Turnbull's Little Friend

MANY Australians of a conservative bent decided some time ago that Malcolm Turnbull was unfit to lead the Liberal Party, quite rightly concluding a man thought by some to be Labor's best leader-in-waiting would do his party a favour by crossing the floor and staying there. From time to time, one still hears kind words for Turnbull's potential -- usually, it must be noted, from people who would not vote Liberal in a pink fit, even if Karl Marx were to be re-animated and installed beside the dispatch box.

That is why the video below should be compulsory viewing. It's not that Turnbull says anything particularly stupid, just that he is evidently prepared to squander a greasy afternoon shooting the breeze with Andrew Jaspan, the former Phage editor who made the paper what it is today. Jaspan, who now heads The Conversation is "a very distinguished journalist and editor" and "at the cutting edge of something really big", which is an interesting way to describe $6 million worth of suckling at the public teat.

Anyway, if you have a spare few minutes and a strong stomach click the link and observe a refutation of the axiom that two negatives make a positive.

Let us hope Turnbull did not take his interlocutor too seriously. He would not want to waste another day filling sandbags at Luna Park.

Hang on, it's already too late! According to the Jaspan-era Age, the amusement park was washed away some time ago.

New Bunker For ClimateFuehrer Clive

YOU HAVE to wonder about Clive Hamilton, who is celebrating yesterday's catastropharian triumph in the House of Representatives by once again denouncing democracy:

Over the last decade or so, politically driven climate deniers have adroitly used the instruments of democratic practice to erode the authority of professional expertise. They have attempted, with considerable success, to undermine the authority of climate science by skilful exploitation of a free media, appeal to freedom of information laws, the mobilisation of a group of vociferous citizens, and the promotion of their own to public office. In this way, democracy has defeated science.

It is well known that the bug-eyed loon, another of the New Establishment's kept creatures,  parted company with sanity quite some time ago. Eventually, even the Fairfax press noticed and declined to publish his submissions. The fact that all were inscribed with crayon on chains of the little paper dolls he cuts out during sessions of occupational therapy must have made that fact inescapable, even at The Age, where only plastic safety scissors are allowed.

But as Hamilton is of the left, no worries. Somewhere down the propaganda food chain, a less lofty pulpit is always waiting. In this instance it was The Conversation, where Andrew Jaspan popped out from beneath a foot stool, snatched up the falling columnist and added him to the site's roster of deep thinkers..

Australian society is certainly a noble and caring one, putting up $6 million of public funds to pay the mortgage of a failed-but-ideologically-sound newspaper editor, who in his turn scrapes reality's other victims from the grease trap of their ranting irrelevance.

On his better days, the ones when he is not instructing orderlies at his institution to polish his jackboots, Hamilton must register some flickering recognition of his great good fortune. Without Jaspan's intervention he would by now have only Lavatorious Polio* to broadcast his insights, and he could not sink lower than that. He should pen a little token of his gratitude -- a column, perhaps, on the evil of dwarf-tossing and why the CSIRO, universities and the Conversation's other generous backers must never, ever think of taking it up.

*NOTE: For those not versed in Latin, that translates as "paralyzing spectacle of the unflushed bowl".

A One-Sided Conversation

SOME time ago, a high-flier came rather abruptly to earth, suffering such terrible injuries that only massive government funding and the most modern technology could make him whole. Many millions of dollars were spent to get him back on his feet, at which point he re-paid the debt by launching an immediate crusade against wickedness in all its manifestations.

Steve Austin, you might be thinking, the hero of TV’s antediluvian action series, The Six Million Dollar Man? No, not him. While the amount spent on rehabilitation is identical, we’re not talking here about an astronaut-turned-crime fighter, about which there would be no cause to complain. Given the $100 million Victoria Police’s executive cadre has squandered in a failed attempt to fix its LEAP database -- not to mention the cost of eavesdropping on each other, cabinet members, their wives and staffers – forking out $6 million for a walloper who can actually wallop would represent good value for money, even if that individual were to be assigned, like so many of his comrades, to nothing more demanding than issuing speeding fines to operators of speed cameras.

