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Narrow Minded Italian Catholic Conservative Peasant From Footscray

The prompts from the blog platform suggest that I introduce myself.

In short, I am several things.

Firstly, I am a Narrow Minded Italian Catholic Conservative Peasant From Footscray. I have been describing myself as that for at least the past 15 years or so.

This description might not be totally accurate.

I am probably not as narrow minded as I boast I am.

Whilst I am of Italian ancestry and reasonably fluent in Italian, I probably think more the iconoclastic way that Australians do, having been born and lived in Australia my whole life.

Nor am I particularly observant religiously, although like most people, 1600 years of Christianity being the dominant religion (‘thank you’ Emperor Theodosius) in Western Civilisation does tend to hard wire us in a particular way. (I do like to amuse myself by claiming that the dinosaurs missed the ark and that the world is just over 6000 years old.).

Peasant? Well, my parents are from peasant stock, as probably most Italian migrants in the 1950s were, and I like growing my own tomatoes in the backyard. But I am a lower middle class office worker really, with the luxury of participating in a post industrial economy. I also have a university education, and not in agriculture.

Whilst I am very personally Conservative, both culturally and socially, I am more Liberal than Conservative, and believe in individual rights and liberties and freedom of choice and conscience etc to the point where I can get quite worked up when I hear of proposals to intervene in the lives of people or to curtail our freedoms.

I also don’t live in Footscray, although I was born there (and proud of it), and lived and went to school there during my childhood and adolescence, and the Western Bulldogs (formerly known as the Footscray Football Club) is my AFL team. I do not live too far from Footscray though. I am in Avondale Heights, which is like a north western outpost of Footscray, and previously lived in Maribyrnong. But just like people from Fremantle claim that they are from Fremantle rather than from Perth, real Footscray people claim that they are from Footscray rather than from Melbourne. I suppose, historically, that it has something to do with the fact that there is quite a distance between the eastern boundary of Footscray at the Maribyrnong River, and the centre of Melbourne, and most of that two mile distance was occupied firstly by a swamp and then by a wasteland involving docks, chemical depots (where were you during the Coode Island fire in 1991?) and quarantine grounds….

Secondly, I am a postgrad dropout. That does contradict a lot of what my first description suggests I am, but we all are complex and many layered people. The MA thesis I was planning to write was about Nietzsche, Hegel and the End of History or some such, which is the sort of topic which would have been pretty passe in 1994 when I was interested in doing it. However, life gets in the way – working full time and getting a promotion at work which resulted in me focusing my energies and attention on my job meant that I did not have much left in the tank for a 30,000 word thesis. And whilst I still enjoy reading Nietzsche for his manic and frenetic style, Hegel is really boring.

As for more? I much prefer the writings of Anthony Trollope over Charles Dickens. I still enjoy re-reading my favourite Nevil Shute novels, and I occasionally re-read my copy of JRR Tolkien. I did ditch Game of Thrones about 100 pages into the first book, and don’t regret it at all. I remain very curious as to whether some of the unpublished novels of JD Salinger from his period of seclusion (I have the general impression he wrote some) will see the light of day during my lifetime, although I loathed Catcher in the Rye whilst finding his short stories fascinating.

Tang still exists

There is a myth that Tang, the powder used to create a pseudo fruit flavoured drink, was developed by NASA for astronauts.

I don’t think this is true, although I believe that astronauts did use it in the 1970s.

I still think of Tang as a very 1970s thing. I think that I first encountered it in late 1978 (around the time of my first communion) when a sample package was placed in our letterbox, to the mild bemusement of my parents.

I hadn’t seen Tang in years, although I recently did some casual searching for it online through the Coles website, which suggested that it was still around, although not available through Coles.

But then, to my delight, I discovered Tang is still available for sale. Last month, I took my mother to the Footscray Market (her big regular adventure) and we browsed through the independent supermarket in the back. And there, on a shelf beside the butcher section, there were a few packs of Tang in different flavours. Some of the flavours were a tad too exotic for me, but I was pleased to see that the traditional citrus flavours were available. Given that I have an abundance of fresh oranges on my trees at the moment, I chose to buy a lemon flavoured pack of Tang.

Will The USA Finally Abandon The Death Penalty

I was chatting with one of my cousins the other day about the botched execution of Krista Pike, and her miraculous recovery from it, with apparently no brain damage. I speculated (and I am skeptical about an afterlife) that perhaps she had actually died and gone to hell, and that a demon had come up to possess her body in her place. My cousin thought that would make an excellent plot for a horror movie.

