Table Talk: Bob Ellis on Film and Theatre

(From And So It Went, page 77)

FLASHBACK

Friday, 1st December, 2006, 12.05 am

‘Rudd hasn’t got the numbers, has he?’

‘He’s got five votes, that’s all,’ said Lou, and Karen nodded. ‘I don’t know what this is all about.’

‘Kim’s confident, is he?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Quite confident,’ Karen added.

‘I’m very confident,’ Michael said firmly.

Were they cracking hardy? It didn’t seem so. Rudd was known as a loner, a leaker, a workaholic with no political friends and few caucus allies. Yet on Wednesday Phillip Adams at the Chifley play said Rudd had the numbers, and he’d had them for six months courtesy of Mark Arbib and was waiting from the moment to spring them. Bob Carr was at the play too and said it was a tragedy for Kim but it was probably so.

Two Fridays ago moreover at a journalists’ banquet in Glebe where guest speaker Rudd gave an uproariously funny speech that was roughly entitled ‘How I And Gareth Arrived At Long Last In North Korea And What Befel Us There’, a ‘dream ticket’ of Kevin and Julia was being mooted excitedly with pamphlets and ribbons to my disgust.

….The most remarkable feature of this extract is the date at the top of it. Six years ago it was known Rudd was ‘a loner, a leaker, a workaholic with no political friends and few caucus allies’ who made fun of his colleagues, in this case Gareth Evans, in front of journalists. And yet they took the chirping tapeworm on, and rolled Beazley on the morning of his disabled brother’s death when Labor was on 54 percent two party preferred, and refused when I asked him to take on Beazley, the greatest Labor figure of his generation, as Shadow Defense Minister, ending his career. And some of them this morning believe he’s changed his spots, he’s learned his lesson, he’s more consultative now.

And the first thing he’ll do is sack the world’s greatest Treasurer.

Among the many things one could say at this point is that a thing threatened is always different from a thing done. Throughout 1975 it was well known as an intellectual proposition that Kerr could sack Whitlam and it seemed to many of us an amusing possibility. But when it happened it had the impact of the Titanic sinking, or Pearl Harbour. The Rudd-Gillard facedown, similarly, while it was just an hypothesis, seemed an amusing new board game. Now it’s a seismic event, like Fukushima, that can sunder our democracy. MORE TO COME

5.50 pm

I said a few days ago in a piece in these pages on the fatal flaws of Rudd, Gillard and Abbott that for Rudd there was a point where arithmetic ended and God began, and like most godbotherers this faith in his destiny would do for him. I said in a piece eighteen months ago that jet-lag and sleeplessness could be the end of him. I have called him in other pieces an ungrateful cunt, a tyrannous pest, an uncorrected Asperger’s patient, an insipid prima donna and an egocentric sadist who, like Hemingway, ‘never forgave a favour’. And so it goes, and went, maybe twenty minutes ago.

He imagines he will be back, refreshed, like Churchill, from two months in the wilderness and in the Lodge again in June but he is finished. He should have had a single-malt whisky and milk and slept it off. But he believed his mood was too important for that, as losers do. And here we are, in corrosive debacle, with Abbott one flounce-out from the Prime Ministership, observing and assessing this pernicious twerp, this worst news for Labor since Evatt.

He sacked, demoted, misplaced or thwarted Beazley, Debus, Faulkner, McMullan, McKew, Duncan Kerr and Shorten, all Prime Ministers-in-the-making far more capable and eloquent than he. He taunted Turnbull, his greatest ally, into oblivion and lost thereby his carbon legislation and his Copenhagen glory. He offered Beazley not the Governor-Generalship, as Hawke did Hayden, nor Defence, which he craved and loved and shone in, nor even the US Ambassadorship, which he offered to Carr first.

He got a thousand good ideas at the 2020 and accepted only two of them, both of them his own. He missed John Button’s funeral to greet Cate Blanchett’s baby. He abandoned the long-held Labor habits of collegiate consultation, policy development in a process respected by both Caucus and the party membership, and convivial comradeship within the cabinet and the outer ministry for the adoring servility of abashed young men, who in turn grew sick of his pointless hyperactive post-midnight indecision and petulance, like everybody, and in dozens walked out on him.

It is time for Gillard and Crean and Arbib, whose numbers put him in, and Bruce Hawker and Phillip Adams who encouraged him to overthrow Beazley, the noblest intellect in parliament and the finest Labor orator since Whitlam, to apologise to the nation for imposing on it this petty little hyperventilating fuckwit when a great man was not only available, but in the appropriate office, and on the verge of power, and Labor on 54 percent.

More later as the news breaks.

8.02 pm

He resigned, he said, because in part of ‘public attacks by faceless men’, which makes one wonder what drugs are keeping his aorta in. Public men are not faceless men. Faceless men are not public men, they are secret men. There are therefore no public attacks by faceless men. His use of the old, drab, fraudulent phrase and the clear, high-vaulting, mother’s-boy self-esteem with which he uttered it is a measure of how silly he’s getting lately.

It’s only about him, and the wrong done him. The wrong he did Beazley, and is doing Anna Bligh, doesn’t come into it. Me, disloyal? Me, lurking in the shadows and intriguing by stealth? No way. It’s so wrong of you to say that. Look, I stuffed up as Prime Minister, I know that. And that’s why you have to make me Prime Minister. Because I’m better now, and I know what to do now. Sack the world’s best Treasurer for a start.

I know a few organ transplantees, and this beaming megalomania is a fairly common symptom, a drug effect. And the drugs that plug the organ in can addle the judgment. Paul Cox, whose liver transplant I am currently dramatising, believed under the operation drugs that he had become the universe for a while, and then that he was living in sixteenth-century Venice, but he got over it, and functions ably now. Kevin has not yet, I think, made a full recovery from the universe illusion, and the strange idea that no other politician has talent or deserves a go. To say ‘I fucked up, elect me’ is not the best of slogans, but he believes it, and that’s the way he plays it: eyes firmly in the mirror, a slim smile playing on his cherry lips.

10 pm

Sky News swears Rudd’s numbers are growing, the ABC that his numbers are dwindling. His characteristic irresponsibility and carelessness of the lives of others are shown by his abandonment of important conferences, the drop-kicking of his Washington duties to Beazley, the man he displaced, the calling of a press conference at 12.38 am, and another at 5 pm, and the sacking, effectively, of his loyal, exhausted, hard-working staff at a minute’s notice, distorting and diminishing and deranging their lives and, not that it matters, their children’s lives.

I’ve suggested to a couple of high-placed friends that Beazley be made, immediately, Foreign Minister and be given a Senate seat by Friday and the extruded Senator (Arbib? Faulkner? Thistlethwaite?) be given Washington. Rudd clearly thinks he can do the job, since he’s bequeathed it to him, but he might be shocked to find him in it so very soon.

And himself on the back bench, without a feather to fly with.

He will be finished politically by Friday, by the look of it. The story of how Garrett warned him about the pink batts, and how he, Rudd, ordered him to ignore the dangers, and how people died, and how Garrett took the fall for Rudd, and the obloquy and the humiliation and the stain, and the shame of the dead, if this story is true, will end his credibility forever and reduce his votes on Monday if he stands to single figures.

If the story is true.

We choose our friends from among those we don’t have to lie to, and Rudd has for too long forced good men and good women to tell lies about him, saying he was a team player, and a top bloke, and the rest of it. And by this proved he was no friend of the Labor Party. And, as Swanny said so energetically and angrily tonight, never ever had been.

And so it goes.

FIRST

Attend the fate of D Strauss-Kahn
Whose chambermaid spun quite a yarn
Of hot pursuit and forced blow-job,
Nude grope, wild struggle, pulsing nob,

Vast lust! which no cold shower can quench.
Said he: ‘Ah wers jerst being French.
Eet ees wert ‘appens avry nart
Een small hotels rarnd erld Monmatre,

Oos chembermeds put out for sous
And gasp lark Eleanora Duse:
“More! More! Yer power ees at its peak,
Give it to me, Dominique!”

Ah werd ev thert more thanks were due
For fifteen berks and parlez vous,
All apertures, and then once more:
Wart else, old friend, are ‘ousemaids for?’

Said she: ‘Look, Buster, the CIA
Shelled out a mill – and that ain’t hay:
To soothe his pride and tease his cock,
Then give this Marxist future shock

By screaming down the corridor,
“He is a pig! I’m not a whore!”
And thus, in France across the sea,
Keep up the midget Sarkozy

While Dominique does five to ten
And Marx does not arise again,
Unlike…each hour…Dom’s mighty cock
He then beats senseless round the clock.’

And thus we, Primates, might yet find
In foreign parts if so inclined,
A lustful drunken doom in gaol.
We’d better watch it, gang. Wassail.

SECOND

Beweep the fate of Cyrus Vance,
Who bobbed up thinking, ‘Here’s a chance.
From bed-sheets stained by this big cheese,
Strauss-Kahn, now blubbering on his knees,
I’ll make my name, I’ll start my run,
And be in the White House in ‘21.
But then, alas, the Frog from Hell,
The quick-shag prince of the Sofitel,
Proved harder to pin down in shame.
‘Zis girl,’ he cried, ‘ees on the game,
She offairs guests, before zey go,
A parting, fond felatio.
And ah wers terched, ah ‘ave to say,
Until she said, “Now you merst pay.
I need, by noon, my cocaine fix,
Before I blow, this night, Hans Blix.”
No Fransh man pays for eet, ah said,
You merst give thanks when you give ‘ead
To serch a grand fromage as I.
I do not ‘appen every die.’
Her rage, Primates, shook la Belle France.
Her details did for Cyrus Vance,
Who failed to note, though he’d been warned,
One does not prod a woman scorned.
One must pay up, and cop it sweet.
Who gives you head will give you heat.
And we, Primates, should learn this rule,
It should be taught in every school:
That nation which will eat a snail,
Thinks you should eat worse things. Wassail.

THIRD
Beweep the fate of N. Diallo:
Her loins were deep, her motive shallow.
In fury scorned she asked cold cash,
Too much I think, for one dud bash,
Eight seconds long, with a short-arsed Frog
Who set all humankind agog
With four swift swivings in one day
At sixty-two. ‘Eet wers mah way,’
He said, ‘Of saying good-bah to New Yerk;
Ze town zat really perps mah cerk.
Ah weeshed to leave wern last caress,
Wern mouthfool of mah tenderness,
So four sad girls Ah ‘ad nert ferked
Ah would make glad. With three, it worked.
Ze ferth, a merst erngrateful beetch,
Weel farnd one merst nert sue the reech,
Merst cerp it sweet, from king or sheik,
Must cry, ‘More, more, great Dominique!’
Merst cerp it sweet, from brute or bard,
Merst cerp it sweet, and swallow hard.’
And now, acclaimed like Charles De Gaulle,
He enters Paris, cheered by all,
With ribbons and trumpets down the Elysee
And lives to pounce another day.
And thus we, Primates, well might strive
For wealth and power, maids to swive,
Champagne, trophy wives and poon,
Whores Chinese and Octoroon,
Life in St Tropez, Gstaadt,
With jet-set bimbos…Have a heart.
Such dreaming is to no avail.
A beer instead. A beer. Wassail.

Yesterday’s revelations that Rupert’s List of parliamentarians defecting to Rudd was innumerate, incompetent or fraudulent (some names were in all three columns and a caucus of 103 added up in the Murdochists’ parallel universe to 120) mean, or could mean, that the Newspoll and Galaxy numbers for Queensland are worthless.

Their client is Murdoch, and he knows what he wants to hear: that Katter’s impact is negligible, and the strange goanna-like stowaway Campbell Newman, the first Opposition Leader without a seat in world history, will get the first 8 percent swing away from Labor in Queensland history despite his brother-in-law being wanted by the FBI.

Well, it could be so; Queensland, Bob Menzies once said, is different. But if the Newspoll figures are as wrong as the Rudd-Gillard figures in Rupert’s List, and why would they not be, then Labor is on 48 percent two party preferred and likely to form with some Katterites and Independents a coalition government.

The Newspoll figures are likely to be wrong because they were taken, for the first time in world history, over thirteen days not three (why?), and on hot summer days during floods and storms when a lot of younger people were not in the house to take the call, a lot of students were on holiday or lifesaving or boating or bushwalking, and no mobile phones were rung. The Galaxy figures are likely to be wrong because the sample is too small, and, once again, the younger voters were likely to be out of the house, on the beach, on a boat, at a 3D cinema with their children.

No correspondence has come in from either of these polling organisations denying error or fraud or corruption and this is very suspicious. It can only be assumed, though I may be wrong, that their sampling methods are dodgy, and their raw figures too revealing to put on the table, and Katter’s party scoring in fact not 4.5 but 14, and the whole election outcome uncertain, and the Campbell Newman Phenomenon a beat-up; like Rudd’s numbers in the Murdochist flagship on Saturday, now dwindling as Doug Cameron begs that he not be sacked as Foreign Minister.

