Et Tu, Michelle...

WHEN you lose Michelle Grattan, you're cooked.

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.   

From Retreat To Rout

ANY military man will tell you it can be much more dangerous to retreat than advance. Panic sets in, order breaks down and fatal vulnerabilities are exposed, leaving even the best troops to be isolated, overrun and put to the sword. When the rout is over, the most lackluster foe will survey the butcher’s harvest and feel emboldened to attack again. It is a lesson News Limited appears not to have grasped, as today’s escalating assault on The Australian by our PM’s left-flank irregulars all too clearly demonstrates. 

Just to recap the details – or, rather, what appear to be the details: The Australian published a column by Glenn Milne dealing with Julia Gillard, her crooked former boyfriend and allegations that misappropriated union funds were poured into, amongst other things, renovations to the couple’s purported Fitzroy love nest. Something in the story was incorrect, and the PM was soon howling down the phone lines at News Ltd. chieftain John Hartigan. The column was pulled, an abject apology published -- and that retreat has set the stage for a humiliating rout which, in turn, opens the field for a further and perhaps even more damaging offensive. If the best defence is offence, the besieged and beleaguered Gillard government now has the momentum to rally its supporters and push back on several fronts. 

At the Herald Sun, where Andrew Bolt, aired similar allegations over the weekend, his blog’s current lead item is an opaque expression of discontent with, one assumes, News Ltd.’s generals and their legal batmen, who appear to have ordered his item be stripped of all quotes from an affidavit alleging wrongdoing by Gillard and her light-fingered former swain, Bruce Wilson. “No politics until further notice,” writes Bolt. “Principles to weigh up. Faith to keep. Sorry.” Today saw none of the Herald Sun blogger’s customary early morning updates, the only additions to the site being hundreds of reader comments requesting further explanation. Nor has he posted an item since.

Bolt is quite clearly ropable, but he is, as yet, holding his tongue. Asked on MTR this morning to explain the cryptic post, he declined. Later, during a phone-in on 2GB with sparring partner Paul Howes, he was more stroppy but equally unforthcoming (audio here). His tone of voice suggested a fellow with a letter of resignation in his pocket, although that is but a Bunyip’s intuition. (Bolt has since updated the post and promised to write more tomorrow)

While Bolt is unhappy, Gillard’s snipers are picking and blasting targets at will. The Phage, for example, recaps the Milne column, repeats the original allegation and provides the low-down on our PM’s righteous fury. Being an ardent ally of the PM has done nothing for the paper’s circulation or financial security, but it certainly makes for fast and reliable lines of communication. (By the way, to see how thoroughly Fairfax is tearing the arse from its own trousers, consult the annual report. The numbers for The Age and Silly on page 50 are shocking enough, but the EBITDA figure three pages later for the Financial Review – down 51.7% on the year – is a testament to staggering managerial incompetence.)

Crikey, which yesterday did truth a favour by failing to appear, summoned the wherewithal to grunt, strain and squeeze out an analysis by Andrew Crook, whose prose was the very picture of delight. The Milne piece was “error-filled”, the allegations long ago “discredited” etc etc. Crook managed to name only one perhaps-significant error – the assertion that Wilson and his doxy shared the same address. The excised portions from Bolt’s post said the couple kept their own addresses, and that the AWU had been billed for renovation work on both. If the scandal is the alleged rorting, Milne’s error would seem to be of no consequence whatsoever. All of which makes The Australian’s retraction and News Ltd’s retreat all the more curious. Hartigan was evidently so in terror of whatever Gillard threatened, the apology also was published in the Herald Sun, which did not run Milne’s column in the first place!

Those who missed Milne's column can find it here, where allrightallright has done the transcription.

If Hartigan hoped to calm things down, make nice with the woman who might soon order an inquiry into the ownership of Australia’s media, it was another ham-fisted move. There have been a lot of those lately, starting with the inept firing of Herald Sun editor, Bruce Guthrie, which has so far produced a scathing critique from the bench of News executives’ veracity under oath, a best-selling book and a former company insider who is making a fresh career out of telling tales and bagging his old bosses. An amicable parting or pre-trial settlement with a confidentiality agreement would have avoided all that. Now there is further evidence of things being not being quite right atop of News Ltd. Consider this paragraph from the Phage report on the Milne column’s disappearance:

The Age understands Ms Gillard was furious not only because the column included a false claim, but because she had been led to believe by Mr Hartigan that News Ltd newspapers were not intending to pursue the decades-old story of her former conman lover.

If true – and the Age’s loyalty to Labor makes you think that nugget came straight from the PM’s office – then one of the most oft-repeated charges against News Limited has just been confirmed: It cuts quiet deals with the powerful to benefit News Ltd. That may not be the case, but it is not a good look, not a good look at all – and now it is out there, grist for every journalism department’s academic mill.

Did Hartigan’s acumen go AWOL when he ordered the retraction? Was he in something of a panic, temporarily dazed and disoriented? He would have known that Four Corners was about to devote last night’s programme to the News of The World stink in Britain, so perhaps he had that looming distraction in the corner of his eye. It could easily have been a night of bruises – the possibility of a news report at 7 o’clock, a bashing from 7.30 and then Four Corners’ megadump of sleaze.

And finally there is the biggest question of the lot: Why retreat at all? If, as seems likely, Milne published only a minor error, it could have been easily corrected and the focus on our PM’s association with corrupt unionists allowed to stand. As for Andrew Bolt, there has been no suggestion of inaccuracy concerning his blog post, which actually corrected Milne on the matter of separate addresses. Why was Bolt’s coverage wrapped up and muffled in the same blanket edict to back off and back off quicksmart?

Gillard might have threatened a libel action, but would she have followed through? Craig Thomson took that route and dropped his case against Fairfax at the court’s door. Would Gillard have been any more eager to go on the sworn record about Town Modes, her grifting ex-squeeze and what she knew and when she knew it? Not a chance.

This could all be very sad for those hoping to see an early election. Now the government’s media militia can point to the Milne debacle and claim that any further attention to Craig Thomson is but more of the sleazy, error-riddled same. It will not be true, but it does not have to be for Tony Jones, Michelle Grattan and other camp followers to take up the cry. 

And News? Well if Hartigan did have a deal to make sure News Ltd was not dismembered, he sure does not have one now. 

Mick Gatto, PM

UNDER normal circumstances it would be good to know our PM is prepared to draw a line somewhere. A brothel creeper on the backbench? No, the satyr who poured the union dues of toilet scrubbers, floor moppers and wipers of geriatric bottoms into sundry pleasure palaces remains an upstanding member of this government, a fellow who, for all his red-faced silence, retains her full confidence. So is it the carbon fabulist who must be banished, the nest-featherer who urges others to head for high ground while expanding his Hawkesbury holdings to the water’s edge? No, Mr Panasonic remains the sober voice of settled science, as do all other spruikers of the Incredible Green Perpetual Motion Machine. Then perhaps it is the minister who, at a stroke of the pen, plunged the beef industry into a chaos from which it has yet to fully recover? Not him, either, possibly because anyone in this government who wrecks but a single industry must seem the very model of managerial nous.

But one fellow, a chap who, unlike Craig Thomson, has actually gone before the courts and been acquitted, elicits both our PM’s disdain and a stern instruction that the First Boyfriend must not allow him to set foot in The Lodge -- not even in the shed behind The Lodge. It may seem unjust, wicked almost, to display such intolerance for diversity, especially as the banished individual is both a supporter of charity and best-selling author, whose memoirs have been published by Australia’s leading (formerly) academic press.

If you were Mick Gatto, colourful Carlton identity and leader of the Acquitted-Australian community you would have every reason to be miffed – and baffled, too. Given that Gatto operates a successful business, he might well have coughed up the $10,000 paid for the right to dine at the Lodge in the belief that it could lead to bigger things. Special Envoy to Palermo, that would have been nice, as would an interim gig sorting out some of the PM’s more pressing troubles. That shovel-ready turncoat Kathy Jackson, who is helping NSW police investigate Thomson’s nocturnal commerce, she could certainly have taken a visit by Mick as an opportunity to review her actions and renew her loyalties.

Indeed, Gatto also could have helped make the Thomson scandal go away. A midnight knock (on door or head), the one-way ride, that extra touch of hard-to-identify flavour in tomorrow’s batch of sausages -- it is a service that might have been at our PM’s immediate disposal if only she had opened the door to opportunity.

Perhaps Gatto should demonstrate his ire by challenging for the seat of Lalor at the upcoming election. If probity is not an issue – and with this government it most clearly is not – then competence alone would guide the voters’ pencils. Big Mick would win that contest at a canter.

UPDATE: The odds on Gatto's new career as MHR for Lalor just shortened. Go to Andrew Bolt's updated post for details. If the allegations are true, Gillard is going to be jettisoned faster than one of Thommo's old condoms.

He Stoops To Concur

DAVID Williamson, tall playwright and unsuccessful re-cycler, offers our PM some more of the heartfelt advice so popular with her Fairfax publicists and ABC-sponsored apologists:

... Tough it out with Gillard and hope the Bulldog in her starts to emerge....

Having moved to Sydney some time ago, Williamson demonstrates that he is as out of touch with Melbourne's winter sporting scene as with worthwhile metaphor. Like his pinup PM, the Bulldogs began their season amidst many confident predictions of glory in September. Since then, they have failed, disappointed and collapsed. Only yesterday they went to Sydney and  were whipped once again.

If Gillard is to draw inspiration from her favourite football team, coach Rodney Eade will be its source.

He will be fired, and not before time, very soon indeed.

Chuck Her Off The E.J. Whitten Bridge

IT HAS been a shocker of a year for followers of Australian Rules Football teams St Kilda and the Western Bulldogs. Each began the season at relatively short odds for this year’s flag, and this seemed entirely reasonable at the time. St. Kilda’s heart was broken, and then its back, by the draw and subsequent defeat in 2010’s two Grand Finals, the last of which Collingwood won at a romp, so the thinking in the Outer was that the Saints would be fired up for revenge. That has not happened. One third of the way through the season, St Kilda has only just managed its first victory, and that by a meagre few goals over a Melbourne squad so ugly even Father Damian of the Lepers would have given them a wide berth.

Footy is the staple of every Melbourne winter and a large part of this city’s idiosyncratic charm, so the Saints’ fall from grace is a frequent topic of conversation. Everyone agrees the game has caught up with the style of play that made St Kilda a contender, and that is the reason one hears in barber chairs and pubs or on the stroll from green to tee for this season’s spectacular collapse.

But there is also that other reason, the one that gets mentioned but not for the most part dwelt upon, and certainly not by Saints supporters: The St Kilda Schoolgirl. If that little minx and her nude pictures, lies, truths, half truths and calculated disruption of the AFL’s publicity machine are unfamiliar there is no point in explaining them. Anyone ignorant of the Schoolgirl’s story will have no interest in the world’s greatest sport and is unlikely to have come so far into this post, so why bother recounting her devilment? If you do not know about it by this stage you do not want to know about it.

None of that can have done the Saints any good, and apparently it hasn’t. It cannot be easy, for example, to be a captain who must run the gauntlet every week of opposition supporters wondering about the state and volume of your pubic hair. Until this year the footy term “waxing” meant nothing more than two players running down the clock by kicking the ball repeatedly between themselves. Thanks to the Schoolgirl’s snapshots the sum of human knowledge has been expanded, if only by a stubby inch or two.

That settles the Saints, but how to explain the Bulldogs, who finished third, third and fourth over the past three years? Always the bridesmaids, this also was reckoned by many to be the year of the Dog, especially on the side of the Maribyrnong where the sun goes down. Hot new recruits, a seasoned leadership cadre, a coach with much to prove – it was enough to see the team open the season at 8-1 for the flag. Then the Doggies took the field in the first round against Essendon, only to be whipped and roundly humiliated.  A further thrashing was administered on Sunday, when the Eagles inflicted one of the most comprehensive defeats seen on the playing field in living memory.

Some men, honourable men, would have requested a minute alone in the coaching box with a revolver, but coach Rodney Eade is not made of such stuff, seemingly determined to stick with the charade of competence until he is sacked. But will that be enough? If St Kilda’s experience is any guide – and it most certainly is --  Footscray has more housecleaning to do. Like St Kilda, Whitten Oval is beset by a troublesome woman. Unlike St Kilda she happens to be the Number One ticketholder.

Yes, sports fans, it is Julia Gillard of whom we speak. When it has suited her, the Dogs have been her bitch. Recall the response to questions about her ambitions to oust Kevin Rudd. Not a bit of it, she swore, adding that she would be more likely to replace Barry Hall at full forward than slime and stab her way into the Lodge. It was a lie, one more entry in our PM’s  ledger of falsehoods and deceptions, and she has returned repeatedly to the red-white-and-blue well whenever it has been expedient to promote the fiction of her working-class, western suburbs authenticity.

Some horny handed daughter of toil she! Never held a job other than that of publicity-chasing lawyer with a bought and paid for Labor law firm. Never met a taxpayer she has not sought to make poorer with her carbon tax. Never stood in the checkout line at Coles in Pier Street, Altona, where her constituents are reminded by their weekly grocery bills that Canberra’s official figures bear not the slightest relevance to the real cost of preparing dinner. Has this champion of the industrial West ever pumped her own petrol or saved the discount coupons to make that costly experience less painful? Somewhere between Wales and Werribee she acquired the nasal infection that is her idea of what her adopted countrymen sound like. Apart from disporting herself in a Footscary scarf when cameras are about, that is the sum total of her ties to the working world.

St Kilda has its schoolgirl and the Bulldogs have their Gillard. Both liars, each prepared to use the team they claim to support for their own ends. Yes, Rodney Eade must go, but the case for cancelling the PM’s club membership is perhaps even stronger. Every time she drags her layabout beau to the President’s box she is a reminder that the fish rots from the head down, that a team prepared to make itself a tool in a liar’s self-promotion will never deserve the full four points, let alone a flag.

Get rid of her, Footscray. And then hand Eade that revolver.