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.

Lustre comes from within, Mr Rabbit

It's okay, apparently, to compare the Prime Minister to Colonel Gaddafi, a name synonymous with derangement since my youth. But I must say I'm enjoying the way that hate speech in public life, so clearly an import from the worst and craziest of US public life and, alas, rocked in the cradle of Christianity both there and here, is being countered in Australia by an increasingly public awareness that this vile stuff is being encouraged if not orchestrated by people with money and/or power who want to hang onto both and are perfectly prepared to exploit the mean-spirited, the short-sighted, the ignorant and the unbalanced in order to do so.

I really would like to know what the motives were of the man who rang up Tony Windsor and threatened him with death. I'd like to sit him down and talk him through what he thinks and believes, and why. I'd like to ask him exactly where he got the idea that this sort of behaviour was acceptable. And I'd like to ask him whether he understands that 'tax' isn't just something 'the Guvmint' (have you noticed how Tony Abbott's pronunciation of this word becomes more strident and nasal with every passing day?) rips off you because they can; to find out whether he actually understands that the point of taxation is to make stuff, manage stuff, buy stuff and build stuff about whose absence he would be the first to complain.

At a what now?

A few posts back I got taken to task by a commenter for questioning the meaning of pronouncements by a Frenchwoman in full niqab. This commenter, like several others, mistook my questioning of her rationale and my feminist difficulties with the idea of 'protecting' women (from what? And whose responsibility is it that they should require protecting? Methinks it's not the women who need swaddling and muffling) for an attack on Islam. I can sort of see where this misreading is coming from, but it's fuzzy thinking at its worst and paranoia to boot.

So let me repeat: I am not anti-Islam as such; I am anti-sexist and anti-patriarchy. And that goes just as much for Christianity. So just to prove that one is an equal-opportunity organised-religion-basher, and heartened by the bracing opinions on the subject expressed by Billy Connolly, whom I saw last night and will post about, much more cheerfully, in a minute, here's something from this morning's news that I find utterly dismaying.

Following closely the faster-than-expected recovery of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords from the experience of being shot in the head by a lunatic (when was the last time you heard, BTW, of a woman shooting someone in the head, apart from those who shoot partners who have been assaulting, torturing and bashing them for decades?), I saw a headline this morning about her, or rather her husband, and clicked on it to read more.

Seems the astronaut husband has decided to go on his planned mission with the next space shuttle, having been reassured that his wife is progressing well and is in good medical hands. And fair do's, I get that part just fine. If I were an astronaut and I'd been at my injured husband's bedside for weeks and weeks and he was getting better every day and being well looked after then I would probably go back into space as well (and imagine, if you will, the opprobrious epithets that a wife would cop from the conservative press for that). No, here's the bit that had me reaching for the bucket:

"Every day, she gets a little bit better and the neurosurgeons and neurologists tell me that's a great sign, the slope of that curve is very important," Mr Kelly said at a national prayer breakfast in Washington.

A national prayer breakfast? In Washington?

It gets worse. Although the phrase is not capitalised in the article, it occurred to me that it might not be any old national prayer breakfast but some sort of particular one. So I googled it.

If you look at the dates you'll see that that's the one all right, and you'll also note that this cute little event began at the height of McCarthyist paranoia, the year the Rosenbergs were executed and the year before J. Robert Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance.

You'll also note that one of the purported purposes (sorry) of this event is for attendees to 'meet Jesus man to man'. Seems to me that leaves the ladiez free to point and mock.

Frankly I don't know why Islam bothers the Americans so much. They seem hell-bent on erasing the separation of church and state quite as thoroughly as even the most evangelical Islamic fundamentalist.

Let's hear it for Australia and the female atheist in charge.

Which just goes to prove that a year is a very, very long time in politics

As is my wont round this time of year, I've been looking back at the bloggy ghosts of Christmases Past, thinking back to what was happening last year and the year before that and so on. Imagine my surprise when I checked the entry for a year ago today, when Kevin Rudd was still doing well as Prime Minister and Malcolm Turnbull (Who? I hear you cry) wasn't doing very well at all as Leader of the Opposition, and found this.

Sometimes I think I don't give my fortune-telling skillz enough free rein.

Code red

From the increasingly indispensable Grog's Gamut:

At the Liberal Party campaign launch, the big policy announcement was the plan to introduce mandatory prison sentencing for people who harbour asylum seekers. The policy Abbott was most proud of was announcing the return of the Pacific Solution.

