By Kevin Healy
There was a piece in the paper this week that I must agree with. "Patting a pig will put a smile on its face", it said. How true that is. I remember the last time I patted a pig, it smiled immediately — and promptly arrested me.
But there are other ways to make a pig smile as well, like fun little fancy dress parties where you can — snort, snort — dress up as the victims of police shootings and hangings. A little bit of black paint and a noose, and you've got the props for the funniest joke since the Holocaust.
Still, it takes a particularly sensitive soul. After all, it's a tough, demanding job — shooting innocent people with impunity, sharpening the boots every night, making sure the nail's in the baton, concocting evidence, bashing out confessions, understanding that every kid on the street in working-class areas is a criminal, and if it's an Aboriginal neighbourhood ... well. It takes a particularly sensitive and understanding pig to undertake all that. And after bursting in and shooting an innocent bloke because he happens to be black and lying in bed, how encouraging that they can go away and have a really good laugh about it.
It was also discovered this week that the Victorian Major Crime Squad was the best named force in the sate. It's appropriate that the two senior policepeople are named Glare and Frame — how they regard you and how they treat you summed up at the top.
Meanwhile, another area of so-called reform under threat is that ban on election advertising. Born again feminist, the World's Greatest ex-Treasurer Paul told the panting electors of Wills, "That was all right when we thought it would help us not to have advertising so our opponents could not tell you how disastrous we are, but now we think it's a good idea because I'm such an exciting and popular performer, and — I'll be modest — my quite brilliant economic policies are starting to bite."
Paul said he was excited that unemployment had fallen to a mere one and a half or 80 million. It made a hard job worthwhile to know he was helping so many people. "After all, we promised to make unemployment a priority when we were first elected in 1983, we promised to make it a priority when we were re-elected, and then when we were re-elected, and then when we were re-elected, and we'll promise to make it a priority in Wills, and we'll promise to make it a priority when we want you to re-elect us again. And those figures show we're keeping our promises."