19 Jul 2013
Words Tim Admin

Crystal Ball Snow Job for 2013-14

When I was living in Los Angeles I developed the habit of dropping by one of the many nail clinics in my neighbourhood and having a manicure. One afternoon, the Vietnamese lady who always attended me took my hand, looked closely at my palm and said: ``How many wives have you had?’’ ``One’’ I replied. ``You’ll have two’’ she said and resumed filing and clipping. She was right as it turned out, and I’ve often wondered how you would deal with being able to forecast the future with such certainty. I’ve tried forecasting the order in which race horses will cover a pre-determined distance and the numbers which will tumble from the Gold Lotto barrel and the results to date have not been encouraging. Then again I’ve only been trying to crack ``the big one’’ for around 30 years. As my father died at the age of 89 still trying to crack it, perhaps more patience is required. My psychic powers, then, are lacking but with a new financial year looming I’ve borrowed a crystal ball – a glass paperweight actually, crystal balls being hard to come by - and peered into the future. The first thing I saw was heavy snowfall. I interpreted this as indicating an imminent climate change so dramatic that Brisbane would experience its first white Christmas. Then I realised that the paperweight was actually a snow dome and that I’d shaken it when I‘d picked it up. Forget the snow but I could definitely see fireworks in the future as people around the nation celebrated the end of the longest federal election campaign in the nation’s history. Come September all those people, including myself, who had locked themselves in a dark room for six months to avoid being driven insane by political advertisements will emerge blinking into the light to discover the political landscape has changed. Who won? The snow dome was a little vague on detail but I made out a pair of men’s Speedos swirling in its mists so I think it safe to presume Tony Abbot will be Prime Minister, leaving Julia Gillard to open a hairdressing salon on the Gold Coast and blame Kevin Rudd for everything. Mr Abbott will have the distinction of being one of the few Prime Ministers elected not because people liked him but because they didn’t dislike him as much as his opponent. The federal Labor Party will be shredded, the scramble of doomed MPs fighting for jobs within the trade union bureaucracy akin to scenes on the boat decks of the Titanic. Clutching their taxpayer subsidised super, the Big Guns will retire on $100,000 plus a year indexed pensions and blame Kevin Rudd for everything. The rest will hand in the keys to the taxpayer funded car and office and face life in that horrible, real world outside Canberra where they have to pay for things with their own money and where they will blame Kevin Rudd for everything. The economy, freed of the constant turmoil of political conflict and the uncertainty it generates, will begin to improve in the New Year after stumbling through 2013. Property prices will start to rise and I have a very good reason for saying this. I have an investment property and if enough people read this and believe it, I might be able to sell it and make some money. The Australian dollar will slide further but we will continue to holiday overseas, exploding the myth that we do so because of the high Aussie dollar. Tourism authorities then spend several million dollars on a study that finds Australians holiday overseas because they like to travel to foreign countries. Imagine that? Clive Palmer buys what’s left of the Australian Labor Party for $5 million, declares himself to be leader of the Opposition and moves to Canberra where he travels around the national capital in a carriage hauled by newly unemployed Labor MPs dressed in dinosaur suits. The Chinese government’s investment corporation does a deal with the Tasmanian state government, buys the island and tows it back to China after bidding unsuccessfully for New Zealand. Two months later, someone on the mainland notices Tasmania is missing but it’s too late. Just kidding. Really. When it comes to crystal ball gazing maybe Mahatma Gandhi got it right when he said: ``The future depends on what you do today.’’ ends