Rupert is fond of cheating, as he did in Florida famously in 2000, declaring for Bush when 500,000 votes were still to come in. Would he be any different now? And would Newspoll give him what he wants?

Let us see the raw figures, the time of the phone calls, the age of the respondents, and the rest of it.

And prove me wrong.

Katter at 14 percent, I’d say.

Prove me wrong.

In the Australian editorial this morning it is said the Rudd matter is ‘driving the rest of the government to distraction and seriously inhibiting the ability of the administration to function effectively’. It is not said what legislation has been held up, what treaties, negotiations or wordings of bills ‘inhibited’. This is because there are none.

It is best we look at the arithmetic of these things. Does anyone believe Bill Shorten, say, cancels meetings with union officials or corporate CEOs or activists for the disabled because he is thinking about the leadership? How then is he ‘distracted’? Does anyone believe the Prime Minister does not turn up and give speeches on the days she is meant to because she is shoring up her numbers in Cabinet? How then is she ‘distracted’?

This is one of those right-wing fictions that look plausible in the lives of others, but never in one’s own. When I was waiting for my father to die I still went on with the work I was doing, making a film about Aboriginal cricketers touring England. When Bob Hawke’s daughter was being treated for heroin effects she could have died of he was still an effective, gregarious, vote-winning Prime Minister. When John F Kennedy’s son Patrick died he continued to negotiate the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with the Russians.

And a whole government is ‘distracted’ into uselessness by Kevin Rudd swearing in Chinese? Really? Really? They are certainly distracted a couple of times a day, for maybe as long as twenty minutes. But paralysed? Unable to make basic decisions? Unable to function? What evidence is there of this? Give examples.

It is part of what I used to call the puppetisation of public figures by the Murdoch press. Prince Charles was nothing more than a leering adulterer absorbed by his beloved’s tampons when he was not communing with lettuces. Bill Clinton had no more than the next blow-job in mind. The fact that a politician, as Bill Shorten showed last night, can have a complicated and nuanced reaction to a number of interlinked and opposed and abrasive things and address them all in his mind when he is supposed to be ‘distracted’ into inactivity and policy stupour is never admitted by the Murdochists whose article of faith is, was and ever has been that left-wing figures are hysterical mad fuckers who can’t keep their dick in their pants or think straight or eat a pie without chundering.

Or, in Kevin Rudd’s case, involve himself in any task without losing his temper. The Youtube film of his exasperation at his own inability to master and read aloud with accuracy an over-written text in Mandarin, and his response to that incapacity in words that all men use when frustrated repeatedly by a task they did not choose or like, effectively stifled all chance he might have had, not necessarily a big one, of regaining the Prime Ministership with an act of technological betrayal and journalistic prurience like the one lately used on Gordon Brown, who used the word ‘bigoted’, accurately, in a private conversation with his political staff in a moving car.

What did for him was not the swearing, though his unlined porcelain choirboy face did not really suit the uttered expletives as much as, say, Bob Hawke’s face might have done. What did for him was his cancellation at the end of the film of a six o’clock appointment because he was no longer in the mood for it. It brought back all the changeable angry chaos of his administration, his unwillingness to delegate, inform, beseech, cajole, say thanks or stick to an arrangement, and all those midnight-to-dawn rewrites, to hectic deadlines, of speeches never given or even referred to again. It brought back the tyrannous pest they had booted out for the very good reason that he was a cunt, and behaved very badly, and very ungratefully, and very cruelly, with no good purpose, towards everyone around him, and everyone who had helped him rise in the world.

A measure of how big a cunt he is, and how incompetent a politician, is the absolute certitude that his first act as PM would be to sack the world’s best Treasurer, Wayne Swan, and Labor’s best communicator, Bill Shorten.

Think about that for a minute.

Murdochism’s machinations are getting as incompetent as Rudd’s of late. They had 120 members in Labor’s caucus when there are 103. They put some names in Rudd’s column, Gillard’s AND the Undecided. Who, one might ask, with a nod to Kevin, is rat-fucking their minds? Their tiny minds? Who?

Rupert, is it?

Of course it is.

It is puzzling that some economic people believe a reduction in the income of all Greeks will help them pay their debts. It should be reasonably clear to a ten-year-old that less income means less taxes and less money paid toward debt reduction. So does sacking people from public service jobs and putting them on what is left of welfare.

No, what must happen is what happened in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. There were two currencies, the rouble, which was worthless outside its borders, and the dollar, which tourists brought in and purchased luxury items with. With the rouble you bought food, vodka, cheap clothes, theatre tickets and the like. With dollars you bought silk stockings, perfume, jewellery, stereophonic radios and Beatles albums. Sometimes a dollar got you a hundred roubles, or, if you cared to risk gaol, eight hundred forged roubles.

This could be duplicated in Greece by retaining the euro but also returning to the drachma and making it unexportable. Certain nominated goods could be purchased by the drachma: basic foods, some medical supplies, ouzo and the like; and stays in tourist hotels, restaurant food, guided tours and the like by the euro.

This would ensure that all the tourism-related jobs were retained, and many people would not starve or riot or go on welfare. It would also attract tourists in great numbers to the cheaper prices. The drachma could be given a notional value of say a fifth of the euro, and the debt paid back in that currency over ten or twenty years.

It would have to be decided how many drachmas to print. But a government gift of sixty thousand of them to each employed citizen or small business person would kick-start the new economy and reduce a lot of despair, proud starvation, prostitution, drug manufacture, and the like.

The advantage of this scheme is it has been road-tested successfully not just in the Soviet Union but in the European Communist Bloc and many Asian tourist places, like Bali where you paid the equivalent of nine dollars a week for a boarding house room and meals. It has been tried before. It works.
Demanding people pay more and more debt with less and less income does not work, obviously, and it is really surprising it was ever proposed.

Or perhaps you disagree.

No-one has yet written in quoting an instance of Gerard being right in the last forty years. He is wrong again this morning.

He says that Labor’s low vote federally — 47 percent two party preferred according to Nielsen, the honest pollster, the other serves the wishes of the criminal innumerate Murdoch who on Saturday said Labor had 120 caucus members not 103 — is due not to leadership troubles but to their crazed views on climate change. He said that if Shorten or Faulkner or Beazley or Beattie or Rann or Wran or Hawke or Plibersek or McKew were Prime Minister Labor’s vote would be the same.

This is patently insane. Gillard’s proud atheism has lost her three percent, her shafting of a Queenslander one percent, her marital status one percent, her hatred of gay marriage one percent, and if, say, Plibersek, presently a suckling mother, were Prime Minister and all her policies Gillard’s, the two-party-preferred Labor vote would be 53 and Labor likely at election to have a majority of thirty-two.

Gerard’s odd view that climate change is not a big threat and those who believe in it lose votes derives I think from his bizarre birth cult Catholicism, which holds that a dead man whose blood he drinks on Sundays will come back soon and burn the planet to cinders before resurrecting five billion human corpses and forcing lions and vultures to practise vegetarianism and the humans to sing his praises by night and day on a green, unpolluted planet created from the ashes of the old in a city of glass by a crystal stream among choirs of angels and resurrected grandparents all now thirty-four years old but no longer married to each other or drinking alcohol. It is not known why Gerard believes this nonsense but he does, and it interferes with his view of the likelihood of the world ending in any other way.

It is hard to see why he is employed and paid eighteen hundred dollars a week when his guiding beliefs are so insane, though it must be said that Fairfax employs David Marr and Mike Carlton also, who show every sign of atheistic sanity, moderation and human sympathy. Perhaps he is there for balance, to provide lunatics with solace in a fast-dying newspaper in the hope that some lunatics will buy it on Tuesday and derive comfort from it.

A better policy, surely, would be to employ me at half his wage for a month or so, to see if the Tuesday circulation improves. I have a track record of getting most things right. I opposed, for instance, the recent WMD war which Gerard  supported calling George W Bush this millennium’s Winston Churchill and correctly predicted the outcome of twenty-nine elections within three seats and the exact margin of Tony Abbott’s victory over Turnbull (two votes, one disputed) when most experts were predicting Hockey by twenty.

I again ask anyone to give an instance of Gerard being right, and Gerard to debate me on any subject, anywhere, in front of any audience he invites.

Rupert’s List without apology now has Plibersek in Gillard’s camp and Cheeseman in one camp not both, Gillard’s numbers at 51 not 46, Rudd’s at 31 not 36 and Undecideds still at 21; which means Rudd has to win them all to win by one, an impossibility. Which means the challenge is over. Not that the Murdochists would say that, of course. But on Rupert’s own figures it means nothing less.

What a grubby, slithery, lying bunch they are. On pages 6 and 7 their morphed Orwellian language continues. Bligh ‘spruiks’ her policy of half the mines’ income for education under the smallest headline on the page, outweighed by the headline Federal Brawl Upsets Labor Campaign. Ah yes, those brawling, unstable mad lefties, so much madder than Sir Russ or Sir Terry or Sir Joh. The Labor campaign has been ‘thrown into upheaval’, we are told, by the Rudd resurgence that now, on Rupert’s numbers, cannot take place. Slim Margins Make The Task Easier For LNP, we are told, and a statewide swing of 4.6 is all that is needed, and none of the old Hansonite 23 percent will go, apparently, to Katter’s Australia Party and mess things up for them. Of course it won’t.

Of course it won’t. How could it. Newspoll has Labor on 42 percent, two party preferred (though five parties can win seats), and Galaxy, even better, on 40. Both polls are funded by Murdochists and are totally honest. Though Murdochists pay policemen for information they would never pay pollsters for false information; at that they draw the line. Sure they do. Sure they do.

Is the Newspoll false information? Of course it is; just like Rupert’s List on Saturday was false information. If I were to poll Queenslanders at home in daytime in Queensland in February I would get 58 percent LNP too. If I were to ring mobile phones I would get 50, because most of the voters under forty years of age would be out shopping or surfing or fishing or watching their kids play cricket in the summer heat and such voters, voters if that age, favour Labor. And I would get 14 or 15 for Katter’s outdoorsy party as they mustered cattle or drove trucks to Birdsville, not 4.5. And if I were to ring like Galaxy those at home on a hot weekend like the one just past, I too would get 60 for the LNP, 40 for Labor, nothing for the Katterites, and a wipeout.

But Galaxy and Newspoll mysteriously don’t ring mobile phones. Of course they don’t. For then they would get news that Rupert, an old, scared man who’s lost America now to Obama and will soon go to gaol, didn’t, very much didn’t, want to hear.

Is Newspoll another Murdochist fraud like Rupert’s List? And the headlines claiming Liverpudlians robbed corpses during the soccer stadium fire? Of course it is; or such, such is my guess. Why else does it have a CEO? Why does it have a CEO? What does its CEO do? Why was its latest survey 1227 people not 1337? Were a hundred respondents discarded? At what hours were the last hundred rung? And so on.

Why does Newspoll have a CEO? If the numbers are what they are and are never tweaked, what is he there for?

Tell, tell.

The actual figures now I suspect are Labor 33, Lib/Nats 36, the Katter Party 14, eccentric independents 4, informal 4 and Undecided 10. Which means Katter’s preferences are crucial, Bligh can win, and Newman can’t win his seat now his brother-in-law is wanted by the FBI.

It’s up for grabs, in short, and the Murdochists’ dirty tricks are coming home to roost as day by day their Big Lies are exposed.

Or perhaps you disagree.

(From Suddenly, Last Winter)

Sunday, 5th September, 2010, 7.10 am

Great storm winds shake the house and bring down a tree we have loved for thirty years on the front lawn. The winds are as bad as any I have known. The very heavens protest at what is happening.

A change of government, perhaps.

9.10 a.m.

The little crippled butcher bird has not come this morning. She may have been killed by the storm.

9.25 a.m.

No, here she is.

What a big, demanding voice she has, trilling and ululating.

She has mouths to feed in this new urgent, rainy spring.

9.40 a.m.
A big earthquake in New Zealand of 7.1 magnitude has brought down five hundred buildings in Christchurch, some of great architectural beauty, ninety in the CBD, and made unstable a thousand others, high schools among them. Strong winds of cyclone force are buffeting the surviving tottery structures and may bring them down. The one person dead had a heart attack, but two others, gravely injured, may follow him into the ultimate question. And so it goes.

As in China in 1976 when both Mao Tse-Tung and Chou En-Lai died, an enormous earthquake shook Beijing. Gough Whitlam and his wife were there and Graham Freudenberg. ‘Did the earth move for you, dear?’ Gough asked Margaret in a famous cartoon.

What portents, old friend, what portents.

3.10 p.m.

An afternoon sleep with a hot water bottle and Kenneth Tynan’s Profiles, just in from the bookshop, a serial treasure of mine that I keep lending and losing. I read again, with pleasure, Ken’s best opening line.

What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.

How good is that. Put the words in any other order and they have no impact, or beauty, at all.

How good is that.

I read on, with familiar joy, his many delvings into Shakespeare in rehearsal and performance.

5.50 p.m.

Katter has had two meals in Brisbane with Rudd, an old fond friend and bookend, and heard out his bitterness with yelps of sympathy. If Rudd were still Prime Minister, Bob has just said, or implied, he would be in the Labor camp for sure.

I imagine Katter in a black cloak aghast on the turrets of Elsinore, and Rudd, a grave sere ghost, impelling him with bespectacled, burning eyes.

Rudd: If thou dids’t ever thy dear file clerk love —

Katter: (yelping) Oh…God!

Rudd: Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder!

Katter: (beating his eyes with his fists) Murder!

Rudd: Murder most foul, strange, and unnatural!

Katter: Haste me to know’t, that I with wings as swift
As meditation or the thoughts of love,
May sweep to my revenge!

Rudd: Adieu, adieu, remember me. (Exit)

Katter: (a dingo howl, a risen fist, a horse-breaker’s leap to the highest turret,) The time is out of joint! Oh cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!

Monday, 6th September, 2010, 7.10 a.m.

A bright, cold morning with little flurries of wind. The lorikeets come and go. I attend to the news, and grow restive.

Oakeshott has spent the weekend in Canberra, sorting out and writing up the Three Amigos’ proposed new laws and parliamentary procedures. Windsor went home, and at an early, milking hour took a phone call from Fran Kelly.

‘Have you made up your mind?’ she asks.

‘No I haven’t, and there’s good reason for that. I really want to talk to the other two about the possible prospect of a seventy-five all. In which we might have to rethink our own thoughts.’

‘How much of a chance, do you think, are we for a seventy-five all?’

‘I don’t know how the other two are going to vote. So we’re going to put our cards on the table today. And we will know, and we will be able to go from there.’

‘So you’ve decided how you’re going to vote?’

‘Not until I talk it through. Because the main objective here is seeing if we can get to something that’s stable. If we can’t get to something that’s stable, we may well wind up back at the polls. And that’s why I mentioned seventy-five all.’

‘Would it be fair to say that at this point you’re more inclined to one side than the other, but you could shift if you thought the other two were going one way and therefore the number was needed to get stable government?’

‘Well, that may need to happen if in fact we don’t want another election. And I’ve spoken to both sides of the parliament and to other people, and they don’t particularly want another election. It may mean that people may be leaning one way, but they may have to come back the other way to get some stability into the system.’

8.40 a.m.

Coalition’s hope for power sinks, say the headlines at Wayne’s, Entsch tells Katter to hurry up. A cartoon has Swanny with a scratched face by a hospital bed where Gillard lies covered in bandages, her broken limbs up in the air and only her eyes visible. ‘You’re looking a bit better,’ Swanny says.

I chuckle a bit; and then it becomes clear what I should do.

11.10 a.m.

‘I’m going to Canberra,’ I tell Annie. ‘I’ll drive down tonight.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘You take the train.’
‘Okay.’

6.40 p.m.

And so it is concluded. We drive in silence through the Forest. We part at five-thirty outside Central. I listen to PM as the train pulls out and suburbs drift by and night comes on.

7.40 p.m.

I sleep for a while and wake and ring Rhys while we stop at Mittagong. He’ll be driving down, as before.

‘See you there,’ he says.

10.05 p.m.

Goulburn goes by in darkness. Bungendore. I fear the outcome, but I have to be there.

10.45 p.m.

The key is in the appointed place, which a button-push opens, in the Best Western Motel in Kingston in the cold and shivering dark. The flat-screen television shows me channels, but not the ABC.

I take two Aspro Clear, and soon sleep.

Tuesday, 7th September, 2010, 6.45 a.m.

By cab to Parliament House, the Reps entrance, with a driver upset as me at the loss of talent from government lately. A Labor supporter, he calls Nick Minchin the best of the others, ill-lost through an injured and addled son to the nation’s dialogue and governance.

6.52 a.m.

I dodge the cameras and at the front entrance go in sidelong and wait for Ben; the muzak is playing ‘Ring of Fire’. One of the Channel 10 girls from our night at the Penrith Panthers greets me breezily and signs me in. I get my new pocket knife through the machinery as I did the old.

7.10 a.m.

I get lost and ask directions to Aussie’s. The aged moustachioed guide, signalling right and saying left, gets me lost again.

7.15 a.m.

The corridors are empty. Only one visible human, a male cleaner in the Disabled Female toilet, looks round at me suspiciously. My footsteps on the polished wood floor. The sound of water in the marble fountain is loud, ominous, threatening.

7.25 a.m.

I attain Aussie’s, order a latte. There is only Chris Uhlmann writing notes at another table. He looks uncomforted. I recall him designating himself as ‘a barren man’ on The Drum a fortnight ago. I feel for him, avoid speech with him.

7.29 a.m.

The papers come to Aussie’s and I buy and read them. Reform deal clears way to end stand-off, headlines The Canberra Times over a picture of the Three Amigos (as they are now being called) drinking tea at Aussie’s and Bill Heffernan behind them listening closely. Lisa Vineburg, the vigilant bureaucrat who trawled through parliamentary computers and off her own bat, exceeding her terms of employment, accused Paul McLeay of porn and gambling ‘at inappropriate levels’, has been told to resign and has done so. Tony Crook has pledged his vote to the Liberals, meaning they can get there now.

7.47 a.m.

Chris Barrett is suddenly sitting down with me. Gauleiter-handsome, blond and unchanged from 1998 when he worked for Kim and nearly got him into power, he ask how my book is going. I give him a copy and he asks me to inscribe it. His colleague Jim says, ‘Write “you’re a cunt”,’ and I do this. Amazed merriment as two more Swan staff sit down.

8.05 a.m.

Swanny joined us, and I gave him a copy too. I inscribed it Unsung hero, as always. He seemed pleased by this. He looked up his name for a while, and read with approval.

‘Swanny,’ I said, ‘are you fifty-four?’

‘I’m fifty-six,’ he said, to my surprise.

‘You’ve been the right things at the right ages,’ I said, recalling how he and I worked in Kim’s office in 1996, as back-roomers when he was, what, forty-three. And now he’s Deputy Prime Minister. For a few more hours at least.

‘And I feel some mornings no more than forty,’ he added, with irony and despair.

‘At sixty-eight,’ I rejoined, ‘you get to feel like a teenager again.’

‘There’s no evidence, Bob, that you ever stopped,’ says Barrett, and laughter occurred.

I looked at him carefully. He was the one Rudd deputed to tell me I couldn’t speechwrite for Swanny, or anyone. He will do what’s necessary, I thought, in the way Richo did, and have a light jest about it.

‘There’s a great line from Arthur Miller,’ I said. ‘I was twenty before I learned how to be sixteen. I was thirty before I learned how to be twenty. And so on.’

‘It’s good,’ said Swanny.

8.15 a.m.

We talk about the campaign and I suggest that Rudd cost Labor eight days with his interventions, and each intervention cost us half a seat. Swanny looks around the room and then looks back at me and says, ‘I couldn’t possibly comment,’ like Francis Urquhart in House of Cards. ‘Take a look at The Australian’s front page,’ he says, getting up to leave, ‘it’s Murdoch’s last roar of pain.’

I buy it at Aussie’s and read it. Gillard mine tax to deliver $8bn less than forecast, it says. Smugglers feared Abbott victory. Crook backing for Abbott clears way for gang of three. Greens alliance threatens Aboriginal wellbeing: Pearson.

Noel Pearson, it seems, has called Abbott a ‘once-in-a-generation’ conservative: good on reconciliation, against Wild Rivers, drunken violence, welfare dependence, and so on. He can do good things for Indigenous people, he’s telling the Independents, and ‘carry conservative Australia with him’.

An interesting man, and by my reckoning our greatest orator. Peter Costello in his book speaks of sitting beside him on an aeroplane, and watching him absorbedly read Hayek. A good few of this lunatic’s fundamentalist views have penetrated, it seems, and it’s a pity.

8.17 a.m.

Amanda Lampe comes by, cracking hardy. ‘It’s like waiting for exam results,’ she says.

Christopher Pyne goes to the ATM, decides not to use it and goes away.

Where is Rhys? I need Rhys’s ebullient intrusive banter, to talk to these people.

8.20 a.m.

Jim has a bacon-and-egg roll which I didn’t know Aussie’s supplied, and he goes and buys me one too, on him. Then he goes away.

8.40 a.m.

The chairs are filling up. Fran Kelly, Michelle Grattan and Malcolm Farr are at the next table, talking thoughtfully. I can’t hear what they say.

Tony Windsor comes in with two friends and sits down.

He sits down in the same chair he was in eight weeks ago, on the day Rudd fell.

Dare I approach him?

Do I dare disturb the universe?

8.50 a.m.
To my amazement he looks up, gives a red-faced big smile, and invites me over.

8.54 a.m.

‘How are you?’ he asks me.

‘Well…I’m okay.’

I look at his beaming, red unreadable face. I cannot ask what is on my mind, or even go near the subject. So great is his charisma (and the word is well-used in his case) that I cannot even go near the subject.

‘Bruce…Hawker,’ I say, clearing my throat, ‘your cousin…’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you know him well?’

‘No, not really. His father I saw a bit of. He was a genuine eccentric, an interesting man. Always researching things. No practicality though. Couldn’t put a cap on a petrol tank.’

‘Hawker’s research,’ I said, ‘brought seven Liberal Ministers down, and put Bob Carr in power.’

‘I know.’
I realise he was a National once, and this is not a good place to go.

‘He’s a capable man,’ he says. ‘We haven’t been close. He sent one of his children to my sixtieth birthday party. Just last week. And today is my mum’s ninety-third birthday.’

A National, I think. Can’t disappoint mum today.

I tell him EG Marshall might have played him in a 1950s movie, and Lee J Cobb, Edward G Robinson, Jimmy Stewart and Brandon De Wilde the others. He seems contentedly amused by this. But then I say, the way you do, that this is the way a democracy should be working, and I speak of Edmund Burke and his address to the electors of Bristol.

‘Yeah, others have made that comparison,’ he says. ‘Well…’

And he gets up and goes away.

What have I caused?

This is awful.

9.15 a.m.

The first buds of spring are on the courtyard trees. A lot of people sit under them, smoking.

At the television, which can’t be turned up, a woman swears the Liberals ‘are confident they’ve got Katter and Windsor. It’s Oakeshott that’s going the other way.’

‘I don’t think they’ve decided,’ I say. ‘I think they’ll work through it this morning.’

‘Nah,’ she says. ‘The Liberals are home.’

I text Rhys: just had a long talk with Tony Windsor, where were you?

9.58 a.m.

I go towards the toilet in the Senate wing and see a man wrestling with a koala in the courtyard, with a crowd of people watching.

His view is the koala should go up a eucalyptus branch he has with him but the koala prefers a real tree, one growing in the courtyard.

He climbs up the tree after it and wrestles it to the ground and puts it in a box while old women shriek with dismay.
This is Endangered Species Week, it is explained to me.

He then gets a Tasmanian devil out of a box and it gets away too.

I go and piss and come back and he’s holding a python and a woman is screaming hysterically.

10.05 a.m.

‘It’s a parable,’ I say to David Marr of the endangered species. ‘It’s called Taming the Independents.’

David Marr is convinced that he may have ruined Australia, or saved it perhaps. ‘It’s now like it was with Harradine and the Wik legislation. He had to be persuaded clause after clause, and genuine argument was happening, and he passed it because he heard good argument. It’s a great day.’

He was in London, he says, when the Gillard news came through. ‘And the catch-phrase all over England that day was deliberately barren.’

‘What’s the line-up?’ I ask.

‘Oh, seventy-five—seventy-five,’ he says airily. ‘Oakeshott’s deciding, deciding as we speak, if he’ll go with the other two or not.’

10.17 a.m.
Faulkner comes by and greets me. ‘I’ve just read in your book,’ he says, ‘that you think I don’t like you any more. This wrongly implies two things: (a) that I’ve altered in my liking for you, and (b) that I liked you in the first place.’

10.20 a.m.

Bill Heffernan comes towards me with a plate of cereal. ‘This is the answer to everything,’ he says. ‘A village in Mexico which eats only this has no heart disease, and no diabetes.’

‘Sounds good,’ I say.

