August 04, 2003 @ 11:14 p.m.
Oi Rev, show us yer politics!

My morning routine consists of staring balefully at the plunger until my coffee is ready.

Sometimes it also consists of listening to the radio that lives in our kitchen, if someone else is awake to switch it on.

Deirdre was with me in the kitchen this morning, so the radio was on. Triple J, my housemates' station of choice (except for Fred who listens to some crappy station that plays tinny doof-doof music which I'm told by those in the know is actually pseudo-doof-doof music). I'm a Peebs girl myself, but I'm also inherently slothful so the station never gets changed.

Whoever Triple J have on in the mornings after 9am was on. And he was interviewing some guy about the Howard Government's (my favourite contradiction of terms!) proposed inquiry about the cost of housing and why so few young 'uns these days can afford to buy a house of their own (and don't move out of their parents' house, thus damning themselves and their partners to many years of quiet sex). I think this is an issue worth inquiring about; however I would have more faith in an inquiry leading somewhere if it weren't for the fact that the Liberals couldn't find their own arses with both hands and a scapegoat.

Also, it gets on my nerves because while I think it's about time something was done about ridiculous house prices, and while I approve of the government grant for first-home buyers (despite the fact prices have widely been raised as a result), I feel the only reason the Howard government really takes a stand on this is because home ownership is something that can be traced back not only to the Australian Dream, but also to "traditional values". It's a more satisfying feeling keeping a woman chained to the sink when the sink is in a house you're paying off the mortgage on.

The report on the inquiry will probably read something like this:

Cons re: bloody expensive houses - less affordable for the average Battler(TM), which means that Struggling Young Couples have to work longer and harder to afford a house, which means that women stay in the workforce longer, which means the uppity bitches develop a taste for having careers, which means they put off having children for ages or sometimes don't have any AT ALL, which means the population, by which we mean the white heterosexual middle-class population of Australia is declining at an alarming and irreplacable rate. Which means we may have to look at other means of bulking up the population so we've got more defence from those weirdos with the towels on their heads. Well, we could look to immigration, but look at what happened when the White Australia Policy was finally diminished. Fat lot of good that did us. Did you know that in some parts of the country these days, white Australians account for a mere 95% of the population? Disgusting. Besides, if we opened up that whole immigration thing, people might start demanding that we start treating those bloody queue-jumping asylum seekers a bit more fairly and processing their applications a bit more quickly. That would be more problematic than a Labor policy meeting. Ha ha ha, I said "Labor" and "policy" in the same sentence! I'm so funny!

But where was I? Oh yeah. If we want to create the kind of Australia we and our children and our children's pasty white inbred children would want to live in, we need to build a better mousetrap. By which I mean, look into making current mousetraps more affordable.

Pros re: bloody expensive houses - Well, it looks like the abos still can't afford to own property, ha ha ha ha ha ha.

With all that said (and surely you admire my ability to rant about several topics while ostensibly only ranting about one?), I have to admit that owning a house is one part of the Australian Dream I buy into. I'd love to own my own place someday. For no other real reason than that it would be mine, something very solid and tangible in my life, an obvious goal that I achieved. I have house fantasies the way girls much stupider than me have wedding fantasies. (In some of the fantasies, I live alone in my house except for a large number of cats, and I pass my free time by standing on the front porch hurling verbal abuse and ammunition of varying legality at passersby. I think this is where fantasy intersects with probable future reality.)

Actually, I buy into something else too: I want to write the Great Australian Novel. I don't really think this is possible; whilst I think my fiction writing ain't too shabby, I'm not sure I've got the GAN inside me. The Great Australian Porn Movie Script, sure, but not necessarily the Novel. Perhaps I can aim to write the Mediocre Australian Novel, like many before me, and hope that I hit above the mark.

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