Enter stage left the ghost of 2016 dressed as 2017...wearing a wig with a mouth like a puckered anus

"Whoa now people let me tell you 
Oh, now people let me tell you where the money is
It's lying and cheating and thieving and dealing"  

Dan Sultan "Money" from Making Waves (A Gadigal Music compilation)

There moost be summat in watta or wurld is off to shite in a handcart! 2016 was more bitter than a pint drawn from the bottom of a keg of a landlord with piles an' splintered teeth. Oh aye there were threads of decency in the wurld at large. Boot it were a struggle to connect these. I am still trying to make sense of the insensible with the Don Long outrage that lasted all of five minutes while the aunties combusted in grief and rage an the deaths in custody continue and there is still no glimmer of justice for any of this*. The folk of Australia seem to prefer to adopt ongoing blindness to detention centres, refugees and indifference to those in the world fleeing war and dying to reach safety. Not in my back yard syndrome and they only have themselves to blame for not being born in a more stable country. And the wars, like cancers destroying and killing indiscriminately. The green fanged rotten rise of the white supremacists. uber nationalists; who live among us in comfortable bigotry and a unique form of snarler eating , canned beer drinking, flag wrapped (and one with enough union jack to go "Oh I say old chap" in it) patriotism. Go figure! The neo libs and their variety of bed mates continue to wallow in greed while telling the disenfranchised to tuck in their tummies and take one for team Australia.

Unions to capitalism-bring back a strong united union movement

Boot we need to wake up in 2017! We are in danger of losing much of what we have taken granted. Sooch as our daughters growing up to do and be what they want as human beings. Sooch as that diversity is not a bad thing and being Australian is complex and ever evolving-not some 1950's charade of the world as was but actually never was. Nowhere is stable if we continue to suckle ignorance and indifference to the plight of others. We cannot keep being the Christmas Turkey that keeps giving to the fat cats. Shall I spread more dripping across me drumsticks as I go down the conveyor belt of life towards the oven marked "Bird your fooked!" It is a national shame that a tiny minority (and mostly men-based on consistently depressing economic research which shows  a majority of rich white men getting richer) are sucking the marrow out of our bones. Then they tell us, the people, there is no other solution but to privatise, steal from the poor, disenfranchised and disadvantaged. Because it is the "leaners" who are dragging us all down - not the robber barons and the entitled. Stealing from within the law is still stealing - like using taxes to fund your holidays and pretending to do a bit of electoral business to legitimise expenses. In the same mouthful they are all berating us that white men are taking such big hits to their esteem and are going to fight back to readjust the balance of power-tipped sideways by all those crazy, rampaging women and uppity people of colour! We've just gone too far in this equality business!!!

The rise of the right and the level of debate

Some days I am breathless with the improbability of it all. Boot for me the pledge of 2017 is its one foot in front of other. No point in being demoralised, better to get out and talk to folk, march sign petitions. Boot more so, educate yerself on the issues. Listen to what is actually being said and learn to listen by watching the weasel folk who don't want you know their real business. Make it your business to question their business (trust holdings, off shore accounts and dodgy accounting, no taxes paid and all). As their coffers grow by taking from yours ask yerself why do they deserve so mooch more? If you are on forty grand to do front line work in yer office and yer CEOs on three hundred grand- what makes what they do so important? Other than sending yer job off shore where they pay someone so much less who has to work harder, while they pat themselves on the back with a series of golden handshakes from having had to graft. Their sweat is the nectar our society is built on? Bollocks! They're joost having a laugh while pissing on us from a great height.

We the people do need to get involved, engaged and draw a line between what we accept in our name and do not accept. Sooch as burst the bubble of Pauline Hanson's myth grubbing and riffing on white Australia. Taking a stand is not a bad thing. Wanting a better life and in a society where we care what happens to one another is not a bad thing. Wanting to give our kids and their kids a better future means us doing the work now to ensure the world can be a better place. That avoiding getting into wars, being played like chooks at a raffle by politicians who think we are so dumb we cannot tell the difference between truth, lies and spin. Get organised. At work join your union, be involved and hold it accountable to help create a more productive and constructive work environment. But hold your bosses to account. Working longer and harder for less income does not a productive society make. Become an activist, yer know it makes sense, because right now, right here on a street near you "Your Planet, its lifeforms, its people NEEDS YOU!" Step up, inform, educate and roar like lions, howl like dingoes and laugh like kookaburras on day release from torpor and step out and democratise. You are not alone!

Vincent Lingari- gone but not forgotten his spirit marches on

* Buy "Ms Dhu" (featuring Felix Riebl and Marliya) and listen and weep. One more outstanding first people's song of pain and anguish to add to mix.