‘I’m planning to live to be a hundred,’ he says, with menace, walking on and eating it with a spoon.

10.25 a.m.

‘It’s the Liberals, the Liberals for sure,’ avers the resident hobbit Don Dwyer.

‘No, it’s not,’ I whimper in pain.

‘No, no, look, it’s happening.’

10.40 a.m.

I see Albo receding with a can of Coke in his hand.

‘Don’t resign!’ I call after him. ‘Don’t resign whatever you do!’

‘Pardon?’ he says.

‘Test it on the floor of the parliament!’ I shout. ‘They won’t vote out a government.’

He looks at me quizzically. ‘Yes, they will,’ he says. ‘They will – or they won’t.’

And he walks on.

10.52 a.m.

I go back to my table, which Don Dwyer is minding for me.

‘If Abbott wins today,’ I ask, sitting down, ‘what happens to Gillard?’

‘Oh, I’m sure she’d carry on as Opposition leader,’ he says cheerily. ‘There’s no-one else primed to take over the job. It would be different if there was somebody else primed and ready.’

‘I reckon Shorten will be Opposition leader by April Fool’s Day.’

‘He’s coming from a long way back. I know you know him, but he hasn’t been a Minister or a leading figure.’

‘I know. Rudd hated him. He would have been the number two pretender if Rudd hadn’t diminished him…I don’t know.’

‘I think he’s carrying a lot of baggage these days…I think the three Independents will go with Abbott because they are, deep down, Tories. They’ve all got a Country Party or National Party background. And in Bob’s case, a long history of conservative politics and so it would be very difficult to spend the rest of their life explaining why they went with the Bolsheviks. No, their National Party background will come to the fore. Nuh.’

11.20 a.m.

Rhys arrives at last, looking haggard.

‘Where were you?’ I ask.

‘Ah, I had a long night last night.’

‘Carousing?’

‘Carousing was only the start of it. I got to bed at six, woke at seven-thirty, and drove and drove and here I am. It looks like we’re done.’

‘Done? What do you mean, done?’

‘Oakeshott and Windsor are going back and forth between the two leaders.’

‘And Abbott will always up his bid?’

‘Always.’

I tell him about the koala and he thinks I’m lying. ‘There’s no koala there. Look.’

‘There isn’t any more.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

11.50 a.m.

He goes to chat up the Independents, all apparently friends of his, and see what’s happening. Ashleigh Gillon goes by and I remember the Disney bluebirds he spoke of. An interesting fellow.

Noon

The Sky News ribbon is alleging the three Independents will be announcing their decision at two-thirty, then it’s changed to three.

12.10 p.m.

Everyone I speak to is sure the Liberals are home.

And I realise it’s up to me.

It may be too late, but it’s up to me.

12.30 p.m.

I walk the half-mile of polished wood floor to Swanny’s office and ask to see Chris Barrett. I’m told to sit and he’ll come out soon.

In five minutes he is standing in front of me, looking suspicious.

‘Look,’ I say, ‘there’s one deal they’ll come to.’

‘Which is?’

‘Offer them a year each as Minister for Regional Affairs, with a fixed and copious budget to spend as they will. That way they won’t be tainted with the full extent of a Labor government and they can get things done in their area.’

‘In which order?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Who’s on first? To coin a phrase.’

‘Let them decide.’

He paused, looked down and then looked up at me.

‘We can do that. We can do that. Thanks.’

1.30 p.m.

I go back and find Don and we go to the staff canteen and I buy a salad. Don went to school with Bob Katter who, he tells me, is not Afghan but Lebanese, and speaks of the difficulty Bob is in occasionally, concealing his ethnicity.

‘Some years ago a journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald, David Leser, was writing a profile on Bob Katter for the Good Weekend magazine, and shortly before it went to proof he had a call from Katter pleading with him not to refer to his Arab background, his Lebanese street-merchant background from the 1880s. And Leser said, “Oh no, Bob, I’m a Jew from North Sydney and you’re an Arab from North Queensland. It shows our wonderful multiculture Australia.” And Katter said, “I know all that bullshit, David, but I’ve told the Kalkadoon tribe north of Mt Isa that I’m one of them and I certainly don’t want to get speared.”’

1.50 p.m.

We are back at the television and Katter has declared for Abbott. The other two are having a press conference without him at three.

Clearly the ghost has stirred him to enact revenge.

2.10 p.m.

Rhys was there when Katter made the announcement in his crowded office. ‘I went for North Queensland,’ he explained with invective passion, ‘I went for my tribe, my homeland, that’s who I went for. And it’s a pity a few other members of parliament didn’t do it as well.’ Then, feeling a bit cornered, he said he wouldn’t vote to oust a Gillard government if it was already sworn in and doing good work.

‘He’s having two bob each way,’ says Don. ‘The Katter safe bet. It’s a tradition.’

2.14 p.m.

I find Hawker in the hallway, and put the three-consecutive-Ministers idea to him.

‘It’s good,’ he says. ‘But Katter’s defected.’

‘You can bring him back.’

‘Okay, I’ll try that.’

And he walks on, texting as he goes.

2.25 p.m.

Windsor has just arrived at Aussie’s and he sits down with me.

I’m tongue-tied again.

We talk, I think, of our favourite movies.

He looks really happy though, and approving, somehow, of me.

I’m too shy. I’m just too shy.

2.40 p.m.

They won’t let Don Dwyer and me into the big room where it’s happening and then a guard recognises me and he says, ‘He’s all right, he’s been here before.’

‘On every such occasion since the fall of Gorton,’ I say gratefully, and we go in, Don with a pass that qualifies him.

3.04 p.m.

We sit in the third row and wait.

The room fills up. Rhys sits in front of me, texting. ‘Why weren’t you there with Katter? It was fantastic,’ he says.

‘I was saving the country.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘I was.’

Three o’clock passes. We wait some more.

At about 3.06 there are lots of lights flashing outside the door beside the stage, and Oakeshott comes in and says, ‘Where’s Tony?’

No-one knows where he is.

3.06 p.m.

There’s a long pause. Oakeshott looks at his watch.

This could be it.

‘Oh well,’ says Oakeshott, and he gets up and does a soft-shoe dance like Fred Astaire. ‘Keep the good folk amused,’ he says, dancing on, and smiling goofily.

What a wonderful country this is.

3.08 p.m.

The flashing lights resume outside the door and Windsor comes in looking red-faced and undecided.

Then he gets up and says he’s supporting Labor, and gives good cogent reasons.

3.32 p.m.

At about three-fifteen Oakeshott gets up and says, ‘And, as in the Agatha Christie classic thriller, then there was one.’

Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, he says, ‘would be both good Prime Ministers, there is no question about that. And if anything that has made this decision all the more difficult for me and I think on behalf of both of us and for Bob as well, a more difficult decision. They both, in this parliament where it will be a different parliament, will contribute fantastic things for this country. And I hope whichever way this ends up going that they renew their friendship, they talk and they do work together as much as possible in the national interest. It does matter.’

3.45 p.m.

He goes on for a while, his stance awkward and shuffling, his voice like that of Tom Long, the youthful clerk-of–the-court in SeaChange, and it seems he will never get to the point. Every now and then he says ‘we’, and it’s probably all right, but maybe it’s not, you never know, he might mean Katter, and twenty-seven minutes pass while he articulates the enormity of his passionate indecision, and we all wonder if there’s a dreadful punch line coming.

At a certain point, however, about halfway through, I text Annie who has interrupted her TAFE class to listen to it with her restless, impatient students: It’s okay, I say, 3.18 p.m.

3.55 p.m.

It’s over.

It’s been sheer agony like (I suppose) Rudd’s unstoppable apologia with blinked-back tears in the Prime Minister’s Courtyard seventy-seven days ago and it’s suddenly, if that’s the word I want, suddenly over. Two good men in an ordinary room with unpretentious language and immense good intentions and greatness of heart have altered forever our national story and made our democracy better.

They’ve restored that freedom of speech which Rudd and his ignorant slim young Gauleiters had for too long stifled.

They’ve brought back Australia again.

A wonderful thing Oakeshott said, in an answer, of this great and noble experiment. ‘This is going to be a cracking parliament. It’s going to be ugly, but it’s going to be beautiful in its ugliness.’

What a fine phrase that is. Like all world-altering clusters of words, it means nothing, and everything.

4.05 p.m.

‘It might have been me that made the difference,’ I said to Rhys who was smoking in one of the courtyards and waving at clusters of tourists who were waving back at him, the celebrity.

‘It might,’ he said. ‘It was close.’

‘These are good men.’

‘They are.’

‘Do you know where Gillard’s announcement is?’

‘Of course.’

4.10 p.m.

We are proceeding thither when we come upon a small gathering in another courtyard. It’s Bob Brown murmuring a few words in his lovely voice to a half dozen reporters, and he says, ‘We Greens commit to making this new government work. We’re committed to making it an innovative period of government, and I look forward to working with them. There’s been a sigh of relief from everybody that at least a decision is made. I think it’s the right decision. I congratulate them, and Bob Katter, for having gone through such a long process, and wish them all well. I look forward to working with them.’

He takes questions, and one of them is mine.

‘Is this the fork in the road?’ I ask.

His face alters into a great joyous smile and he says, ‘When there’s a fork in the road, you should always choose the exciting one.’

A journo takes umbrage at this. ‘There’s no evidence,’ he says, ‘that Australians want an exciting federal government, is there?’

‘If you think Australians want a dull federal government,’ Bob replies, ‘I’ve got no evidence about that. I think people do prefer excitement.’

4.30 p.m.
We’re in the Labor Party Caucus room and Gillard keeps us waiting again. Eventually she comes in, and she’s clearly been crying. But she smiles, and lifts her head, and all the computer chips are in place, and she says:

‘Can I say we live in a lively and a resilient democracy – and it works. We have democratic institutions and conventions that work well at the most important times when they’re put to the test by the Australian people at an election…Throughout this process of forming a new government we’ve been open with the Australian people. To quote Rob Oakeshott, sunshine is the best disinfectant, and we’ve agreed to far-reaching reforms that make me as Prime Minister and our government and how it functions more accountable to the Australian people. So, let’s draw back the curtains and let the sun shine in. Let our parliament be more open…’

At this point someone in the room groans, ‘Fu-u-uck’. Some around me later allege it was me. You may say that, Matty, but I couldn’t possibly comment.

She then goes on to speak of ‘forging a new paradigm’.

This means, I am told by The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary, ‘to shape by heating in fire a new grammatical inflection.’

Which is just what we fucking need.

4.55 p.m.

Don has gone home and Rhys and I look at the portraits of the Prime Ministers lined up in the usual place.

‘Notice something?’ I ask.

‘No. What?’

‘Whitlam’s eyes.’

‘So?’

‘They’re the wrong colour. His real eyes are blue.’

Rhys looks at the portrait’s soggy brown eyes.

‘But he chose this portrait.’

‘I know.’

5.25 p.m.

We go to Abbott’s press conference and admire his grace, unscripted eloquence and what I guess must be called his heroic stoicism.

‘I congratulate Prime Minister Gillard for being restored to office,’ he says. ‘For our country’s sake, I hope that she can be an effective Prime Minister in this term of parliament. For our country’s sake, I hope that the Labor Party can provide a better government in this term of parliament than it has over the last three years. For our country’s sake, I hope that the Labor Party can rediscover the soul that has been so lacking, particularly over the last half of the previous government.’

And so on, without notes, most eloquently. He seems a good, deserving man. He says he hopes he will not go down in history as the best Opposition leader never to have become Prime Minister. Asked several times if it will be henceforth a kinder, gentler Opposition, he eventually says, with care, ‘My intention if the government does well is to give credit where it’s due. If the government does badly it will be held ferociously to account. Now, you won’t be surprised if as an Opposition leader I tend to focus more on what can be done better than what had been done well, because that will be my task.’

The word ‘ferociously’ registers, and is noted down, and that is the end, after half a day, of the vision splendid of a gentler, kinder, sweeter parliament. We have been warned.

7.20 p.m.

Events after this became surreal.

The building emptied almost instantly and, seeking an alcoholic drink, Rhys and I found Aussie’s closed, and the canteen closed. I rang Shorten’s office and Matt said there was, he thought, some beer in the office fridge. Rhys went down to his car to recharge his iPod, or something, and I loitered by the marble fountain amazed at the echoing emptiness about me.

Then Hawker came towards me with two of his most influential colleagues, Simon Banks and Mark Nolan, looking chipper.

‘We are the real Three Amigos,’ Hawker said. ‘And our work here is done.’

And he walked on, chuckling and texting.

