Mayor Mullet and Anna Alphabet pull a swifty on the water pipeline malarkey, but The Magpie calls them out.
Cairns has dropped its funding for promotional body Advance Cairns after an independent review – shouldn’t Townsville follow their example?
And Ewen Jones (remember him?) makes an appearance on national TV to pull the race card on Adani opponents …
But first …
Talking Turkey …
In Australia, the first Tuesday in November is all about horses, and in America, the fourth Thursday in November is all about turkeys, th traditional nosh for the annual Thanksgiving holiday. One of the more bizarre traditions in this killingest of countries is the ceremonial Presidential pardoning of a turkey, excusing the bird from meeting its baker. Bentley seems to think things are more than a touch ironic this year.
The ‘Pie wonders if The Trumpet would have spared the bird from the chopping block if it was a black turkey.
Was This The Work Of Simpo Templeton?
The ‘Pie wonders – with good reason – if a photo opportunity hoax during the week was all the work of the Townsville City Council’s new media man, former Astonisher beat-up artist and Mullet lap dog, Anthony Simpo Templeton.
Anthony Simpo Templeton
The ‘Pie’s suspicions are based on the fact that it was a hoax, pure and simple, claiming to be the official first turning of the sod for the much debated second water pipeline for Townsville. It was an occasion that didn’t fool one photoshopper.
The only sods that turned was when Mayor Mullet and Anna Alphabet both turned to the camera for a deceptive photo op in a desperate chase for votes, and in the Mullet’s case, credibility.
We’re accustomed to political lies , non-answers and subterfuge at all levels, but it becomes a real worry when a mayor, a premier and the only newspaper in the city collude to deceive readers. Normally it is just a lack of balance, but this straight deception was aimed more at the well being of the paper’s associate editor Mayor Mullet.
But deception it was. one council emplyee was pissed off enough to risk this comment on the Magpie blog during the week.
Council Insider
November 24, 2017 at 8:00 am (Edit)
Early this week the premier and the mayor turned up out at Woodstock to what was claimed as a turning of the sod ceremony for the start of the second water pipeline.
The question was asked was this a genuine sod turning or not? I am afraid the premier and the mayor misled the people of this city. Every year before the impending wet season contractors with excavators go around the city’s waterways and clean them out to ensure these waterways work efficiently if we get heavy rain. This is exactly what was happening when the contractor was told to stay on site and scratch around in the dirt so the premier and the mayor could pretend this was a sod turning.
I can tell you council is still a long way away from starting on the pipeline. For someone who works for this organisation it’s embarrassing to see the mayor deliberately misleading the public. I couldn’t let this go by but for obvious reasons I can’t give you my name. I just wanted to let people know this whole exercise was a hoax.
The big hoot in all this is the involvement in above story would’ve been approved and chortled over by the Astonisher’s resident Wylie Coyote, deputy iditor Damo Tomlinson. Like Wylie, Damo has a predilection for dropping anvil’s on his head, or blowing himself up. So if you recall just recently in his Mein Kampf Lite column, he gave us all a good chortle when he took a big stick to ‘media organisations’ which, Wylie claimed, regurgitated Green Party media releases without any examination or investigation. Which is more than a bit rich coming from a person who has a role in the headless-chook, Facebook-dependent twaddle that the Astonisher churns out for its diminishing masses.
But Wylie ol’ son, where was examination or investigation of the pipeline ceremony tripe? Or was the word of Simpo (or maybe Dolan, was it?) good enough for your lofty journalistic standards?
Seriously, What Are We Paying Them For?
It seems we in Townsville might be returning to the dark old days when we continually turned envious eyes northwards and regularly compared ourselves with Cairns. While this can be self-defeating, perhaps there’s one recent move by the Cairns Council that Townsville could look at. The council there has voted to cut its $300,000 funding of Advance Cairns, the city’s Townsville Enterprise equivalent.
It’s a massive stink up there, with the crux of the matter being a council review which found the group had fallen short of its obligations around co-operation, transparency and delivery of infrastructure investment.