I will put that flippancy aside. Krista Pike is a particularly evil person – if she did indeed die and have her body possessed by a demon in her place, I doubt anyone could tell the difference. Aside from the horrific way she murdered her classmate as a teenager, she later on had an opportunity to strangle another death row inmate – for which she is serving an additional 25 years for attempted murder. She is not one of those death row reform stories where we are dealing with someone who is penitent and a genuinely changed person, like some of those people for whom some advocates might elicit sympathy and call for clemency.

The best place for Krista Pike is to be locked up for life, where she has less opportunity (but obviously not zero opportunity) to harm anyone else.

But is it appropriate for the state to seek to kill someone like that, even someone who is clearly so monstrous as Krista Pike? And is attempting to execute someone in a way which is clearly painful and with a genuine chance of failing truly just?

Full disclosure: I am opposed to the death penalty. I did not always oppose it. In my early adulthood I would have supported it enthusiastically if it came up for discussion, and until about a decade ago, I was ambiguous about it. My position now is that some people may deserve death for their horrendous actions, but they should instead spend the rest of their natural lives locked up and forced to reflect on what they have done and the lives they destroyed, in the hope that perhaps they might find some realisation and repentance.

Krista Pike is one of two executions which are subject to intense scrutiny at the moment. The other is the imminent execution by firing squad of Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter. The US government originally intended to make this execution public through live streaming.

International outrage at this suggestion has caused the US government to reverse its position on the live streaming.

In a twisted way, I am disappointed that the US government is not going to live stream the execution after all. This is not because I have some ghoulish desire to watch this mass murderer torn apart by bullets from the comfort of my iPad. It is because showing the brutal reality of state sponsored violence in the form of public execution is something which will make most sane people extremely uncomfortable, and hopefully make them think more seriously about what capital punishment actually is, and whether it is something which a civilised modern society should still countenance.

The botched execution of Krista Pike was not broadcast, and I am unsure as to whether a video recording of it even exists. If it does, it should be available for people to see, so that they can reflect on the reality of what was attempted and failed. As it stands, the news commentaries on how the execution proceeded alone are enough to cause revulsion.

The USA is a very different place from the rest of the Western World. The excessive religiosity (a mutated form of protestantism different from the muted Christianity the rest of us nominally follow) and the obsession with gun ownership are matters that I find quite disturbing and to some degree bewildering. The commitment to capital punishment is, if anything, a symptom of this difference that is even more disturbing than the love of God and Guns.

Public executions were, for the most part, abandoned in Europe before the Second World War. Capital punishment itself faded out in the post war era. The last execution in Australia was the hanging of Ronald Ryan in 1967, two years before my birth.

America sometimes seems to be fifty or more years behind the rest of the Western World. The continued survival of capital punishment well into the 21st Century is one of the most visible signs of this lag.

I would hope that the public attention on the executions of Krista Pike and Nidal Hassan cause Americans to reflect on what the State, as the proxy for its citizenry, is empowered to do, and whether this is the image and reality that they, as a society, wish to represent themselves.

If anything good can come of this, and I do not see the intentional killing of any human being, however evil that person may be, as a good thing, then it would be that it causes opinion in the USA to finally turn against the continuance of capital punishment and bring it to an end.

Treasury Wine Estate’s Alan Bond Moment….

Kerry Packer was famous for many things, but his most famous quote was probably saying that you only have one Alan Bond come along in your lifetime.

What he was referring to was his sale of Channel 9 to Alan Bond at a premium price, which was followed, several years later, by Alan Bond selling Channel 9 back to Packer at a deep discount.

[Footnote – whilst Alan Bond was a very profitable moment in Packer’s life, there were similar but not as lucrative moments with his investments in eCorp and Crown Casino.]

The announcement several days ago that Treasury Wine Estate was selling the Rosemount wine brand back to its previous owner, the Oatley family, reminded me of Kerry Packer and his dealings with Alan Bond.

I did mention this to one of the corporate affairs people after the Treasury Wine Estate AGM a couple of days ago, who happened to be hob-nobbing with shareholders. She said that I was not the first people to make such comparisons since the Rosemount announcement.

