ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
A Betoota Heights sole trader has come across the Betoota Shire Council’s road team out on the Durie Development Road this morning, and he’s made a mental note to come back this evening with a length of someone else’s good hose and a few jerry cans.
Darryn Hartog is coming back because he’s planning to execute a heist of petty proportions.
The 47-year-old rural contractor has told The Advocate that he’s “doing his arse” right now, and the cost of diesel is cutting into his already slim margins. He has a family to feed, he says, and the shire council are “nothing but thieves.”
“I’ve made a mental note, I’m going to come back this evening to siphon the diesel out of that grader,” he said.
“Now, before you get all high and mighty on me, stealing diesel from the shire council is a victimless crime. It’s akin to insurance fraud. We all do it. These bastards on the shire council have these bullshit tenders they put out, but they always go to the same bastards. Why does Betoota need six skateparks? Because the Mayor’s son-in-law has a concreting business. That’s why,”
“There’s no jobs from the council for shit-kickers like me. They put one out to do up the dog fence. I used to work on the dog fence back in the day, and those bastards know it. Who got the tender? A farmer’s son. A tubby little brown boot-wearing private boarding school cunt with a smashing pair of bloody wapjohns hanging off his chest where his pectoral muscles should be, but because he hasn’t worked a day in his fucken life, he has no pectoral muscles, mate,”
Darryn explained that there’s often more to siphoning diesel from a council grader than meets the eye.
“They have trail cameras sometimes, so you can’t just pull up and go suck,” he said.
“You need to park off the road so nobody sees your ute parked there. People know what we drive out here. So you pretty much hide your ute, or in my case, get the cheese and kisses to drop you up the road and sneak down to the camp. Preferably through some bastard’s paddock,”
“Once you’re there, you might need to bolt cutter a padlock or if you’re a thinking man like me, you drill the barrel out. You can get a good flow going, a quick flow if you drill a few holes in the top of the fuel tank to let the air in,”
“Trust me. Everyone’s doing it.”
More to come.