That being the criteria, Townsville Enterprise would certainly be guilty of the final two counts.
But while Advance Cairns Trent Twomey in his defense reeled off a list of tangible, actual achievements in recent years, The ‘Pie wondered how TEL Chairman Kevin Gill or CEO sock puppet Little Patty O’Callaghan would put up as a defence if their council funding was kyboshed here in Townsville. Actual achievements would be thin of the ground to the point of invisibility. Otherwise, why don’t we know about them?
But look at this … Little Patty sent out this little alert this week past, in which the findings of an economic assessment on the proposed underwater art museum were summarised. So, what did we learn here, folks?
It’s a report detailing the purported benefits of the underwater sculpture project (which is in itself a great idea).
First red flag that is raised is its author, our city’s wannabe Economist in Residence David Lynch (Dolan Hayes business partner). Whether the numbers in his report are any good is, for the time being, by the by.
Mayor Mullet previously has rubbished Lynch’s economic analytical ability as work as ‘not worth the paper it was written on’.
Astute readers will recall it was Lynch who penned Jane Arlett’s economic impact report on the proposed second Burdekin Dam pipeline during last year’s council elections. The Mullet railed against Lynch’s the report while attacking Arlett, and famously asserted that there was no water crisis.
But Lynch’s latest report – which apparently The Mullet thinks is just beaut, although the original idea was sparked by sacked gallery director Shane Fotzgerald – actually exposes another problem. You see, according to Lynch, a public-private investment model for the underwater museum of $5.75m would deliver an annual impact of $42m. That’s a 7.3 : 1 ratio. Contrast that with the Council’s gamble on the billionaire’s airstrip at which $18.5m of ratepayers’ money is being thrown on the promise of $90m annual impact. That’s a ratio of 4.86 . So on a straight bang for buck terms, the tourism gig is 50% more effective than the airstrip. So why would Council gift an airstrip to a billionaire for an airstrip hundreds of kms away rather than invest in something that is (a) demonstrably better bang for our buck, (b) local, and (c) doesn’t jeopardise our city’s reputation but rather, enhances it?
One other little thing about this one … Lynch admits that the entire analysis he undertook was based on the Input-Output economic model provided by a company called REMPLAN. Townsville Enterprise subscribes to REMPLAN. The ‘Pie hopes Lynch was not paid simply to run a model that TEL already pays for! This doubling up would be an egregious waste of public monies.
Then There Was This …
Townsville Enterprise fanfared its annual ‘economic snapshot’ report of the region, all very swish and full of numbers, stats, hopes and dreams. Which is all OK, but what’s this we see down the bottom of all this …
This report was clearly written by Carey Ramm’s AEC group, who are pretty whizzbang with this sort of data. And you can bet AEC didn’t do it for nothing, and was paid by TEL for their trouble – one way or another.
But wait, wouldn’t that just make TEL simply a commissioning entity, with bugger all substantive input? Something a council staff officer could’ve done before morning smoko, even on a busy day?
An independent review of TEL’s operations – and what they actually do do – would put any dust-up in Cairns in the shade.
And Cheer Leading This Waste Of Ratepayers Money Is – Ta Da …
The views emanating from Wishing Well House, home to these Dudley Do Nothings, no matter how inane, are continually bolstered by an erratic Townsville Bulletin, which continually and knowingly supports various narrow agendas for its own spectacularly unsuccessful commercial ends. And for this abdication of a newspaper’s prime responsibility towards the community that suckles it, the Bulletin is reaping its just rewards in disastrous numbers. And not just in the print version, which is well and truly down the toilet, the the paper continues to be shunned by its potential digital audience.
A rating of 1.8 is pretty dire, and just a thousand or so take-up by Android users.
Oh dear.
CLEVER OR JUST CALLOUS?
The placements of ads in newspapers has always called for layout subs to be wary and alert, because the juxtaposition of certain stories with certain ads can cause great offence and sometime legal difficulties.
