Pointing the finger make us not One
but a Divided Nation

You just can't tell with some people. Just when we were sure that One Nation would moderate their behaviour to try and obtain 'respectability' they went off again.
Pauline Hanson wants all street and business signs to be in English only. She wants to be able to tell what sort of shop she's going in to. I don't suppose she ever sold calamari.
And Pauline, haven't you ever been overseas? A lot of Australians have; many to places like Indonesia and Singapore, where signs are posted in English just to help people like us.
The fact that so many Queenslanders voted One Nation shows that her policies are striking a chord with some rural voters. It's a common enough occurance. When things get tough it's time to find someone to blame.
Hitler had the Jews, Stalin had nearly everybody, Pol Pot had intellectuals and Pauline Hanson's got Asians, Aboriginals and everyone who can't speak English fluently.
The disaffected exNational Party voters in Queensland fell into a trap. They voted for people with no clear idea of what they would actually do once they got into parliament. In fact they ended up ousting the party which was most likely to help them. Now the poor farmers must make their representations to a Labor government.
All this One Nation stuff is going to make a bitter pill for John Howard's Liberals to swallow. Which way to lean now, eh chaps? For every little voice that says, "Renounce her quickly, move a bit away from the right," there's another little voice that says, "No, no. If you're seen to be moving to the left, we'll lose even more voters to the New Right."
What's a PM to do! Not to mention the awful task of selling a GST. Parties to his left don't support him, parties to his right either don't want it or want to tie it to impossible trade-offs. The GSTers, Howard, Costello & Co must have died when the Farmer's Federation, perhaps still miffed by not getting hold of the waterfront and desperate to hide the true cost of their debacle, made their support of the GST conditional on the removal of the fuel excise tax. There's no way the government could let go of that nice little earner.
The hardest question for the government to answer is who will pay the extra tax that needs to be collected if any of us are to be better off with a Goods and Services Tax. Big Biz is throwing its weight behind the GST so it can't be them. Surely it's not the pensioners again?
One thing is for certain, the rural sector is going to pay an unfair share of the tax burden with a GST. We pay more for our goods because it costs quite a lot to transport them thousands of kilometres to our shops. This cost is added on so we pay more than our coastal city cousins.
Here's the vital catch. Transport is a Service, GST; we will pay more for the goods and the service. To offset this extra charge, the government promises income tax cuts but they will be uniform across the board. That is, city slickers will get the same tax breaks as us even though our costs have risen much more.
Thanks guys, but no thanks! By all means reform the tax system. Bring all the ridiculously differing tax rates into some sort of order. But don't slug the bush. We're not doing too well as it is.
I don't particularly want to become an unpaid tax collecter either. It's bad enough paying it let alone collecting it.
Oh, and Pauline tell us. Had you been born (God forbid) an Asian, would you be trying to stop those rotten foreign Australians from owning any businesses in your country?