In 2007 the voters were pretty much of a mind that Pacific Solution was the type of policy only a backward looking, racist and morally bereft nation would employ. Now it is Abbott’s set piece.

Just so you know.

Rodents to the right of us, rodents to the ... Oooh, shiny!

The ever-quotable Bernard Keane in this morning's Crikey Campaign Special:

Despite Kevin Rudd’s – by his recent standards – extravagant endorsement of the Gillard Government last night, his reappearance should be sufficient to ensure another day is spent by the Press Gallery interrogating the Rudd issue. Perhaps the Prime Minister can just start her press conferences by tossing a shiny thing into the midst of the hacks. It would have pretty much the same effect.

I've only read the transcript of the Rudd/Adams interview, I didn't actually hear it. One commentator has said Rudd sounds 'gutted', which is probably because that's what he has, surgically, ever so slightly been: now minus what had become a troublesome and more or less expendable bit of gut.

But given that it was clearly not a wholly trouble-free operation -- the last personal acquaintance of mine to have keyhole surgery for gall bladder removal was in hospital for less than 48 hours and fully recovered by the end of the week -- and given that he is still clearly well below par, and given the rage and hatred that steamed out of Phillip Adams' columns and radio time after Rudd was deposed, and Adams' well-publicised departure from the Labor Party after decades of loyal belonging, what I want to know is this: Why did they do it?

I know that loyal Queenslanders have never recovered and probably never will recover from the rolling of their boy Kev and therefore, you know, them.  But everyone, not just Queenslanders, seems to be taking not just the content of this interview, but the fact of its being set up at all, at face value. Surely I'm not the only non-Queenslander to the left of Kevin Rudd and Phillip Adams who thinks she can smell a rat.

Far, far too much information

One particularly detestable bit of all-purpose politics-and-public-service jargon is getting a good workout during this limp election campaign period: 'roll out' as an all-purpose verb to mean either 'introduce', 'develop', 'implement', 'put into practice' or any one of half a dozen other specific activities depending on context.

But I can't help wondering whether The Australian's Cameron Stewart has seen it used this way before, whether he's decided to extend its meaning, and/or whether he actually checked this bit of copy before he filed it. Who knows, maybe he did it on purpose and thought it was funny. Here you go:

Mr Abbott pointedly opened Sunday's debate by reminding voters that he and his wife understood what it was like "to raise a family, to wrestle with a big mortgage, with grocery bills, with school fees".

And yesterday he rolled out wife Margie for the first time in the campaign.

Abbott has said publicly that he feels sex-starved when on the campaign trail, which is in itself far too much information. But I would pay a lot of money not to now have in my head a sequence of unwelcome images involving the rolling out of Margie. Really I would.

Perspective

One of the many lovely things about reading fiction for a living is that it tends to make you an armchair (time-)traveller. Just in the last few weeks I've read books set in the 1990s, the 1970s, the 1950s and the 1760s; books set in Scotland, Leningrad, Berlin and Buenos Aires, the Netherlands, the English Midlands, Chennai, Chicago and country Victoria, just off the top of my head.

Many of the novels I read for review are partly or wholly set in times and places of brutal regimes. One juxtaposes 1970s Argentina with the German Democratic Republic (so-called) of the same era. Another is set in Leningrad in 1952, where survivors of the wartime Siege of Leningrad are now living under Stalin, speaking in whispers, fearing their neighbours, watching their own every move. A third is partly set in India, where everything that happens is immediately politicised and a herpetologist knows better than to try to find out who it was, knowing that he would come home that night exhausted and therefore not thinking or moving quickly, who left a deadly snake in a basket on his verandah.

So every time I see people snarling and squabbling over Rudd v Gillard, or even over Gillard v Abbott, much less get irresistibly drawn into said squabbling myself, I think of a phrase that has been much in my thoughts ever since I first came across it, one that has had a calming effect on many occasions and has reminded me again and again how extraordinarily useful and powerful a psychoanalytic angle can be in explaining our behaviour to ourselves: 'the narcissism of small differences'.

Moving Australian working families forward with a great big new tax

Can anyone familiar with PR and/or media training please explain to me the reasoning behind advising pollies (for surely they must have been advised; they can't be doing anything this stupid off their own bat) to just keep plugging away with slogans despite the fact that it makes everyone in the country want to take to them with a baseball bat after they've heard it the first ten times or so?

