Canberra Needs Better Social Lubricant

Well Howard doesn’t drink beer, it’s to fair dinkum and crude, I heard he drinks ethanol cocktails.

Ah beer – the bread and the circus in one package.

I’m hearing your arguments and saying to myself – cheap beer is the solution, now what was the question again ?

If anything, a happier Maelinar is a more pleasant Maelinar, and therefore more likely to be friendlier when I meet some asshole in the supermarket who thinks they can get into the 8 items or less aisle with 11 items. I might even let them get away with it if beer was 50 cents a pint. I’d be that happy.

If somebody wanted to talk to me, I’d have something to talk about, like; ‘remember when beer was so expensive and pubs really sucked like being caught in Bali with a pack of gum, an empty wallet and 2,000 ecxstasy pills’?

Now beat me black and blue with a policemans truncheon, but I’d even consider voting for Stan the Man if he reduced beer to 50 cents.

Afterall, cheap beer, and of course disarming the populace, is the great social panadol enjoyed by most white governments of the world today.

I’m with bulldog – I had to change my local supermarket once because they got all “friendly friendly” on me and buying a carton of milk turned into a serious D&M.

More’s the fact that folk like me choose to indulge stereotypes, save the cognitive overload and be antisocial pricks the majority of the time.

Agree

We need more industries, wider range of people aside from public service blanks.

Well I’m happy to say I chat with my neighbours, drink with them, and they’re always calling me over to help shift furniture (particularly the MILFs), push trucks with flat batteries etc.

We have a good community spirit happening. One of the things that shits me about Canberra is that people don’t want to stick their head over the fence for a yarn with the neighbours. People are too insular.

Cheap booze and decent sporting teams will make the difference to population increase, but let’s not go overboard with the neighbourhood love thing.

More pubs my ass. (Sorry Thumper but higher agenda at work)

Where I come from cheap beer is what brings people together, and creates more babies.

Don’t care if there’s only 1 pub in Canberra, as long as it served beer at $0.50 a pint, you’d be an incredibly popular government, you’d definetly get more babies, and the community would definetly be closer together.

Heck I might even consider car pooling with all the residents on my street as long as I wasn’t deputy driver all the time.

The problem with jumping on the ‘getting to know your neighbour’ band-wagon is that I suspect that a lot of Canberrans, like me, enjoy the anonymity of the current arrangement.

Let me explain: As anyone who has spent any time in Canberra will attest, you only have to speak to someone for forty seconds before you know not only who they are but also who they’re related too, who they went to school with, who they’ve worked with etc.

For once, let Canberrans enjoy a sense of ‘I can do what the hell I want without it getting back to people I know’. It’s healthier that way.