The rise of the Billy Tea Party?

Anyone who's been to one of those Australiana theme parks knows that the "proper" way to make billy tea (for those who don't know a "billy" is a pot for boiling water on over a campfire, most properly an empty tin with a loop of wire over the top for a handle) is to boil up the water, throw in a handfull of tea leaves and swing the thing up and over your head (without the water falling out and scalding yourself) to settle the tea leaves. That's apparently the proper way.

Despite quite a bit of time spent in the bush and yarning with plenty of old timers I've never met anyone (apart from soon to be burnt city slickers and over enthusiastic schoolkids) who actually used that method, stirring with a stick or tapping the billy a couple of times with a stick or knife being the preferred method (though mostly it's done with teabags these days).

And hot on the heels of the frightening US Tea Party movement, stirred up by that vacillating idiot Tony Abbot and the crybabies of the mining industry, scared and angry people are loading up their trucks and busses and cars all over the country to converge on Canberra to winge about, well, here's a couple of examples:

Calls last month by Federal Green’s leader, Senator Bob Brown, for an independent inquiry into Australian media ownership and regulations, sparked Mr Pattel’s protest plans amid concerns the inquiry could restrict freedom of speech and other democratic principles.


“I was under some pressure to organise a protest and was holding back but when the Green’s overstepped the mark I was compelled to act,” Mr Pattel said.


“Freedom of speech is sacrosanct to the democratic principles of our country.

“Once we’ve lost that; what have we got?”

A politician calls for an enquiry and you decide to protest? Given that one of the owners of much of our media is a foreigner and his company has been implicated in some fairly dodgy behaviour (phone tapping, corruption etc) overseas then wouldn't it be a good idea to look at who owns what and encourage a diversity of views? Rather than restricting freedom of speech Brown's call seeks to preserve it (and the Greens do have a good record on this kind of thing).

Ok, let's look at another one:

''The first was reading the 340-page Clean Energy Bill 2011 [the federal carbon tax bill], and the other 12 bills to which it is attached.


''The words 'global warming' are not mentioned........

Let's look at the proposed Act, being lazy and just using the word search function, they're right that "global warming" isn't mentioned however by my count "Climate Change" is mentioned sixty six times. Obviously they put the wrong words into the search function.

So, one's protesting to protect Rupert Murdoch's fortune and another is protesting because they didn't plug the right words into the search function.