Elizabeth Farrelly, Crack Columnist

HAVING chewed over a smorgasbord of seemingly random thoughts about Sydney’s mayor, big projects, women’s oppression and Irish drunkenness, Elizabeth Farrelly has extruded her weekly log on the Silly’s opinion page. Nominally about the many achievements of Clover Moore, its chief topic is, as always, the special and precious gift to the world that is Elizabeth Farrelly. Why the Silly believes the musings of an onanist, and an architecturally fixated onanist at that, belong on the opinion page is a question unlikely to be put until adult editorial supervision is restored to the newspaper. In the meantime, Big Notin’ Betty will continue to turn out lines like this:

My father, his father and proud eons of bog-Irish fathers before them believed fiercely in the great divide between women's work and the other sort. I don't recall the phrase ''men's work'' figuring too heavily.

Women's work, though, was clear. It covered everything routine, repetitive and mind-numbing, everything that didn't actually get you anywhere - feeding, weeding, sewing, hoeing, scrubbing, tubbing, bubbing.

Men got to do adventurous, limit-testing stuff. Stalking wild boar, caulking ships, walking on the moon. (For a positivist intellectual, my father was noticeably primal in his choice of metaphor. But I digress.)

Caulking ships, the great male adventure! Nothing could be further from the truth, as stuffing oakum into narrow gaps for hours on end would seem a chore for which Farrelly is perfectly suited. Simple, interminable and making use of fluffy rubbish that would otherwise be thrown away, caulking is the boatyard equivalent of  her weekly column. View the short video below and observe how a talent for the boring and repetitious makes her a natural..

Loping about the lunar surface and stuffing cotton fibre into cracks, at the Silly they cannot tell the difference.

Certificates, Fines And Pen-Pushers

MELBOURNE’S Occupisants met in the City Square tonight and decided they can best hasten capitalism’s demise by sleeping in the Treasury Gardens. Things in Greece and the attitude of Victoria Police not withstanding, they may be in for a long stay, as an economic system still rich enough to indulge the Brown government’s media inquiry must be reckoned to have quite a bit of mad money yet to be run through.

The submissions are rolling in at a nice crack and can be found here, where fresh ideas for making the press behave itself are added daily. So far, two themes are running strong. The first is that publishers really could use a bit of benign supervision, authority being re-inforced with fines. The second puts the case for directing subsidies to “appropriate” organs. They fit rather nicely together, don’t you think? Behave yourselves – “stick to the narrative” would be more honest but just a tad too blunt – and let’s see what sums and subsidies we can rustle up. For example:

There is a strong case to be made, which this submission seeks to articulate, for both increasing, and extending, the public funding of the print media and for requiring appropriate accountability for the use of public funding

John Corker, a whiz at media law from the UNSW, puts it rather succinctly in the section of his submission dealing with the online extensions of ink-and-paper publications. He thinks they need to be “certified”, and that learned and worthy folk – people very much like himself, no doubt --  should formulate codes and guidelines. If a magazine is published once a week, should its website be obliged to get the stamp of official approval? Corker is inclined to think that frequency warrants supervision, but he is less sure on other matters of classification. “There may be other influential publications for which standards of conduct should apply such as The Monthly,” he writes, demonstrating a gift for understatement.

Not to worry, the committees and working groups to follow the inquiry itself can calibrate at their extended leisure publications’ degrees of importance, as no doubt they will.  Here is the pressing need, as seen from Prof Corker’s ivory tower:

I suggest that consideration be given to developing criteria to identify ‘influential online news and current affairs media outlets’. For these publishers certain standards of conduct should apply as they bear a responsibility to the public as conceded in the APC Statement of Principles. This would include all existing newspapers and magazines perhaps published at least once a week.

That once-a-week thing would get one entirely irresponsible publication off the hook. Australian Amateur Boatbuilder has had barely a story on anything but stitch-and-glue flat-bottom sharpies for the past two years -- clear discrimination against catboat fanciers and pocket-cruiser enthusiasts (see the Kari 3, what a beauty!). Whatever they end up calling the coming media regulator, it will be peppered immediately with so many of the Professor’s complaints that the staff will need to double at the very least. This should please the bureaucrats very much indeed.

While questions are being raised about inquiry co- prober Matthew Ricketson’s fitness to serve, the news on the submission front is not all bad. Douglas Drummond, for example, presents a spirited case for telling would-be regulators to shut up and slink away:

Government has the forum of Parliament and the cloak of absolute privilege to respond to media attacks. In controversial matters, its parliamentary response is assured of public exposure in media outlets, particularly those that are commercial rivals to the attacker.

Since the political advertising case in the High Court, governments can spend practically unlimited amounts of public monies defending their position and attacking opponents by political advertising in the print and electronic media.

Drummond also notes the likely high cost of being dragged before a government truth tribunal and the need for brigades of public servants to push papers and publishers around.

It is a first-rate submission and everyone should read it, but don’t count on it being paid the slightest heed.  

Gestatin' The Obvious

HIS constant proximity to an elephantine PM must be colouring Transport Minister Anthony Albanese's thinking. He now believes human pregnancies can stretch to 43 weeks

Judith Sloan at Catallaxy sets him straight.