I made my way to Shorten’s office, texting Rhys the good news of the beer. Matt greeted me, and I asked if Shorten was in. ‘Sure,’ he said, and I went into Bill’s office, and he was on the phone shoring up his future. He gave me his big lighthouse smile and with a hand-gesture bade me fuck off. I went out, and in the fridge found two beers only, Cascade Premiums, awaiting me.

‘Can we drink these?’ I asked Matt.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Help yourself.’

Soon Rhys was amongst us and we sat and sipped and talked. Then Rhys went outside to make a phone call and ran, physically, into Rudd.

Rudd looked at him enigmatically.

‘How did you respond…to the outcome?’ he asked.

‘With…mixed…feelings,’ Rhys replied. And they both fell about laughing.

In the office, meanwhile, Bill emerged and asked who owned the laptop.

‘Rhys Muldoon,’ I said.

‘Rudd’s man.’

‘Indeed.’

He looked at the half-drunk Premium. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is the last free beer he gets from me.’

Immediately Rhys was in the room, and I introduced them, assassin and corpse’s friend, and their big smiles flowered matily.

‘Good to see you,’ Shorten said.

8.20 p.m.

Shorten falsely swore he’d join us at the Realm a bit later and we finished our beers and went down in the lift to the car park.

It was full of drunk and fighting old men in war medals and their worried, nagging wives.

One of them had locked knees and couldn’t move. Rhys tried to pull him to his feet and probably crippled him. He was weeping, and his drunken wartime comrades growling at him. We moved on and got in the car. Reality goes into overdrive sometimes, I thought.

We got to the Realm and immediately encountered, three inches away, Bronwyn Bishop, smiling at us crazily, like Luna Park.

‘Good to see you,’ Rhys said.

10.50 p.m.

Beers, double vodkas and ciders wash down the excellent Italian sausage pizzas we then eat in the Realm and we talk of things. I read him Tynan’s essays on CS Lewis and WC Fields. He reads out the one on Garbo. He agrees with me that this, for him, has been a great life-experience. We talk about people we love and drink a toast and share a man-hug. Soon he leaves to join Kevin Rudd in his new, small, rented Canberra house for commiserative conversation and a further beer or two.

On the pub television are images of Abbott and Gillard among conscript veterans of two wars, uneasily, fraternally, patriotic and chummy, as required. As is required in politics.

It’s been a long day.

11.20 p.m.

I take a cab to the motel and go in. The television isn’t working again.

And I think, again, as I did at the end of The Things We Did Last Summer, my first political book, My God I love Australia. And my God I love elections.

Notting Hill meets My Favourite Year meets Me And Orson Welles meets An Affair To Remember meets Roman Holiday meets State And Main meets Cabaret meets Extras: how could it fail? But it fails. It really does. It will make a lot of money, but it fails.

Declaring my interest, I and Denny Lawrence took ten years (during which our audience died) to write Intimate Strangers, a play whose main characters are Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller and Noel Coward, set in August 1956 like this film, during the shooting of The Prince and the Showgirl, like this film, whose script looks like it was written by somebody who had read ours, or who had seen it in a
rehearsed reading directed by Greta Schacci in London a year ago.

It is based on the memoir, now much tarted up, that Colin Clark, son of Kenneth Clark of ‘Civilisation’, published in 1993, which I read back then, about his time as a third assistant on the film and his acquaintance — now upgraded to affair — with Marilyn, six weeks after her wedding to Arthur Miller.

Did Colin schtupp the white goddess when he was 23 and she 30 though all her known lovers were older men during her honeymoon? Well, maybe. Our researches suggest there was trouble with Miller who did indeed fly to New York to see his daughters leaving Marilyn pregnant (and, as always, ectopically challenged) behind and in the mood for a solacing sexual episode but Olivier’s memoir suggests it was with him: ‘My marriage was in danger,’ he says. Did she also fit Colin, as it were, in ? Well, maybe. In his book we read of him being sucked off by a male school friend in the back of a London cab; and maybe his mood changed when Marilyn confronted him nude. Maybe; maybe so.

But what happens in the movie is so Hollywood-formula and so far from some, not all, of the facts as to make one doubt the whole story. The star-crossed lovers go to Windsor Castle where Derek Jacobi shows them some Leonardos; they go to his old school Eton where besotted schoolboys swarm around her; they go naked swimming and it’s cold in the water and he rubs her down. His diffident attitude is like Michael York in Cabaret; the day out is like Roman Holiday; the Jacobi episode like An Affair To Remember. At one point she dances, sexily, for some applauding pedestrians; something Marilyn, shy as a rabbit, never did. At another, Dame Sybil Thorndyke (Dench) tells Marilyn what a great screen actress she is, beguiling her into getting some lines right for a change. In actual fact Sybil, a true professional, always on set at five a.m., was appalled like Olivier when Marilyn drifted in drugged in the early afternoon, though she did tell Colin ‘that little girl knows more about screen acting than any of us.’ She would never have told Marilyn; she was too English for that.

And the big lie that Larry gave up film direction after this debacle is unforgiveable. He strove for years to get his Macbeth up, and would have directed Francis The Talking Mule if he had been offered it, so keen he was to make money and provide for his copious, ever-expanding dynasty. He even played Big Daddy on television, and MacArthur for the Moonies, and appeared on stage posthumously for a fat fee as a hologram in Zeus, the way one does if one is filled with hubris and rapacity and casting-couch lechery and fatherly guilt and immortal longings as Larry was always.

There is so much factually wrong in this film. A tall, ugly woman plays the petite and lovely Vivien Leigh as a sane complaisant constant wife, when she was mad as batshit, under electric shock treatment and pregnant to Peter Finch at 43, miscarrying in the second week of the shoot. This miscarriage is awarded, insanely, to Marilyn, to give her something to do, and Colin some bloodied sheets to ponder, feigning sudden adulthood, or something.

The dialogue is clunky, and smirched, I would guess, by a big American rewrite. The whole premise, I don’t want to be Lord Clark’s son I want to be in movies, so like the ‘Gotta Dance’ number in An American In Paris, is not just unfactual (his father got him the gig and encouraged his career choice) is very Noo-York-Noo-York, and Colin’s later career, which was never in Hollywood, where having porked the divine MM would have given him great cachet, but in Europe making documentaries, it’s so thoroughly out of tune with probability that even the geriatric Orpheum audience noticed, and, as the expectable plotline cranked through its gear-changes, began to grow restless; not least because the great love of her life, Arthur Miller, the American Century’s foremost playwright, is sidelined into a snaky begoggled cuckold and a sort of slim-gilt Charles Ryder, slumming, moved into his bed.

Branagh, though, is superb as Olivier. Male, priapic, smouldering, narcissistic, demonic in his drive-for-glory, a man who is not fully himself until he has got a false nose on, this is the Larry we wrote and he will see the script, by God, eftsoons, if he has not already, there are two or three of our lines dragged in or alluded to and somebody must have seen it. Many of his lines are witty and he will get the Oscar for his delivery, that immortal quack-and-thunder that so many imitators get wrong, though Rhys Muldoon, in our version, was very close.

And … Michele Williams’ Marilyn. She seemed ideal in prospect; but the large wide eyes, the full, parted mouth, the breathy singing voice, and, most unsettlingly, the fabled big rounded bottom were each replaced by something smaller, and the miraculous white glow, the radioactive intimate charisma everybody spoke of, which black-and-white film could perhaps have supplied, as it did in The Artist, was absent also, alas. The original casting, lost in the wash, or do I mean lost in translation, of Scarlett Johanssen would have been fine. The decision to top-and-tail it with Marilyn singing in a voice nothing like Marilyn’s in presumably a nightclub, which she never did, was disastrous. Eddie Redmayne as Colin is very good, like a handsome, questing, diffident weasel, Zoe Wanamaker as the flatterer-from-hell Paula Strasberg, superb, and very like Judith Anderson’s perfect hectoring lesbian witch, Mrs Danvers, in Rebecca.

The script by Adrian Hodges, brother I guess of Gillard’s destroyer, is a tenth as good as ours. The director, Simon Curtis, a BBC second-rater, leaves out, as we did not, the scene where schoolboys in midsummer moonlight sing under Marilyn’s balcony while she and Arthur watch naked from behind a curtain bewitched by English romantic politeness; and what a fool he is. He mentions it as dialogue only; our dialogue, as it turns out, the bastard; what a cinematic loss.

A lot of people will see this muddlewitted movie and not quite regret it because of Branagh and Wanamaker and in some scenes Williams (she gives good blithe drugged fragility), and Emma Watson as Colin’s girlfriend, but the subject deserved better; and got it, of course; as our play’s Off-Broadway New York reading in April and subsequent production, if there is one, hopefully will show.

See it if you will, and the hell with you.

I sat among children enjoying the ‘fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-it’s-only-a-word’ song in the South Park movie believing the world had changed five years ago but I did not reckon then on Murdochism’s eagerness to revive old shibboleths and impose them on the unwary.

‘Fuck’ can occur on the ABC, the national broadcaster, in The Thick Of It, The Slap, The Chasers and Rake and any radio reading of Philip Larkin’s most famous poem but not in the mouth of our national leader, because of rules fabricated by the right-wing media which no-one actually believes in but always gives voice to, fearfully, on demand.

Every Australian over two hears the word about once a week, everyone over ten, indeed, hears the word ‘motherfucker’, an incitement to incest, at least once a day. The weird idea that politicians alone among human adults must not use these words is another Murdoch dirty trick, a new rule proffered as if it was an old one.

For JFK was famed for his ‘salty language’ and suffered no harm for it. Gough Whitlam used the word frequently in my hearing, and so did Paul Keating once when he said, famously, of a political wife he disdained: ‘Couldn’t get a fuck on a troopship coming back,’ and Bob Hawke pretty constantly, at no more cost to his voter base than Rudd sustained at the strip-club, and even the prim Kim Beazley a couple of times in my hearing.

So what is going on here? Well, it’s a shrewd use of a half-memory of Rudd’s horror at a Bill Henson photograph (he was shown it with black strips over the nipples without warning and had no option, after the strip-club, but to react in the way he did, against apparent pederasty not in favour of it) and his habit of giving press conferences outside of wooden churches on a Sunday, and it implies that he’s a hypocrite.

If one were to go deeper into the meaning of all this, it would grow more interesting. Because for Rudd as for all practising Christians there is a point when arithmetic ends and God begins. He literally believes that if he has, say, 35 votes in Caucus and needs 52, faith and prayer will supply the deficit. And if they don’t, he will swear about it. Swearing occurs when you don’t get what you want, and it has no other cause. Swearing occurs when God has failed you. Rudd, like Job’s wife, is cursing God when he swears; or God’s new vicar on earth, YouTube.

This belief in God’s intervention in his vote-getting is, I would think, Rudd’s fatal flaw. And it raises the question, what is Gillard’s, and what is Abbott’s, and if they are greater flaws than Rudd’s.

Gillard’s is pretty plain, and it was not seen in her until she was Prime Minister. It is her instinct, when asked a question, to ask herself, ‘What is the lie I can utter in reply to this?’

She was different when she was Deputy. She was joshingly, playfully truthful, or half-truthful, what was called in earlier times ‘a good sport’; and she changed, changed utterly after she became Prime Minister, into a kind of Gloriana of Mendacity, a Big Sister whose face on television is no longer trusted, admired, or feared.

It is worthwhile comparing her in this regard with her great ally Bill Shorten. His response to any question is to ask himself, ‘How much of the total truth, the complex, difficult truth, can I reveal here without sustaining political harm?’ He gets past ninety-five percent, as a rule, more than almost any other living politician. Similarly measured, Combet would get to ninety percent, Roxon and Plibersek to ninety-one, Brown to ninety-two, Katter to ninety-three, Windsor to ninety-four, and Rudd to (not a low score) eighty-three. Gillard’s score is below forty; and this is what people hate about her. She seems to be lying, or spinning, or slithering around reality all the time.

On this measure Abbott is a curious mix. He is very truthful about his own emotions and his own state of doubt and self-amusement and self-disgust and pre-confessional Catholic guilt, but absolutely false about policy. He does not want to drown children at sea, but he says he does, or says he will ‘turn the boats around’, however leaky they are, which means pretty much the same thing. He says he is passionate about the mining tax, but he doesn’t give a stuff about it.

His fatal flaw is his impatience. He wants every ball to be an ace. He wants to win every hour of the day, and bring on an election before the Swan Budget proves him innumerate with an actual surplus and leaves him nowhere to go. His timetable is two months not two years and this, and his sleeplessness, back-ache and early rising to go jogging is killing him.

And so it goes.

12.20 pm, Saturday, 18th February, 2012

It has just been pointed out to me that on page 2 of the Weekend Australian there is a list of Gillard supporters and a list of Rudd supporters and Darren Cheeseman is on both of them.