Is there some deeply rooted belief that slogans will sink in if repeated often enough despite conscious resistance to them? I do not believe that this is true. None of them have sunk into me yet, nor into anyone with whom I've discussed it. Every time Kevin Rudd said Working Families I thought Christ this is a stupid slogan, it doesn't even make sense, unless you picture tiny tots being shoved up the chimneys or down the mines. Every time Tony Abbott says Great Big New Tax, all I think about is how pathetic and unrealistic people are who expect the guvmint to do stuff for them, like build roads and provide hospitals, with fairy dust or leprechaun money, and I redouble my commitment to paying tax even for stuff I don't personally approve of. (Someone who wants the guvmint to support opera needs to be pretty generous in her tolerance of supporting the Institute of Sport, after all.)

And now we have Julia Gillard chanting Moving Australia Forward, another bit of meaningless wankery. No, no, let's move Australia backwards. Eventually we'll bump into South Africa. (And won't that be fun.)

Gillard is a very very bright person and must be aware from her years in the law how easy it is to irritate and alienate the people you are talking to. She gave Working Families a fair old nudge herself when she was Deputy PM and there's obviously some heavy pressure coming at her from somewhere to keep this chanting up. But why? And from where? And why don't the pollies rise up in a bipartisan body and say No we're just not doing this any more, it makes us look like idiots? And who invents these mindless little choruses in the first place?

This is hilarious

Memo to the Liberal Party: if you want to sell something to women, enlisting the aid of the aggressive, amoral, antifeminist dick-wavers in their 20s who tend to abound in PR and advertising is probably not a fabulously good way to go about it.

That would be the case with any product you were trying to sell. But when the product you're trying to sell is Tony Abbott, well, think of a number and double it.

The party is understood to have appointed Splash Consulting, an agency that focuses on marketing to women, to conduct research in up to eight key marginal seats where women have been identified as crucial to a swing against the government.

And I bet it's cost them a squillion bucks and we don't need to ask where that money came from, do we now. And yet, I can think of a foolproof way of selling Tony Abbott to women voters and the Liberal Party is very welcome to my advice for free:

Give him a head transplant.

FTFY.

Strange bedfellows

From this morning's Age:

Christian Democratic Party MP Fred Nile has succeeded in introducing a bill to ban the wearing of the burqa in the NSW Upper House.

Mr Nile introduced his private member's bill, seeking to ban the wearing of the burqa and other face veils in public, shortly after 8pm yesterday.

Last month, a debate on the same bill was voted down by the NSW Upper House.

Greens MP John Kaye said only the four Greens MPs and Family First MP Gordon Moyes voted against introducing the bill on Tuesday.

"Last month the coalition and the government did the right thing and said no, they would not allow the Upper House to be home to this kind of racist dog whistling," Mr Kaye said.

"This time they caved in."

The Greens and Family First, eh? Only the burqa could produce such a strange alliance, involving such very different reasons for making the same choice.

Last time the ban-the-burqa brigade was in the news, it was instructive and often entertaining to watch commenters on and offline scuttling and scrambling to adopt whatever they thought the correct line was, and being scuppered by the utter confusion into which the burqa debate will always throw those of us who'd place ourselves anywhere to the left of centre.

Only the libertarians, this time, knew exactly what they thought and said so. Feminists (including me, though for me the bottom line is always that women's rights trump cultural difference) grappled with this lose-lose question, for feminism is a broad church and the question, however vexed and vexatious, is clear: does one further restrict the rights of women by banning a garment oppressive to women, or does one exercise tolerance however repressive in the name of women's freedom to wear whatever they like? And does one continue to insist that the garment is oppressive when wearers of the burqa pop up and say Hello, excuse me, I'm doing this by choice?

And what, in the free west, is a feminist to do, if anything, about women complicit, usually unconsciously and usually for their own self-protection, in the furtherance of an oppressive ideology? Because Goddess knows this doesn't apply only to Moslem women, and indeed could as justifiably be applied to women of my mother's generation, assorted footy and cricket WAGS, and doting mums who are out buying Bonds' new bra for eight-year-olds. (And there, incidentally, go my favourite knickers; anyone want to join me in a Ban Bras for Babies Bonds boycott? What chance do you think we'd have of successfully introducing a bill to ban them?)

