Story by Emmjay

There was very heavy mindset traffic on the M1 this week with a severe ideological pile-up over the death of a pedestrian Maggie T who was said to have been wandering around in circles for years after decades of allegedly acting as if she “owned the place”.

This spilled over into regional backroad mindsets with the Federal frontbencher for whatever attacking the Foreign Affairs minister over “massively insensitive” comments of first-hand experienced racism by the Minister about the deceased, to wit – that Maggie T had advised him that Australia should shut the door to Asians – not realising that the Minister was actually married to one.

Some mindset holders alleged that the deceased was congenitally unable to experience embarrassment due to a brain defect (no right hemisphere front lobe) and a skin as thick as a rhino.

In other thoroughfares, mindsets showed increasing confusion over National Broadband policy with the most lucid Libnat making the mistake of standing next to Tony Abbott when he explained their putative approach – later described by industry specialists as amusing in an absurdist way.

No mindset surprises in the revelation Thursday this week that Sydney’s peak hour traffic came in at #7 of the world’s worst – increasing transit times in comparison with non-peaks, by more than 30%.  OK, Sydney WAS flowing better than Moscow (minus 30 degrees) and Venice (persistent water over the road in many places) and Beijing (who are actually smelting the air to recycle their heavy metals).  Allowing for slight temporal irregularities in the Earth’s rotational speed, and for leap years, it was conceivable, according to transport experts that Maggie T would still be a little bit alive if she had died on the way to work during peak hour in Sydney – which is well recognised as more like time travel than anything that can be detected on a GPS.

Consternation, anger, frustration and entrenched bigotry were on the rise again – this time over the State government’s decision to rip up the rainbow pedestrian crossing on Oxford Street – allegedly a frequently visited gay tourist  photo opportunity destination where, according to the O’Farrell government, gays camping it up for the lens on the rainbow crossing allowed redneck Eastern suburbs drivers too much time to organise hit and runs.

Staying on the transport theme, the Federal Minister, Anthony Albo announced  the second wave of transport fantasy in the run up to the Federal election.  The usual pile-up over Sydney’s second airport and the huge jump in Mylanta sales amongst the good people of Badgery’s Creek, was added to this week when Albo trotted out some guff about the East Coast Very Fast Train mirage being as imminent as 2019 – or the Sydney to Canberra leg, at least – with another ten to twenty years before Sydney to Melbourne via Wagga Wagga (is that a swinging seat again ?) in 3 hours becomes a reality.

The announcement prompted an astonishing quiet, punctuated after a time by a single voice (a parched journalist) coughing and ordering a Coopers followed by a lot of shuffling and shoe-gazing as the press gallery tried to avoid eye contact with the Minister, less the embarrassment became universal.  Snake oil futures continue to rise rapidly and still show no sign of peaking.

Mindset traffic also came to a standstill in Sydney’s CBD this week when the City Council’s plan for turning George Street into a pedestrian mall transversed by light rail – Bourke St Melbourne style, hit a major roadblock in the form of the State Government asking the City Council what it was planning to do with all the traffic that was not then going to run up George Street.  Seasoned commuters are used to waiting for the next apparition to arrive and nobody needed the City Council to actually say aloud “Gee, I wish we had thought about that!”.  It was clearly not the first time the planners had run themselves up a one way cul-de-sac.

Street violence mindsets continue to strengthen with the O’Farrell government opening up public car parks to licensed shooters this week.  Parking attendants have demanded bullet-proof vests, to which the premier responded “We’ve heard this all before.  Only a handful of innocent bystanders ever get killed by licensed shooters.  Most deaths are caused by careless unlicensed shooters like bikie gang members and my government has stamped all of them out”.

This has been Emmjay in the Pig’s Arms chopper, for Trotter’s Ale – and remember when you need to get to work in a hurry, think “Pig’s Arms”.

Tune in next week when the Pig’s Arms Mindset Team asks the question “Is coal seam gas just a fart in a phone booth ?”