The real Six Million Dollar Man, the man who owes his restored health entirely to taxpayers, is the irrepressible, unsinkable Andrew Jaspan, the former Phage editor whose performance was so poor, even by Fairfax standards, that he left “to explore other opportunities”, which is corporatespeak for staggering onto the employment market with the knife still jammed in your throat. Life might have been miserable for Wee Andy, whose employment options must have been chilling. He might, perhaps, have scraped together an income by representing Islamic head-loppers, who do owe him something of a debt.

“I was, I have to say, shocked by Douglas Wood’s use of the ‘arsehole’ word, if I can put it like that, which I just thought was coarse and very ill-thought through … As I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive.”

Turning off lights to save the world (allowing that a ladder was provided to reach the switch) might have been another possibility, but he had long since devalued the currency of his usefulness by doing precisely that for no-payment-whatsoever. Why buy something you have already enjoyed for free?

If dolphins and seaweed carried wallets and suffered from advanced paranoia, those species might have covered the Jaspan mortgage by engaging him to spread scare stories about the imminent demise of Port Phillip Bay. Once again, trouble is that he had orchestrated just such a PR offensive in 2007, when the Queen of the Netherlands arrived to dredge the mouth of the Yarra and the Heads, and the Phage pushed relentless front-page scares about environmental vandalism (and don’t skip the caption). Today, with the dredging done, even the dimmest varieties of marine life understand that only Fairfax shareholders had anything to worry about.

Fortunately for the little chap, there is a species even slower than seagrass, which at least has the wit to bend with the tide. Not so the people running Australia’s universities, who remain pointedly oblivious to growing public scepticism about the great climate scare. You can’t blame them, really, as there is no institution of higher learning in this wide, gowned land which has not snaffled at least a little cash to build departments that have repaid the favour by going to the mattresses in support of the idea that high, green taxes need to be imposed on their students’ fee-paying parents. God help all those warmy rappers and climate bitches if common sense were ever to derail the global warming gravy train. A sales job behind the cosmetics counter at Myer might be an option, especially for the more comely, twentysomething hot-weather hos, but the prospect of retaining such a position must be rated slim. Shouting abuse and obscenity at the people who pay your bills is appreciated on Hungry Beast and at the ABC, but paying customers won’t generally accept such behaviour face-to-face.

That is where Jaspan’s vestigal usefulness comes in. The man has cred with the people who no longer have any, so it was only a question of time before what you might call the New Establishment put him to work, after a fashion. At the Conversation, he is repaying the debt in spades. As at the Phage during his tenure, the rather peculiar definition of public debate holds that one side, the publicly funded one, advances a point of view which advocates of any other perspective are excluded from countering. Such is the Conversation’s reputation for fairness that Viscount Monckton insisted his written response to questions from one of Jaspan’s juniors be published in its unedited entirety or not at all. Monckton concluded his note with the following request: 

Finally, a question of my own. Please disclose the sources and amounts of your website’s funding and, in particular, please state how much funding the website has received directly or indirectly from taxpayers’ funds. This is a Freedom of Information request.

Monckton is a visitor to our shores, so he can be excused for not being up to speed on the latest trend in Australian tertiary education, which amounts to paying cash-on-the-barrel for the best kind of press coverage, ie., the sort you write yourself. Last year the Australia Literary Review, a monthly supplement in the Australian, struck a funding deal with the Parkville Asylum and seven other leading universities. This involved a new editor, formerly the education reporter – a good one, too -- and reportedly the chap who lined up the sandstones’ funding. Since then, academics have dominated the ranks of reviewers, with the July edition featuring ten epistles from the ivory tower out of 14 main reviews, many of which, in any given edition, are likely to be books by other academics. Amongst the regular contributors is Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis, who laments at great length in the current edition  “the troubling new literature” questioning the alleged benefits of a modern university education. Davis’ anxiety is delicious, given his own institution’s enthusiasm for varieties of wisdom never known to have lifted graduates’ employment prospects in the wider world.