So… let’s rewind about 25 years to when Southcorp still existed. Southcorp was at that time mostly a wine making company based in South Australia, whose main asset was Penfolds.

Rosemount was, at that time, a mostly cheap and cheerful wine company which was the second best selling wine brand in Australia.

Obviously they were doing something right, something which Southcorp’s Board of Directors wanted to emulate.

So Southcorp’s Board offered a friendly takeover of Rosemount which turned out to be an intentional reverse takeover, where the Oatley family became major shareholders of Southcorp and the CEO of Rosemount (a son in law of the family) became CEO of Southcorp.

Some of the decisions made by the new CEO destroyed a lot of shareholder value very quickly and caused the rise of the Casella family’s Yellowtail brand.

The old Southcorp distribution network in the USA was surplus to requirements, given that Rosemount’s network was being kept. Simultaneously, many NSW contract grape growers for the merged entity were also terminated.

This left a network of American distributors looking for Australian wine product to sell, and many Australian grape growers looking for someone to buy their grapes.

The Casella family stepped in, taking over the distribution network and filling that vacuum with a new cheap wine product made from the grapes that Southcorp were not buying: Yellowtail.

Yellowtail was not the first Australian wine brand to feature an aboriginal painting of a kangaroo on the label – I have seen others before this – but it was the first to become so phenomenally successful.

Current sales for Yellowtail globally are over $500 million – about a fifth of what Treasury Wine makes. Not bad for a business which got its kickstart from an ill conceived merger between two very successful wine companies.

In 2005, the Oatley family sold their Southcorp shares to Fosters Group, which precipitated Fosters taking over Southcorp.

Fosters then, circa 2010, spun off all its wine assets into Treasury Wine Estate, before itself falling to a foreign takeover in late 2011.

In the intervening time since the Rosemount merger in 2001 and now, the Rosemount brand has been reduced from the $1.5 billion Southcorp paid for it to a few footnotes in the Treasury Wine Estate annual reports.

The price of the transaction between Treasury and the Oatley family this week has not been publicly disclosed, but I strongly suspect that it is far far far less than the $1.5 billion Rosemount received in cash and shares in 2001. The Australian Financial Review used the term ‘a tiny fraction’ of the original price.

I’m curious to see what happens next, as to whether the Oatley family is able to rebuild the Rosemount brand back to its former glory days, and more importantly, whether Treasury recovers from where it has been in the past two years.

But it is a text book long term example of the sort of questionable merger and acquisition decision making which destroys shareholder value, or transfers it to more nimble competitors.

My Treasury Wine Estate Cargo Cult

Treasury Wine Estate AGM was yesterday, and I gathered my party posse and attended, as per usual, to freeload on the catering provided immediately after the AGM closed.

As in previous years, I am reporting on that catering. Two years ago, I would have rated everything 10 out of 10, given we had two hours of fine finger foods and access to many fine wines, leading with Penfolds Bin 28.

Last year, not so good (4 out of 10), but I still made the most of the hour of fine wine which was available, and of the lamingtons which were the dessert.

This year, even more disappointing, probably reflecting on the collapse in the share price and the suspension of dividend payments. There was no Bin 28, although I discovered eventually during the meagre hour of festivities that Bin 311 (a white wine in the same price point) was available and I made sure I got me some of that. I also got a good few sausage rolls (one of my many weaknesses) from the buffet. But I scored yesterday 3 out of 10.

Afterwards, my friends and I headed down the street to the Kelvin Club and had lunch there, with a couple of bottles of shiraz.

Reflecting on it when I got home, it occurred to me that myself and the other Treasury Shareholders are a bit like a Cargo Cult: we attend the AGM each year because we are retired and have the spare time to try and freeload a bit off the company in which we are minor investors. We take it for granted that Treasury Wine is always going to give us decent catering, because they always have, going back to the old Fosters Group days.

MyGov’s Tax Platform Is No Longer Fit For Purpose

Five months ago, I did luncheon in the Savage Club on the day after the Federal Budget, ie the Budget where our government reneged on its explicit election promises about capital gains tax issues and negative gearing. [Any wonder that critics are using AI very effectively to create parodies of Albo and his henchpeople? Ridicule is a very powerful political weapon.]

Whilst I was waiting for my guest to show up, I grabbed a coffee and a newspaper in the Social Room downstairs. It is interesting that whilst all the four major newspapers are available in the Social Room, the management of the Club had the prescience to place two copies of the Australian Financial Review rather than one on the table which holds the reading materials.

