In which politicians talk about Qantas and their metaphors give them away

Quoted in a report tonight:

Bob Brown: 'This lockout is also a sellout of the spirit of Australia.'

Tony Abbott: 'It is the responsibility of government to ensure ... that brand Australia is not damaged.'

Got that? Lapsed Presbyterian Bob Brown thinks Australia has a spirit. That devout Catholic, Tony Abbott, thinks it's a commodity.

In which Tony Abbott falls on his ass but doesn't get a special cookie from his mommy

In the Senate, Labor's Doug Cameron said he was concerned about "the disintegration of the Liberal Party". "The barbarians are at the gate of the Liberal Party," he said. "Who are these barbarians? They are extremists. They are Tea Party imitators. They are the remnants of Pauline Hanson's One Nation. They are the radio and newspaper bullies whose ignorance is in direct proportion to their pay packet. If you get close enough, you can smell the fear of the Liberal Party moderates as Mr Abbott leads them down the dry well of fear and ignorance."

Tea Party imitators? Members, more like. Did you see the spelling on some of those signs? I don't mean the basic illiteracy, I mean 'mom' for 'mum' and 'ass' for 'arse'.

Who wrote those signs and at whose behest? Who were the people carrying them? Were they actual Americans, or did they copy them boilerplate-style from some lunatic-fringe website?

Also, is that the Doug Cameron with the charming Scottish accent who quite some years back used to be a scone-hot rabble-rousing unionist extremist annoying the bejesus out of parliamentarians by running rings around them in arguments? I kind of liked him back then, too, but I like him even more now.

Quotation from here; more on the subject at Loon Pond; and Margaret Simon on the way The Australian, in contrast with The Age, is pretending this morning that none of it ever happened. Which in itself is telling; even The Australian has disowned this mob this morning.

A message from my computer

'The file “768208-rally-abbott.jpg” could not be opened because it is empty.'

Truer word was never spoken.

Meanwhile, check out this photo. Classy, no?

You can't see her in the photo, but Pauline Hanson was there. I bet Mr Rabbit was very, very careful not to go anywhere near a moving bus.

And as TC Yasi approaches the North Queensland coast, the man who almost became our Prime Minister speaks

And this is what he has to say.

Observe the precision of his judgement, and the exquisite subtlety of his timing.

In which Tony Abbott uses the bereaved, the unhoused and the traumatised for political gain

You've got to hand it to him though; he's 100% consistent. One relied upon him to make some response of this calilbre, and one has not been disappointed.

I have been giving some thought to Abbott's bizarre attitude to the NBN. I think it's to do with egocentricity and solipsism: with believing that if you personally don't understand something, then it can't possibly be important or true.

Christmas Island

Cast your mind back six years to Boxing Day 2004, when a tsunami caused 230,000 deaths in Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and ten other countries. The then Leader of the Opposition, Mark Latham, was on holidays, and the tsunami was the turning point in his leadership: first he made no response, and then made a belated, surly, graceless, defensive response when asked by journalists whether he had anything to say. Latham's leadership was already on the nose, and he was ill, but his attitude and behaviour in the wake of the tsunami was the last nail in the coffin of his leadership. He resigned just over three weeks later.

All of which makes me hope that the Prime Minister, then a good friend of Latham's, remembers that too, and saw the warning in it and remembers that as well, and that therefore as we speak she is on a plane, hot-footing it back from her own holidays to front up and do and say whatever she can about today's tragic loss of life off Christmas Island. It's a tragedy on a far smaller scale, but the right-wingers are already wielding the fuzzy logic for which they are notorious, clearly unable to get their heads round the fact that the reason asylum seekers are crossing dangerous seas in dangerous boats is because staying at home is even more dangerous, and unless Gillard hits the ground running on this one, she will be actively helping out the likes of Blair and Bolt in their efforts to make her look very, very bad.

Now you know how it feels to be a woman, Kevin (SA edition)

This is wrong on so many levels I don't know where to start.