But those for whom unquestioning leftitude is a central plank of self-identification found themselves unable to discern what the correct line might be. The right-wingers went for the notion that the burqa is a threat to national security, which was, if I remember rightly, the issue that brought this question to public attention in the first place. Presumably hordes of Islamic terrorists could hide any number of bombs and guns under them and who knows, I suppose they could, though history has proved again and again that if you want to hide bombs and guns you don't need a burqa to do it. This case was strengthened by the opportunity for a little concern feminism, though that was clearly secondary, and I suppose it's a form of progress that wingnuts should feel some need to pretend to care about women's rights because Goddess knows they never used to.

But a certain kind of tribal left-winger, determined to take the correct line (and I actually saw a few people turning up on blog comments threads anxiously asking what the correct line was, so that they could take it), was torn in several different directions: reluctance to ban stuff; repulsion at a garment so oppressive to women; outrage at the racist dogwhistle in the 'national security' idea and the inherent ignorance behind the push to do this in Australia, unlike in France where there is a coherent and longstanding ideology behind it to do with the importance of maintaining a secular state.

And don't, she said sadly, underestimate the unacknowledged hostility of a certain kind of man, regardless of his political persuasions, to any kind of female appearance (up to and including not being acceptably hot) that seems to suggest that a woman is not desirable and available to him, even just for ogling. Next time you see a woman in any form of Islamic dress, even just a headscarf, being heckled in the street, listen closely to what is being said.

Because for some men, simply failing to conform to their porn-fed stereotype is enough to make them hate you.

Liberal schmiberal

Malcolm Fraser has left the Liberal Party, and poor Margaret Simons, who as the co-author of Fraser's political memoirs has known for four months but promised not to say anything -- which as a journalist must have really, really hurt -- is finally liberated.

Like many old enough to remember, I've got one of those sharp 'where were you when' memories of Fraser's spectacular catapult to the top of the Australian power tree on the day of the Dismissal. I'd just come out of the Adelaide U English 3 exam, during which I had concentrated excessively on Persuasion at the expense of Anna Karenina, and was being picked up outside Centennial Hall (now pulled down and replaced) in the Wayville Showgrounds, where university exams were held, by my dear friend J in her little blue Anglia, the dead spit of the one owned by the Weasley family except that it couldn't fly, though on occasion it certainly felt as though oh never mind. We drove away to the tune of the ABC fanfare for the midday news and then the sound of a shellshocked newsreader.

Twas a day of blues: my memory of Gough Whitlam's outraged and infinitely imitable voice saying 'Because nothing will save the Governor-General' is all tangled up with lines of powdery lavender-blue flowering jacaranda against the lacquered blue enamel of an Adelaide November sky.

We were all so outraged that none of us had a good word to say about Fraser, but I remember noticing even at the time, and certainly later, that he was consistently good on race and racism. His harshest criticism of John Howard was on the subject of boat people. And his resignation from the party now seems to have been triggered by Tony Abbott's bluster about closing the borders and so on. (Hello, Budge, Australia's an island. We don't have borders.)

How Fraser is feeling can only be imagined; apart from anything else, I bet he wouldn't talk about it. Imagine being 80 and deciding that an institution that has had your loyalty all your adult life is something to which you can no longer bear to belong.

In which the Leader of the Opposition replies to the Budget

It was hard, particularly as the radio was on in the car on a shopping expedition so I only caught bits of it, to concentrate on what was actually being said in Tony Abbott's formal reply to last night's Federal Budget. I did take in the unrelenting negativity, and pick up a few linguistic infelicities (the misuse of 'shirk', for example, and the weird construction 'class war envy', which suggested to me that Abbott isn't especially familiar with either 'class war' or 'class envy' as concepts) and a number of clichés ('crystal clear') and tedious catch-phrases: is 'Great Big New Tax' already even more annoying than 'Working Families'? You decide. Why oh why, etc.

[UPDATE: two other things I've just remembered:

1) This gobsmacking moment when Abbott talks about health care as though it were just another for-profit commodity whose providers' profits should be protected as a top priority:

More GP “super clinics” sound like a good idea too except that 36 were promised at the last election and only two are actually operational. In fact, fee-for-service under Medicare has already produced hundreds of private sector equivalents and these don’t deserve unfair competition from government-funded rivals. (From here),

and

2) the disgraceful, repetitive, harping dog-whistling about China, a country that of course everybody knows you can't trust, because they're, you know, Chinese, and communists, and anyway Kevin knows a lot about them and can talk to them in a language that real Australians don't understand, so that must be really bad, right? I mean, who knows what he's saying to them?]

