The Malady Lingers On

THIS CATCHY number will be familiar to many readers, but those who spent the weekend traipsing about Kingston Heath may have missed it:

To quote Ian Turpie, late of this planet and the Go! Show, it has a good beat and you can dance to it. Come the election, where ever Gillard turns up to excrete a few more lies, this song should be her soundtrack.

She Really Is a Piece of Work

IF ANDREW BOLT was not being denied his moderators once again -- a strange way for News Ltd to demonstrate its faith in a digital future -- one of his commenters certainly would have reacted to this post about Slater & Gordon by noting this passage in The Australian's report that was its inspiration:

Their leaflets warned that, with Mr Blewitt at the helm, the union risked returning to "bad old days" of corruption. They also revealed attempts to level "20 charges of misconduct and mismanagement of union funds" against Mr Blewitt.

"Unfortunately, unless something is done to restore justice and credibility to the union, the union is destined to go back to the bad old days (of corruption)," the leaflet stated.

The attempts to have the union accounts audited and Mr Blewitt investigated or ousted were crushed by the legal action [for libel], in which Ms Gillard and her then boss in the industrial unit at the law firm, Bernard Murphy, were acting on Mr Blewitt's instructions.

Mr Murphy, appointed a Federal Court judge by the Gillard government last year, said yesterday he had nothing to add to a statement he made two months ago. He said then that his reasons for leaving the firm of Slater & Gordon in 1995 had nothing to do with the AWU.

Mr Blewitt said yesterday the defamation action was ordered by Mr Wilson, who jointly controlled the slush fund.

What do we have here? Yet another, hitherto unmentioned example of our PM putting her legal talents at the disposal of a crooked lover and the corruption that was his stock in trade.

A FURTHER THOUGHT:  Given that Gillard was involved in suppressing the complaints of corruption levelled by the AWU's would-be reformers, how can she continue to claim deny she knew of that corruption or her bedmate's part in it? The simple explanation, as with most things about Gillard, is that she is a liar through and through.

Go West Young Man

JUST PUBLISHED by Mark Baker of The Age, a paper whose reputation he is trying valiantly to restore, is news that Peter Gordon has not kept a personal copy of his former law firm's missing Gillard File. No surprise there.  What is worth noting comes late in the report (emphasis added):

''I have absolutely no idea where any such documents might be, while noting of course that some or some parts of the documents referred to may have entered the public domain with the relevant WA statutory authority and the originals may of course still be with that authority,'' [Gordon] said.

Baker probably did not need to be told to go fossicking in the West, but it was certainly nice of Gordon to steer him in that direction.

The Latest Real Julia

THE Slipper-led revival of Labor's political fortunes hasn't worked and the campaign to depict Tony Abbott as Bluebeard on the Molonglo isn't sticking. Teams of quality journalists taking en masse dictation can't budge the polls because the only people who still believe quality journalists are other quality journalists. Stacked QandA audiences bring a little comfort, but there can be no realistic expectation surly lesbians with HECS debts represent a sufficiently large voting bloc to save our Prime Minister's bacon.

So what tactic can a Prime Minister of no known principles try now? Another about-face, of course!

(Warning: turn down the volume if viewed at work)

Lara Bingle For PM!

COMPARE and contrast:

Lara Bingle: Had an affair with then-Blue Brendan Fevola
Julia Gillard: Kissed former Bulldogs forward Barry Hall
Score: Bingle 10; Gillard 2

Lara Bingle: Gets lots of freebies from designers whose clothes she models
Julia Gillard: Got lots of free clothes from crooked boyfriend via Town Mode
Score: Bingle 10; Gillard 4 (penalised for having to sleep with her wardrobe master)

and the clincher...

Lara Bingle:  Looked good in not much while doing crappy Tourism Australia ads
Julia Gillard: Looks awful in a truthful pitch to waterborne New Australians-to-be
Score: Bingle 10; Gillard 3
 
That puts Bingle ahead by a score of 30 to 9. Here's the ad that sealed the deal:

Readers who believe they may have further reasons why Bingle should take over as PM are invited to air them as comments.

Gillard Slept Here .... Sometimes

ABRAHAM LINCOLN had his log cabin and Johnny Cash a shotgun shack, and so did our PM Gillard progress to greater lodgings from her humble start as a "young and naive" lawyer allegedly residing during a period of career crisis and romantic turmoil in this tastefully renovated double-fronted Victorian at 36 St. Phillips Street, Abbotsford.

Just to re-cap, extensive renovations were done to the property while the nation's future leader was playing quoits with Cottontails and bedpost at light-fingered lover Bruce Wilson's nearby Fitzroy digs. When eyebrows were raised about the source of those funds, Gillard produced a hand-written receipt to support her assertion that the property did not benefit from a penny of her lover's ill-gotten gains.

That claim satisfied former News Ltd chief John Hartigan, who fired a columnist for doubting the PM's word, and saw Fairfax, which makes big noises about editorial independence, dispense with the services of broadcaster Michael Smith. As for the Fairfax dead-tree press and the ABC, those prisms of truth would focus their gaze on the former Chez Gillard only if it became clear that the home's  occupant had not recycled her rubbish.

But non-journalists remain interested in the property's history all the same, especially the Professor, who cannot help wondering if Phillips Street's longer-term residents remember their former neighbour and have memories to share about those long-ago renovations and the contractor(s) who executed them. Also a source of curiosity: during the PM's SATDAC period (slap & tickle/dilation & curettage), do they recall if the property was rented, which would put pay to the claim that Gillard was but an occasional overnight guest at Chez Wilson.

Anyone who has inspected the home's interior also is invited to decribe the built-in robes, which must be on the large side to have accommodated all those free frocks from Town Mode.

(Many thanks to reader Brooke for digging up Ms Gillard's former address from an old phone directory. Also, much gratitude to commenters who note that the street is actually St. Phillips Street.)

Staying The Course

BETTER the liar they know.....

Four Cornered

THERE'S AN OLD joke, funnier, it's true, toward the end of a pleasant evening, about a poor, leprous, reeking wretch who crawls into a magnificent cathedral as a grand wedding is in progress.

"Why, God, why me?" he cries, bringing the ceremony to a halt. "How could you have so wronged me? My wife and family dead, my fortune stripped away, my health ruined. Why, God why?"


So moved is the congregation it takes up the visitor's cry, voices rising as one unto the Great Bunyip, each mouth beneath the stained glass and soaring arches imploring an explanation for such calamity and dread misfortune.  Even the bride and groom fall to their knees to pray for mercy, hearts all but broken by the poor man's sobbing recital of all the many more Divine injustices visited upon him.


As he crawls to the altar rail and suppurating* sores stain the flagstones upon which he comes to rest, the bishop adds his voice to the questioning chorus.


"Why, God, why," is the cry from his and every quivering lip. "Why him, Lord? How could You inflict so much grief on such a pathetic little mouse. How could You, God? How could You?"


There is a rumble in the air and a mighty, swirling cloud of blinding, brilliant light billows beneath the cathedral's dome, whence descends a giant hand with pointing finger that stops but inches from the poor man's tear-stained face.


"Why did I do this?" says The Voice of Ages. The celestial finger points and quivers as the faithful hang upon the answer.


"Why?" booms The Voice as the finger jabs, "because this one just gives Me the absolute shits."

 -----///-----

THERE are few if any moments in life when we can touch, know and quite enjoy the Divine certainty of another's torment, but anyone who watched our PM duck and weave and snap and scold on Four Corners must surely have felt that guilt-free, godlike tingle. Her press gallery congregants can take up Gillard's case, as they do almost every day now, praying for mercy in their columns and pleading for  wisdom's Divine intercession to make voters see, as they all do, the many sterling virtues and wonderful accomplishments of the Labor crew.

Last night as Gillard squirmed and those darting, cornered eyes supplied a candour that her voice dared not, you had to love every miserable second of the creature's unravelling. Finally, the woman who has told so many lies ran out of them. She would not answer because she could not answer. To confirm that she knew her victory speech was drafted two weeks before the knife went into Rudd would have been to validate every suspicion of cynical and predatory ambition she has for so long denied.

It was beautiful to watch her come undone, sweeter than the licorice icecream the Rufous Bird brought with her for dessert.

She's gone, you know, about to be crushed and buried by the mountain of her own deceits. We'll get our chance to play God with the rest of them soon enough, when scandal, happenstance or, if we must wait that long, the passage of  another 18 months brings an election to the nation's rescue. Until then, let us enjoy this moment as a demonstration of that lesson many still teach their kids: a bad end for a bad person.

But most all she's gone because, as she demonstrated so well last night, she shits every adult with an ounce of sense or decency, especially decency.

Enjoy the show. It is going to be fun and very bloody.

*originally mis-spelled, but now correct. It was late. Much licorice icecream had been consumed.

When There Are No Tomorrows

SOME YEARS ago, a boon companion from the Professor’s youth was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, one of the nastiest varieties you can get. His doctors detailed how they would go about treating it – if treat is the right word for an ailment that carries off 95% of its victims in less than two years. He went home, stared at the wall for a spell and was reviewing the options when his son cranked up the stereo in another room. The song was Lou Reed’s White Light, White Heat, from Rock and Roll Animal, and by the time the track was done his mind was made up.

Just twelve months to go? Bugger it! He called the oncologist and told him to inflict the rads and chemo on someone else. As he was almost certainly off to meet the Great Bunyip, he decided to jam as much fun as possible into however much time was left.

And he did, too. Cigarettes, the nicer drugs, alcohol, wild women while still able to handle the exertion – those became the staples of a life running down. His ex-wife took him to the cleaners when they divorced, so he stuffed his wallet with credit cards, whose debts would never be re-paid, and went to town. And to Europe. And Asia. And South America.

Fourteen months he survived, all but the last few jammed-packed with pleasure. When the coffin birds hovered by his casket at the funeral home he was wearing a very sharp Armani suit and, by arrangement with the undertaker, a smile. Oh, yeah, and they played White Light, White Heat very loud indeed, which is the only way to hear it.

You don’t often see such logic in the face of death, and until recently, the assumption had been that the Professor’s mate was one of a kind. Now, though, looking at what our PM and her rabble are getting up to, it seems he has inspired a brood of imitators.

The Gillard mob, they know they’re doomed, that sooner or later the brothel creeper Thomson will be forced to quit, and after that who knows what else might shave their numbers to the point where a no confidence motion sweeps them all away? In the meantime, they are making merry and there is no stopping them.

Give Bob Brown a staggering $11 billion to underwrite his party's green fantasies? Why not! There will be nice jobs for mates and board seats aplenty amongst all the burgeoning alternate energy outfits and think tanks that money is going to underwrite.

And propriety, that is another casualty of this wretched government’s impending demise.

Put a drunk and habitual rorter in the Speaker’s chair? You bet. Peter Slipper has been bought and paid for with his much improved salary, not to mention whatever sinecure or diplomatic post might be conjured into being as a token of appreciation for, ahem, fairness and discretion while presiding over the House.

And Rupert Murdoch? As Labor and its Greens guardians go down for the count you can stake your last dollar that the common goal will be to take him and News Ltd with them.

Subsidies for Fairfax? Probably. And if you think that is far fetched, just look at today’s decision to snatch away from Sky the contract for running the Australia Network and award it in perpetuity to the ABC. There is no basis for it, no rationale except a diseased and dying government’s spite.

The wake for the Professor’s friend was a hell of a party. So, too, will be the celebration to mark the demise of  the filth that now encrusts the government benches.

There will be a difference, though. The hangover will be worse, much worse, and it will last for years.

Aunty Julia Gets Involved

AN accidentally intercepted telephone conversation:

NASAL VOICE: Hello, little boy. How are you holding up in Bali?

TEEN VOICE: The pigs have me locked up for nothing! A little dope, that’s all. And it wasn’t my fault… (shouting) Mum and Dad forced to come to this crap hole because they said I was too young to stay home alone. It’s their fault! It’s their fault!

NASAL: I know, I know… but you shouldn’t call them pigs because it is culturally insensitive. In a Muslim country pigs are not very popular, and you don’t want me to send Judge Bromberg up to make you change your tone, do you?

TEEN: So, like, this guy forced me to buy the weed. Forced me!

NASAL: I know what it’s like, young man. A bad man once forced me to buy $17,000 worth of frocks with stolen money, but like you I was young and naïve.

At this point the conversation was swallowed by static, but clarity soon returned.

NASAL: So, little boy, have you had any visitors?

TEEN: Just Dad, what a loser!

NASAL: And your Mummy?

TEEN: She’s too scared ’cause she knows it’s her fault for making me come here. I am so much not down with that bitch.

NASAL: I meant official visitors, like Mr Rudd. He’s probably flying to Bali right this minute, but you shouldn’t talk to him, and never, ever pose for pictures with him, OK?

TEEN: Who’s he?

NASAL: A very nasty man who will not go away. He’ll promise to get you released, but don’t listen to a word he says.

TEEN: OK

NASAL: Leave it to me, little boy. I’m working on a regional solution and will have something worked out with Indonesia, Malaysia, East Timor and maybe New Guinea before anyone has a chance to molest you, seriously molest you

TEEN: You mean like that Mr Rudd?

NASAL: No…well, he might, you never know what he might get up to.

TEEN: OK

NASAL: And when I get you out we’ll all go to the Lodge to have our pictures taken. Won’t that be lovely!

TEEN: Will there be sniffer dogs there?

NASAL: Not for you, little boy, not for you … and if that nasty Mr Rudd does turn up, I want you to give him the name and phone number of the massage girl you were with when they arrested you.

TEEN: OK

NASAL: We missed getting any pictures of him at a place called Scores in New York, so this time I could get a nice little snap for my dossier, er, album...

And then the line went dead.

Solyndra: Tip Of The Berg

FOR some reason, up until this morning, neither Phage nor Silly had published more than a few inconsequential words about the Solyndra scandal in the US. A week or so ago, the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman argued in his syndicated column, re-published in both papers, that green subsidies “really helped start-ups leverage private capital, but you also get Solyndras.” If the Fairfax target audience was capable of curiosity, this throw-away reference might have incited it. Despite all the many reports on Obama’s politically motivated squandering of $500 million, until that point not a single mention had graced the pages of either Australian broadsheet.

Three days later, Fairfax man in Washington Simon Mann added a little more to the sum of Age’s readers’ knowledge, such as it is. “Having abandoned its push for a carbon price, the Obama administration is under fire in the wake of the collapse of solar panel maker Solyndra, into which it ploughed more than $US500 million.” Again, no mention of the quid pro quo that apparently opened the cash spigot for a generous Democratic Party donor. That is hardly surprising, given that Mann was decrying Republican presidential candidates’ climate-change scepticism, which means “Green power does not rank in their calls for American energy independence.” Fairfax does not have many readers left, but those who remain can rest assured that they will never be confronted by news stories that might provide an incitement to independent thought.

This morning in the Sunday Phage the cause of public enlightenment took a turn for the better, although it was left to an opinion columnist, the IPA’s Chris Berg, to explain the scandal in terms other than evil Republicans’ indifference to the environment. Berg’s article is a good read and a fine summation of everything the Age has failed to report. But his column does not bring readers entirely up to date, there being no reference to Solyndra’s quest to mine additional green dollars from Australian taxpayers.

Unlike the US parent, Patrick Featherston, head of Solyndra’s Australian subsidiary, claimed in a submission to Department of Climate Change not to need “direct cash contribution from the Government”.  Rather, it was “an accelerated depreciation schedule of 5-7 years” that would spur “a large uptake” of rooftop solar systems.

Our PM has few things to celebrate these days, but Solyndra’s sudden collapse in the US may be one of those rarities. If the US company had not gone bust, who can tell how many buyer incentives the Gillard government might have provided to promote a rogue multinational’s technology? It could have been awkward, with Solyndra’s Australian clients attempting to reach the customer service department of a company that no longer exists.

Gillard’s sole consolation would have been her good friends at Fairfax, where the policy, apparently, is to publish opinion on the news pages and hard facts in the op-eds. And where, on the form of the past few weeks many failing years, no mention would have been made of it at all.

UPDATE: Here's a thought. Why doesn't a reporter call a few of the Australian companies installing Solyndra's products and ask where they stand now? Who knows, there might be a story there.

The Hospice Vigil

ANYONE who has endured the anguish of a prolonged deathbed vigil will know how the mind takes refuge in a grim relativism. There is no hope and you know as much, fully aware that sooner or later (and most likely sooner), the loved one laid low will heave the final breath, that the loss will be forever, and why no prayer or medical miracle can alter the coming end. Yet somehow, despite all the evidence of eye and experience, the mood adjusts. As the former Mrs Bunyip’s mum went to her reward via an awful final month of wasting and shrinking, there was even a little laughter amongst the tubes and monitors. It wasn’t a callous jocularity so much as the product of that mental adjustment by which, with chuckles and kisses and by creeping degrees, one begins to accept the loss before it has yet happened. The news that the disease was terminal came as a shock, but once assimilated there was some room for light and shade. True, the visitors’ eruptions of good humour brought comfort to the dying, but it was those gathered ’round who drew the greatest benefit from distraction and delusion. She had a good day, you might say when pain  briefly receded, and you would be fortified with good cheer to overlook for just a moment the certainty of its return.

Something very similar is underway amongst those friends and lovers gathering at the Gillard government’s deathbed. There are bouts of denial, of silencing the grim certainty by shushing the realists who speak so tactlessly of the cancers that are eating it. Ask 2UE’s Michael Smith about that. For two weeks he has been off air, silenced by Fairfax until he agrees not to speak of our PM’s intimate relationship with a swindler. It is a valid matter for discussion, not least because it raises the issue of Gillard’s judgment, the connections that elevated her political career and, in her claim that she was “young and naïve at the time”, the ongoing willingness to fudge and mislead. For the record, Gillard was 35 and a rising lawyer when her then-bedmate was robbing union members blind.

Same thing with those troublesome refugees. Not so long ago, when a government of another stripe was in power, the Fairfax press and ABC could not write enough of conservative Australia’s racist inhumanity. A boat dubbed SIEV-X went down with horrendous loss of life and no charge against John Howard, not even of murder, was too spurious or obscene to be withheld. And where are they now, those outraged accusers, as more boats sink and Gillard clings to the wreckage of her flint-hearted “Malaysian solution”? Apart from a few activists who demonstrated their moral consistency by chasing Immigration Minister Christopher Bowen down the street, the rest of the posse has disbanded. No books or breathless broadsheet exposes of a heartless butcher in The Lodge. Wouldn’t do to be so frank, not at this time, not with a dearly beloved on life support.

Instead we get, well, just read Misha Shubert in this morning’s Sunday Age and observe the latest source of comfort for our PM’s soon-to-be mourners. It’s not that Gillard’s crew is inept, incompetent and ideological incoherent, nor is that Australia’s voters have noticed as much. Yes, Gillard is perhaps a little awkward on the stump, Shubert concedes in passing, but the problem – the real problem – is that Tony Abbott has “torn up the rule book”, as the headline puts it.

“Abbott's success as an opposition leader is that he simply shrugs off the expectation for consistency," Shubert writes. "He is adept and swift at rationalising shifts in position. And, let's face it, he is not often held to sustained account to explain such anomalies.”

Forget Gillard’s inconsistency – from cash-for-clunkers to her stillborn citizens’ assembly and, of course, the no-carbon-tax bill of goods – it is all about Abbott and his Teflon coat. It is a perspective that would have been at home beside the bed in which the ex-Mrs Bunyip’s mum expired. Out of the dying woman’s earshot, the cancer took flesh in her family’s imagination. It was no longer a disease, but a near-human entity, one whose advances and retreats were evidence of the evil her well-wishers projected upon it. Didn’t bother the cancer, of course, but having something to blame did ease the burdens of those following its progress.

Shubert might well enjoy casting Abbott as Tony the Tumour, and while her summation of the opposition leader’s astute tactics as a violation of political fair play would rile the sensible rest of us, leave the poor woman to mop the patient’s brow and see her off with words of blameless comfort.

Gillard's condition is terminal and this government with her. So don't begrudge the Shuberts, Hartchers and Marrs the consolation of pointing the impotent finger at the coming coalition ascendancy. Just be ready to make sure Tony Abbott cleans up her legacy of decay.

The Broken "Record"

FROM Sydney, 2UE's Mike Smith puts some questions to our PM and gets -- surprise, surprise -- the runaround.

Hear here.

One More Pull On The Handle

SOME PEOPLE play pokies, forever backing losers while hoping their luck will change.

Fairfax journalists are different. They keep investing their credibility in Gillard and hoping she will come good. It has been just plain “bad luck”, according to an Age senior editor, that less savvy types see her for a dill. Not to worry, the latest ructions on international markets will give her “an opportunity to shine”.

Fairfax has been betting the house on this proposition for so long there is not much of the old pile left.

Two Pods in The Pee

ONE OF the more interesting things about smoking is the opportunity to observe the way butts discarded in the toilet often find each other. Not always – sometimes they will sulk in separate corners – but surprisingly often, and for no apparent reason, they are drawn to float butt-to-butt or side-to-side, like little logs on a Canadian river. What mystery of physics arranges these matings must remain a riddle until the grants and peer-reviewed literature are in, but it seems noxious discards’ mutual attraction also applies in the wider world.

The proof: On August 3 in Melbourne, Julia Gillard will launch former Police Commissioner Christine Nixon’s biography 

UPDATE: As a reminder of Nixon’s oily dissembling, let us re-visit her testimony before the Bushfires Royal Commission on April 14, 2010. Nixon is being asked to explain details omitted from an accounting of her social calendar provided at an earlier appearance:

Q: The statement makes no mention of a meal at a pub; do you agree with that?

NIXON: I think that, looking at the statement, it

was prepared with the best knowledge I can at the time…

Q: When you prepared this statement had you forgotten that you went to the Metropolitan [Hotel]?

NIXON: Look, I didn't think it was relevant, and what I understood I was being asked about was my role as the Police Commissioner and the other two responsibilities I had on the day. Whether I had a meal at home and prepared it myself or whether I had a meal otherwise, I didn't see as being important….

Q: …But you have just agreed, Ms Nixon, that the omission of the reference to the meal out in the statement was a matter of choice. You decided it was not relevant?

NIXON: I did.

Q: I suggest to you, you deliberately omitted reference to the meal being out at a pub both in your statement and in your oral evidence because you didn't want to reveal that you had gone out for a meal rather than stayed at home?

NIXON: Look, I don't agree with that point at all. It was an arrangement that was easily cancelled. It wasn't significant. It wasn't a celebration….

And thus it was that Victoria’s senior disaster official left the bushfires command centre to stuff her face while 173 Victorians were being burned to death. As the full transcript makes clear, for three full hours on the terrible night of February 7, 2009, not a single emergency official bothered to contact Nixon, presumably because those at the command HQ realized her wisdom was not worth the cost of a phone call.

Is it any wonder a pair of oleaginous specimens like Nixon and our PM enjoy such mutual esteem?

Julianomics -- Dead In The Water

IT REQUIRES a rare talent to introduce a tax that costs more than it brings in.
  

The Age understands the scheme will cost more than the revenue it raises over its first four years, with most of the cost blow-out coming in the first two years. It is expected to become budget neutral later

Another first for Team Gillard. What a crew.

UPDATE: The nose isn't right and the hair should be a touch ruddier, but English artist  John Everett Millais captures both our PM's pasty complexion and her imminent fate -- political fate, that is -- in this 1851 rendering of Ophelia, driven to madness and self-destruction by a demented Hamlet (frequently mistaken on Elsinore's battlements for Bob Brown).

She is dead in the water, our PM. The sooner an election sweeps her away for good, the sooner adults can begin making things a little less rotten in our very own Denmark on the Cotter.

 

Aunty's Foul Mouth

IF ONE gives the Gillard government the benefit of the doubt on matters of motive, then its most enduring legacy will be a tutorial on the treachery of good intentions. Labor brought with it to power in 2007 an evangelical zeal to wipe clean the sins of Howard The Beast and the planet-raping, baby-drowning racists who joined him in marching Australia into the wasteland of amoral indifference. It wasn’t mere politics Kevin Rudd and his then-loyal deputy peddled from the stump -- although there was plenty of that, of course -- but a niggly and chiding campaign of moral betterment.

Consider an issue, any issue, and ponder how the shadow of the left’s favourite preachers and pulpits blocked the light of reason, inevitably casting perceptions and prescriptions in the stark white and black of virtue and wickedness. Far from representing the well-heeled upper crusts of the world’s many Trashcanistans (who else can meet the people smugglers’ steep fees?), those who arrived uninvited at Christmas Island were taken as the living proof that the law and attitudes were evil and needed to be changed. The law was changed, almost immediately, and the result has been wrecked boats and lost lives, roof-sitters, riots and, coming soon, a fresh and bizarre trade in human flesh that will see a series of unequal swaps between Australia and Malaysia. As the floundering Gillard makes its incoherent attempts to restore that eroded popularity the one possibility that her government will not consider is that its sliding numbers are all its own doing.

Or global warming, as it was once known, that has seen so much more of the same. Rudd branded it the great moral question of our age and jetted off to Copenhagen with an entourage large enough to reflect that pressing urgency. Result: Much posturing and many photos of the former PM and ….  well, nothing much that can be measured, other than the polls’ calibration of the public’s growing disbelief. An astute government might have stopped there and cut its losses. Instead, because it found their company more congenial, it listened to GetUp’s crowd wranglers and the Youth Climate Coalition’s children’s crusade. Now we have Gillard’s carbon tax and her policy's insufferable advocate, the jet-setting Tim Flannery, whose salary, shuttlings and pseudo spirituality are daily reminders that theology has usurped both science and rational policy.

Fix education? A government that heeded none but teachers’ union reps bought, seasoned for taste and swallowed at a gulp the dogma that public works projects produce smarter kids. The result has been twofold: a mushrooming of gold-plated shelter sheds and the opportunity to observe the much better value for money private schools’ lean bureaucracies consistently achieved.

And now comes the budget, which is salted with many further examples of a government attempting to do well by doing what it hopes voters will perceive as doing good. The most striking examples are those set-top boxes, which grannies are to have connected at considerable taxpayer expense. Again, while this initiative must have struck Gillard & Co., as a hands-down vote winner, the likely trajectory from largesse to debacle is easy to plot. There will be shonky installers and horror stories -- lots of those. There will be another industry ruined, just as the home-installation industry was cruelled, by the flood of market-distorting subsidies and state-sponsored competitors to existing aerial installers. And we will see the greatest inevitability of them all: baffled oldsters needing many publicly funded follow-up visits to reset their boxes every time there is a power outage or granddad fouls the wires with his mobility chair. Gilard & Co. may not have noticed, but geriatrics are not renowned for techno savvy.

Nor for their indulgence of obscenity, which makes what the grey battalions might find to watch via those boxes somewhat problematic. Yes, The Bill will screen forever on some UK-themed channel devoted to repeats. And yes, Midsommer Murders and Antiques Roadshow will not be going away. But suppose your Aunt Violet had tuned in to last night’s Angry Boys premiere, what might she have made of it? While intermittently amusing, Chris Lilley’s latest vehicle was more memorable for the dialogue’s relentless obscenity. This sort of thing is always justified in the name of realism, but it was the closing credits that put pay to that excuse. As the names of gaffers, best boys and other mysterious crafts rolled down the screen, a voiceover concluded the episode with a sentence that climaxed in the word “motherf___er”.  There was no need for most of the show’s salty language, but that parting shot characterised the shock-the-squares attitude and the ABC’s endorsement of it.

Or suppose your Auntie Violet had stayed tuned for Angry Beast. Once again, purposeless obscenity was endemic. Andrew Bolt has a clip of one segment and he asks, quite rightly, why taxpayers should underwrite not just propaganda but filthy, raucous and grossly offensive propaganda?

The ancients will get their set boxes and Michelle Grattan, Peter Hartcher and all of Gillard's media courtiers will once again have an opportunity to make their inspired excuses for waste and incompetence. But those set-top boxes, they will bear 24/7 witness to a national broadcaster’s misguided sense of mission and our government’s well-intentioned gift of toxic rot.

Churching The Haw-Haw-Haw

A TRAIL OF broken promises suggests it is beyond the hope of any man to make an honest woman of Julia Gillard, but if Tim Mathieson were to proffer a ring this instant there seems a chance our prime minister might grant him the opportunity to try. Royal weddings can have that effect on gal’s heart, even a small, flinty republican one. And what a touching scene it would make, certainly if captured by the same Women’s Weekly shutterbug who did such a wonderful job of misting all the lenses before Australia’s last election.

This time there would be reporterettes and anchor babes to take down all that delicious chatter of trousseaux, the hen party hijinx, and to record those girly giggles over racy gifts (“who knew they made these things with sustainable clockwork drives!”) from Penny, Jenny, Nicola, Tanya and Kate. The Werribee Romeo would be snaped on bended knee and Gillard above him, casting a Mills & Boone gaze at her suitor over the topsail swell of that formidable bosom. What romantic soul would not think of Foo made flesh at such a moment, that famous nose peering not over a mere fence but to shared lives beyond the altar, where the road of love transects the plains of passion?

 

And the ceremony, that would be lovely too, just like that other wedding taking place tonight in London. That would be the union the Chaser team was banned from lampooning, much to the astonishment of the ABC. It will not happen here, mind you, not if and when Australia’s leader is churched. She wouldn’t mind at all if the Chasers turned up, perhaps to hunt down Craig Emerson in the rearmost pew and capture his lovelorn tears at what almost was and might have been.  Nor could she have objected if one of those comedic geniuses impersonated the groom’s grandfather and spouted a lot of anti-Semitic silliness -- just one of the witty, wonderful gags, according to last night’s Q&A, with which the ABC was planning to amuse the world from Westminster Abbey.

Such fun, and so much Chaser-style potential! A knee-slapping joke about Princess Di? Yes, please, lots of those, because that is the ABC’s style these days. (The humourous hope, perhaps, that the bridal carriage would not be guided by a French chauffeur?). And who would think this Chaser episode complete unless the altar boys were quizzed on priestly sodomy, at least one $10-an-hour security guard was not confronted by his smirking betters, and salty language, which denotes a comedian’s “edginess” and much of the ABC’s primetime viewing, was not scattered all about, random as a journalism professor’s punctuation.

Yes, Mark Scott would have deemed the ABC’s money well spent on a show like that. As it stands now, unless Julia says “yes” and saves the day, all that cash for general preparations, the Prince Philip makeup, flash costumes, oh-so-witty gags and advance footage will have been wasted. And it would have to be a significant sum indeed, if the makeup and production values of that Q&A clip were any indication.

So rather than see such a large chunk of the ABC budget squandered, Ms Gillard must help to balance the budget by inviting the Chasers to her own wedding and giving them free rein to run with at least some of that now-unusable London material. And being the sport she is, we can all be sure she would welcome the chance for cackling at the mother of the bride or the hiding of dead mice in her wedding cake.

It is, after all, exactly the sort of thing the ABC was planning to inject into somebody’s else’s wedding, so it would have to be both right and proper for our maybe-bride-to-be’s special day. Otherwise people might say our prime minister is, in addition being a liar, a hypocrite to boot.

The Cavalcade Of Crap

SO, why blog? Experience leaves no doubt the urge can get well out of hand, demanding a good deal more time and energy than the subject matter – or rather, the fruits of that content – might actually warrant. In olden days, in this blog’s initial incarnation, grains of uncovered truth tumbled irregularly with the chaff of snark and sarcasm from the posting mill. Those were the little triumphs to be sure, and it would be a lie to say that there was no thrill of the hunt about them. Pouncing on Phillip Adams’ repeated lifting of others’ work, for example, was always satisfying, moreso when even Media Watch was obliged, eventually, to pass comment on one particularly egregious example of literary theft. Indeed, it was the jolliest fun to observe David Marr’s discomfort as he wriggled like a victim of extreme constipation in search of a more comfortable position. Marr succeeded, eventually, in extruding truth as it is recognised at the ABC: Yes, the beloved Phillip had been a little naughty, but that wicked Janet Albrechtsen is genuinely vile and, as Marr strained to explain, so much more deserving of contempt. At the ABC, as in the schoolyard, relativism’s shelter shed is always open to playmates caught in heavy weather.

Why, only the other week, the latest bottom on Media Watch’s chair of ease was doing much the same, although with an emphasis on energy efficiency that befits a fellow so ready to rebuke those who doubt that our planet is in the process of melting. Where Marr strained and winced while declaring Adams innocent of serious wrong, Holmes has simply ignored another matter altogether, one many might consider more serious. That would be the late Alene Composta’s letter to Drum editor Jonathan Green, the one in which she explained how her expose of Liberal moose knucklers would help Labor at the polls. Holmes did address Green’s gullibility in a little item for The Drum (which allowed no comments), but of his colleague’s eagerness to put the ABC’s resources at the disposal of an attempt to influence an election, so far not a word.

So why bother with blogging? Time and again the liars and luvvies, the wholesalers of cant and dribblers of sophistry, are exposed by the likes of Blair, Bolt and Beck, yet the cavalcade of corruption goes ever on, brazen as ever. Consider Mark Scott, for example. Fresh from trailing three steps behind Fred Hilmer as his master led Fairax down the road to ruin, the former chairman’s godson took charge of the ABC, where one of his innovations, Mr Green’s Drum, now features a daily cavalcade of columnists whose inanity might have given even poor Margo pause to publish. Well, at least for a second or two.

Golf is more fun than blogging, as is sailing, fishing and roasting dead flesh over coals for boon companions, especially those who bring available women to the Billabong’s backyard gatherings. Yet against the dictates of common sense and the needs of an easy life, a blog is being revived. Put it down to mischief and, to be frank, just a dash of malice. To be lectured and hectored day after day, to be reminded constantly of one’s moral, physical and dietary shortcomings, well it gets on the wick.

One example: As an experiment, or a drinking game for the younger set, count the number of times “climate change” is uttered in the course of a typical night’s viewing. It is not a concept so much as an aural wallpaper plastered over every show and topic, relevant or otherwise. Young Master Bunyip, who is nesting temporarily at the Billabong, took up the challenge and nipped himself into a state of near alcoholic coma on a recent Monday evening, so frequent were the mentions, prompting a concerned Papa to go on at length about the younger generation’s moral, physical and dietary shortcomings.

Climate change perplexes the New Inventors’ panelists, draws anxious nods on the Gruen Transfer and, via David Attenborough, there are reminders that it causes fretfulness amongst other lesser primates. It overloads our screens with icebergs, deserts, chimneys, and men in Steve Irwin shirts. No documentary regardless of subject, be it bewildered clown fish or flooded farmers, is complete without a fierce pontificator in his laboratory, CSIRO office, campus research centre or field-tripping LandRover, each and every talking ad well-paid head sounding dire alarums about the bad things to come. As the money flows and the cameras roll, it seems almost every political issue is now to be framed in climate change’s prism. The topic sloshes endlessly about our newspapers and nightly viewing, bilge from the bottom of Tim Flannery’s wee tin boat.

Such ubiquity is dangerous, as it poses only the question of how we must deal with climate change, not whether we must deal with it at all.  Make no mistake, our Prime Minister would never be pursuing her plan to place a surcharge on everything if the ground upon which she plans to make her stand had not been so thoroughly prepared. When Jonathan Holmes, who purports to cover media sins, becomes a hunter of heretics, as he did through the course of an entire recent show, it can be taken as a given that dogma long ago trumped rational discourse.

Immigration, regulation, the very role of government and the extent to which it may meddle in citizens’ lives and attempt to regulate their follies, the prevailing mindset has dressed those subjects in the same armour, established their nostrums as the wisdom received. They are the concepts whose presumptions must be kept immune to challenge, quarantined even from the innocent query.

It may do no major good, but blogging can be a therapeutic cleanser amid such a storm of crap. Posts may come often or not at all. That will depend on which way the wind is blowing, whether the fish are hungry and if the Billabong’s barbecues continue to draw admiring women, ideally young and firm, whose sympathies can be rotated with relative ease, and after no more than one ordeal by ballet, into the horizontal.

Even if it does no good in the long run, a little venting can still put a shine on the soul.