Like his immediate and indeed only superior (structural, that is, not moral necessarily) the Premier, Mike Rann, the Treasurer and Deputy Premier Kevin Foley was assaulted over the weekend by someone he had clearly made unhappy. This happened on the street at 3 am on Sunday morning, after Foley had, by this account, been doing the rounds of the bars and clubs.

Foley is single and 50. He must have been as sad a sight in some of those clubs as poor old Sam Newman, who may be even older than that but is at least better looking. (Those of you who have never seen any photos or footage of Foley will have to trust me on this one.)

Foley was due to take over as Acting Premier yesterday morning, while Rann ran away on one of his many international trips presumably to do one of his many international deals. Rann has barely been sighted since the state election in March and the seedy and seemingly interminable scandal that led up to it.

Now, one is resigned to being ruled by people whose capacity for good judgment would fit into their left ear and leave room over for a cotton bud; it happens all the time. If the Treasurer and Deputy Premier, whose ambition to be Premier is very well known, wants to be trying to crack onto women young enough to be his daughters in clubs, and turning up in pizza bars on Adelaide streets with 'unknown' women after nights on the town with millionaire property developers, then that is, of course, his business. It's a free country.

But the sentence that keeps leaping out at me from that linked report is this one:

Ministers arriving for cabinet yesterday said Mr Foley was entitled to walk on a city street at any hour without being assaulted.

Quite. Yes. Yes he is. And I'm sure none of those Ministers would even dream of saying Well, clubbing and pissed on the streets in the small hours, he was just asking for it. I wonder if he was scantily clad.

Foley was quoted in yesterday's paper-edition Advertiser as saying 'What it does clearly show to me is the risk I now take as a senior politician out in public.'

Leaving aside the question of whether Foley was incapable of taking this message in when Mike Rann was attacked with a rolled-up wine magazine (I love that Adelaide touch, I just love it to death) way back in the mists of time and it's only now finally sunk in, I'm guessing that most of the women of Adelaide -- not only those who like to go out and have a good time at night, but those who are old and feeble enough to be an easy target for the horrible little shits who lurk around ATMs waiting for an easy handbag, and all of us in between -- read that sentence and thought Pfft, Kevin, welcome to my world.

Why We Still Need Feminism, Part #1,763

If ever you were tempted to think that women in Australia or indeed in the West generally had finally gained some sort of equality in public life, ask yourself this simple question.

Can you imagine how it would have gone down with Australia's (these days) almost uniformly conservative MSM journalists -- and, alas, with the bulk of the populace -- if Julia Gillard rather than Tony Abbott had been photographed in Afghanistan firing an automatic rifle?

They'd be blithering and drooling for weeks. They'd start with Hanoi Jane, and they'd go downwards from there. And in the meantime, Abbott's petulant whingeing about being made to look silly is dominating the papers, most of which are ignoring Abbott's puerile narcissism and instead using this massive non-event to attack what he's calling (and calling, and calling, and calling -- if there's one thing Abbott does love, it's a bit of repetition, a bit of repetition) Gillard's 'low bastardry'.

See, it's okay for the Leader of the Opposition to call the Prime Minister a low bastard, publicly and repeatedly, but it's not okay for a woman to shoot a gun.

The rules are baroque and Byzantine, Grasshopper, and nor do they make any sense, but you break them at your peril.

Who's sorry now?

Tim Dunlop has a sharply pointed post this morning on the subject of Tony Abbott's sudden discovery that he's actually quite sorry the Howard Government was a bit nasty to Independent Andrew Wilkie (you know, the one almost certain to win the seat of Denison) back in the day, calling him 'unbalanced' and everything.

The fact that Abbott apparently can't see how this looks tells you everything you need to know about his judgement. A nice hot cup of STFU would have been a great deal more to the point. And the waspish comment of the spokesperson suggests that news of this particular apology was never supposed to get out, which indicates that Abbott and his bad judgement are living in Fantasyland as well.

In the words of the First Dog on the Moon ...

Australia, what have you done?

