Marcus; eater of trees

Adam Giles contacted me via email at 14.11 this afternoon. here is my response...

dear adam,

 i find it heartening that you should choose to send me some form of communication today at 14.11 the day before you and your clp associates wish to be re elected to lead our wonderful territory in tomorrows election. sadly i can't help you as i live in the fannie bay electorate and therefore cannot help your re election on a personal level. rest assured i will tell my alice springs friends of what you have done to the territory since you came to power while terrance mills was representing the territory in japan. 

    i am reasonably aquainted with karen brown your candidate in my electorate due to my involvement over many years in the arts community and find her a fine person. i had a lovely chat with her while handing out greens waste of papers during the federal election at parap primary swchool. she, i must say, frowned slightly when i mentioned my opposition to fracking which i took as a slight abberation from the clp party line. maybe i was wrong and if i was i hope you forgive her for it should she unseat mr gunner and you retain the reins of power. 

    speaking of mr gunner, he was right next to the both of us as karen and i cosied up. of course i couldn't resist talking with him as i am a bit of a have a chat at times. with him i talked about the profligate waste involved in the community housing projects that have been in place for decades here. 

    by that i mean the lack of workable inclusive training programmes for the countrymen living in the communities, the overpriced and inappropriate housing choices justified sometimes by horrifyingly high transport costs, and the use of training companies who, if they did their jobs in the fashion i thought might be sensible and 'constructive' would be out of a very long term contract if they succeeded. a bit like the model used by the privatised usa prison system a cynic might say. he was a but evasive on the whole thing and i had to assure him that if he got re elected i would be in to chat more on the subject. i must say the issue is fraught with cultural issues that some find hard to cope with and i appreciate that, but i must say DEAL WITH IT ALL OF YOU FREAKS AND GROOVERS or you may be considered self seving, bank account filling, fuck ups by folk who for what ever reason believe they have a reasonable moral compass. 

    but i digress i think, maybe... who gives a shit really, i've started on the next bottle of port and i guess i should wind this up before i become incoherent. the reason i find your new found ability to communicate with your constituencies to be an improvement on your past efforts is because you never pbothered to communicate with me before except for vacuous party political news letters. don't worry i dont get much from the other mob either but i occasionally run into some of then in social situations. for instance mr gunner used to turn up to parap school council meetings when i was on the council.
    should you have chosen to have contacted ME about the TIO issue or the leasing of the DARWIN PORT i guess i would have disagreed with your plans and that might have made you sad. i would have been a bit sad too if you took offence to my opinions on those matters but i sometimes feel i must voice my opinion and all i can say about that is 'damn the consequences', sorry 'bout that mr g. 

     the other one i feel i must mention is your stance on fracking. you, on the radio just this morning, said you felt that the oil and gas industry needed to be supported as they employed good honest territorians (not fi fo's from around the country flown in by good people you may be aquainted with in the travel industry).

     i must assume that your support of a destructive dinosaur of an industry (sorry for being a bit opinionated there) is because you believe the workers involved in that line of work are too dumb to retrain into the far more sensible (for a sundrenched and broad tidal ranging country) industries of solar and tidal power generation. i won't enter into the use of geothermal energy in your neck of the woods because i am certain you are all over that issue. i guess it would be a waste of contractual paper if you were to start developing power that didn't use oil, gas and contacts developed over decades of contacts made by the clp for the good of the territory and (dare i say it) the world!

    i look forward to your cheeriest response sometime on, perhaps, monday as i appreciate you have a busy weekend ahead of you and i wish you all the best as i wish most fervently for the best for our rapidly warming world.

    as a poet i shall leave you with a haiku i wrote a few weeks ago at the fabulous Red Dirt Poetry Festival which i am sure you supported whole heartedly. here it is my good man. sorry about the use of a japanese poetic form if it drags up old memories but what the fuck, you did what you thought best. 

            Warm as toast i am,

            But should i be so warm?

            Stop burning fossil feuls!!

by crikey, i just saw another one i wrote that day which may be in some way appropriate. i dunno but...

            Debate time is gone,

            Senseless bickering is here!

            What happened to love?

yours with massive love and with air cheek kissy sincerity, 

Fred Van't Sand.

voter and territory resident for the past 31 years.

PS i do invite comments and opinion... unless i have somehow hit the nail very fully on the head and no more can be said. i can't see how that could be though.