The Murdochists’ growing inability in these latter days of Empire to get their story straight (as when Rebekah Brookes told the House of Commons that ‘of course we sometimes paid the police for information’, and James put his hand over her microphone and sweatily gabbled, ‘Just to clarify that, Mr Chairman…. ‘) is evidenced once more in this massive typo, and shows how likely are the other names on what I suppose must be now called Rupert’s List.

What a cack-headed, grubby bunch of slithering dills they are entirely. The numbers, Gillard 46, Rudd 36, and Undecided 21, add up to more members than Labor has in Parliament, for Christ’s sake. How scared and tired and smelly they’re getting. They know Rupert will be under indictment soon, and their own jobs in jeopardy, and they need an Abbott government as fast as ione can be cheated into office. By this, the Cheeseman Effect, they show how crazed and smirched and blithering they are.

And so it goes.

6.20 pm Sunday 20th February
L
Cheeseman has declared for Rudd and and Plibersek on Insiders for Gillard, pretty much, making two on Rupert’s List wrong thus far. Garrett who took the fall for Rudd on roof-batts after warning him of their dangers would be a certain Gillardite or Undecided, and … the others look plausible, especially Mike Kelly whom Rudd would have given Defence and Gillard made Minister For Cheese. That puts it at 47-j35 -21 with Rudd needing to pick up 17 of the 21 Undecideds to just get over the line; even on Murdoch’s wishful figures it’s a hard ask.

If it’s to be brought to a head on Monday, 28th, it will mean an inconclusive Gillard victory, and continued Rudd eructations from the back bench, or a compromise candidate Gillard stands down for (Shorten? Crean? Plibersek? Albo?); or a third aggressive, uninvited candidate, probably Smith.

Or a Rudd victory; and, I suspect, a quick election after a good Budget he can possibly win; and a cleansing thereafter from the Cabinet of his many tormentors and an end to the influence of any and all of the Independents, including Wilkie.

It’s hard to see the Gillard numbers holding. Slipper; Thomson; Oakeshott; or Cheesman could vote for a No Confidence motion and Quentin Bryce ask the man who made her GG to try and form a government. Or her son-in-law Shorten. Or, failing him. Tony Abbott.

Hard to see it ending well.

‘All of Murdochism all at once’ is a fair description of page 10 of this morning’s Weekend Australian. Newman Set To Rout Bligh In Landslide, says a headline, Katter Fails To Gain Traction, Labor’s Last Chance Is Washing Away, and Keating Unleashes over an ugly photo of him and Anna Bligh holding hands and stumbling, apparently, up a stairway.

And then there is the Newspoll: Katter’s party not mentioned by name and the fiction ‘two party preferred’ adding up to 58-42 (‘based on the preference flow of the March 2009′ when there were five parties contesting, and 1227 interviews not on three days but twelve, just so the numbers come up right, a sampling never done before in world history but appropriate here in Queensland, to conceal the dire fall in Newman’s numbers in the last week); and 6 percent ‘refused’ or ‘uncommitted’ of those at home and not out on the paddock or the boat or the beach with a mobile phone.

And even then the published figures make no sense. Labor’s 30 plus the Greens’ 9 plus 3 of Katter’s 4.5 plus a third of the ‘others’ plus a third of the ‘uncommitted’ add up to 46 not 42 which a good campaign and some shrewd Katter firebombs could win it for Labor, tightly.

But none of that, of course, none of this mere arithmetic, afflicts ‘the Murdoch will to fight,’ as a Wharf Revue soliloquy has it, the Murdoch will to cheat where necessary, and even where unnecessary, an election getting close; like the Bush-Gore-Bush-Florida one of 2000 and the Bigotgate-Brown one of 2010.

A few pages on we see Murdochism working hard again. Charlie Chaplin may not have been a ‘Soviet spy’, it alleges, in the war years when the Soviets were fighting on our side and dying in millions for our cause, and he may not, shock horror, have been born in England, shades of Obama. On the same page we learn under Obama’s Dirt Squad Aims For Santorum the startling news that the White House is looking at Santorum’s legislative record — not his private life — to see if they can show him to be a Far Right eccentric, which he is, and unelectable, which he is. ‘Obama’s Dirt Squad’ is up there confidently asserted as if it were a given, though it has never been postulated ever before, and as if the Murdochists’ dirt file on Obama (alien, Muslim, pal of terrorists, predatory homosexual, grubby Chicago politician, disengaged academic, policy naif) had never existed. The Democrats have dirt files; the Murdochists do not. The News of the World was closed, it seems, for no reason.

Thirty Murdoch loyalists will come to trial in England soon, and Rupert himself be arrested this year, under Delaware laws against corrupting foreign officials, and his fumbling pleas that he is decrepit, addled, misspelling his twitterings and otherwise losing it may work to keep him out of the slammer; or not.

But in these dog days of his eminence and world influence it is plain his verbal hoodlums are stepping on the gas, and pumping more and more fraudulence into the Australian political process, and we will see what we will see.

A narrow LNP victory, I predict, by two or four seats, Campbell Newman not gaining his.

And Murdoch, himself down for the count, pushing one more ally back up into office.

Andrew Symonds bowed out of first-class cricket this week, his end having been assured three years ago when he was discovered drinking a schooner of beer, an unforgiveable thing to do, at a football match when he was supposed to be off it. He was a coffee-coloured man whom Political Correctness found to be of interest, always. Of this, and of them, and of our nation’s great loss of a majestic, mutinous talent, I wrote on the fifth of January, 2008, in Unleashed:

Nothing Andrew Symonds does surprises me any more. He’s our best all-rounder since Keith Miller but he’s behaved really stupidly in this case, and he should like Warne, I guess, be banned from Tests for a year, or else be made to listen to Alexander Downer sing Gilbert and Sullivan standards unaccompanied for half an hour. And his confederate Steve Bucknor should be fined a hundred thousand dollars and required to take an eye test. And Ricky Ponting should be breath-tested for hubris before each game. I refer them to the phrase ‘It isn’t cricket’ and what it means.

It means that when you’re out, and you know you’re out, you walk. It means that if you give a man out and the camera says you were wrong, you call him back. It means that if you know your enemy is coming on to bowl, you don’t appeal against the light for this reason only. It means, above all, you don’t report anything said on the field to any official whatever the rules of the day. And it means if you win by a combination of all of the above, you apologise for winning and say why you’re sorry you won.

It also means (let’s spell it out) that if you unjustly escape being given out when you were out, you don’t gloat; you don’t brag, as Andrew Symonds foolishly did, about having cheated and having wrongly survived.

I saw every minute of the second Test in person or on television and most of the larger minutes replayed six or seven times and believe me, Symonds was out at 30, Dravid not out at 38, Ponting was out at 17, and the difference this made, of no more than 260 runs that were thieved from India’s lead, would have seen their victory assured by Saturday night, and what Harbhajan said, in the context of cricket, as cricket has always been played, meant nothing, nothing at all.

Let me quote from page 1 of Alex Buzo’s great book Legends of the Baggy Green.

‘It was the fourth day of the fourth Test in Antigua on a windy May day 2003 and Rannaresh Sarwan was heading for his first century against Australia. Hoping to focus his thoughts on other topics, bowler Glenn McGrath greeted him at the non-striker’s end with an enquiry. “What does Brian Lara’s cock taste like?”

The beanpole paceman then waited for an answer. Sarwan, loyal to his leader, responded, “I don’t know, ask your wife”.

As an attempt to introduce a more savoury note into the conversation, this was a failure. “If you ever fuckin’ mention my wife again, I’ll fuckin’ cut your throat out,” shouted McGrath, towering over the Indian-descended Sarwan and pointing for emphasis.

There followed a complaint about sledging to the umpire… by McGrath.’

But neither man was suspended, as I recall, for three Tests because of this exchange though the story was soon well known. Is the epithet ‘monkey’ somehow worse, more vile, more offensive than the above? Let’s look a little closer at the English language and its usage.

Political cartoonists are allowed to make bears, rodents, King Kong, Gollum, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck out of politicians and are never sent to gaol for it or laid off work for weeks. The phrase ‘the lying rodent’ was used of John Howard and ‘Wile E. Coyote’ of Peter Costello without legal penalty.

I compared Wally Grout, the wicket-keeper, to a wombat in 1968 without imprisonment, and the perfect Anglo-Australian Michael Charlton compared Wes Hall to the Abominable Snowman in 1960 and was allowed to continue on air and to front, in fact, the first Four Corners for years thereafter.

And Harbhajan called Andrew Symonds a monkey and may lose his honour, his career, his livelihood and Ponting keep what he winningly calls his ‘integrity’ because of what was called by him a racist epithet and reported to the umpire and the Board.

I have some knowledge of racism in cricket, having made a film called Dreaming of Lords about an Aboriginal Test Team going from empty stadium to empty stadium in England, and having seen neither hide nor hair of these brilliant young men in any State side thereafter. Bradman, it seemed, didn’t like Blacks, and his successors were somewhat of this mind as well.

Is the word ‘monkey’ racist? Or does it more or less adequately describe a man with a dark face, big white painted lips, addled rust-coloured corkscrew hair and a clownish agitatedness that adds to that first, impulsive, slanderous impression?

He looks a bit like a monkey to me, just as Bucknor looks like Morgan Freeman, Ponting like a fugitive Afghan boat-person, Sharma like a fraught greyhound, Stuart Clark like a white cockatoo, Gilchrist like a King Charles spaniel and Brett Lee like the young Tab Hunter. My wife didn’t know that Symonds was black, and agreed he looked like a monkey before she knew he was black. Should she be charged with racism as well? And in what way should she punished? And for how long?

The whole truth of it, I fear, is that Symonds is one of the world’s finest cricketers, one of the best of all time, but is not, I fear, if I may put it this way, gingerly, with caution, what we used to call a ‘gentleman’.

And he now and then avails himself of the chance to, I won’t say cheat, the language is struggling here, but bend the rules, tweak the ancient traditions a bit — letting Dravid be given out unprotesting, for instance — and he, yes, also, now and then, in some lights, does look like a monkey; in the same way as, in some lights, Winston Churchill looked like a bulldog, a vile aspersion if I ever heard one. And Jack Kennedy, as was remarked at the time, looked like Bugs Bunny. And Charles de Gaulle, as was remarked at the time, like an imperious poodle.

The entire French nation, come to think of it, were once called ‘cheese-eating surrender-monkeys’ by no less than Homer Simpson without the teeniest hint of racism ever imputed to the epithet. Cultural revulsion yes, but not racism. And the world’s cartoonists, moreover, have many, many times portrayed George Bush as a chimpanzee and were never called racist for this repeated insult either.

I am by a useful coincidence a member of the Primates, a luncheon club of drunken rogues and reprobates that includes Bill Leak, Warren Brown, Richard Fidler, Bruce Venables the actor and popular novelist and Meredith Burgmann the politician, a monthly gathering dedicated to the acclamation of ape-like, exuberant, uproarious behaviour, and we lately, contentiously, after much close-reasoned argument, part-funded the purchase of an orang-utan by Taronga Zoo. And some of us think the orang-utan should have drinking rights at our secret venue.

So at our next meeting, ever the diplomat, I shall propose that Andrew Symonds be asked to come in his stead.

And sink a few schooners. Tell a few jokes. Sing a few songs.

And learn how true gentlemen behave.

…And, ah yes, what to do about it?

Rudd should ask Ponting to say that in his view the Second Test was drawn, and to try at least to withdraw his charge of racist abuse and say he might have misheard it. And Rudd should invite both teams to Kirribilli House to meet the Primates and have a few jars.

I’m sure this won’t happen. And it’s a pity.

Beweep the fate of Alan Joyce,
Who had, poor lad, no other choice.
‘Oi could not wait another year,
Loik Estragon and Vladimir,
For Godot to come and discuss the matter,
So Oi, loik me hero, Mahomed Atta,
On Saturday after a Guinness or two –
It seemed the sensible t’ing to do –
Aimed all my planes at the world’s economy,
Lest poilets and stewards t’ink they could dishonour me,
And so spifflicated the Melbourne Cup,
And the Balance of Trade; who dreams that up?
And the weddings and funerals and celebrations
That mostly enhance the joy of nations:
There’d be none o’ that: Oi pulled the plog,
Oi sank a Guinness, and shot me dog,
Oi kicked me old secretary, and knocked down the walls
(For that’s what it’s loik when Destiny calls),
Oi slept on the floor, and pissed out the winder,
Oi didn’t feel well, me tongue was loik tinder,
Had a Prairie Oyster, and went on the telly.
‘There’ll be no backing down!’ Oi told Fran Kelly,
Speaking in Gaelic, she seemed a bit puzzled,
Oi then refused to speak to a media muzzled,
Oi moved on then to the Tullamore Dew.
It seemed the sensible t’ing to do.

