BARRY SAYS KICK ARSE FOR CHANGE

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Presumably Barry Prismall no longer uses a typewriter, so when he ‘clicked-out’ this piece he had his tongue half planted in his cheek and just maybe he was thinking to himself “time to stir the possum and liven things up around here”.

You'd have to wonder if Barry had ever seen the Justin Chadwick and Ann Peacock movie, ‘The First Grader’ – LINK. It’s set in Kenya and based on a true story. It’s the story of an ageing Mau Mau fighter, still fighting, and fighting this time for his right to go to school and learn to read. Barry might well have seen it!

Anyway he tells us about how Qantas was taken on and beaten and that in fact their front man, Alan Joyce, even flew in to Launceston for a dose of humility.

Barry even recounts how Christine Milne stopped the Wesley Vale pulp mill and the way ‘The Greens’ saved the Franklin and invented the Tarkine.

Barry reminds us that they did all that ”with rubber rafts and passive, peaceful police arrests … [and that]… It got the desired world media attention”.

Barry also reminds all the ageing hippies out there in newspaper reader land about the downfall of Marcos in the Philippines and how ‘public opinion’ finished the Vietnam War.

Barry, somewhat Ghandi like, implores us not to “fight with abuse, fists and stones” but to do so with ideas. He reckons “if you're right and have common sense in your corner, it's only a matter of time.”

However, at up there,or is it down there, whatever, in St John’s St and Town Hall they might not be cheering him on despite the fact that a good political scrap sells newspapers and especially so to ‘old-farts’.

There is as they say, "an outside chance" that the local government cum amalgamation cum accountability protests that are seemingly gaining ground might just be encouraging the Examiner to say …. yes we’ll have some of that!

GO Barry! ... GO! GO! GO!

T Alen