The Abbott Shogunate.

or Sesame Seeds and Australians are Very Much Alike. The More you Squeeze Them, the More you can Extract From Them.

Queensland MP George Christensen (National/Liberal Coalition: "conservative, centre-right, libertarian") ordered the peasant rabble to shut up: we are allowed, nay, encouraged, to protest under Labor governments, only, not under his party's government.

Instead of whingeing about Tony Abbott's efforts to lower Australian living standards to third world levels, we must embrace Asia's example:

"Aussies should do tour of Asia & live like locals to put these 1st world complaints re budget in perspective" (here and here)

This is the example the Coalition wants Australia to follow:

"However, it is important to emphasize that, despite the recent tendency to question the characterization of Tokugawa Japan as feudal and its peasants as serfs, those peasants were, in fact, subjects whose reason for living, as the ruling class saw it, was solely to work the land and provide for the economic needs of the samurai. If 6 percent of the population expropriates 50 percent of the land's bounty, and leaves over 80 percent of the population to subsist on what remains, one does not have to be a Marxist to see in this system a classic case of exploitation. This was the conscious policy of the Tokugawa ruling class. An eighteenth-century Bakufu [i.e. Tokugawa shogunate government bureaucracy] official asserted, 'Sesame seeds and peasants are very much alike. The more you squeeze them, the more you can extract from them.' Ieyasu, the founder of the Bakufu, said that the samurai, in their behavior toward the peasants, should act as arrogantly as they wished. 'When the peasants see ordinary samurai behaving in such a manner, they will be terrified all the more of high officials and will not dare harbor treacherous thoughts. If the peasants are allowed to be self-indulgent, they are bound to stage peasant uprisings.' Another high Bakufu official told his subordinates, 'The peasants constitute the foundation of society. To govern them, a certain principle must be followed. First of all, the boundaries of each peasant's plots must be firmly established. Then, they should be allowed to retain what they must actually consume during the year. The rest should be taken up as annual contributions. The peasants must be governed in such a way that they have what is essential but no more.' The Tokugawa ruling class also believed in keeping the peasants ignorant. 'A good peasant is one who does not know the price of grain' was a saying common among officialdom. 'Peasants and townspeople,' it was said, 'should be forbidden to attend school'." (Mikiso Hane, "Peasants, Rebels, Women, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan")