Robert Doyle's collapsing kingdom

While poking about in the shed last month in hope of finding the perfect nut, bolt and spring washer to repair a broken scissors, a receipt from 1978 came to light amidst the cobwebs. It was for a Victa motor mower, the sum a quite staggering  $379, purchased by the machine’s original owner from McEwan’s in Bourke Street, the hardware emporium that was a Melbourne institution until it went out of business in 1993, when the chain and its flagship were purchased by Bunnings.  Passed to the Professor via a Springvale garage sale for a much more reasonable $30 in 2006, the mower came with the original receipt, which the elderly former owner had taped to the handle. Thirty five years after being unpacked, the lusty four-stroke still does a fine job of cutting the grass.

What brings this to mind is a story in today’s Age recounting the travails of the developers who purchased the McEwan’s building, just up the Bourke street hill from the Mall outside Myer. Their tenants went broke for want of passing traffic and the former emporium, which was supposed to become a chic, three-storey bazaar, is empty and covered with graffiti. Reporter Chris Vedelago also quotes a 2010 judgment in a case brought against the then-landlord by a disenchanted tenant: “‘There was virtually no pedestrian activity, either by reason of customers coming to deal with businesses in the Foundry,’ as it was re-named, ‘or by reason of the so-called 'ant trail' [a new retail thoroughfare created between Bourke and Little Collins streets],' the judge found.”

While the Age report goes on to note that the site’s future is in doubt, the opportunity to suggest a fresh use was missed, despite an obvious and compelling alternative.

Why not re-christen it The Lord Mayor Robert Doyle Institute For Really Stuffing The CBD?

For those not blessed to live in Victoria, know that Doyle was the former leader of the parliamentary Liberal Party while Labor premiers Bracks and Brumby were feather-bedding union mates in projects that ranged from the still-unused $12 billion desalination plant to the re-development of the MCG. A preposterous figure, he would rise in the Legislative Assembly to make a point, be dismissed as a pompous featherhead by the governments of the day and melt meekly back into his seat, a gelatinous pool of spineless irrelevance topped by an empty skull and an inflated sense of self-worth. If he showed any life at all it was when there was a bit of a sort in the public gallery and he craned his neck to take in the spectacle. Doyle was such a lousy leader of the Opposition that his replacement, the hapless and hopeless Ted Baillieu, constituted an actual improvement.

After failing in Spring Street he found his niche at the Town Hall, much as the more problematic lumps sometimes lodge in the S-bend, where his only worthwhile achievement has been to turn loose police on the Occupists in the City Square, and even that took him four weeks to authorise. Other than that, he has been a very good Labor/Greens mayor, which is certainly not what voters had a right to expect when they voted for a Liberal.

LaTrobe Street has been converted under his leadership from a broad and free-flowing thoroughfare to a single lane of cars. The rest has been given to bicycles, as you would expect to happen with a CINO (conservative in name only) mayor at the city’s helm. Worse than that, parking fees have been hiked, hiked again and then hiked some more. Once upon a time, all of Melbourne looked to the CBD for its first-order shopping needs. Now only an idiot ventures into the CBD if there is alternative source of the desired good or service – the former McEwan’s building being the  proof of that. For decades the store thrived. Now it is empty and ugly, with no hope of ever again hearing the tinkle of money in a merchant’s till.

It should take a lot to ruin a city, but Doyle demonstrates -- and the CBD's plethora of empty shops prove it -- that even a man of the most meagre talents can achieve that end.  

The carbon-cuttingroom floor

Amongst Young Master Bunyip's many talents, the capacity to read cyberglyphics is one of the more surprising and unsettling, as it suggests a relatively recent insertion of back-door genes in the Bunyip line's DNA. There was, however, scarce time to wonder how the former Mrs Bunyip might have amused herself while the Professor was down at the mooring because the young fellow's discovery in what he calls "the sauce code" for Tim Flannery's new Climate Council website is very amusing. Here is part of the code, which goes on for pages.

