targeting sub-contractors...good!

I couldn't help but chuckle the other day while reading this polemic against the poor old innocent "self-employed" sub-contractors read it here . They've come out with the usual tired lines that claim "we've reached a point of no return with this government...the Gillard government is deeply hostile to the self-employed...I have not seen such a blatant and intentional attack on the self-employed as this budget".
So while they're bleating, each and every comment along those lines just draws me a little bit closer to the Gillard Government (which as previous blogs indicate, I'm keeping at arm's length). For during the Howard years the one group I considered the most responsible for the awful direction that Australia was headed in, was the self-employed contractor. While it's unfair of me to lump everyone into the same boat, I just couldn't help but get frustrated by what these people represented, and was seething as to when was I going to see the day of their political destruction? While I guess that day has finally arrived?
This is the group that legitimised Howard's power and perfectly represented his anti humanitarian agenda. For your average sub-contractor - thanks to the skills shortage that became entrenched during the Howard years -  represented the country's nouveau riche, uneducated toothless moron types with the southern cross usually tattooed on their arms earning well over $100K living in McMansions in suburbs like Melbourne's Wantirna (and whatever its interstate equivalents are?). These people of course suddenly threw off their working class roots and considered themselves too good to join a union or vote for Labor anymore. Their existence revolved around the car, because they chose to live in areas without public transport (which they're also too good for), with three or four car families being the norm. A peoples whose existence outside of their work or family was extremely minimal, a peoples easily influenced by tabloid journalism and shock jock radio (and naturally climate change sceptics). But the common thread that linked all these people together, was an inherent underlying racism boiling below the surface, which thanks to Howard, was allowed to bubble over as acceptable in the mainstream.
The key defining moment of course was the Tampa and asylum seekers. Almost overnight you saw the political dynamics change, with seats like Richmond in NSW expected to be certain Labor gains, returning to their conservative roots (with the Labor candidate virtually getting spat on post Tampa). The politics of race had entered the mainstream for the first time since "Asian immigration" was the hot button issue of 1988, and ended up destroying Howard's leadership the first time around. But this time it was a very different story, Howard knew what he was doing, and a month later came September 11, almost like a gift from heaven (Allah in fact) which just cemented this inherent racism as acceptable.
Sadly this was the constituency that was deciding elections in the Howard era (and maybe the Abbott era?), and in my more idealistic days I just couldn't reconcile that with the Australia I wanted to live in.
But finally we've caught up with them, and the Labor party is ready to get its revenge on this tax avoiding, gas guzzling, climate change denying, hate filled constituency. And the only word that comes to mind to describe it is.....schadenfreude!