There already were several of my Brother Savages sitting in corners of the Social Room, grumbling amongst themselves about what they had read in the newspapers about the capital gains tax changes.

I truly wish that I could claim that I am so clever that all I needed was to read the erudite expositions of the journalists of the Financial Review to tell me all that I needed to know about the Federal Budget, but I have to be honest and say it was rather complex. Instead, I had to grab the Herald Sun and read the idiot’s guide to the Budget.

Which leads me to tax time. For all my adult life, I have done my own taxes, without assistance of an accountant. My taxes are pretty simple, mostly. I don’t have a margin loan, or an investment property, or any trust structures. All I have is my principal income (until recently my salary, and now my defined benefit superannuation pension) and my share portfolio based income.

I do buy and sell shares, and usually have losses to declare, rather than handsome capital gains.

I did consolidate aspects of my portfolio during the financial year, and sell off some underperforming shares, which left me declaring a net capital loss of about $45,000.

I shrug at that – I take my risks, even though that mostly is in companies which should not inflict so much pain on me.

What makes me incandescently annoyed is that trying to declare my capital gains events this year turned into a future exercise which repeatedly caused my blood pressure to spike. Each time I tried inputting my capital gains events, one issue came up at the end which stopped me from finalising my capital gains recording – something which made no sense and which had no prompt in the actual capital gains recording tool.

It isn’t just me. One of my friends who does his own taxes and has similar need to record his capital gains had the same problem. When I did luncheon with one of the committee members at my Club a couple of weeks ago, my luncheon companion, who is an accountant, drily observed that he had heard that there was a problem in the MyGov tax platform which was going to cause a lot of people to have to go to an accountant or tax agent to sort out a very very minor item before they could finalise their taxes.

And so I decided, for the first time in my life, to go to a tax agent and lodge my taxes through an actual professional. Whilst she was doing my capital gains tax recording in front of me, she came across the very same problem and had to ring her firm’s help line to work out how to get around that defect in the design of the system.

And of course, being me, I still end up owing money despite my large capital losses, causing some gnashing of teeth.

But when a government system which is designed for self service is not working in a way such that mug punters like yours truly cannot lodge their own taxes for the first time ever (and my taxes are more simple this year than they have been for many years due to no longer getting any payments from my former employer), then there is a serious problem – the designers of the system and the policy makers have gotten so out of touch that they do not care whether it works.

The online tax returns system in MyGov is simply not fit for purpose.

I assume that our beloved elected leaders, Anthony Ellery Albanese and Dr Jim Chalmers, have never lodged their own taxes by themselves, and that they have always counted on accountants to do those for them so as to maximise their deductions for their investment properties.

And that just shows what is wrong with the system and why so many people are angry at the established status quo.

The End Of Credit Card Reward Programs?

Ever heard of Diners Club? Most people under a certain age have not, even though it was once the pioneer in creating credit card culture.

My first credit card was a Diners Club card – a charge card actually (there is a subtle difference between charge cards and credit cards). I got it in March 1996 on the advice of a friend who proved many times over the ensuing years to be financially illiterate (bankrupt at least once, and at age 62 he is still working and not a home owner). It was cobranded with Ansett Airlines (who were a part owner of the ANZ franchise of Diners Club) and earned me 1.25 Ansett Frequent Flyer points on every dollar I spent on the card.

I actually ended up claiming three free flights between 1996 and 1999 – one return flight to Perth and two flights to Melbourne from Canberra when I was working in Canberra for most of 1999. I then accumulated some 58000 points between May 1999 and September 2001 when Ansett went broke, but did not have the time or inclination to take a holiday….

I cancelled the Diners Club card soon after that, but I had gotten a Visa card with my bank in mid 1996 when I got my first mortgage, and I still have that card.

Along the way, I have also had an Amex card issued by American Express itself, and later on an Amex card issued by my bank. And for one year, I had a Coles Mastercard.

The main motive for holding any credit cards initially, and even now, has been to accumulate reward points – the illusion of something for nothing we get when we spend excessively, supposedly on normal household expenses, although it does get a bit out of control very easily.

The Reserve Bank has, effective today, banned the charging of credit card surcharge fees to card users, in the hope that this saves consumers money.

