Betty For Breakfast

THE SCARY thing is not, as Malcolm Turnbull asserts, that the sales and reach of “quality newspapers” are shrinking, it is that there are still quite a few people about who are prepared to pay for forest products imprinted with the thoughts of people like Elizabeth Farrelly. Sydney is home to some 4 million souls, of which roughly 200,000 buy the Silly every day. It is not all that many when seen as a fraction of the whole but it is enough to wonder, and to worry, about who might be sitting next to you on the train. If someone were to demand $2 a day to visit your home, blather inanities, demand that you pay higher taxes, insist that we can trust climate scientists always and then, just for good measure, leap onto the table and crap all over your brekkie, well that person would be sent packing by any sane household. But shockingly, to roughly 5% of Sydney’s population, that behaviour is rather appealing. The rest of us might regard Farrelly as one of the undigested corn kernels deposited on the bacon and eggs, but to the Silly’s five-percenters her thoughts and urgings are golden nuggets.

The next Silly columnist?

“Call me simple,” she urges readers at the start of her latest movement, which goes on to establish quite definitely that she is nothing of the kind, just quite, quite mad. It seems Government is our friend, although it is sometimes hard to make out that message for all the grunting and straining that went into producing lines like this:

Government is really a gardening job, pruning the intemperate growth spurts of those who'd build the world to fit those who must both inhabit and sustain it. This sculptural goodness is government's only exciting part. The rest is just gossip and horse-trading.

Or this:

Governments “are especially thus inclined when they've taken business, once their subject (in the Elizabethan sense), into the bedroom.”

At this point, even devoted Silly readers might be wondering what Farrelly wishes to tell them. She has, after all, touched on building regulations, toll tunnels, Rupert Murdoch, why the ABC is the best face of Australia, “competing private birds’ nests”, university funding, moral models and tycoons who are “not barons but priests.”

Then, quite suddenly, semi-coherent thoughts rise from the introductory miasma and she addresses her real theme, which is food labelling and what she perceives to be its gross inadequacies. If you do not read the Silly, just imagine a lunatic creature, organic cotton knickers about her ankles, depositoing something stinky in the toast rack and you will have a very good idea what the 5% is paying for. The prize nugget in this little pile is that, by Farrelly’s reckoning, the Nanny State is guilty not of excessive mollycoddling but gross neglect for not doing a lot more of it.

There is no point in further summarising her column, which proceeds to touch all the greenish bases, from monstrous Monsanto to the lining of baked bean tins. What is worth considering is why the great minds at Fairfax continue to publish it?

One theory at the Billabong is that Peter Fray, the Silly’s editorial supremo and none too coherent himself, must have run over Farrelly’s dog and offered her space on the opinion page as compensation. That he failed to recognise the greater intelligence of a squashed pooch would be another black mark on the record of his Silly stewardship.

But there is an alternate and perhaps more likely explanation, one that sprouts from Fairfax’s Fifty Grand Vizier Greg Hywood’s recent observation that the circulation of his newspapers no longer has any bearing on their commercial success. If he genuinely believes as much, then Farrelly can only occupy her pride of place in order to drive off another chunk of that lingering 5%. When Hywood has reduced the number of his customers to a big, round zero he will, by his reckoning, have the most successful media company in the land.

And Farrelly will still be mad.