The Education Of Young Mr Hodges

AMONGST THE many questions it would be good to hear put to fugitive spinner Tony Hodges, there is a minor one – a curiosity, really – which some policeman or inquiring QC might want to toss into the mix toward an interrogation’s end. By then the really important stuff will have been covered and the sum of human knowledge expanded in regard to the PM’s efforts to stir up the Blacks for political gain. It is an unfortunate way to put it “stir up the blacks”, so ugly with echoes of the racist past that Gillard and the loudest of her Sorry Day breast-beaters would shudder at the sound of it, especially if news cameras happened to be handy. But with apologies, it is the only description for that madcap caper at the Lobby restaurant.

“Hey, let’s get those simple, excitable Humpytowners all riled and waving spears at Tony Abbott. Lights! Camera! Evening news! See, Australia, he’s a nasty, racist, extremist bastard and the blackfellas hate him too.” Can’t you just imagine the sounds of high-fives slapping as the PM’s twentysomethings whooped it up at the sheer genius of their slick, political smarts. Golly gosh, such operators! Start a race riot and lift the PM’s polls? Worth a shot. Yeah, why not? Sounds like a plan. Let’s do it!

And that is why, if we do get to see Hodges under oath, someone has to ask the most fascinating question of them all. It is simple and it is this: What TV shows and films did you grow up with?

Don’t laugh, this is serious. Hodges is a young fellow. If he is a day over 30 it would be a surprise, so let’s say he graced the planet for the first time in 1981. Ten years later, Bill Clinton was almost in the White House and Hollywood churning out the first of what would be a decade's crop of  just, fair, inspirational and entirely fictional presidents. Indeed, the more tawdry Clinton’s record grew, and the grubbier third-parties’ dresses became, the more ennobled his fictional counterparts. America had itself a low dog in the White House and knew it, so it invented Jed Bartlett and beamed the preferred fantasies of a righteous leader to the world. Sure, President Martin Sheen’s staffers cut deals and corners, but right was on their side and that made the smarty-pants strategems OK.

Let’s also figure that Hodges is the product of an educated, middle-class home, the sort of place where politics gets tossed around the kitchen table, maybe even with a passion. By sixteen, the West Wing is making its weekly mark on young Tony’s evolving mind. So, too, most likely, docos like The War Room, with the snappy James Carville making no bones about putting politics above principle and winning above everything. It had to make an impression on a kid who was nearing his franchise and would have been off to uni at about the same time a rapist president pardoned his brother’s drug dealer and finally went away.

By the late Nineties, young Tony would have been ripping into student politics and that political brain was being moulded into some increasingly narrow channels. John Howard? Boo! Hiss! to that baby-drowning scumbag. Any line, no matter how slanderous or vile, was fit to be deployed against the little jerk. The papers lapped it up, much to young Tony’s secret astonishment. He is a sharp kid and cannot seriously believe, not in his heart, that Little Johnnie has frogmen sinking SIEVs or aims to see chattel slavery in Australia’s satanic mills. But some of that is what a former ambassador is saying, which lends credence to the absurd, so why not urge the poor loon on? Sling him a book prize or two, put him on the ABC, extol his madness as proof of a crusader's heart. Surround Howard with enough jabbering self-publicists and some of their spittle will stick.

And over there in gallery, what fun!  It is the likes of David Marr, who has hijacked the pulpit of the once-serious press as thoroughly as did a posse of illegal aliens the Tampa’s bridge. Marr and his mates are hissing warnings about fascism on the way, and if you are sharp as young Tony it is funny as all hell in a deliriously cynical sort of way. Pantomime dames as a Greek chorus, who could take seriously Marr and Manne and the caterwauling choir? Certainly not Young Tony, professional political operative-to-be, who has by now figured it all out. Politics, it’s about advantage and distortion and carrying the mob, so a lie is the truth is a lie if any of those options is what you must make the voters believe. On weekends, when he catches a movie, it will be Wag The Dog or something from Michael Moore. The utility of lies is further re-inforced.

It is all a game, a glorious, silly, all-engrossing game – that is what young Tony has come to conclude as he moves with some nice new suits from campus intrigues to Canberra, where he can celebrate the special dispensation his spinner’s job confers -- the right to deal deception in the name of Higher Truth. He’s of the left and the left is by definition more virtuous, so anything that advances its cause must by definition be even moreso.

If you have wondered, as decent people outside the Canberra press gallery surely must, how a young man could have set in motion the lie that sparked Australia’s birthday riot, embrace the left’s conception of charity and grant young Tony at least a little slack for the nurturing amorality of his political upbringing. The kid was brainwashed from the start, taught to know the price of power but never to recognise the value of the decencies he and his kind have been so prepared to shred in its pursuit.

A faltering economy, racial  suspicions fanned and glowing, class resentments, ethnic ghettoes and green, cash-hungry monsters, they are the more obvious elements of the Gillard government’s legacy. But it is the amoral rot at the core of her leadership, that adoration of deceit and obfuscation, which may be the most damaging thing she leaves behind.

Inhale deeply, catch a whiff of this dying government’s grasping venality.  It has poisoned the likes of young Tony and the stench is spreading. Indeed, to a soundtrack of Gillard's ongoing lies and dodges, it grows more pungent by the day.