Whilst the imposition of surcharges has been an extremely annoying and growing nuisance in recent years, the immediate impact on consumers has been the closure of various rewards programs. My bank has summarily replaced its main rewards program with its auxiliary program, which is far inferior.

As the Ansett experience killed off 90% of my desire to accumulate frequent flyer points a quarter century ago, my main interest in credit card rewards is claiming cash back on my credit card bill – something which, thanks to surcharges and the temptation to overspend, is a false economy.

As a believer in the doctrine of rational ignorance (ie that it is not worth my time and energy to study the fine print of most offers in search of a bargain), I am not going to waste too much time on working out how to game (if this is indeed possible) my current credit card’s remaining loyalty offers. Instead, I think I will phase out the use of my credit card in favour of a combination of my debit card and cash.

This might change the spending habits I have developed over the past 30 years, and cause me to reduce my levels of consumption. But I doubt it.

Moira Proves Me Right! Duh!

Several weeks ago I predicted in this blog that Moira Deeming was likely to join Family First, although I did hedge this with an observation that the DLP was also a possibility.

Yesterday, Moira announced that she is running for Western Metropolitan for Family First.

Told you so!

I can promise you that my only problem with filling in my ballot in November will be whether I put her above or below the Greens, Labor, Animal Justice and Reason parties.

Let’s Talk About Airwashing

I warmly welcomed the news a few days ago that Saudi Arabia’s LIV Golf Invitational Series is likely to be abandoned.

It was, prior to Saudi Arabia’s purchase of the 2034 World Cup Tournament, that tyranny’s most ambitious attempt at what we call sportswashing.

We all know what sportswashing is. Put simply, it is the attempt by companies, governments or individuals to divert attention from their more nefarious or otherwise dislikable activities by sponsoring sporting activities, be they sporting teams, or leagues, or global tournaments.

I have written about sportswashing on at least two occasions in this blog.

At least one of those posts involved discussing it in the context of the Apple TV+ show Ted Lasso, where a fictional Gulf State airline is a sponsor of AFC Richmond, and the ownership of this airline by that Gulf State is used to sportswash its exploitative business practices in Nigeria. This of course results in a player revolt when they realise this, and the ending of this sponsorship.

Another of these posts talked about real sponsorships in the AFL. The Sydney Swans are sponsored by Qatar Airways, which is owned by the Qatari government. The Qatari government, of course, is responsible for the Doha Airport incident, where several Australian women were forcibly removed from an airliner and subjected to invasive gynaecological searches. I have argued continuously that Qatar needs to be held to account for this, and that its corporate proxy, Qatar Airways, should be penalised.

I probably have also written about Emirates Airways, which sponsors the Collingwood Football Club, and has done so for many years.

I have not gotten around to writing about Etihad Airways, which used to sponsor what has now been renamed as Marvel Stadium, and which owns the Manchester City group of soccer teams – including Melbourne City.

All three of these airlines are government owned – the former by Qatar, and the latter two by one or other of the emirates in the UAE.

All three are national flag airlines which use their sponsorships and ownerships to detract notice from the appalling human rights records in their their home countries.

Qatar of course has been better at sportswashing than the UAE, in that it was able to successfully buy the hosting of the 2022 World Cup tournament – a voting process which was rife with bribery.

But one of the aspects of sportswashing which so many of these instances have in common is the usage of airlines.

True, the use of oil wealth to create from out of the wilderness a large and luxurious national flag carrier, like Qatar and the UAE have done, has other purposes than deflecting attention from the reputation of the respective regimes in relation to human rights or business practices or environmental concerns. For instance, creating major global hub airports at Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Doha, has attracted a large tourist trade which did not exist three decades ago. It may even lead to a sustainable long term global business – although I believe the end of Etihad’s stadium sponsorship had something to do with issues with the bottom line.

However, let us not pretend that using the untold billions of oil revenue possessed by some of these nations to create national flag airlines is simply a matter of economic motives, such as creating trade and tourist routes.

It is a matter of directly increasing national prestige by normalising the business and consumer relationships of people in other parts of the world with these regimes, regardless of the human rights and other concerns about their political and business leaders.

Indirectly, through their sponsorship deals, these state owned airlines engage in sportswashing to a unprecedented degree.

So it is not a case simply of sportswashing. It is something bigger that these states engage in. It is what I term ‘air washing’. I am surprised that Saudi Arabia’s flag airline, Saudia, has not yet been utilised by that regime on the same scale as its neighbours.

