You know, sometimes it's not easy being The Vine's News blogger. Some days I look around this cosy little community and the role just... gets to me a bit. For instance, there’s Clem, talking about the vuvuzela and making jokes about the vuvuzela. Everyone has an opinion on the vuvuzela. It’s a topic of conversation. There are jokes to be made. The word is fun to say. Vuvuzela. Heh. Or there’s Lorelei, talking about how hot redheads are and attaching hot photos of redheads in corsets. Of course that’s picked up 11 000 hits. I’ve been responsible for 20 of them. Or there’s Tobler1, throwing down a weekly list of the best memes that the Internet has to offer. He gets to hunt down YouTube videos, animated GIFs and various other bits that make up the lifeblood of the internet and then posts a random assortment of them for everyone else to enjoy.

And what do I get to work with? A bizarrely hectic debate over a proposed tax on the shit that we dig out of the ground. And I’m not saying the shit we dig out of the ground isn’t important. It is. We are very good at both digging shit out of the ground and selling land so that other people can dig shit out of the ground. But at the end of the day, it’s about two subject areas – mining and taxation - who are to sexiness and humour what the image of me squatting over a mirror and waxing my own scrotum is to... well, sexiness and humour. Although, I guess you might find it amusing. Personally, the idea keeps me awake at night.

But either way, here we are. Mining! Tax! Hooray! What an election-worthy topic!



Remember the 2008 US election? I do. I poured more of my heart, soul and reading time into that election than I have to any of my academic pursuits to date. And why wouldn't you? To an outside observer that election was such a titanic and obvious battle between good and evil that it may as well have been waged between a black He-Man and Skeletor. It felt - with some justification - like the fate of America, and perhaps the entire world was actually at stake!



After a cursory search of the internet, it appears that no-one has ever made an image of Obama dressed up as He-Man. This is the closest thing I could find with the search "obama he-man"



Rawr. Although really probably could have just contented myself with this:



Rawr.

Anyway.

But not here. No. No grand ideas here. Just an increasingly futile war of words between two men with the combined electoral appeal of fungus over exactly how much we should charge someone for the privilege of digging shit out of our ground.

Even a month ago noone would really have predicted that it was going to come to this. There were so many other trigger points. Remember the ETS? Half the reason Abbott even became leader of his party was because of climate change. But then Rudd shelved that and put out a budget of which the only real point of controversy was a bit about mining taxes. Which was the only real point upon which the Liberals leapt. Which is why we're now bearing witness to a sequence of hysterical accusations and counter-accusations about what is largely an aside, the tenor of which wouldn't have seemed entirely out of place in your average late 17th century Puritan hamlet... That's a reference to witch-burnings and, more specifically, Arthur Miller's The Crucible. I really must stop making these asides so oblique.

Mmmm. Wimples.

But perhaps a greater question than why the Rudd government thought that a complicated and in many ways abstract financial construct was going to be an easy sell to an unconcerned and economically uneducated public, is how exactly they've managed to screw up selling what really amounts to a tax on incredibly wealthy entities so that Australia as a whole can benefit. I mean, it's hard to see how anti-corporate sentiment could possibly be at a lower ebb right now. We have just witnessed three years of the second largest economic meltdown in modern human history (I say modern - who knows, those wacky Phoenicians may well have courted economic catastrophe at some point in the early BCs), driven almost entirely by the rapaciousness of very, very rich companies.

And in some ways the ease with which Australia negotiated the Gigantic Fucking Collapse was to do with the strength of our resources sector, but there were a lot of other factors at play as well. Remember all that free money we got last year? That was Kevin Rudd's doing. In no small fashion that - and a lot of other Government-enabled initiatives - saved our economy. Or even if they didn't, he should quite clearly be able to make it look like they did. That free money was awesome. I want more. And yet, here he is, taking it on the chin, being effectively caricatured as a man with singular designs on the evisceration of Australia's economy. Because that's a message you can really trust from a few billio-fucking-naires who dress up for a day in reflective vests to show that deep down they're still men of the people. Boy, my heart bleeds. All over your surprisingly expensive leather settees.

And, look, I'm not trying to claim that there's no risk here, or that there won't be some adverse effect - in a lot of ways the economic considerations involved are too complex for my feeble mind to deal with - but the way we're talking right now it's as if the entire future of this country could be decided on this one tax. It can't. It won't. If for no other reason than the fact that Australia sits on well over $1.5 trillion worth of as yet untapped resources. Putting us behind only Russia and South Africa in terms of exactly how much shit we can actually dig out of the ground. God. $1.5 trillion. The sheer amount of Twilight memorabilia you could buy for that



Rawr.

Point is, the miners might talk big, but the fact is Australia remains a fundamentally appealing prospect - both quantitatively (how much shit we have) and qualitatively (how easy we make it to get the shit out of the ground) - and it would take a lot to demolish our massively burgeoning mining industry. Like, perhaps a tactical nuclear strike or two.

In the end, this tax, being talked over and modified with the fluoro clad billionaires as we speak, is probably unlikely to have any profound effect on the economy at large, and hey, the extra money might well come in handy. But even so the risk still remains that it could be a politically devastating move for the Rudd government. And this is because, at a fundamental level, by casting the election around a concept that most people quite simply have no idea about (shit, I don't and the vast majority of people in WA certainly don't), you really open the process out to the crassest, emptiest, most effective brand of electioneering there is: high-pitched, tabloid fear. AKA (in Australian terms): "Aieee, my mortgage!"



Anyway, we're all done here. Thanks for bearing with it. I'll try and keep mining chat to a minimum in future. Now, off you go, run along and see those redheads.