zero tolerance
...one section of the community continues sucking shamelessly on the public teat. These parasitic slackers don't care that their leech-like behaviour makes even welfare-seeking single mothers look mutually obliging. They just sit back on their florid derrieres, living the high life on government handouts and thumbing their noses at the hard-working taxpayers left to pick up the tab.
They are, of course, the elderly.
While today is the day John Howard will let Peter Costello out of his box to give a major statement on ageing, you can bet your panicked pre-election populism that whatever he comes up with won't come close to curtailing the rampaging bloodsucking of these atrophying freeloaders.
Fact: Many elderly job snobs are just plain lazy. They kick back in granny flats, nursing homes and emergency wards, even though they're still perfectly capable of engaging in menial labour in production lines, pet-food factories, faecal recycling facilities and so on.
Fact: Forcing grand folk into such work is fiscally and socially responsible: First, it will shorten their increasingly costly existence and, second, it will give them the satisfaction of knowing they're giving something back to the community they've sponged from so shamelessly for so many years.
Critics of forced aged labour are bound to bleat about physical incapacity, human dignity and the right to die at home among loved ones rather than on pensioner chain gangs. They'll point out that even hunter-gathers such as the Kalahari bushmen were able to support entire generations of non-working young, sick and old, despite their allegedly subsistence lifestyle.
But what Australia's bleeding hearts need to remember is that we are not root-eating, loincloth-wearing, elderly supporting savages. We live in an advanced, civilised society and must therefore pay through the nose to avoid a lonely death in a clothing bin.
Emma Tom/The Australian Feb.25.04
Bludger : lazy person, layabout, somebody who always relies on other people to do things
Rort (verb or noun) : Cheating, fiddling, defrauding (expenses, the system etc.)
Whinge : complain
