To a humble blogger whose most fervent core belief is that “PRIDE is the root of all evil”, Senator Joyce’s column in the Canberra Times resonates strongly:
Selfless shine above the selfish
Easter, Queensland’s state election is over, Parliament is out, time to relax with the family.
Relaxation is essential but in so many careers our life is like climbing a cliff continually reaching for that next foothold or crevice to pull us further up. If you stop too long you will cramp and fall off and if you have reached your top, well then, it is all downhill from there.
At the triathlon in Mooloolaba last week the general aim of competitors was to do a PB. At work, a career implies aspiration, as the alternative is regret. How many colleagues in the coffee room tell you that they are aspiring to a lesser job on lower pay? Spiritually, have you ever come across someone who told you they actually did find enlightenment but got bored with it in favour of banality?
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Relaxation, like sleep, is an elixir on so many levels. So I am in Forster-Tuncurry ”relaxing”. At church on Sunday the local parishioners asked what I was doing. I told them I was ”relaxing with the family” which can be an oxymoronic juxtaposition. Some of the parishioners were ”relaxing” as well; some had been relaxing for years.
There are a lot of businesses that are very busy here helping people relax. To relax, apparently you have to consume lots of stimulants such as coffee, served at many shops up and down the main street.
You have to be eternally vigilant that you don’t go from purposeless relaxation to exercising as you go for a walk. Just as dangerous is reading the paper in which you may find a philippic written by some column troll and you will be taken back to work to write your rebuttal against this oxygen thief.
Then there are the questions you ponder as you stare at the ocean – what is the right proportionate mix of all these component parts; career goals, physical health, spiritual depth and how does one make sure that it is does not crowd out the most important responsibility to your family. How much is the appropriate amount of guilt you should feel before you are stirred from the slumber of ”there is more that I can do but I really cannot be bothered”.
Senator Judith Adams was a great example of an unselfish determination to serve. While some at Judith’s stage of life would have been content with relaxing, Judith instead took on board the major challenge of federal politics. Judith would have known her fate, but she worked until the end.
Born in Picton, New Zealand, she migrated to Australia and worked as a nurse. Judith began serving in the Senate in 2005 at the age of 62. I started then, too, I was 38. She was pro choice; I was and am pro life. Judith was a regional Lib, I am a regional Nat.
On so many levels we were likely to lock horns, but we didn’t. In 2008, I was honoured to attend the funeral of Judith’s husband, Gordon, a former Royal Flying Doctor pilot. Judith was a very matter-of-fact, practical and driven woman.
Politics is a job where you have the unfortunate experience of working with colleagues who die. Good people. It is the flip side of people like, and I will say it, Craig Thomson. I will say it because some drag the office down while others raise it up. A person can respect their public office while being completely at odds with a lot of what you believe in, but they conduct themselves in such a manner which deserves nothing but respect. Judith was such a person.
My recollection of Judith will be her intense interest in the lives of regional Australians. She committed to the task knowing she was never going to be a senior office holder. The reality is that many of the wider public would probably not even know her name. The strength about Judith was that this was not what was driving her.
She just wanted people to have their lives affected in a way which made things better for them. She didn’t want the fuss and the bother of the laurels. Even when she was going around on her electric wheelchair in Parliament, she always said that this was only temporary and that she was getting better. I have a sneaking suspicion she realised the truth but just didn’t want the attention to distract her from her job for others.
Barnaby is right.
Barnaby Is Right 
Thanks for posting Senator Joyce’s insightful comment about selfless service.
Ultimately, that is probably the most meaningful purpose of life. The current demise of society seems to be the result of selfishness. It probably cannot be corrected by anything other than selfless service of public servants like Senator Joyce.
See: http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/
omanuel,
This may fit in to your understanding –
Exodus 14
“It seems that the Israelites prefer Egypt to the desert, slavery to freedom, Pharaoh to God and Moses, the past to the future, and the secure and known world to the insecure and unknown world. In other words, slaves desire to remain as slaves! Why? Because of fear – they fear freedom; likewise, they fear death and are afraid of their masters. The Israelites have therefore returned to being a slave or a prisoner – of the false comforts of Egypt and their own fear of the unknown!
Thank you so much for your commentaries. Not only for this article, but for all of your
writings.
I particularly, enjoyed the piece on Mr Turnbull (Member for Goldman Sachs). Very
informative.
I always knew that there was something more than political opportunism driving Turnbull
but was never really sure what it was.
I knew that someone with Turnbull’s, obvious,intellect would never subscribe to the global
warming/climate change nonsense unless they had an ulterior motive.
Can you tell me if you have written anything on the “United Nations,Agenda 21”, otherwise
known as “Sustainable Development”?
I believe this issue is the biggest scandal of our times, perhaps ever. The connection to the global warming scam is clear for all to see. But this is not only an attempt to defraud
taxpayers. It is a plan to strip us all, of our freedom,pdemocracy and property.
If you have not addressed this topic, I urge you to do so at the earliest opportunity. The
implementation of this treacherous scheme well underway and if it is to be stopped, it can
only be stopped through public awareness.
Best Wishes
Bill
Hi Bill,
Thanks for your comments, much appreciated. I have not written on the UN’s Agenda 21 specifically. I have tried to assist in raising public awareness by analysing and exposing the demonstrably *financier* underpinnings of the proposed “solution/s” to “global warming”. Should opportunity permit, I will look to bring in Agenda 21 as a standalone issue in future.
Cheers, TBI
The esteem which I have for Barnaby Joyce after reading that has risen greatly. Such people in authority are a rarity.
“Let every soul be subject to higher authorities for there is no authority if not from God.” Romans 13:1 Barnaby obviously knows the highest authority to whom he is subject.
Matthew 24 –
“But Jesus called them to Him, and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. 26 Not so shall it be among you; but whoever desires to be great among you shall be your servant, 27 and whoever desires to be first among you shall be your bondservant; 28 just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life as the redemption-price for many.”
The link to this portion of essay cannot be posted as the whole post then disappears into cyberspace. Not even portion of the link will get through and I’ve tried a few times.
I think Barnaby would agree with this –
Part of an essay –
“Chinese Crackers” Historian Humphrey Mcqueen
“…….Once bitten, twice bitten
The failure to question China’s future is endemic in Australia where the economy
is again being derailed by mineral exports. In the era of deregulation, policy
makers are left with no strategic options beyond predicting that the China boom
will go on, and on. Australians have been down this yellow‐cake road more than
once before. Our forebears believed that they would grow rich if only the Chinese
wore woolen socks and put sugar in their tea. In The Glugs of Gosh (1917) poet C J
Dennis portrayed his fellow Australians as exchanging
… pianers and pickles and spanners
For seventeen shiploads of stones.
From the late 1950s, Australians transferred that cargo‐cult mentality across to
Japan’s mineral imports, leaving Australia ‘a lucky country run mainly by secondrate
people who share its luck’, as Donald Horne recognised in1964. Until Rex
Connor became Minister for Minerals and Energy in 1973, no Swank of Gosh had
thought it necessary to put a number on ‘the contribution of the mining industry
to Australian welfare’. The answer came in the 1974 Fitzgerald Report, which
calculated that, far from adding to the national coffers, the Australian tax‐payer
had subsidised BHP, CRA and Aloca to ship our dirt to Japan to the tune of
$137m.15
Five years later, then Treasury Secretary John Stone warned that a
coming boom in energy exports meant that we must dismantle our still
substantial manufacturing sector to manage a new bout of currency
appreciation.16 Stone’s resources boom confirmed ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s conclusion
from observing cattle booms and Northern Territory booms: ‘They all went bust’.
Within seven years of Stone’s pronunciamento, treasurer Keating was bleating
about a banana republic as the exchange‐rate plunged.
Statistical inflation
These memories and experiences would have done no more than keep me wary
of a China boom. The catalyst for my becoming a China sceptic was a 2003 article
titled ‘Gold into Base Metals’ in one of the most prestigious publications in
bourgeois economics. From an examination of the evidence between 1978 and
1998, its author, Alwyn Young, documented the unreliability of Chinese statistics,
thereby turning ‘the extraordinary into the mundane’.17 My mentions of Young’s
evidence encountered blank stares, although Crickey accepted a version in mid‐
2007. Because of the seminal place that Young’s article had in my outlook on
China, and because so much of the popular belief is based on very big numbers
about its growth, I shall open with his material.
Instead of fiddling with the final figures published by central
administrators, Young tracked how those results had been constructed from the
results forwarded from below. Lower‐level officials were rewarded for meeting
expectations and punished for failing to come in on target, as had been the case
for millennia. From time to time, the central authorities tried to correct the
errors. For instance, ‘the 1994 gross industrial output estimates were revised
downward by about 9 percent’. That year, the government identified 70,000
cases of misrepresentation. Another reason for the gulf between the hype and
the performance has been a ‘systematic understatement of inflation by
enterprises’. Young concluded that ‘the growth rate is not the highest in all…
EDIT: For some reason your comment was going directly into “Spam”, Kevin. Here is the link you wished to include http://strangetimes.lastsuperpower.net/?p=1799