But leave that for Davis and colleagues to discuss over fair-trade tea and organic bikkies. More relevant is his column’s penultimate thought, “We might believe universities deliver public benefit,” he writes, “but need to show how.”

Apart from the money Davis has channeled into the ALR, the centrepiece of his plan to demonstrate universities’ worth is, wait for it … Andrew Jaspan! Here is how Davis hailed the Conversation’s launch back in March:

Publications such as The Conversation offer an opportunity to … share findings and ideas, and provide a public space for discussion, disputation and evidence. It can become a virtual campus, a set of discussions in electronic hallways, a shaping and influence that may travel eventually beyond participants to a wider world.

Sounds lovely, eh! A Socratic chinwag under the digital plane tree, all contentions examined without fear or favor, truth above all, etc., etc. That Jaspan might be the man to lead such an endeavour, given his record at The Phage, must strike any reasonable person as grotesque. By Davis’ professed standards, what sort of value are the Conversation’s backers getting for their $6 million of other people’s money – a sum that includes, if rumours doing the rounds at the Parkville Asylum are correct, Jaspan’s annual salary of as much as $400,000?

Not well, not well at all – and it is the treatment of Christopher Monckton which most handily illustrates the site’s failure to meet its own stated goals. According to Dyer, remember, the Conversation is about “discussion, disputation and evidence”. So how does the Conversation treat Monckton and what he has to say? By setting up a special page – Monckton Watch – where assorted warmists’ assaults are compiled for easy reference. If you’re going to win one of Davis’ “disputations”, it really helps if the neither disputer nor supporters are invited to the debate.

It would be easy to fill post after post chronicling the Conversation’s monoculture, regardless of subject. The NT intervention? Against it. Individual freedom? Not keen. A nice roast dinner? Planet wrecker! Democracy? Not for bogans and proles.

So let the matter of bias and mindset go through to the keeper. There is a larger cause for disquiet about the Conversation, and it is this: When the current Labor government is banished to the opposition benches, as it surely will be, what tools are available, what pressure can be brought to bear, to make the Conversation honour its proclaimed standards? As an individual player, the site is not, and never will be, an organ of great influence. But as another brick in the wall the New Establishment has erected around ideas it dislikes, it will carry its share of the propaganda load.

To see the future, consider the Conversation’s recent batch of articles defending climate-change dogma, climate change science, and, not to put too fine a point on it, climate change hysteria. Published to coincide with Gillard’s big push to get its carbon tax enacted, it was immediately spruiked by that other, publicly funded partisan, The Drum. Next came the CSIRO, which is both a Conversation backer and a committed advocate of spending more on climate research, especially at the CSIRO. All told, the Conversation published 13 pro-tax stories on the subject, all of which were tweeted, re-tweeted and/or republished by aligned outlets.

And that is why a twerp like Jaspan and a $6 million joke like the Conversation is worth more attention than its content warrants.

It will be all very well and good to see an adult Abbott government, but its opposition – it’s real opposition – will not be the represented by the union hacks and elevated ambulance chasers of the ALP. It will be the publicly funded mouthpieces whispering their corrupt, self-interested talking points into the sympathetic ears of the ABC, Fairfax (allowing that it still exists) and anyone else who might help spread the word.

Dyer and his mates have every right to fund the Conversation and keep Jaspan in the manner to which he believes himself entitled. They do not have the right to make the rest of us pay for it. After scuttling the carbon tax, PM Abbott must make de-funding the left his next priority. The Conversation is all the evidence he will need.

UPDATE: At Catallaxy, Judith Sloan also finds the Conversation less than impressive.  

Team Tupperware

EVER since Mrs. Bunyip decamped, the refrigerator at the Billabong has been getting into a terrible state. Without a homemaker’s eye to spot the stuff that is turning nasty, strange growths and fuzzy, fungal oddities have been sprouting in odd corners, prompting a series of cleanups. Old chops are chucked, lumpy milk becomes the whey to go, and the ringtails do very nicely with the palsied fruit that flies out the back door, bounces off the fence and ends up in the compost heap behind the barbeque.  This irregular emphasis on cleanliness may seem like a chore, but there is good in all things and wisdom to be found in the oddest places. Take the plastic tub in which the remains of a scotch fillet were packed away some months ago, along with a dollop of gravy, a smatter of peas and the smashed-together mix of carrots and parsnips that goes so nicely with grilled meat. The container came to light only last night, when it turned up behind a box of Christmas-era custard that was mistaken for milk and plopped a nasty surprise into the evening’s final cup of coffee.

But the Tupperware’s contents, that was another story. Amid those gangrenous swirls of greys and blues and the white-speckled sprawl of pallid green blotches there was an explanation to be found for one of the great mysteries of Australian life: How can it be, week after week, that the meat and potatoes of public discourse looks so much like a compote of corruption? As the putrescent meat and veg from the fridge circled the vortex and disappeared down the lavatory (it was too far gone to join the other jettisoned goods in the kitchen tidy), all was made clear. As with rot and putrescence, people like Leslie Cannold, at it again in this morning’s Phage, maintain their places in the pulpit because they are the favoured residents of a closed and sealed environment.

On Friday, Cannold was sending Mary Magdalene to the knock shop with an article at the Drum. Today she is blessing Fairfax readers with her analysis of Zambian mining royalties. Tomorrow we should anticipate her thoughts on, well, whatever topic tickles her fancy. The subject will not matter because Cannold is in thick with what you might call the groupthinkers’ of Team Tupperware, along with so many other common room comrades, see-nothing editors, favoured think tanks and union-backed “non-partisan” generators of panic and press releases. Like her containerized confreres it appears all she must do to see her latest thoughts published is take her seat at the keyboard.   It is a happy little club to which she belongs and as the late Alene Composta demonstrated, admittance is gained with the “correct” opinions, no matter how loony.

How else to explain Guy Rundle, whose words bounce from Crikey! to The Drum to Fairfax and back again? Or crazy Clive Hamilton, who moves from mulling the need to suspend democracy to indignant denials that he ever said any such thing. Or Marieke Hardy, whose CV of vulgar columns, foul tweets and unfunny sitcoms never quite manages to disrupt the latest trip to the bank with an ABC cheque tucked into her garter? Or ponder Catherine Deveny, the Brunswick harpy. How does a “spaz” slinger get appointed to the post of disabilities ambassador? And then, of course, there is Robert Manne, the Boob of Bundoora, who sobbed for mistreated illegal aliens when John Howard’s policies were in effect, but told Q&A’s audience just two weeks ago that Labor made a horrible mistake when it dismantled them. 

Or how could it be that Andrew Jaspan rises again? It was the Mini Mancunian who drowned The Phage in a gullytrap of fraudulent stories about the dangers of dredging Port Phillip and was next caught, and caught red-handed, taking his paper’s riding instructions directly from Earth Hour’s charlatans.

It is a dismal record, but he has just been given $6 million of public money to helm a website dedicated to providing leftoid academics with access to yet another lectern.

The answer must surely reside in that closed, hermetically sealed container in which the likeminded love each other’s work. It is a small and stinky world under the lid, a place where there is no tolerance whatsoever for the antiseptic benefits of dissent’s sunlight. So it is banished as the rancid congratulate each other on the soundness of their opinions -- and the rot goes right on festering.

The next time you notice something toxic and nasty in the corner of an opinion page or on the ABC, take heart in the knowledge that the opinions expressed, even the most ludicrous ones, are beside the point. It is not the thought that counts but the purported thinker and his or her good standing with all the other grey little peas in the suppurating mix.

Look inside the container and it is not an edifying sight. But do you know what? There is absolutely no reason why the rest of us have to swallow it. Indulge their mutual invitations to  taxpayer subsidized literary festivals, try not to get too upset by the sounds of snouts in the trough of grants and subsidies and appointments to gold-plated gigs at the ABC. It is their mess, let them wallow in it -- until Prime Minister Abbott cleans out the ABC’s shelf in the fridge and Fairfax finishes the job of flushing itself out of existence.

Their day is coming, for there is no future in corruption.