YMB explains that the various bits of cuneiform mystery and their associated exclamation marks mean that sections are "comment out" -- erased from public view, in other words --  presumably when someone at the Climate Council realised that the original video link would not do much to advance the cause of separating the gullible and indignantly self-righteous from their cash. Indeed, it would have been a powerful disincentive to heep hands well out of pockets

Here is the video, according to YMB, which the Climate Commission originally intended to present.

As can be seen, there were some very rash predictions tumbling from Flannery's lips in 2010, none of which has come true or is likely to. (No need to endure the full clip;the funny bits about polar bears, massive rises in sea levels and the certainties of experts are near the start). Much safer, on the whole, to have Flannery talking about "the science" and his cause's need for cash, as he does in the substitute video.

Sadly, Flannery does not address the climatic imperatives that persuaded him to leave Mrs Flannery to fill the sandbags at the waterfront home he formerly shared with her and seek higher ground with a prostitute-turned-author. Donations to the Climate Council should be placed beneath the big pink dildo on the night table (the black one is reserved for solstice celebrations).

UPDATE: YMB wishes to make it clear that he did not discover the hidden code. Rather, he was alerted to it via an email now doing the rounds.

 

"Be consumed" (and washed down with a nice red?)

With Tim Blair still chucking down vin rouge ordinaires and pitching his beret at a jaunty angle someone has to keep an eye on South Australia. Fortunately the state's tourism authority has put together a strange little ad which makes that rather easy, as it is replete with reminders of the locals' peculiar little ways. Blogger won't allow the video to be embedded, but you can go here and marvel at the things South Australians value and which they hope will persuade potential visitors to share thei odd delights.

There are bugs, lots of them, dead rabbits and a man with a gun in Wolf Creek mode. A chicken is sensously plucked. There are cuts of mystery meat hanging on hooks, which must have been easier to photograph than barrelled bodies in an abandoned bank.

The highlight comes at about the 1.18 mark in the clip, where a young woman in a white dress and holed stockings writhes for not apparent reason in the dirt.

Is she dying? Has she been ravaged? Is she feeling about for Sarah Hanson-Young's brain?


Nobody but the director can answer those questions. But with an election coming up, those South Australian voters capable of living elsewhere, given sufficient rehab and the attentions of caring medical practitioners, should bear this promotional effort in mind when they cast their votes. If they are not hung on a meat hook first, that is.

Quolls, Beware

The Bunyipmobile ate up Victoria over the past few days, pausing for a spell in the Grampians, where a Bunyip's efforts to save the newly rediscovered tiger quoll came to nought. The appealing little creatures had been believed extinct in the region for well over a century, until one was recorded padding past a hidden video camera some weeks ago. They are in big trouble now. If foxes and ferals were not enough to worry about, the quolls will now have environmental bureaucrats crawling over their turf, setting live-catch traps, installing radio transmitters and all the other things grant-fed academic greenies like to play with when not scaring Age reporters with tall tales of global watming.

One hundred and forty years those quolls have survived since the last sighting. If they heed the Professor's advice, written on carrots and personalised notepaper and stuffed into hollows and fallen logs, they will survive another 140 years.

What they must do is avoid the experts who will shortly descend in droves -- once the grants are approved, that is.

Arts Minister Heidi Victoria wants to hear from you

Let us just imagine for a moment that there are more pressing matters than a pleasant nine holes, a little fishing and an idle hour or two enjoying what for the moment remains the inchoate bafflement that has held many Labor and Greens supporters in its thrall since that glorious Saturday a few weeks back. Allowing for the existence of a spare moment, we might -- should, actually, being responsible adults -- unleash a little anger that the closest thing we have in Victoria to a conservative force is the government of Premier Napthine, one of whose ministers has spent the past week announcing grants to an arts community that will always take the money and, just as predictably, do whatever it can to assist its patron's ouster. To Overland, $50,000 worth of Guy Rundle-and-worse. To the Melbourne Writers' Festival, a quarter of a million. And to the chap who slithers about in a box of smoke, a very welcome $15,000. Apolitical he might seem, but which way do you reckon the human filter tip's audience will lean come the casting of the ballots in November 2014?

One could try calling the office of the Arts Minister Heidi Victoria and register a protest, but she holds her seat of Bayswater by a very comfortable 21 per cent, so the odd whiner is unlikely to be blessed with more than the cooing voice of sympathetic electoral officer and the sound of telephone going dead.

But just imagine that Ms Victoria received a message from her office -- the news that callers had been promising to contact schools, clubs, civic organisations and alert them to the fact that their MLA had just given $50,000 to a St Kilda gallery that was closed by the police after an exhibiting artist was charged with producing child pornography. Unlikely to go down well, you would think.

Or what about getting even more serious, starting from the position that a conservative government which isn't conservative doesn't deserve to be a government either. So just suppose Napthine was given to understand that candidates in just one or two of his most marginal seats were to be portrayed as supporting the public funding of really nasty stuff. It wouldn't be entirely fair, true. But then neither is the $250,000 lavished on the MWF celebration of lefties talking about how smart they are and everyone else isn't. If the minister is too busy or too lazy to call the organisers aside and request a little balance, then she might as well send her dog to administer the portfolio.

Here is the minister doing what politicians do and ingratiating herself with those on whom her future depends, in this members of the Pirate-Australian community from the local cricket club.

And here is where you can send an email to Ms Victoria. Readers should feel free to copy and paste their remarks into the comments thread. One message will be ignored, but a bunch of them might actually prompt a reaction.

Next, rabbits will be funding myxo

Readers will perhaps forgive the Professor for going on at the length of quite a few recent posts about Arts Victoria and the money it is lavishing on people and institutions a reasonable soul might regard as antithetical to the priorities and philosophy of a conservative state government.

Well here is just one more entry in the list of aid and comforts bestowed upon the enemy:

Melbourne Writers Festival, MELBOURNE $259,000
Melbourne Writers Festival is Melbourne's annual two-week event for writers, readers and thinkers. The Festival engages over 350 international, national and local writers at over 300 events each year.

And here is the MWF's 2013 guest list:

Gay Alcorn, Cathy Alexander, Dennis Altman, Wendy Bacon, The Bedroom Philosopher, Eric Beecher, Larissa Behrendt, Sophie Black, Julian Burnside, Jennifer Byrne, Fiona Capp, Jane Caro, Michael Cathcart, Alison Croggon, Mary Crooks, Sushi Das, Catherine Deveny, Anne Deveson, Charles Firth, Morag Fraser, Anna Goldsworthy, Jonathan Green, Libbi Gorr, Wendy Harmer, Joan Kirner, Ramona Koval, Mark Latham, Benjamin Law, Antony Loewenstein, Amanda Lohrey, Miriam Lyons, Father Bob Maguire, Anne Manne, David McKnight, Peter McPhee, George Megalogenis, Tony Moore, Terry Moran, Denis Muller, Ben Pobje, Henry Reynolds, Peter Rose, Julianne Schultz, Margaret Simons, Peter Singer, Tim Soutphommasane, Jeff Sparrow, Fiona Stanley, Anne Summers, Magda Szubanski, Arnold Zable.

Go through the list. Every single one of those names is a lefty, most moving from one publicly funded trough to the next and calling that a career.

Who is handing this money out? How much is going to mates? What steps has Premier Napthine taken to reform arts funding in the Garden State?

If Napthine won't act, why should he expect decent people to vote for him in 2014?

Boy crazy at Arts Victoria

The things those artists get up to! Remember Paul Yore, the artist whose works saw the Linden Centre shut down for a number of days following a police raid back in June? Yore is edgy and hip, as they say, as is the Linden for showcasing his work, like the two examples (below) removed by those philistine wallopers.

The Linden has just been gifted with $50,000 to keep pushing the boundaries of art (and Squaresville's sensitivities)

Linden Board of Management Inc, ST KILDA $50,000
Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts is a contemporary art gallery dedicated to exhibiting new work by contemporary artists and supporting artistic development.

There has been a lot of chatter lately about a re-ignited "culture war", but that is just silly talk.

How can you have a culture war when one side's elected champions refuse to take the field?