But with the 2034 World Cup around the corner, I say: ‘Watch this space.’

Postscript: just realised today that several years ago I used ‘sky washing’ as a term to describe the same sort of practice. Me bad. The index on my WordPress account is not very good so I can’t keep up with my own writing.

What The Hell Is Happening In Footscray?

Despite living in Avondale Heights the past 23 1/2 years, I still consider Footscray my home town. I am proud that I was born there, and that it says as much in my passport. I support the Footscray Football Club (aka the Western Bulldogs) and own a significant amount of fan gear, including polo shirts and baseball caps which I wear regularly.

And I still spend so much of my time there. I don’t only pass through it en route elsewhere via Footscray Railway Station, but I also frequent various businesses. Today I took my elderly mother to the Footscray Market for her shopping. On Tuesday I met a close friend at the Station Hotel before we did lunch in Hopkins Street at a Malaysian-Chinese restaurant and then visited a few of the bars in Barkly Street. And last Sunday I did a long lunch with much red meat and red wine at the Station Hotel with a couple of friends.

And I don’t plan to stop going to Footscray – in broad daylight at least.

But there is a lot about Footscray recently which is truly rotten, and this troubles me.

Let us count the ways….

Just this week, two serious incidents in the Nicholson Street Mall.

Yesterday (ie Wednesday 5th August), the Mayor and another councillor were in the Mall for a meeting with local traders in the early afternoon. Council workers were clearing rubbish when one of the itinerants who haunt Nicholson Street started showing aggression to them. This resulted in that itinerant threatening the mayor with a large knife. After police came and took this chap away, he was booked and back in Nicholson Street within the hours, hopefully sans knife.

Monday (ie 3rd August), a local shop owner in Nicholson Street tried to intervene and break up a fight and protect people from someone armed with a wooden plank. The result was a broken arm.

On 25th June, local state MP Katie Hall intervened to stop a man kicking a woman in the head outside her electorate office in Nicholson Street south of the Mall – she got assaulted and required surgery for her injuries.

Earlier in June, the son of Barry Michael, famed for his boxing career in the 1980s (he was a world champion at one point) was charged with murder after stabbing someone behind the Courthouse Hotel (which is the pub located near the corner of Nicholson Street and Irving Street).

Several shops on the western side of Nicholson Street just south of the Mall were burnt out three weeks ago. I passed that segment of the street earlier this week merely because I don’t believe in ceding the streets of my home town – one of the shops was a kebab shop I would occasionally buy from.

Last November, a cafe in Buckley Street (which is on the other side of the railway tracks from the epicentre of the troubles) closed down because the owner was seriously assaulted in his shop.

In June 2025, a veteran news photographer was walking through Nicholson Street in broad daylight one Sunday morning when he was assaulted and received fatal head injuries.

And to top off the list, let’s remember that a man armed with a knife charged at police in Nicholson Street in April 2025. They shot him dead, which resulted in locals holding a protest against police violence.

I observe, somewhat wryly, that posters advertising this protest were displayed prominently in shop windows up and down Nicholson Street. I don’t remember seeing any posters protesting about the killing committed by the itinerant criminal (and yes, I am using the word ‘criminal’ with just cause in this context) who bashed the news photographer to death two months later displayed in any windows.

I do my little bit for Footscray. I still spend a fair bit of money in restaurants and bars there, including in Nicholson Street (I applaud the owners of Maples Cafe, the Footscray Best Kebab Shop and Mr West in particular, as well as the divers Ethiopian restaurants south of the Mall). I walk through the streets in broad daylight when I still feel safe there.

But me as one single individual who does not still actually live in Footscray can only do so much.

It is up to the local traders, the current residents of Footscray, the local council and the state government to actually do something, in proportion to what is in their respective power.

Local residents need to shop and spend money there. The traders need to organise better and put pressure on the council and government. The state government needs to commit the police resources to make Footscray safe again.

And the council? They are not hiring private security guards right now. What they are doing is advertising for two or three ‘engagement officers’ at $100,000 salaries (plus superannuation) to address the social problems in the Footscray CBD.

My mother of course has her own views. As the mayor likes to knock on doors and talk to residents/voters (he is very good that way), she is looking forward to the next time he darkens her doorstep. She will tell him he needs to hire some very big security guards to patrol central Footscray.

Moira: The Gift That Keeps On Giving – For Jacinta!