In any case, I was constantly distracted from the substance of the speech, such as it was, by the voice delivering it. As a child of the twentieth century and indeed a direct product of the Second World War, I tend to react quite badly to nasal, high-pitched, hectoring, aggressive, negative, bludgeoning male politicians' voices. They remind me of something I can't quite put my finger on.

More on 'bad writing'

I've never understood what on earth people are talking about (and there are many of them) when they call J. K. Rowling a 'bad writer'. And now that I've read this (hat-tip to my FaceBook buddy Naomi Parry), I understand it even less.

Look at the exquisitely skilful, careful structure of this piece, the way it dances between its developing argument and its vivid concrete examples. Look at the semi-transparent fabric of reasonableness softening, but not extinguishing, the righteous anger. Look at the humour. Look at the precision of the word-choice and the careful crafting of the sentence structure.

I can only assume that when people say she doesn't write well, what they're referring to is the fact that she writes simply and clearly, using easy, familiar words that represent the way her characters think and speak. It's almost as though she were writing fiction about children for children. D'oh.

This, however, is non-fiction for grown-ups. Go and have a read.

Equivalences

Let me get this straight: Christine Nixon is to be crucified for taking an hour off, when she wasn't even rostered on, in order to have dinner -- but it's cause for gasps of meeja admiration when the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition goes AWOL on a nine-day bike ride, taking yet another opportunity to wobble his budgie at slavering photographers and horrified truckies for the entire length of the Hume Highway.

Because, like, he's fit, and she's, you know, not, and everyone knows the skinned rabbit look equals virtue whereas a traditionally built lady must by definition be, you know, evil.

Have I got that right?

Have a read of that linked article, and then ask yourself how much more vile, ignorant, sniggering, misogynist fat-hate Nixon would be copping even than she already is if she were to emulate the Leader of the Opposition and say, in defence of the shocking crime of having an evening meal, 'I'm just being myself.'

I know Florida is odd, but still

The 'Say what?' feature at the Doonesbury site offers a daily sample of demented quotations from US public life. Here's today's:

"If you voted for Obama... seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your health care begin right now, not in four years."

-- sign on the office door of Florida urologist Jack Cassell

I suppose long immersion in matters urological might do strange things to your temper and world view eventually, but this is just extraordinary, possibly even illegal. And Robin Williams reckons we're unevolved.

Mind you, I imagine anyone who voted for Obama would, on seeing Cassell's sign, fall over themselves to get as far away from it and him as possible, so the Pollyanna view is that it's a win-win.

Prepare for the Rapture, but if you get left behind, at least your medical bills will be smaller

And, as the US holds its breath and the ABC website updates its news,

Mr Obama clinched the votes of some of wavering Democrats this morning by agreeing to issue an order reaffirming a ban on using federal funds for abortion.

The vote, in a rare Sunday sitting of the US House of Representatives, could come within the hour.

Republicans remain united in their opposition, with one declaring that healthcare reform will lead to "Armageddon" and another saying "demons" have overrun the Congress.

Update: YES HE COULD!

It's Abbott

Who beat Turnbull by half a toenail, 42-41, after the surprise elimination of Joe Hockey in the first vote.

Holy sh*t. As it were.

Of course you realise this means they will never beat Kevin for the foreseeable.

*Does little dance*

Not to mention the ongoing Liberal Party nomenclaturial farce if Julie Bishop retains the deputy leadership.

Are they mad? I mean, like, barking?

One thought one was past the age of cringe, but no

As Channel Seven excitedly leads up and counts down to its revelations about Premier Mike Rann and his secret, married ex-girlfriend, an affair (according to her version, shortly to air, and previewed in today's Sunday Mail) that ended five years ago, the Channel 7 reporters were asking other pollies what they thought. Cut to shot of the Prime Minister saying, with mysterious irrelevance (or was it?): "I know of nobody who sticks up for his state more than Mike Rann."

**CRINGE**

Either he knew what he was saying, in which case there's no doubt left about Rudd's general attitude to SA, or he didn't, which is almost sort of worse.

From my email inbox

In the coming weeks you will be contacted by the Governor General’s office with regard to the various protocol, dress code etc associated with attending a function at Admiralty House.

Can anyone explain to me why this sentence should produce an overwhelming desire to turn up in a sweaty blue tradie's singlet and the grottiest, daggiest tracky daks I can find? The convict ancestry, perhaps?

And me the proud owner and frequent consulter of this book since 1984, too: