Your thin line

By Alan Scully

Remember our government's form,

They backed Patrick's WorkChoices a few years ago,

When their masked hoodlums in hoods struck at midnight,

Motivated by self, these hoons did it for dough,

Backed up by attack dogs off their leads,

And so it began, more a war than a fight,

Quasi commandos, they captured our wharves,

An intolerable social failure,

Welcome to John Howard's Australia.

As malicious as it was avaricous

Audacity had never seen the like,

And literally, nor had the western world,

Seen such naked ambition,

Born of greed and spite

Such was the genesis of Work Choices

So in retrospect we should have known,

The seeds of changes were on the wind

Our future we were shown

And though not prophets, we should have read our lot

For our past did hold the future

If only we'd read the plot

We are ruled by class-biased vandals,

The very antithesis of their conservative claim

They are wolves in sheep's dress

Tipping the toil of a century's gains

Into the bin of social distress

So that our kids will be denied the birth rights

Given to all the children of our past

We can't take anymore of this

Our present society cannot last

Howard doesn't think he needs a mandate from you

To create our own working poor

For he has a Trojan horse called Work Choices

And without your mandate he has made it law

Do we have to man the barricades all over again?

A la the shearers' strike

Or the fiasco of Patrick's docks

No thankfully the answers' easer than that

It's in the ballot box