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you will be aware that I am not exactly an admirer of former State Opposition Leader Matthew Guy.

My thoughts on him during the late era of his leadership have been expressed thus, if you want a recap:

Bye Bye Bernie: But Matthew Guy is not off the hook….
Bad Guy! He’s Not An Alternative Premier – He’s Just A Naughty Boy

To reiterate, I consider him a hypocrite, a cad, and a blackguard, and my reasoning for such feelings is set out in detail in the above blog postings.

But for all that, I do not think that even he deserves to have Moira Deeming inflicted upon him.

Last month, Moira Deeming, who happens to be a former English teacher, complained to the police that Matthew Guy had put her in a headlock at some function. The police reviewed the security footage and took no action, as Guy had merely put his hand on her shoulder to get her to move closer to him so she could hear him clearly. Her explanation after her accusation was disproved was that she misunderstood the meaning of the term ‘headlock’.

I am so grateful that the English teachers I had in high school were competent and were able to instil in me a greater understanding of the English language (and are largely responsible for me being able to write in the fluent and coherent style that has lasted me throughout my studies and working life).

Matthew Guy has rightly demanded an apology from Mrs Deeming for besmirching his name in this way. As this has not been forthcoming, there is, yet again, talk of expelling her from the Parliamentary Liberal Party and removing her tenuously held endorsement to run as the lead Liberal candidate in Western Metropolitan. She has obtained a two week injunction preventing the Liberal Party administration from pursuing the latter course of action.

One way or the other, Moria has had the most destructive impact on the Victorian Liberal Party in the past four years. Her narrow preselection win four years ago was followed by the misguided departure of one of her main rivals who then ran against her as an independent, as well as the resignation in protest from the Liberal Party by one of her predecessors in the seat.

Then, on entering parliament, she participated in some now infamous rally which was hijacked by neo-nazis. The downstream consequences of her participation in that rally caused her to be expelled from the parliamentary party, to successfully sue then Opposition Leader John Pessuto for defamation, and then to cause Pessuto to lose his leadership in consequence. I am firmly of the belief that John Pessuto would have had the best chance of leading the Liberals to victory at the upcoming state election.

Her recent re-endorsement as candidate for Western Metropolitan only occurred because the prospective candidate who had successfully challenged her was immediately revealed as one of several prominent Indian community leaders who had given a character reference to someone gaoled for underage sex offences. [There were other issues with that other candidate, and I wish that local Liberals had done a better job of trying to find a better alternative to her.]

All of which, for a very junior sometime member of the state opposition, has taken up a lot of oxygen for both the party administration and the opposition leadership group which should have been spent on more important matters, like exposing the serious issues with the current government and choosing decent candidates in a timely manner to run against Jacinta Allen’s appalling government.

Jacinta must be grateful indeed for the existence of Mrs Deeming in the state opposition – particularly the way her presence fluctuates between being in the party and not.

What happens next? The state election is due in four and a half months. The party administration has not yet filled all the seats where it needs to field candidates, and having to decide what to do about this turbulent backbencher is eating up a lot of time and energy which should be spent on preparing for the election.

If she is allowed to run as a Liberal, then she will be a major electoral liability across the state. If she is disendorsed (and I have little doubt that this will happen), I am confident that she will look for a new home in some other party.

Apparently Pauline Hanson and One Nation were interested in welcoming her in earlier this year, but when Mrs Deeming chose to remain in the Liberal fold, their interest waned. I suspect that Pauline has learned over the past 30 years to be cautious about people who are not good team players.

But there are other options, which one could take from the Bernie Finn playbook (our Bernie, by the way, has gone from DLP at the last state election to Family First at the last federal election and has now officially embraced One Nation).

One Family First activist posted a long and very sympathetic entry on Facebook very recently about how hard done by Mrs Deeming has been by the Liberals. It is reasonable to interpret this as a public overture to her. I think it is a very viable option.

And of course, there is the DLP, who have taken one of the five seats in Western Metropolitan previously in 2006, and who welcomed Bernie in as their leader and candidate in 2022 after his long overdue expulsion from the Liberals. The DLP appears to be moribund at the moment, after changes to electoral laws on membership numbers stripped them of the ability to run in Federal elections, but the addition of a sitting member of state parliament would reinvigorate their capacity to run candidates.

Moira Deeming might be down, but she is definitely not out. More’s the pity.