The Magpie mentioned this matter three years ago:
In the 1950s, London’s Daily Mail lead story had the headline about the anti-colonial violence in Kenya, . The headline read ‘Mau Mau Butcher Two Nuns’. Right next to it was an ad for the popular Three Nuns’ pipe tobacco. Sadly, the tobacco’s slogan, emblazoned next to the headline was ‘I prefer Three Nuns’.
The ‘Pie was reminded of this when he spotted a double page spread in the Astonisher – the question is asked : was this an error on the right hand page? Or was it callous cleverness?
However, there was one neat headline in the paper this week. The story was about a kid who bashed a cab driver but avoided jail because he was to return to his church bible studies (courts believe this sort of thing, you know).
Interestingly, the headline on the website had been changed to something more pedestrian .. wonder if the bible bashers complained?
But some errors are simply unthinking mistakes … or in the case of an Adelaide catholic school, shall we say a cock-up. With much fanfare, Blackfriars Priory School unveiled a new statue of St Dominic.
With much less fanfare but a sight more speed, the statue was hastily covered by black sheeting.
And if you ask why, may God bless you for your innocent life.
When They Pull The Race Card, You Know They’re On The Run
Ewen Jones
Dumbo Jumbo walks among us again, at his gabbling, infuriating best. Infuriating because of his long standing habit of making some valid points with clever and colorful phrases, before plunging off into boofheaded insulting silliness.
Take last Thursday, when he was a guest on the ABC gabfest program The Drum when it was telecast from The Strand. Host Ellen Fanning wanted to discuss Adani and the general plight of Townsville with guests Dumbo Jumbo Jones (replete in thongs, shorts and an untucked business short), …
… Carey Ramm of AEC and, for some reason, Paulina Skerett, principal of ST Patrick’s College on The Strand. Why she was there is a bit of a mystery, but Ramm gave a very balanced and sober analysis of the Adani issue. Although a former Labor staffer, he has a wide business background – The ‘Pie once observed that Mr Ramm had fingers in more pies than the Collingwood proctologist – and this allowed him to give both competing sides of the debate in succinct and fair terms. His summation of the Adani request for Australian taxpayer money for its rail line was to the point but couched in diplomatic terms.
‘This is the biggest coal mine in the world they are proposing, so if you’re going to build the biggest coal mine so a billion dollars just for your rail infrastructure shouldn’t stop you. I mean, we’re talking about a project that will got for 40 to 50years … a billion dollars is neither here nor there (to Adani).’
But there’s no show without Punch, so we received the recycled wisdom of former member for Canberra who lived in Herbert, Ewen Jones. Normally, the usual pap we get from this quarter is hardly worth repeating. But The ‘Pie is sure he was not the only one offended by the shallow waffling justification for the mine when he said the arguments against Adani ‘is racism at work – people are saying because they are Indian, they must be dodgy.’
Is that all you’ve got Ewen? Really? Any possibility that people, including The Magpie, oppose giving both taxpayers and ratepayers to Adani because he is a corporate crook. That is according to the Australian, the SMH, ABC and Fin Review, to name a few who have published their solid research in this matter. The ‘Pie has long opposed the giving of public money to Adani, because Guatam Adani is a proven self-interested shyster and liar, who has shape shifted his way through the known facts like a malevolent wraith bent on fleecing suckers. He is not a crook because he is Indian, he’s a crook because he exploits gullible dills like Mayor Mullet and Senator Matt Canavan, his Canberra cheer leader.
But by you’re measure of tortured logic, Dumbo, no matter what the evidence, one mustn’t say anything, or one will be judged a racist because he is an Indian.
Channeling the creepy Canavan’s line doesn’t do anything for your credibility, Ewen, which is already on crutches.
Here’s the program, with Dumbo at 19.56, and Carey Ramm following immediately afterwards.
Finally … Was It Creative Or Just A Cock-Up?
An American jet fighter crew has been stood down for their creative effort in skywriting over Washington (state not DC).
………..
That’s it for this week, but comments during the week are sure to be running hot with election opinion, join in if you feel the urge. And if you feel a different urge to show support for the blog, the how to donate button is below.