An Inquisitor's Income Source

AND while we are on the topic of partisan hacks and those who love them, what about Matthew Ricketson? Most often described as “a former journalist and academic”, he is also one of the two inquisitors appointed by our PM to make sure the media writes and thinks in the correct and appropriate fashion. Well Anne Summers’ question about Rebecca Weisser’s “undisclosed” ties to Qantas prompt another matter worth considering.

Why is Ricketson investigating the media when he is (a) a recent Fairfax employee and (b) an ongoing freelance contributor to that organisation -- and also at News Limited, where he made his feelings about Rupert Murdoch crystal clear in an approving review of Bundoora Bob’s laughable Quarterly Essay on the evil that is The Australian (which is so evil it published Ricketson’s thoughts). “I found the essay persuasive overall but don't take my word for it. Read it and make up your own mind,” he wrote in late September.

This is one of the two men who are going to decide what is appropriate to report and how to write it. For the sake of appearance alone, Ricketson must step down.

UPDATE: The Opposition is asking who proposed Ricketson and might that person have been Bob Brown?  The Silly's headline, "Opposition probes prof's links to Greens" 

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Old Gal Loses Reading Glasses

ANNE Summers must have thought she had found something as telling and scandalous as the fact that Andrew Bolt once had a girlfriend who did not become his wife, excitedly tweeting that her fellow Q&A guest, the Australian’s opinion editrix Rebecca Weisser, should have disclosed that she once worked as a PR operative for Qantas.

Some gotcha, sweetheart! The info is in Weisser’s Q&A biography, and Summers, having had her senior moment corrected by several respondents, has now flushed the original allegation down the memory hole.

Poor old Summers, what is to be done with her? There will not be any cushy appointments for her under the Abbott government, and with Fairfax in its parlous state, outlets prepared to publish whatever crap dribbles down her leg are apt to be rather limited. Julian Disney had better get his speech police off the ground ASAP! Slack and partisan but well-connected, the feminist battleaxe is the perfect choice to administer Disney’s fines and lectures about the need for accuracy. 

Disney's Brave New Tomorrowland

He would say that, wouldn’t he, Julian Disney of the Press Council, who is really, seriously demanding the power to punish writers and publishers because free speech is, you know, not the same thing as appropriate speech, and he and his fine-wielding mates are the arbiters best qualified to say which is which.

What else could such a man think after a working lifetime atop the caring-industrial complex? Decades of drafting protocols and frameworks, of building budgets and then identifying the threats to underwrite them – that has been his stock in trade throughout a rich and rewarding career. It is all there in the law professor’s biography: President of the Australian Council of Social Service Organisations, a turn as chief executive hand-wringer at its international counterpart, conspicuous friend to social workers and “stakeholder” advocates whose careers and mortgages hang on an assured supply of the downtrodden and oppressed, the vilified and generally wretched. As one potted CV puts it, the very busy Disney has been “a Law Reform Commissioner and chair or member of government advisory committees on economic planning, superannuation, education, employment and training, public administration, superannuation, housing and other matters.” It seems what people say, write and publish is to be the next of this apparatchik’s  “other matters”. 

You could laugh at Disney – you should laugh at Disney and all the other empire-building poverty pimps  – except his latest gambit to grab a bit more funding and influence is about as serious a threat as you might come across. Sure, it seems harmless enough now, even laughable, and who would object to press reports being bias-free and accurate? But Disney, he is the last person you would entrust with your right to express an unpopular or abrasive thought.

First, by any yardstick his record of success is deplorable. Ever notice how the number of “social justice” programmes and organisations continue to swell? Notice, too, how the ranks of the miserable always expand in lockstep. The greater the number of social workers and policy drones, the more they find syndromes and emerging ills to keep them occupied – and the harder Disney and his ilk campaign to secure and build their budgets.

But it is hypocrisy which is perhaps the most striking of Disney’s traits. Go back 40-odd years and he was a young student sharing a house in England with Geoffrey Roberston, whom he continues to rate as one of his best and closest friends. Roberston was making a name for himself as a gun hand in the legal team defending Richard Neville and the infamous Oz magazine against charges of publishing obscenity. It was a crusade that met with Disney’s approval, as he explained only recently to The Monthly:

Robertson offered up his services at a time in his life when he says he “knew all about the law and nothing about justice” and spent the trial “in the well of the court … as stagehand for the defence”.

Disney says this is a “huge understatement” of his role and that Robertson was the strategic brain and driving force behind the whole enterprise: “His performance, especially given his lack of experience, was a real tour de force.”

So, once upon a distant time, Disney backed the right to publish material that violated the then-Establishment’s standards. Now that he has become part of the New Establishment, well it is a different kettle of fish.

Cup Picks

FOR WHAT they are worth, here are the Billabong's picks for a race that stops a nation even more effectively than the PM who declines to act on a Qantas chief's warning.

Omen punters take note: the projected winner also brings Ms Gillard to mind. 

1/ Drunken Sailor
2/ Americain
3/ Manighar 

A FURTHER FESTIVE NOTE: When trick-or-treating tribes of little imps came knocking at the door last night, all received a quick lesson in modern multiculturalism, courtesy of the jelly beans below.

As readers, university-based activists and federal judges will note, each and every one is authentically black.

A FINAL ITEM OF SUGARY NEWS: If you drink Coca-Cola, which goes quite well with rum and bourbon, it might be time to stop. If Coke can afford to give the World Wildlife Warmist Fund seven-figure sums, it can afford to do without your patronage

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