Carney Barker

ONLY six years have passed, but it would be the rare follower of politics who could these days recall the Shocking Scandal of Tumbi Creek. In a nutshell, the former Coalition government was accused of buying regional votes with development grants directed disproportionately to seats it hoped to gain or retain. The dredging of Tumbi Creek, which runs through the seat now occupied by the throbbing member for Dobell, was one of those initiatives – a $750,000 project to open easy access from stream to sea. If none of that rings a bell, don’t fret. It is quite a while since the dogs were barking, and the caravan has long since moved on. But at the time it was almost a big deal -- big enough to warrant a Silly editorial urging readers to outrage at the spectacle of so much money “being given away with undue haste and with scant regard for anything but the purchase of electoral support.” Funny, isn’t it, how the Silly does not write leaders like that these days?

Shaun Carney, associate editor of the Phage, might do better than most at recalling all the twists in the saga of Tumbi Creek, as he penned a despairing column at the time about John Howard’s contemptuous dismissal of the then-Opposition’s interest in the affair. One of the cancers eating at Australia’s body politic, according to Carney, was Howard’s happy discovery that voters could not have cared less about so many of the things that agitated the Silly and Phage -- in the case of Tumbi Creek, the government's appalling ethical deficit. 

A little before three o'clock on Thursday afternoon, John Howard decided he'd had enough of Labor's attempts to turn into a scandal a grant to dredge Tumbi Creek on the NSW Central Coast. It was time for the PM to inject a bit of Howard-era political reality … After offering a brief, fudged and unconvincing response … about the timing of the grant's announcement, Howard delivered his lesson which, boiled down, was: who cares?

Needless to say, Carney thought it a terrible thing that prime ministers and ministers unload tricky questions on bureaucrats, advisers and departmental investigations, thereby insulating themselves from the consequences of their own corruption. Carney was right about that – and he could be on the side of the angels once again, as the Opposition’s demands for more on Craig Thomson’s nocturnal transactions with assorted naughty schoolgirls are stonewalled, dismissed, or denied a response by the purported need not to compromise ongoing probes.

Back in 2005, Carney took exception to those tactics. But today? Well let us just say his enthusiasm for honest, open government has seen something of an eclipse. The problem is no longer a government that dares not tell the truth. Now the obstacle to a better, brighter Australia is an Opposition animated by “grievance and fear”, as Carney informed Silly readers just the other day:

Does Gillard have it in her to respond to Abbott's style of politics any more than Rudd did? When one leader decides not to observe the rules and picks up support as a result, what does the other leader do?

Er, the “other leader” loses the next election, Shaun – at which point we can expect fresh columns about the beastly new government and its jaw-dropping refusal to answer reasonable questions. Golly, there may even be an editorial in the pipeline about squandered trust and profligate spending.

The Comfort Of The Familiar

IT IS often said that military commanders re-fight the last war, sending their cannon fodder over the top without pausing to consider if the current enemy bears comparison with the previously vanquished. The assertion is not entirely true, of course, and perhaps less so for generals than the broader population. Between the Great War and the next, for example, Italian theorist Giulio Douhet formulated his doctrine of aerial bombardment and saw it adopted well nigh universally. Same with Kurt Student, whose parachute-borne assault on Crete bore not the slightest resemblance to any action seen two-plus decades earlier on the Western Front. But set aside the quibbles and, as a broader guide to our species’ psychological circuitry, the maxim holds true. In moments of peril and uncertainty, the comfort of the familiar will always be the most seductive option.

You can see the appeal of that oh-so-easy mindset in your morning paper, especially if you are one of Fairfax’s surviving readers. Indeed, with brothel creeper Craig Thomson now the soiled banner to which the hapless Gillard must rally her troops, her ink-stained quislings’ blind compulsion to find solace in what they know best is proving irresistible. Consider Laura Tingle, who is re-kindling the rage of her girlhood and ranting on Twitter about an elected representative’s right to remain in office until the electorate turfs him out. Almost four decades on from November 11, 1975, with Saint Gough in an old folks’ home and intimate exposure to hubby Alan Ramsey’s domestic drool having done its immense harm, a menopausal Tingle is back on the ramparts, so blind with partisan fury she notices no difference between a government denied Supply and one whose survival hangs on a former union chieftain who supplied his sordid needs with members dues. It’s not much of a government, as even Tingle must notice in her more lucid moments, but dammit, it is her government, and so long as Fairfax gives Tingle permission to render herself and her employer a laughingstock, that will be where her perceptions begin and end.

In the Age, something even more remarkable, courtesy of associate editor Shaun Carney. Read the selection below and wonder if Carney, too, has been sleeping with Ramsey:

… if the government is going to go down, it might at least go down swinging. The dismissive taunting of Monday's protesters by minister Anthony Albanese in Parliament - the self-titled ''convoy of no confidence'' he re-labelled as a ''convoy of no consequence'' - was remarkable because of its aggressive, assertive nature. … the government should have juiced up its approach long ago. Until Albanese launched into the rag-tag bunch of truckies on Monday, Labor seemed to want everyone to believe that its only detractors were inside the Coalition party room. The only saving grace of the Thomson affair is that it gives government MPs a single point from which to dig in and defend themselves.

So, an MP mocks citizens who peacefully protest government policy and Carney raises his little fist and calls for more of the same, apparently oblivious to his many readers – well, former readers – who share the Canberra protesters’ reservations. How could he do it, transcribe the dialogue of current events with such a tin ear? Again, blame the urge to dilute consistency with the dribble of party loyalty. Carney spent his formative years reporting on the mobs who denounced John Howard. Their cause was his, but now that Howard is gone and Carney’s team in power, his perception of the foe remains unchanged. It was Labor’s opponents then, and it is Labor’s opponents’ now. If Ruddock had denounced so-called advocates for asylum seekers in the terms Albanese directed at truck drivers, Carney would have been the first to see a divisive ugliness eating at the soul of Australian democracy. Now, at long last, his government’s critics are getting what they deserve, and three cheers for Albanese, Honourable Member for Arrogance, who puts the boot in.

Georges Santayana was a little off the mark when he observed that those who neglect history will be sentenced to repeat it. For the likes of Carney and Tingle, a subjective eye to history frames their perceptions. As for being sentenced to repeat it, that is no punishment but a badge of honour.