Look, I’ve been a bit distracted these past two weeks, okay? I know I’m the first GrodsTeam member among equal GrodsTeam members and I have a responsibility to keep posting and commenting on this website, but sometimes real life walks into the blogging room wearing a ticking vest of shit-to-fuck-your-life-up bombs and martyrs itself. So shut up. Here are a few GrodsNibbles I’ve jotted down recently.

1) Iguanagate
I’ve been very much out of the news loop this past week or so and the whole “Iguanagate” “scandal” bemuses me. Ken L at Road To Surfdom summed it up beautifully when he wrote this.

It’s remarkable how being out of Australia for even 10 days, liberated from daily exposure to the news, can provide fresh perspectives on life.

On arriving home I found that the story du jour was about something called ‘iguanagate’ – the very name reeked so much of triviality and childishness that I couldn’t be bothered trying to find out what it was all about.

I mean, seriously. Is this the most important political issue in this country? Even in the top 100? If someone was visiting this country and picked up a paper to see what’s going down politicially they’d be within their rights to consider our nation to be a total joke. As my kids at school say in these instances: What. Evah. Maaaaaan.

2) Nelson Iguanagate doorstop gold
Of course Bren-doc Nelson has jumped on this total non-issue faster than a customs official on a heroin-filled condom that fell out of a smuggler’s arse. In a doorstop yesterday he gave four long answers to hard-hitting journalist questions, crapping on about how Belinda Neal and the Labor Party are destroying democracy, but did a brilliant u-turn and quickly aborted the interview when a journalist changed the course of the questioning and addressed a much more important issue.

QUESTION: A Labor official claims that the racist pamphlets handed out during the election campaign in the seat of Lindsay were created in a Liberal MPs office. What do you think about these claims and should there be some sort of investigation?

DR NELSON: Well, as we know from the Iguana Joe incident, Labor people will say and do anything.

Thanks.

P to the W to the N to the E to the D.

3) Rolling stock belongs to laughing stock
Australia’s most useless public transport minister, Lynne Kosky, has claimed that she didn’t release tender documents to the public (leaked recently by the Liberal opposition) because the uneducated plebs might find them “confusing”. Of course the public would find them confusing; after reading them I’m at a loss to work out how the government could possibly screw the system even more. In an effort to attract bids for running a system that is already at 100% capacity with no prospect of real investment in infrastructure, the Labor government is offering to reimburse most of the costs of tendering and restrict fines for bad service.

Disgraceful. Just disgraceful.

4) JB Hi-Fi is, like, so gnarly, dude
It’s official: JB Hi-Fi’s catalogues are written by 11 year olds.

I certainly felt the sickness when I read this

The Victorian government has a problem. 18 people have died in non-boom gated level crossing accidents across the state in the last ten months — with 25 deaths in the past four years — and the recent introduction of rumble strips, driver education campaigns, and other non-boom gate measures have done nothing to stop the carnage. It’s looking more and more likely as time goes on that Premier John Brumby and transport minister Lynne Kosky are going to have to bite the bullet and — gasp! — spend some serious money on boom gates to save some lives.

But that’s not how Brumby and Kosky roll.

The Victorian Government will slash speed limits at more than 70 level crossings across the state after a spate of fatal smashes.

Speed limits will be cut from 100km/h to 80km/h at 72 level crossings across Victoria by the end of the year, Public Transport Minister Lynne Kosky said today.

I’m tellin’ ya, this government brings new meaning to the phrase “tinkering around the edges”. Firstly, cutting speeds by 20kph around rural level crossings is going to do nothing to stop drivers taking the risks that often contribute to these accidents. Secondly, cutting speeds by 20kph around rural level crossings is going to do nothing to stop drivers’ concentration lapsing as it often has in these accidents. Thirdly, how is the government planning to enforce these speed limits at 72 remote sites across the state?

As much as I hate to say it, it seems that the Victorian Labor Party has put a price on human life and they’re not prepared to pay it.

Every day the Brumby ALP government in Victoria is looking more and more like the worst parts of John Howard’s shameful administration. Yesterday the head of the Transport Ticketing Authority, Vivian Miners, resigned from his job by “mutual consent” with the transport minister, Lynne Kosky. Miners is responsible for the smartcard ticketing debacle that is hideously over-budget and three years overdue, and in a completely unrelated coincidence he was due this morning to give evidence at a parliamentary committee investigating his apparent conflict of interest during the smartcard tendering process. This is the kind of accountability and transparency that John Howard was famous for.

But his resignation has highlighted the ridiculous salary that Miners was being paid: $545,000. That makes made him the highest paid public servant in the State, and it’s more money than John Surname earns in a year. How can we possibly justify such an astronomical salary for somebody whose job, while important, is to oversee only one aspect of one portfolio of the entire government? If over half a million dollars is justified for the head of the public transport ticketing division then why isn’t the Premier on at least double that figure? And since I can bring my classroom photocopying in under-budget every term why aren’t I paid as much as Vivian Miners is was?

The Editor, John Surname, Ant Rogenous, Jeremy Sear, Wah and Craig discuss the following:

* Blogging
* Kevin Rudd’s first 100 days
* The Liberal Party
* Brendan Nelson
* Interest rates
* Cricket
* The Herald Sun
* David Hicks
* Dick Smith
* Osama Bin Laden
* Prince Harry
* Connex
* Lynne Kosky
* Public transport
* Victorian Labor Party
* Fleshlight
* What is the plural of “penis”?
* Liberal leadership future

** I don’t know why but that bloody “Play now” link is still serving up episode four. I have no solution yet. Something to do with the intertubes broken or something. Just to be safe, use the “Play in popup” link or the “Download” link. **

[display_podcast]

 GrodsThink RSS feed

Back when Lynne Kosky became Victoria’s public transport minister she tried to solve the system’s substantial problems but pretending they didn’t exist. You see, the poor punctuality of train and tram services is all relative; punctuality was poor relative to commuters’ expectations which were unreasonable. How dare the public transport user expect their train to arrive at the time published in the timetable?

Now that Ms Kosky has acknowledged that commuters’ punctuality demands are probably reasonable she has decided to try and fix the problem. However, she’s not fixing the problem by making the service more reliable, rather she’s pledged to improve “personal and electronic communications with passengers” to show them that the system “cares” when totally failing the commuter.

Lynne Kosky is fast becoming a farce of a minister.

Lynne Kosky is coming up with all the great ideas about how to improve Melbourne’s public transport system and none of them require the government to do a thing. Last month she admonished commuters for unreasonably expecting their trains to turn up on time, and now she wants schools to stagger their start times to ease demand on the transport system during peak times:

Public Transport Minister and former education minister Lynne Kosky wants to run a pilot scheme encouraging schools to change starting times to spread the commuter peak.

“If we changed some of our schools’ starting patterns, and it probably is the ones that are located close to the city, that would provide incredible capacity on our train system,” Ms Kosky said.”

For crying out loud, why can’t the government “provide incredible capacity” on the train network by investing some bloody money? The government’s public transport strategy at the moment seems to require commuters changing their behaviour to match the crumbling and inadequate system rather than building a system that matches commuters’ needs.