual success was no more. We were desperate for a solution. We wanted a consciousness that didn't do the wild swoops of anguish, ending in tears, but kept us calm and considered while everything we wanted was moved in part by an evil that wouldn't go away.

I was harassed, time and again. She was persistant in her demands beyond all normal bounds; stone cold greed that would rort any situation. No phone call or demand from that woman was ever in my interest. She picked up Sammy last night and she demanded to speak to me from the car. I tried to back away but got caught anyway. She had activated all the things with Centrelink, she told me, talking from her new $33,000 car. I'm entitled, she said, in that voice designed to raise the hackles of even the most tolerant bloke.

I tried to protect myself from the ceaseless demands, always over money I didn't have that much of anyway. Any target was worth going for, and my attempts to steel proof myself had failed. They were small amounts of money at the end of the day; bnt it was the principle of the thing. The government dished out money to the undeserving, while those who got up and went to work every day, who paid PAYE tax, we were the suckers supporting a massive and grotesque abuse of our money, all in the name of income redistribution.

Prime Minister John Howard, faced with appalling polls that give him no chance whatsoever of winning the next election, has played both sides of the fence; and is now paying the price. He dished out billions upon billions of dollars through Centrelink in family payments, catching up most of the country's families in the Centrelink bureaucracy because you needed to be registered to get your payments, basically to get your own taxes back. It was little more than buying votes. If he had done the right thing, and reformed the family court and the child support agency, he would have had a million or more separated parents out there campaigning for him. As it is, they have been dudded and must realise that by not fixing the problem, all the votes they might have had have disappeared. Your children are a vote changing issue; but instead they ducked and weaved, not having the guts to stand up the feminist lobby groups. They could have won so much support. They could have done the right thing by the nation's kids. Instead, they protected the bias of the Family Court and the discrimination of the welfare system in favour of the single mother model, they perpetuated the chronic welfare dependence amongst separated parents, denied hundreds of thousands of kids a proper relationship with their dads, and will pay the price at the box office. Serves them right.

THE BIGGEST STORY:

ABC:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200703/s1868897.htm

Attacks over Burke fail to dent ALP: poll
The Federal Opposition has opened up a huge lead over the Government in an opinion poll published in this morning's Fairfax newspapers.
The AC Nielsen poll has Labor leading 61 to 39 on a two-party preferred basis.
Labor leader Kevin Rudd's rating as preferred prime minister is up five points to 53 per cent, while Prime Minister John Howard's has fallen to 39 per cent.
More than 80 per cent of those polled said they did not care about the Brian Burke affair, despite nearly two thirds saying they believed Mr Rudd had been less than truthful about his meetings with the disgraced former Western Australian premier.
The poll of 1,400 voters was taken from Thursday to Saturday.
It suggests Mr Rudd's personal approval rating has risen three points to 67 per cent, while Mr Howard's has fallen three points to 46 per cent.
Labor's deputy leader, Julia Gillard, says the Government's attempts to attack Mr Rudd over the Burke affair have backfired.
"These polls are really telling the Government it's time to put down the mud bucket and pick up the tool box and start concentrating on the national interest," she said.
"All the Government's done over the last three weeks is throw mud."
Federal Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane says he is not concerned by the opinion poll.
"The real test will be when we do go to the election and Australians have to think about Australia's future," he said.
Mr Rudd's approval rating of 67 per cent is a record for an opposition leader.