The Angry Exile: Those illiberal Liberals again

The Hangman

Into our town the Hangman came,
Smelling of gold and blood and flame.
And he paced our bricks with a diffident air,
And built his frame in the courthouse square.
The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
Only as wide as the door was wide;
A frame as tall, or little more,
Than the capping sill of the courthouse door.
And we wondered, whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal, what the crime
That the Hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.
And innocent though we were, with dread,
We passed those eyes of buckshot lead --
Till one cried: "Hangman, who is he
For whom you raised the gallows-tree?"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
And he gave us a riddle instead of reply:
"He who serves me best," said he,
"Shall earn the rope of the gallows-tree."
And he stepped down, and laid his hand
On a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for another's grief
At the Hangman's hand was our relief
And the gallows-frame on the courthouse lawn
By tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way, and no one spoke,
Out of respect for his Hangman's cloak.
The next day's sun looked mildly down
On roof and street in our quiet town,
And stark and black in the morning air
Was the gallows-tree in the courthouse square.
And the Hangman stood at his usual stand
With the yellow hemp in his busy hand;
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike
And his air so knowing and business-like.
And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done
Yesterday, with the foreign one?"
Then we fell silent, and stood amazed,
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."
He laughed a laugh as he looked at us:
"Did you think I'd gone to all this fuss
To hang one man? That's a thing I do
To stretch a rope when the rope is new."
Then one cried "Murder!" and one cried "Shame!"
And into our midst the Hangman came
To that man's place. "Do you hold," said he,
"with him that was meant for the gallows-tree?"
And he laid his hand on that one's arm.
And we shrank back in quick alarm!
And we gave him way, and no one spoke
Out of fear of his Hangman's cloak.
That night we saw with dread surprise
The Hangman's scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
The gallows-tree had taken root;
Now as wide, or a little more,
Than the steps that led to the courthouse door,
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
Halfway up on the courthouse wall.
The third he took -- we had all heard tell --
Was a usurer, and an infidel.
"What," said the Hangman "have you to do
With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"
And we cried out, "Is this one he
Who has served you well and faithfully?"
The Hangman smiled: "It's a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows-beam."
The fourth man's dark, accusing song
Had scratched our comfort hard and long;
"And what concern," he gave us back.
"Have you for the doomed -- the doomed and Black?"
The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again,
"Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick," he said. "that we hangmen know
For easing the trap when the trap springs slow."
And so we ceased, and asked no more,
As the Hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night,
The gallows grew to monstrous height.
The wings of the scaffold opened wide
Till they covered the square from side to side;
And the monster cross-beam, looking down,
Cast its shadow across the town.
Then through the town the Hangman came,
Through the empty streets, and called my name --
And I looked at the gallows soaring tall,
And thought, "There is no one left at all
For hanging, and so he calls to me
To help pull down the gallows-tree."
So I went out with right good hope
To the Hangman's tree and the Hangman's rope.
He smiled at me as I came down
To the courthouse square through the silent town.
And supple and stretched in his busy hand
Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.
And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap,
And it sprang down with a ready snap --
And then with a smile of awful command
He laid his hand upon my hand.
"You tricked me. Hangman!," I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men...
And I no henchman of yours," I cried,
"You lied to me, Hangman. Foully lied!"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
"Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said. "Not I.
For I answered straight and I told you true --
The scaffold was raised for none but you.
For who has served me more faithfully
Then you with your coward's hope?" said he,
"And where are the others who might have stood
Side by your side in the common good?"
"Dead," I whispered. And amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me:
"First the foreigner, then the Jew...
I did no more than you let me do."
Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
None had stood so alone as I.
The Hangman noosed me, and no voice there
Cried "Stop!" for me in the empty square.

Maurice Ogden

Saturday, 4 June 2011

Those illiberal Liberals again

Triathlon competitor he may be, man of iron he ain't. In the face of accusations that the Liberals still get donations from the tobacco industry - and since both the donations, the industry and its products are all perfectly legal the correct response should be: "Yes, and?" - leader of the federal opposition Tony Abbot hasn't just bent on plain tobacco packaging, he's rusted away to nothing.

TONY Abbott has offered Coalition support for plain packaging of cigarettes, bowing to political pressure from Labor and sections of his own party for the tough new anti-smoking measure.

Sections of his own party, eh? Tells you all you need to know. Once again a brief visit to dictionary corner is in order:

Liberal

Adjective
1. Showing or characterized by broad-mindedness; "a broad political stance"; "generous and broad sympathies"; "a liberal newspaper"; "tolerant of his opponent's opinions".
2. Having political or social views favoring reform and progress.
3. Tolerant of change; not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or tradition.
4. Given or giving freely; "was a big tipper"; "the bounteous goodness of God"; "bountiful compliments"; "a freehanded host"; "a handsome allowance"; "Saturday's child is loving and giving"; "a liberal backer of the arts"; "a munificent gift"; "her fond and openhanded grandfather".
5. Not literal; "a loose interpretation of what she had been told"; "a free translation of the poem".

Noun
1. A person who favors a political philosophy of progress and reform and the protection of civil liberties.
2. A person who favors an economic theory of laissez-faire and self-regulating markets.

And since the Liberal Party fail on most of that, particularly and spectacularly the first three adjectives, it's perhaps necessary to hold the dictionary open at the right page and twat them across the eyes with it until it sinks in.

The Opposition Leader today revealed the shadow cabinet had agreed to back the introduction of drab olive green cigarette packages, depriving tobacco companies of their colourful branding.

"We will seek to amend the legislation to ensure that it really does bring smoking rates down but if our amendments fail we won't be opposing the legislation, because we really are committed in opposition as we were in government to try and bring smoking rates down,” he said.

Which I'm sure is welcome news to the tobacco industry. The illegal tobacco industry that is. The one the governments apparently don't bother trying to police much and instead leave it to the legit tobacco industry to deal with, mainly by way of trademark infringement cases.

SYDNEY is flooded with blackmarket cigarettes selling for as little as half the price of a genuine pack, but peddlers are avoiding punishment because it is tobacco companies who catch them.

The Daily Telegraph was able to purchase Chinese-made counterfeit cigarettes from outlets at Kings Cross and Warwick Farm.

British American Tobacco (BAT) conducts about 1000 undercover purchases each year and has taken legal action against more than 100 retailers in the past three years, effectively suing them for copyright infringements.

[...]

Illegal retailers caught by the ATO would have to pay five times the excise they avoided, plus fines and possible jail time.

Sources said it was left to tobacco companies to regulate the industry, serving notices on businesses for copyright infringement. Lawyers for BAT demand restitution for the estimated lost income and the retailers are told not to do it again.

So the illegal baccy trade already has a market advantage in that they can break the law and the people who are most inclined to do anything are their law abiding competition. The Australian Tax Office, incidentally, are too busy chasing millionaires hiding money offshore to really give much of a shit about it.

Now, hands up everyone who thinks that the legal tobacco industry will carry on doing this when they're no longer allowed to use their own branding. Come on, anyone? Anyone at all? Thought not. Not only will they probably be pretty disinclined to bother doing the governments' dirty work for them having just been shat on I'm not sure they'll even be able to do it. I imagine the strategy of the fake cigs makers is to make their products look at a glance as if they are the real McCoy, and they're hardly going to bother carrying on imitating trademarked branding that the tobacco companies themselves have been forced to stop using. And of course that doesn't even include the loose chop-chop being sold by weight anyway.

Identify the brand. Hint: it is not
"Customs & Border Protection"

Good news for the illegal trade, surely. Not only is there now cross party agreement to hamstring their legal and regulated competition yet further but the move will make the real difference between the illegal and legal products even harder to discern with the exception of price, and of course the illegal baccy trade was already winning on price by a country mile. Australia, it seems to me, is soon going to become one of the best places in the world to buy cheap smokes - they just won't be legal ones on which tax has been paid, which means that on top of all the other stupidity the federal and state governments are going to have to find ways of making up however much of the $10 billion or so tax revenue they will lose through this lunacy. Yep, at the moment smokers are paying more than the rest of us, which really ought to win a few more friends than it does. Can we really expect them to continue if the government persist in making consumption of legal tobacco too much of a pain in the arse?

More to the point, even if by some miracle this does actually reduce the number of smokers rather than increase the numbers buying illegal tobacco the government will still lose revenue and the rest of us will be expected to make up the shortfall. Now I don't know about anyone else but smokers paying more tax than non-smokers suits me just fine. I didn't mind too much when I was a smoker and it wasn't a major reason for me giving up - I don't see it as being all that different from someone who drives twice as much as me paying a lot more fuel tax.

So with just a couple of days left to tell the government - not that they'll be remotely interested in anything other than sycophantic agreement or pathetic gratitude - what we think if either of my readers are in Australia I urge them to pop over to I Deserve To Be Heard and make a submission via their web form to the Minister for Health and your federal MP. The Minister's email account seems to be sending rather a lot of automated out of office replies at the moment, which comes as no surprise, but unless you want those smokers that we're all supposed to dislike so much to be encouraged to buy cheaper fags and put taxes up for the rest of us we should really make the effort to let her know what we think.