Quote of the day

This is an election where slogans are really wearing thin. Abbott today tried to start talk about Labor’s “Great Big New Filter”, after which most of the listeners went out and had a great big new chunder.

-- From Grog's Gamut.

When testosterone attacks

Everyone already knows that the judgement of former Labor leader Mark Latham isn't super flash (though it's better than that of the Labor blokes who put him in charge), but even Latham sank to new lows of error in choosing to confront Tony Abbott yesterday -- thereby hijacking a function for old soldiers; stay classy, Mark -- and ask him more stupid, irrelevant questions in his "job" as a "journalist" for the ever-reliably-scummy (speaking of sinking to new lows) Channel Nine, who seem to be doing an excellent job of keeping themselves in their own news. As you would, having had that amount of practice.

Because Latham may be a big hulking boofy bloke who can break cab drivers' arms and try to yank little old deaf dudes in glasses off their feet and rip their arms off while pretending to shake their hands, and he may be four years younger than Abbott,  but Abbott is a zillion degrees fitter, and he's a trained boxer with just as much, though far better controlled, natural aggression. And he would have known that had he lost his temper and beaten the bejesus out of Latham, at least three-quarters of the population would have cheered. And probably voted him in. Don't even think about it.

Not just rocky, but also horror

'An astonishing number of prayer groups'

If anyone reading this happens to be teaching creative writing or running workshops or whatever, here's an article you might find useful. Certainly I plan to save it, so it's to hand should I ever find myself teaching anyone the difference between sentimentality and the real thing.

I've been a fan of Christopher Hitchens, even all through his contrarian views on Iraq, ever since the positively Damascene moment in a friend's sunny apartment overlooking Sydney Harbour on Easter Saturday 1994, where I read him for the first time. The moment of revelation was specifically this paragraph from a review in the TLS, first published 1988, which gave me a major new view, as of suddenly opened curtains on a window that turns out to be much larger than one imagined, of what it was possible for a writer to do:

If one takes the normal American ambition to be the pursuit of happiness, and charts the ways in which that pursuit is so cruelly thwarted, sooner or later one strikes across the wound profiles of Dallas, Texas on 22 November 1963. In those 'six point nine seconds of heat and light' or those 'seven seconds that broke the back of the American century', some little hinge gave way in the national psyche. The post-Kennedy period is often written up as a 'loss of innocence', a judgement which admittedly depends for its effect on how innocent you thought America had been until a quarter of a century ago. ... With Kennedy's murder, the Republic doomed itself to the repetitive contemplation of a tormenting mystery. Here is a country where information technology operates at a historically unsurpassed level; where anything knowable can in principle be known and publicised; where the bias is always in favour of disclosure rather than concealment; where the measure of attainment even in small-change discourse is the moon-shot. And nobody is satisfied that they know for certain what happened in the banal streets of Dealey Plaza.

And now here he is in the current Vanity Fair, almost another quarter of a century later, on what it's like to be diagnosed with cancer at 61.

Check out, in particular, the final paragraph, where one of the world's most famously strident and adamantine atheists and actively anti-Christian crusaders observes, briefly and neutrally, knowing that the irony does not need to be pointed out and will not escape his readers (one of the reasons I love him is his unfailing respect for his readers' intelligence), that he is getting supportive messages from 'an astonishing number of prayer groups'.

Imagine the struggle to process and reconcile this -- to do so at all, much less weakened, as he clearly is and including intellectually (though there's not much evidence of that in the writing) by the brutal treatments that all past and present cancer patients know far too much about.

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.

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.

Sorry, Annabel, not good enough

The ABC's Annabel Crabb published a long, informative, entertaining piece at The Drum the other day, characteristically witty and meaty, in defence of journalists and their current behaviour and reportage on the campaign trail.

Much of what she is says is fair enough. But nothing she says can possibly excuse what I've just heard on the radio.

I got into the car and turned on the radio and there was Julia Gillard in Queensland, mid-speech, announcing the Government's seniors policy, after what I imagine was a somewhat stressful morning meeting Kevin Rudd for the first time since she became Prime Minister. The seniors stuff sounded pretty good, mainly the improvements to the pension situation but also several other things. Jenny Macklin followed up. And then it was time for questions.

I listened for a total of just over half an hour, apart from the four and a half minutes it took me to duck into Dan Murphy on the way home, and I heard one, and only one, question, right at the end, about the policy announcement. Every single other question, asked mostly in an aggressive, smartarse, gotcha tone of voice by what sounded like a bunch of extremely young journalists (with the exception of -- wait for it -- Mark Latham, who was "working as a guest reporter for a commercial network"; is there no scrap of venomous fuckwittery of which the man is not capable?) was about her meeting with Kevin Rudd, except for the ones about the presence of Mark Latham.

Wah wah wah shrouded in secrecy (actually, said Gillard, there was a TV camera and sound gear in the room) wah gotcha wah wah why didn't you make eye contact (actually, said Gillard, just because you didn't see something doesn't mean it didn't happen) wah wah gotcha blah are there really two leaders wah wah wah knifed blah blah assassinated wah wah doesn't Mark Latham upset you blah not helping wah wah aren't YOU having a hard time wah wah gotcha blah Kevin Rudd Kevin Rudd Kevin Rudd.

Gillard answered every single one of these aggressive, repetitive inanities with humour, patience and grace.

As someone with an 83-year old father and an older sister recently turned 60, I would have quite liked to hear some questions about the seniors policy. I didn't think it was too much to ask. Perhaps the baby journalists thought Julia had spoken about it so clearly and in such detail that there were no questions left unanswered. But it seems more likely that they didn't hear a word she said and were filling in time tweeting and texting till her mouth stopped moving and they could start yelling But we need to talk about Kevin!