But, before all this, Oi doubled me wage,
And thus allayed the mounting rage
Of those who t’ought me underpaid,
Until they had their flights delayed.

And me phone has stopped ringing, here’s a how-do-you-do.
Oi suppose it’s what  happens when you crash, or crash through.

And Oi’ve been elected the Fool to Meself,
Snd Oi’ll be the richest man on the shelf.
Oi hope you recall me, and stand me bail.
Oi’m just a dim Paddy; well meaning.’ Wassail.

I again ask David Williamson if he is ‘Bob’, or ‘Bob’ to say who he is.

‘Outburst’ is another Murdochist word that is used on Labor or Left politicians but not on Tory ones. Labor politicians have ‘outbursts’. Liberal ones have ‘disagreements’, or ‘propose alternative policies’, or ‘issue clarifications’. All the verbs and nouns used on the Left imply mental instability. Labor politicians never merely ‘say’ something. They ‘spit the dummy’ or ‘rock the boat’ or ‘further evidence leadership tensions in a recent outburst’, or ‘shake the party to its foundations’.

This is all very carefully done, as was the assertion that Gordon Brown (showing mental instability) shouted at his staff — all the time, it would seem — and had an ‘outburst’ in the back of his car about a ‘bigoted woman’ that eight days later lost him office. Though he murmured the word, it was reported as if he bellowed it. Though it was a private conversation, it was reported as if he had shouted it through a loudspeaker at Wembley. Though it was accurate, it was greeted as if it was unforgiveable.

Another Murdochist dirty trick which all media outlets use now is the Enforced Lie. So you have no leadership ambitions? No. Not now, not ever? Not now, not ever. You’re a hundred percent behind the present leader? A hundred percent. Do you like Mr Rudd? We work as a team. Is he a good team player? He’s fine.

By these means it is shown that politicians are false and devious and hide their feelings when they have no choice but the Enforced Lie. Instead of admitting, and assuming, and taking for granted, that all politicians have leadership ambitions and all parties have divisions, factions, policy disagreements and backstage karguments, the Murdochists evince surprise, and shock, and awe, when these commonplaces are even rumoured let alone revealed. A politician seeks promotion, wow. Who’d a thunk it.

No such amazement greets a corporate power-play. James moves to displace Lachlan, astonishing; sinister; is Newscorp tearing itself apart? Is it High Noon in the Murdoch boardroom? You never hear it reported this way. Alan Joyce mad? Unthinkable. The question never arises. Alan Joyce is acting appropriately in a difficult situation. He is not drinking heavily, or fighting with his male lover. He has the country’s interests at heart.

The Enforced Lie also means a politician, in the wake of his first untruth, is likely to fabricate another. Have you ever thought of not getting back into surplus this year? No; never. Was the Education Revolution a mistake? Of course not, it’s a tremendous success. And more and more they are made to seem subhuman, robotic, dumb or crazy when they have no other choice but to say what they say, defend their track record, defend their leader.

There actually ought to be a law against this, as Clarke and Dawe implied so skilfully last night. Why not ask questions on policy, and the future of the nation? Does it matter that much who enacts, or touts that policy? We plan to murder all the Jews! Yes, but is Reichsmarshal Goering after your job? Do not distract me from this, the Final Solution! Has he got the numbers, do you think? Do you think your job is safe? My plan is to kill six million! You’re evading the question, aren’t you, mein Fuhrer, are you getting sufficient sleep?

‘Leadership tensions’ are code, like everything else, for mental instablity. Sane parties don’t have leadership tensions, mad parties do. There were no ‘outbursts’ from Hockey, for instance, when he was seeking the party leadership. Outbursts are what Labor people do. And was he ‘destabilising’ his leader’, Malcolm Turnbull? No, he was ‘bringing on a spill’ to ‘resolve the leadership question’, a very different thing.

This is a slightly subtler version of what O’Reilly and Hannity do all the time: evince outraged amazement that these madmen in the White House want free medical care for poor people. Are they out of their minds? Are they crazy? They must be.

‘Said’ is a good word. I see no reason for using another.

Do you?

To the Wharf Revue last night and The Golden Century afterwards with Wedderburn, Muldoon and Assange’s lawyer Jennifer Robinson and a talk till after midnight.

Assange may well not win, she says, his unusual, quirky plea for the Swedes to come to him not he to Sweden to assist with their enquiries into charges not yet made, and America may yet confect new retrospective laws, whatever they are (they can’t be treason, he’s not American) and put him for twenty years in a federal prison — not Guantanamo, it’s too visible now — where he will rot, go mad and suicide, maybe, and recede from human memory.

I argue this won’t happen in this, an election year. Obama would not risk the ire of Ellsberg and the Hollywood Left, he wouldn’t, he really wouldn’t, I argue. But she is very gloomy. She’s as beautiful as a film star, country-town Australian, working class, a Rhodes Scholar. A bit like Sharon Stone.

Wedderburn, a political insider, is amazed Assange did what he did, a thing so utterly dangerous. He likes the danger, she says. I show her the wikileaks poem. He’d like this, she says. I’ll show it to him.

We then talk of Gillard’s immediate reaction when the Swedes came after him with ‘sex by surprise’ and the punctured franger and the rest of it, which was not to defend a threatened Australian overseas as she would, say, Schapelle Corby, the drug fiend, but to say ‘he’s broken the law’, though of course he had not, and she was a lawyer and knew he had not. I put the theory that Gillard, like the fabled figure Coggins in Parkinson’s Law, is the one in the office who always gets everything wrong, and is therefore the most valuable person in the office because she so endlessly, reliably errs. Whatever she recommends, you do the opposite. And that will be always the right thing, the perfect thing, to do.

We talk of things I suppose I shouldn’t reveal, about what Rudd, Muldoon’s co-author, will do now in the next few days. On my way home in a cab later I get an email from a Labor insider who says there’ll be a challenge on Thursday March the 1st which Rudd knows he will lose but will serve his purpose, to wreck his displacer and ensure her end. This seems to me about right. Jennifer asks if Gillard might be retained as Deputy. Muldoon is explosively amused.

A curious, accidental, half-prophetic, oddly tender, searching interlude. I’m going tonight again for the seventeenth time to the Wharf Revue with Jennifer (if she comes) and Viv and Nathan Rees who will enjoy the sultry ‘Kitty Keneally’ number I am sure, and Fred Hollows’ spare widow Tracy, who bore him a son called Ben we used to take on our Christmas holidays.

If you go to the Wharf Revue you meet people, and things happen. It will play a week in Melbourne soon and you should see it, if you have any brains at all.

But why should I think you do.

And so it goes.

More later.

In an unshared sleeping compartment on the night train to Melbourne after a day’s work on our Luna Park musical as Goulburn went by and the palely fading dark drew in it occurred to me how to fix everything in the world, very simply.  I wrote down some figures and on my Motorola did the basic calculation. It was this.

We pass a law declaring all money owed on a family dwelling is now halved, and all rents reduced by a third, and the rents cannot go up again for at least ten years without the permission of an ombudsman or a specially convened commission of enquiry with a judge at the head of it, at a local, state or federal level.

If we did this it would add add between a hundred dollars and three hundred dollars each week to the money spent by citizens with jobs: on holiday-planning, theatregoing, shoe buying, gift giving, second-hand books, piano lessons, eating out, white-water rafting, horse riding, dog owning, trips to Tasmania and so on, and bring down unemployment by one or two percent.

It would mean university students could spend more time studying and young couples living together could escape each other now and then. It would mean fewer mothers would have work, more children could be conceived and born, and grow up with a backyard to play in. It would mean thousands of small businesses would not now go bust, and fewer numbers of bright young women not be forced into prostitution, striptease and drug muling. It would mean a better world.

What is there against it? Well may you ask.

It would slash the big banks’ profits by billions, and annoy some shareholders. It would enrich the mutual societies. It would make it harder to get some money from overseas borrowing institutions. It would shock the IMF. It would reduce the earnings of real estate agents. But…

It would mean ten million Australians weren’t skint any more. It would mean they had a life, and not just a sickening scramble for sleep and mincemeat from week to week. It would mean more children saw their mothers from time to time, and their grandmothers, who could now afford to come by train or plane and see them. It would mean more days at the beach, more Christmas dinners with the extended family.

Why not do it? Well, it’s possibly never been suggested before. It would help out Greece, and all those poor Irish fools with big, empty apartments to pay off in a tourist economy wrecked, as all economies are, by real estate prices and their sombre Chekhovian shakedowns.

Is it constitutionally impossible? Don’t think so. Governments in wartime can seize land, conscript builders and miners and factories and build and sequester whatever they want. They have reserve wartime powers to control prices, and this, God help us, is the economic equivalent of war.

It would be popular with ninety-eight percent of the people, and whichever party brought it in would be re-elected with thumping majorities for a hundred years.

I put it on the table anyway, for table talk. If there’s something terribly wrong with it, please let me know.

Or, as we say in this neck of the woods, discuss.

(From Suddenly, Last Winter)

8.10 a.m.

There is frost on the grass as we disembark, though the rain has stopped, and trudge up the hill beneath the big preposterous building. Ben Ruse on the phone says, ‘I’ll be out in a tick to sign you in.’ We sneak past the waiting reporters – ‘You’ll just say something stupid,’ Joel predicts – and wait at the desk for Ben. Then Duncan Kerr turns up and signs us both in. ‘This is my giant Nubian servant,’ I say of Joel, whose woolly, unshaven, shabby appearance suggests a smack addict or suicide bomber. We are given our clip-on ‘Unaccompanied Visitor’ cards and urged towards the invigilating machinery.

As always I sneak my Swiss Army knife past the X-ray device (putting it in my jacket pocket beside the mobile phone whose silhouette it therefore shares) to show it can be done. We get lost in the corridors and keep asking questions; we both have a near psychotic incapacity to arrive on time at the simplest destination.

Incompetence, I decide, is a larger problem than some of us believe. Bush in Iraq, Obama in Afghanistan, BP in the Gulf of Mexico; New Labour privatising the railways and, after many train crashes, nationalising them again; Rudd failing to note that a hundred and forty houses were going to burn down if careless or crooked tradesmen availed themselves of his roof-batt largess, are only random samples of the incompetence that, in the age of CEOs, imperils, impedes and harasses us all. Phone enquiries redirected to bemused Bombay PhDs; editorial writers unable to distinguish ‘rein’ from ‘reign’; economists surprised that child labour persists on the Subcontinent which gains by this ancient and persistent form of slavery a trade advantage; politicians as smart as Whitlam who believed that ending all protectionism would help, not smash, our economy; police who believe that chasing stolen cars and killing innocent infant bystanders is a useful thing to do: all these opinions are thought to be expert, or just, or useful, by decent, incompetent citizens who nearly always get it wrong. Not the least of these is Julia Gillard; discuss.

8.40 a.m.

We get fractiously lost in the corridors and, asking directions, make our way to Aussies coffee shop whose queue is half a mile long and Joel despondently joins it. The Independent member for New England, Tony Windsor, is seated at a small round table, his tanned stern face unsuggestive of his first cousin Bruce Hawker, and I quickly sit and talk to him.

‘How do you read it?’ I ask.

‘Well,’ he says in an accent too flatly rural for the imperial Roman face it comes from, ‘I’m sensing a drift away from Labor in my electorate. Which was never Labor, of course, but it’s an interesting symptom.’

‘Is it…Emissions Trading Scheme-related?’

‘It’s character-related. They can’t believe Rudd changed his opinion so totally. We’re simple folk up my way,’ no irony gleamed in his eyes, but it was there, ‘and we like to be able to take a man at his word.’

8.50 a.m.

The coffee queue is impossible and Joel urges me to stifle my pangs and rush off to ‘wherever it’s happening, man’. We encounter Don Dwyer, a constant beaming chirrupy presence, the Jiminy Cricket of the fringes of Canberra politics, who phones me news of political debacles when they occur
.
‘It was a very exciting night,’ he says. ‘They weren’t just walking with their cameras, they were running. And the mood around was, don’t go home, don’t go home. This is history.’

8.55 a.m.

We gather among the usual suspects (Michelle, Fran, Coorey, Farr, Tony Wright, Heather Ewart, Karen Middleton, but not David Marr who is watching mortified a live feed in a London hotel) observing blue-clad security persons move up and down and Simon Crean approaching down a corridor. The thwarter of Beazley, mentor of Latham (he made him Shadow Treasurer), the numbers amasser for Rudd and Gillard, he looks a bit pale and sullen but focused once again like a fox on a hen. Plibersek comes by, smiles vaguely and goes in and then Rudd with a melancholy Faulkner, like Lincoln approaching Gettysburg, and a shattered Maxine beside him. Gillard in heavy make-up soon after, steered by hard-faced young warriors eager for earthly advancement, Wayne Swan serenely beside her. Then Stephen Smith ashen and fucked in a truly beautiful suit. ‘Good morning, good morning,’ he says. ‘Nice to see you.’ Then Shorten who looks away, determined land scared, and moves inside.

