Beggars' Choice

... I'm going to sound sub-Seinfeld; whenever I hear "the Little Drummer Boy" (and I'm beginning to hear it a lot these days) I always think, "as a parent of a newborn, is that what I would really want? Some youthful Keith Moon turning up, unannounced, and bashing away for an hour or two?". It's bad enough when it's next door, but I guess we should be thankful he wasn't accompanied by his otherwise ever-present mates, Little Bass Boy, Little Shouty Angst Boy, and Little Rev His Commodore Aimlessly for Hours on End Boy.

To cut a boring story as short as possible, the Australian federal government are about to introduce sweeping new Industrial Relations reforms. The Business Council of Australia (a name that says fun times like no other) have been running an advertisement which assures us that although our standard of living is quite high now (cue graphic listing us at 8th or so) watch what will happen if we don’t get these IR reforms! Tick tick tick, and down we go to number 18 or so. Bloody hell! 18! Would you stand for that? I certainly wouldn’t! Why, we’d be living like Mexicans, practically.

So, anyway, if you were wondering ‘do I support these reforms?’ let me say quite categorically, no, I don’t – because I don’t think they go far enough. If lack of IR reforms can send us sliding down the slippery slope that is ‘standard of living’, then by gosh it ought to work the other way too! Let’s lobby for IR reforms extreme enough to send us shooting to the top of that list, and knock off number 1, ie Luxembourg. Yeah, Luxembourg, those smug bastards.

You know it makes sense.

1. Playing chess
2. Unenthusiastic jigging whilst listening to iPod
3. Jazz Odyssey for bagpipes
4. Off-key grunting
5. Shouting at passers-by