Can anyone tell me what this appalling crap is all about? Has journalism become a matter of goading someone until they lose their temper or burst into tears? Exactly when did loss of control or bodily containment become the stuff that "news" is made of? Did any of them even realise that there were policy announcements being made? Is this the kind of scrum that produces the kind of rubbish we're getting in the papers and on  the news? Do journalists really think that public life is a soap opera in which the only thing that matters is emotion, personalities and gossip? How much of this is being driven by the Rupert Murdochs of the world? Can you really blame the obviously extreme youth and inexperience of some of these journalists when Kerry O'Brien is doing more or less the same thing every night on The 7.30 Report? Now that journalism is something you need a university degree for, what on earth are they spending those four years teaching them? And is the Australian public really only getting the media it deserves?

Whatever the answers to these questions may be, I am bloody glad I'm not a journalist. I would be hanging my head in shame, mortification and sorrow at the untrained flea circus this once noble profession has become.

'One tends to get the type of person who is terribly thrusting and ambitious...'

'Thrusting', eh? I notice Abbott's world view as reflected by his vocabulary hasn't significantly changed in 30 years. Here for your listening pleasure (because it will confirm all your worst fears, and there's always something lushly satisfactory about that) is Tony Abbott, student politician, interviewed at UNE in 1979. Via Larry Buttrose on Facebook.

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.

In which we ask ourselves what has happened to the profession of journalism in this country

Bernard Keane in today's Crikey Campaign bulletin:

Only in this bizarrely [sic] – and bizarrely uninteresting – campaign can Labor’s distribution of Tony Abbott’s comments on a variety of subjects be described by serious journalists as a “smear campaign” -- a term they so far haven’t used about the remorseless focus on Gillard’s marital and parental status.

The only bit of that I disagree with is the part about the campaign being boring, which as Mark suggested yesterday at Larvatus Prodeo is in itself a bizarre thing to say, what with roller-coaster polls every two minutes and superannuated pollies coming out of the woodwork to throw in their two cents' worth.

Still. While it is indeed ludicrous to call it a smear campaign, and I can imagine that seeking and finding words of Tony Abbott's to use against him must be a walk in the park, in the sense of being both easy and fun, I think they should stop it. It's a tiny bit grubby, but more to the point it makes Labor look desperate. I mean, they are desperate, but as almost every woman knows, advertising that fact only increases it threefold.

'The next great Russian dancer'

is, they say, Ivan 'Rocket Man' Vasiliev, age 21.



He's currently dancing in London with the Bolshoi and I first heard his name on radio the other day, with an interview. Dancing makes him happy, he says, because it is his element. 'I am fish in water.'

More here.

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.

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.

But then, as the cold winter's night began to close in ...

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.

There's no pleasing some people

Yeah see if they win it'll only be because she is a GURL so nyerdy nyer

Bernard Keane, in this morning's Election Special from Crikey, on last night's 'debate':

The only momentary interest came right at the finish. At the end of his closing address, Abbott said “so this election will determine whether the Prime Minister is to be elected by the people or by the powerbrokers. Whether Prime Ministers are to be chosen on the basis of the job they’ve done, or gender."

If Tony Abbott think[s] Julia Gillard became Prime Minister because of her gender, or that the only way she’ll win the election is if female voters reflexively vote along gender lines, then he really does have a problem with women, and not just a political one.

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'.

I'M NOT SHOUTING

Here's some folk wisdom garnered over a lifetime of dealing with my father (a dear man in many ways, but pure Id, and born without even a Volume switch much less an Off switch), with two of the blokes  from my chequered past, and now with five years' worth of blog discussions: if in an unguarded moment you are unwise enough to point out to an angry, aggressive man that he is being angry and aggressive, he will turn on you with the anger and aggression ramped up to the power of ten and say I AM NOT BEING ANGRY AND AGGRESSIVE!!!111!11!!

And he will genuinely believe that that is true.

Journalism fail x2

Can there be any profession apart from popular music in which the gap between the good and the bad is as wide as it is in journalism? In Australia, in the corner of intelligence, ethics and the cause of truth, we have journalists like George Megalogenis, Michelle Grattan, David Marr, Margaret Simons, Laura Tingle, you write your own list. In the opposing corner, we have, well, you write your own list. It'll be longer.

Yesterday two things stood out, journalism-wise, and neither of them was pretty. There was the serious issue of national political reporting, which Bernard Keane sums up brilliantly in this morning's special election edition of Crikey:

The media obsess about Kevin Rudd and then use their obsessing about it as evidence that Rudd is “distracting” from the Labor campaign.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, except that it wasn't at all ridiculous if you're an animal lover, here in Adelaide we had an exotic (and gorgeous, look) young macaw called Tambopata escape from the Zoo. It spent a day and a night flying from tree to tree around the Adelaide CBD and Parklands. Not only was it skittishly evading capture, and trying to get away from the magpies and crows that were attacking it, but it was also trying to get away from the media pack that was following it around frightening the bejesus out of it as they hustled and chattered and scampered and bumped each other out of the way every time it settled in a tree from which it might have been lured down by Zoo staff. By the time they finally caught the poor thing yesterday morning, the bird people from the Zoo must have been ready to throttle anything carrying a microphone or a camera.

If you go to that link and read the story you'll see a number of very, very Adelaide remarks in the comments thread:  among the expected gibes about murderous crows and so on, one punter observes 'Funny if the pandas ate it.'