Presumably Jesus wants them for sunbeams instead

One of the things that occurred to me very forcefully several times during the nightmare morning I spent a few years ago in the Assemblies of God stronghold in the Adelaide suburb of (wait for it) Paradise, researching this piece [update: they seem to have put it behind a paywall, sorry!], was that many of the less, how you say, cerebral people among Christians tend to use Jesus (Assemblies of God are very very big on Jesus) as a sort of all-purpose blank screen onto which to project their desires, fantasies and fears. So while I didn't see Q and A last night [CORRECTION: it was not last Monday's but an earlier Q and A, on April 5 this year. This error has been kindly brought to my attention by Ken Lovell. Hi Ken *waves*], the telly still being borked and me still being too disorganised busy to get and set up a new one (new antenna, furniture-moving, nine-yard logistics narrative), it comes as no surprise to read this morning a particularly stupid and indeed mildly offensive remark made last night [on April 5] by Mr Rabbit in answer to a question about asylum seekers:

"Jesus didn't say yes to everyone, Jesus knew that there was a place for everything and it is not necessarily everyone's place to come to Australia."

Jesus wept. 

Last time Abbott said something like this (for it is his line, and he has been holding it for some years) I was silly enough to make what I would have thought was the obvious 'No room at the inn' argument to a Christian, Abbott-loving friend of mine (yes yes, I know). It made him incandescent with rage and scorn, but I'm still waiting for him to explain exactly why it's not a valid point.

Yes, we know

As readers of this blog may have noticed, I'm quite a fan of Crikey reporter Bernard Keane and am enjoying his weekday reports in Crikey's special extra early-morning campaign newsletter. And I am an even bigger fan of George Megalogenis, one of the few grown-up journalists this country seems to have left.

However.

Here's Keane is this morning:

The impact of the Latham “intervention” on the weekend is yet to be played out, but I suspect George Megalogenis was right in suggesting yesterday [Keane doesn't say where] that there appears to be a pattern of men trying to undermine our first female prime minister.

Keane says this as though it were a new thought: as though Megalogenis had made some startling new discovery.

Female journalists and bloggers have been saying it ever since the day Gillard became Prime Minister. We have offered all sorts of evidence in support of the observation. And for the most part we have been ignored, if not squashed, mocked and derided, by blokes in online conversations about it (not all blokes, but enough of them to stifle conversation on the topic), whenever we so much as stuck our heads above the parapet and hinted that there might be a bit of it going about.

But I suppose that for some people, nothing's really real until a bloke says it.

In which recycling occurs

Back in 1994 I was writing a TV column for Eureka Street. Here's what I said about Laurie Oakes, whose weekly political interviews were the cornerstones of Channel Nine's now-defunct Sunday.

The 'political' interview often becomes a news event in itself, a focal and sometimes pivotal point in the affairs of government. While it purports to deal with the events of recent days, bits of it frequently end up in everybody's news bulletins on the following Monday night; constructed thus as 'news', it sometimes produces further consequences.

Keeping track of these unfolding causalities is disquieting. Among other things, they indicate just how much power Oakes has to help make things happen; his recent interviews have had a hand in the ebb of Ros Kelly's fortunes [remember Ros Kelly? -- Ed] and the flow of Bronwyn Bishop's. Remarks edited out of context, and then repeatedly re-broadcast both by Nine and by other stations, can have major consequences; and sometimes those remarks have been lured, coaxed or goaded out of reluctant ministerial mouths in the first place by strategies comparable in subtlety and sympathy to a well-aimed jackboot to the groin.

Cheryl Kernot, interviewed a week or two before Ros Kelly's resignation and taking a tough stand on accountability, is one of the few politicians I have ever seen remain unflustered by Oakes throughout an entire interview. Kernot, like Gareth Evans [ooh, prescience! -- Ed] but unencumbered by what Jane Austen would have called his uncertain temper, is both spectacularly well-informed and possessed of high-level debating skills; at one point she left Oakes speechless, sweetly but mercilessly showing him up through a hole in his own research.

One of the most noticeable features of this interview was the difference in its participants' rhetoric: Kernot's images and metaphors were those of consensus and integration, Oakes's those of strife and fracture. His language, illuminated by the difference, revealed his view of political affairs as essentially antagonistic, competitive and hierarchical; 'win' and 'lose' are two of his favourite words. This world view, like the medium through which it is expressed, is coercive; in shaping his questions according to it, Oakes builds whole suburbs of verbal dark alleys down which it becomes very difficult for his subjects not to go. Most politicians' terror of silence is such that a simple 'I don't accept the terms of your question' would never occur to them, even when that is clearly the case.

When Julia Gillard patiently said 'I don't accept your premise, Kerry' to Red Kezza on the evening of the day she became Prime Minister, in response to just such a begged question about the 'stabbing in the back' of Kevin Rudd, I whooped and hollered and applauded and frightened the cats. I'd been waiting (at least) sixteen years to hear a politician say that to a journalist.

Much of the rest of it also reads as though those sixteen years had never existed. Perhaps these are the glory days for which Oakes yearns, and that's why he's behaving the way he is now.

What's prompted me to dig this out of the filing cabinet is the news that Cheryl Kernot may be standing as an Independent for a Senate seat. Go Cheryl.

Opprobrious epithets

Mungo McCallum on the "debate" in today's Crikey is in form as fine as it ever was back in the day, when he was writing for the Nation Review and Whitlam was Prime Minister:

Abbott is apparently happy to be seen as a fraud and a poltroon, a shyster who cannot be trusted or believed and who stands for nothing. This, of course, is precisely the political cowardice of which he accuses Gillard, and on her record to date he has a point. But pots and kettles, people in glass houses, etc.

Of course the voters are the real losers. Never has the prime ministership of Australia been contested by such a pair of abject, craven, weak-kneed, whey-faced, chicken-hearted, lily-livered, jelly-bellied milksops.

Actually, I'm learning a lot from Tony Abbott

What I'm mainly learning is the extent to which political tribalism blinds most of the populace to the actual facts of a politician's actions and words. Take this report in this morning's Age.

How very easy it would have been, were one inclined that way, to run this story under an even more damning headline. I'm a Liar, Says Abbott. But you wait: the spin will start any minute*, if it hasn't already, and the tribally conservative among us will simply see this story as more evidence that Abbott is a frank truth-teller besides whom Rudd looks etc etc blah. Abbott Truthful About Telling Lies.

Abbott seems to believe that if he does or says something then that something is, by definition, okay. It must be okay, because Tony Abbott did or said it. So therefore they can't be, you know, lies. Not really.

His comments as quoted in that Age article shed some light on the way he sees his own behaviour:

Mr Abbott said: 'I know politicians are going to be judged on everything they say. But sometimes in the heat of discussion you go a little bit further than you would if it was an absolutely calm, considered, prepared, scripted remark - which is one of the reasons why the statements that need to be taken absolutely as gospel truth [are] those carefully prepared scripted remarks.'

By 'you' here, of course, he means 'I'. But people should understand that, right? As for the heat of discussion, yes, sometimes, in the heat of discussion, you [sic] do indeed go a little bit further. But in my experience, the heat of discussion tends to propel you further towards the naked truth, not further away from it.

'All of us when we're in the heat of verbal combat, so to speak, will sometimes say things that will go a little bit further.'

All of us do that. So I'm no different from everyone else. I'm just a bloke. Not like that other bloke, you know, the robotic bureaucrat blah blah blah.

Also, it's combat. Because I'm a man's man, you need to remember that, so I see everything in terms of fighting, and talking is fighting, right? And the point is to win, not to muck around with nancy-boy ideas like telling the truth.

God I hate nancy-boy ideas, they make me feel threatened.

See, I didn't mean that last bit. Not really. Only sort of. And people should know that.

He said his parental leave promise 'wasn't absolutely consistent with what I said the month before'. Many people had pointed out the inconsistency 'and I accept that.'

He accepts it, see? Taking his responsibility like a man's man. He accepts it. Now move on, please, nothing to see here.

He hoped when the budget returned to surplus, a Coalition government would not have to increase the tax burden, 'but nevertheless it was the least bad way of proceeding at the time.'

And anyway, it's Labor's fault.

Mr Abbott used the same rationale to explain his assertion that the argument on climate change was 'absolute crap', later saying he had been loose with his language while trying to make a case for Liberal policy to an audience in regional Victoria.

Ah, there you go; he only said that to keep the Duelling Banjos happy, so it was all right, right? He wasn't lying, you see. He wasn't even 'misspeaking'. He was loose with his language. Why was he 'loose with his language'? To endear himself to those hicks from the sticks, of course. The ones whose votes he needs so badly.

It's astonishing that a Rhodes Scholar couldn't see that one coming, but this remark makes him look abominable either way. Either he really does think 'climate change is crap', in which case he's lying in an ABC interview for all to see, or he's lying to rural voters, a big chunk of his heartland and crucial to his grab for power, because he holds them in complete contempt.

When challenged last night about how the public could know whether what he was saying was rock solid or not, given the climate change incident, Mr Abbott said: 'Well, again, I think that most of us know when we're talking to people or when we're listening to people … when we can put absolute weight on what's being said and when it's just the give and take of standard conversation.'

No, 'most of us know' that when we're talking to normal people they're usually telling the truth. This may be because most normal people don't have all that much to hide.

In any case, the public pronouncements of a politician -- no matter how 'unscripted' -- hardly qualify as 'the give and take of standard conversation'. And even if they did, most of us are reasonably sure that when we're in a standard conversation, we are neither giving nor taking lies being spouted in order to pull the wool over our, or their, eyes. At this point you really have to wonder what Abbott's personal and social life is like, if he thinks 'the give and take of standard conversation' is about lying.

Asked whether he made core and non-core promises, Mr Abbott said this was a subject that was run up and down the flagpole lots of times in March 'because you are not the first person to have noticed what you think is a serious inconsistency.'

What you think is a serious inconsistency. Because of course it's not really. We all know a non-core promise is a still a promise. It's just one that you make but don't mean, and you do it so that you'll get what you want. Everyone does that, right? What is your problem?

UPDATE: This, via The Poll Bludger, is entertaining and informative. Note date of article. This part is my personal favourite: In late August [1998] Abbott set up the Australians for Honest Politics trust ...

*UPDATE 2: And apparently it has. Here's Bernard Keane in today's oven-fresh edition of crikey.com.au:

'The best spin I've seen about Tony Abbott's disastrous 7.30 Report interview is the fact he's willing to admit he lies reflects a commendable honesty, much better than most politicians who lie without ever acknowledging it. Abbott has boldly broken down the fourth wall of politics, turning to the audience and pointed out that he's just working to a script, not actually saying what he means.

In short, Abbott is authentic and honest because he admits you can't believe him. Nice.'

Oh God I miss him

I mean, can you think of anyone else who left school at fifteen who could make himself so vulnerable by, yet still somehow convincingly get away with, calling a Rhodes scholar and Oxford MA an 'intellectual nobody'? It's not as if Abbott's speech or behaviour of late have reflected these qualifications, or indicated much capacity even for logical or consistent -- much less for abstract, rigorous or difficult -- thought. Even his supporters say fondly that he is a bundle of contradictions, almost as though an absence of clarity were a desirable thing in a political leader.

If you read that link you'll see that Keating has also provided an admirably brisk summary of Turnbull's superiority as Opposition leader, and has coined the pungent, nay, scary phrase 'the poor man's Howard', all in one short radio conversation.

Sad waste that his shortish tenure as PM may have been, it's some consolation that these days he feels free to tell us what he really thinks whenever somebody asks him, untrammelled by the restrictions of office.

UPDATE: Oooh look, there's Footage.

You have to wonder what ABC employee chose to describe this as a 'rant', and under what sort of instructions. And you have to wince at that very very telling little Freudian slip right at the very end.

UPDATE #2 (12.43 am CST): Hullo, someone at the ABC website has changed that heading and removed the word 'rant'. Someone, clearly, who also thought it was as suss as anything.