Piers Akerman, Radburn, Rosemeadow, the Dole and Lateral Thinking

Thank the lord for the fat owl of the remove, one Piers Akerman, columnist for the Daily and the Sunday Telegraph, and his latest article Rosemeadow solutions.

Just when you think the world is tilting on its axis, and the valiant fighters against the left have abandoned the field - Michael Duffy in search of a good coffee, Miranda Devine who knows where - as January slumps into the time of the lotus eater, and lefties take over the world, along comes the portly chappie to remind us of the perils of the left.

Last week, he managed to sort out the blacks by suggesting they go back to a bit of horticulture and feral pig hunting, instead of some tedious make work scheme involving looking after the land. Brilliant, and especially useful for those blacks stuck in a desert climate.

This week he regales his readers with a deep understanding of Radburn New Jersey, which he uses as an insight into Rosemeadow, Sydney. But wait "Although they share a common design, there's no other similarity between the garden suburb built for affluent Americans in the '20s and the public housing estate built for indigent Australians in the '70's".

Well, okay, but it makes a good lead on to the story, as Piers can blather on about the orderly design of Radburn, then bemoan the way that's turned into an "us" and "them" mentality in Australia.

Piers then goes on to show just how much he's part of "us" while he talks about "them" - the unruly ruffians who indulged in a public melee (such a quaint word to describe a brawl) last week, and so saved the world for tabloid papers in search of a weekly sensation.

Piers does a little cherry pick of a story by another reporter with the Daily Terror - no point in running a story when you can run it twice, and show those greenies how to go about real rcycling. It's the sad and sorry story of one Lauren Williams, Rosemeadow mother of four, a drinker, a product of a broken home, last employed when she was 16, and with her kids rapidly heading in the same direction as her and her some time partner (the father of three of four of them has seen jail time for drugs and guns).

It's all, he mutters and mumbles, indicative of things gone wrong amongst the detritus of society. As a solution to the problem, the state government is now proposing to pull down the estate, which doesn't spread the poor through an area but instead concentrates them in the one space.

Akerman doesn't think the problem is architecture (not that anybody said that, they were thinking about social planning, but hey let's go with the flow). No, the problem, it seems is the dole, which was one designed for those who had fallen on hard times but has been used by social engineers from the Left who regard it as another tool for redistribution of wealth.

Yep, at $270 a week, that's real redistribution of wealth. No wonder why between riots the good citizens of Rosemeadows go out and buy the odd Mercedes or Rolller. Those cunning lefties with their fiendish ways, stripping money off Malcolm Turnbull and Piers so they can have a real consumerist bout the average middle class citizen would envy.

But worse still, it's likely that "avaricious lawyers" will create new income streams through a charter of rights which will give dole bludging the status of an inalienable right - no doubt in the same way the pinkos have used the American Bill of Rights to establish a new dictatorship of the proletariet. You know, the way they hand out food stamps in America is a real scandal.

But okay after all the generalist blather what is Piers' actual solution to the actual problem - strip the mother of four of all payments, starve her and her children to death, or send them out to a salt mine to work, or ship them off to New Zealand, or better still down to Tasmania to work in the new pulp mill, or take them on a forced march to Alice Springs to work on horticulture with the blacks, so that only the tough who survive will awaken to a glorious new dawn? Maybe they could just live in the street, or under a bridge, like that troll that kept giving good folk a hard time?

What do you actually propose to do Piers, apart from mutter darkly into your hundred buck bottle of chardonnay, with its woody zest and fruity overtones?

Well actually the fat owl of the remove is never given to solutions of any kind. He's just given to bitching and dark conspiracy theories. So he seizes the moment to take a shot at the ideological priorities of NSW Labor by bemoaning the licensed shooting gallery that gives junkies a warm safe place in which to inject their poison. Everybody knows, especially Piers, that things are much better when junkies inject their poison in cold, dank uncomfortable and unsafe places - that way they can kill themselves more easily, and by killing themselves off make the world a better place for Piers and for "us". QED.

But what's that got to do with Rosemeadow? Well, concludes the fat owl, bricks and mortar aren't the problem. "The solution has to address the culture in Macquarie St, not Rosemeadow".

Brilliant. The fat owl can always be relied upon for a laugh. That's Pier's solution, and what a solution it is. The one thing he should have added is that blather is a reliable purgative for the soul, if not a damn good laxative and diuretic for the body.

Simply put, the fat owl has nothing to offer when it comes to a real solution to these kinds of neighbourhoods, outside of a relentless stifling ideological purity that's so dumb and impractical it's recently been discarded in elections throughout the thinking world. (By the way, just what has Macquarie street got to do with federally funded and delivered unemployment, single mother pension and other support mechanisms?)

But each week, if you want to see a comically alarmist vision of the Hindenburg exploding in flames, tune into Piers so you can experience an assault on safe houses, bills of rights, dole bludgers, lawyers, politicians and Macquarie street.

When rhetoric becomes rote, it becomes a social evil, part of the problem, never a solution, never a bridge between "us" and "them", but a paranoid fantasy, a shadow play designed to whip up rather than sort out community passions. Instead of lateral solutions we get laboured festering delusions.

If only we had a "worst person in the world" segment for the Australian media, surely the hapless fat owl of the remove would be a strong weekly contender. Yahooh, I say, give me some more of that tuck, you beasts. And if you live in Rosemeadow, no tuck for you at all, you wretched, dole bludging lefties, sucking on the teat of society, and having such a good time at our collective expense, as alcoholic dead beats doing time in the jail of life always do.

Memo to Piers and fellow thinkers: "must try week on dole in wretched estate with bugger all cash to hand, brain wasted by grog, children acting like wild things, and cask near empty. Surely to experience this nirvana once in a lifetime will be enough for ultimate insight". And the answer is ...?