9.20 a.m.

They’ve been in there a long time. I need a piss and eye without hope the pot plant; Joel shakes his head. Tony Wright asks how the Beaconsfield film is going. ‘Good,’ I lie. ‘We’ve got a director.’

‘That’s not right, is it?’ Joel asks.

‘Keep it down,’ I say.

9.22 a.m.

We wait, and wait some more.

Kieran Gilbert behind me tells the nation how it’s going, over blurred heads moving in the corridor. Abbott’s ratings have plummeted in the last few hours, he says. Tanner is still supporting Rudd but Swan has defected to Gillard, and features now in a ‘dream ticket’ with her. Gillard has seventy or seventy-four votes. Rudd was safe while his polling figures were up, but once they started falling he had no friends.

9.25 a.m.

‘What is it?’ I ask Tony Wright.

‘Rudd’s pulled out,’ he says, readjusting his mobile. ‘He’s not contesting.’

‘Julia? Or Tanner?’

‘Julia.’

9.29 a.m.

Journos around us, Rhys now among them, are thumbing their iPods. He won’t stay around, Peter van Onselen is saying. ‘He’ll resign his seat. He’ll be keen not to go down in history as a wrecker.’

‘What a bitch,’ says Joel. ‘This isn’t fair.’

9.41 a.m.

With the bovine, melancholy gait of pallbearers approaching an esteemed coffin, Dick Adams and Michael Forshaw, one vast and bearded, one resembling a worn-out wallet, came down the hallway and stood before us.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Forshaw said, ‘as Returning Officer of the federal parliamentary Labor Party, I wish to report to you that a special meeting of the party was held this morning at which the position of leader and deputy leader were declared vacant. The new leader of the federal parliamentary Labor Party, elected unopposed, is Julia Gillard. And the new deputy leader of federal parliamentary Labor Party, elected unopposed, is Wayne Swan. The next Prime Minister, the next Labor and the first female Prime Minister of this country will be Julia Gillard, and Wayne Swan will be the next Deputy Prime Minister of Australia.’

There was a babble of questions, most asking what was said.

‘Each of the people elected spoke to the Caucus. I don’t wish to canvass what they said. I will leave it to those members to report that. The meeting was conducted in a very orderly manner. I can say it was a very gracious speech by the Prime Minister and also by the new leader and the new deputy.’

‘Was there any display of hostility to the Prime Minister?

‘‘This has been a difficult time for the Prime Minister, it’s been a difficult time for the party. I’ll leave it to the Prime Minister Mr Rudd to make further comments. I don’t wish to comment other than to say that he led us to victory in 2007, a victory that was achieved when many people thought we would still be spending more years in Opposition.’

9.46 a.m.

Tanner comes out alone. Smith and Macklin, Gillard supporters, together. It’s the best possible result for Labor, van Onselen says. No ballot, no blood on the carpet. Harry Jenkins, the bluff-bearded Speaker, comes out and goes past me.

‘Pray for me, comrade,’ he says.

Debus, who could have been Prime Minister had he had the luck, goes by. Plibersek, red-eyed, in tears.

‘Rudd is going to the G20 tomorrow,’ says Rhys, ‘at 9.20 a.m.’

‘Maybe he could still go,’ I said, ‘and come back, and resign later.’

‘No way.’

The icecream-faced Ashleigh Gillon is wittering prettily on a nearby television, wondering if Julia will go to the polls soon or ‘establish herself as Prime Minister’ and go next year.

9.52 a.m.
Gillard and Swan are obscured from us by jostling cameras. They come towards us, in mid-shot, like faces on an ancient marble frieze. It seems that Rudd is behind them, but no, it’s Simon Crean, her mentor, keeping watch as always. They walk slowly, enjoying, or enduring, the moment.
‘I feel very honoured,’ she says to a gabble of questions, ‘and I’ll be making a full statement soon.’

9.55 a.m.

Rudd comes out in conversation with Faulkner and they go through a gauntlet of flashing cameras and leaping and stumbling stringers through King’s Hall and down a corridor to his office. Faulkner looks as always like the priest who accompanies the likeable murderer to the electric chair in Warner Brothers movies. They chat as they walk on, betraying no particular expression, as young fools yell, ‘Mr Rudd, to what do you attribute your downfall?’ and ‘What are your immediate plans, Mr Rudd?’, making sure they call him Prime Minister no longer. He goes with Faulkner, Maxine and his young people into his office.

10.02 a.m.

‘An hour and a half?’ says Rhys Muldoon, displeased. ‘That’s got vodka written all over it.’

10.11 a.m.

We got to Shorten’s office requesting vodka. Ben Ruse, unhappy to see us there, says, ‘We might have some whisky’ and comes back to Rhys’s loud annoyance with half-strength beer. Shorten is locked up on the phone and won’t talk to us. On their television Arthur Sinodinos, the smartest Howard adviser, comes on.

‘This is a remarkable day in Australian politics,’ he says, in a voice remarkably like Richo’s. ‘I think Labor have really panicked. Rudd will go down as one of the greatest self-inflicted wounds in Australia’s political history. I think they’re grasping at straws now. It’s very close to a poll. It’s always destablising for a governing party to change leaders so close to an election. I think the Opposition will argue, well, you’ve changed the leader but have you changed the policies that led to the problems that the party now faces? And I think that’s a dilemma they face. They’ve got a group of state-based apparatchiks who believe that you can transplant the state approach to federal politics, and so there’s a lot of focus on the latest opinion polling and focus groups. But what counts in Canberra, what counts in federal politics, is steadiness in policy and consistency over time, and there hasn’t been enough of that lately. Kevin Rudd has paid the price for that and Julia Gillard has been handed a poisoned chalice.’

Discussion follows on Gillard needing now to doff her crown as ‘the trade union leaders’ queen’, to reassert the Ruddock line on boat people and abolish the heinous tax on mining billionaires.

So, it being that sort of day, Albo moves to cancel Question Time.

‘I will propose that later this day,’ he says, ‘I would move a resolution suspending the sitting of the House until such time as the bells ring. I will agree on the time with the Manager of Opposition Business so that all members can be informed, and I will then inform the House, as such.’

‘Cancel Question Time?’ says Rhys. ‘We can’t cancel Question Time. We’ve got to see it.’

Ben Ruse brings him another beer.

10.42 p.m.

Arrangements are changing by the minute. It now seems Rudd, not Gillard, will have a press conference at eleven-thirty (you won’t have 07 to kick around any more, as Dick Nixon might say) in the Labor Party room. He hasn’t resigned yet, and is constitutionally able to advise an election if he wants to.

And Shorten’s mother-in-law constitutionally able to turn him down.

11 a.m.

Bill’s beer stocks are near exhausted and Rhys is drinking his own vodka. On Sky News the joyful virgin Ashleigh Gillon (every one of whose utterances is preceded by the unspoken word ‘gosh’) is asking the smirking Senator for Family First, Steve Fielding, what it was that did for Rudd in the end.

‘It was clearly Rudd’s leadership style,’ Fielding replies. ‘Quite clearly it was non-consultative, and I think that the Super Mining Profits Tax showed that lack of consultation. And the Caucus has got jack of it. And I think most Australians can see through the spin and a lack of substance in running a government, and this has led to his demise. It really is a leadership issue, it was a leadership style that was non-consultative and clearly it wasn’t going to last, and it has brought the Prime Minister down.’

11.20 a.m.

We skol our beers, thank Ben and hurtle forth and find after navigational hardship the Labor Party Room, in which the cameramen are already packing up and moving out. The Press Conference will be, we are told, in the Prime Minister’s Courtyard, immediately.

11.40 a.m.

A sterile grapevine overhangs, as in Gethsemane, the Babylonian windows of the stone exterior of the place of exit, or execution. What Joel calls ‘Stephen King clouds’ pass overhead. The amputated bosoms of Sumerian goddesses deck the lawn. There are two Australian flags above two microphones in the place where, like St Thomas More, the doomed will address with martyr’s eloquence the interested congregation.

A crowd is before us, but we press in close. Between bobbing heads I see him approach, his wife and son on either side. With a mild-mannered, half-mocking smile he says:

‘I was elected by the Australian people as Prime Minister of this country to bring back a fair go for all Australians, and I have given my absolute best to do that. I’ve given it my absolute all. In that spirit I am proud of the achievements that we have delivered to make this country fairer.

‘I’m proud of the fact that we kept Australia out of the global economic recession. I’m proud of the fact that, had we not done so, we would have had half a million Australians out there out of work. Because that’s what happened around the rest of the world.’

His dark-eyed son Marcus looks on with concern; his wife Therese looks more apprehensive; and he continues.

‘I’m proud of the fact that we got rid of WorkChoices and restored decency to the workplace. I’m proud of the fact that we started to build the nation’s infrastructure, including a National Broadband Network which I fundamentally believe will transform this economy in ways which we have yet to conceive. Fundamentally transform our businesses and the way in which governments operate, health services are delivered and the way in which education is delivered in our classrooms. The missing piece of twenty-first century kit for our country.

‘I’m proud of the fact that we have begun the Education Revolution. Three hundred thousand extra computers in classrooms, that’s a pretty big thing for a kid in a classroom who has never seen a computer on their desk before. I’m proud of the fact that we now have Trades Training Centres built to service every one of our nation’s secondary schools.

‘I’m proud of the fact that new libraries are springing up right across the country, often in schools which have never had a library before in their lives, or, in some places, have never had a new building built in their schools since the War.

‘I’m proud of the fact that we now have nationwide early childhood education. I’m proud of the fact that we now have a national curriculum for our schools, for every state of our nation and the Territories. I’m proud of the fact that we now have fifty thousand more university places, and the fact that we have invested so much more in our universities, in our research.

‘I’m really proud of the fact that we’ve reformed the health system, and now have a National Health and Hospitals network. When we look back on this in a decade’s time – and at the fact that we’ve made the Australian government, for the first time in our history, the dominant funder of our nation’s public hospital system – this will be seen as a very, very deep reform.

‘I’m proud of the fact that we are building twenty regional cancer centres right across our country. You know, if you go out there and people are suffering from cancer, it does alter your priorities.’
At this point his voice alters, and the pauses become longer.

‘Many of those folk have never had decent cancer services before. Never. And I was always stunned by the fact that people out there are three times more likely to die in the first years of their diagnosis through the lack of services. We’ve done something to change that, and it’s big. It’s the biggest investment in cancer services our nation has ever seen.

‘I’m proud of the fact – and some people have probably never heard of this one – that we have a National Organ Transplant Authority. As somebody who borrowed someone else’s aortic valve I feel a particular responsibility for that. There’s nothing like having a bit of somebody else in you, it focuses the mind and in my case also focuses the heart.’

Now he is near tears. His pain, his loss, his regret is hypnotic, involving, engulfing.

‘I’m proud of the fact that we’ve restored decency to the aged pension – it’s pretty important – making sure that people on the aged pension have some capacity for human dignity. An extra hundred dollars is the biggest increase in the pension’s history. I’m proud of the fact that we now have paid parental leave. It’s been a long time coming.

‘I’m proud of what we’ve done on homelessness. I’m proud of the fact that we’re on track to halve homelessness in this country through work like Common Ground, in which Therese is directly involved. I’m proud of the fact that we’re adding twenty thousand additional units of social housing. I can’t stand it when you go to places and there is literally no place at the inn.

‘I’m proud of the fact that the first thing we did in government was ratify the Kyoto Protocol. I’m also proud of the fact that we boosted the renewable energy target to twenty percent. I’m proud of the fact that we tried three times to get an Emissions Trading Scheme through this parliament, although we failed. And, if I had one point of future policy, it must be our ambition to pass a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme within this parliament – the one that follows, I mean – so that we can make a difference, a real difference, to climate change.

‘I’m proud of the fact that we now have, for the first time in the country’s history, a Murray-Darling Basin Authority, and for the first time in our history a basin-wide plan and a basin-wide cap on water.
L
‘Also proud of the fact that on the global stage Australia is now at the table of the G20. This is big for the country. When we look back on that in ten years’ time, having a place at the table when stuff goes wrong around the world is pretty useful. We lobbied hard and long for that. It’s a good achievement for Australia for the future.

‘I’m proud of the fact that we are closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Little things and big things: putting hundreds of Indigenous kids with scholarships into our nation’s leading boarding schools; backing such things as the Clontarf Academy, now twenty-two of them we fund around the nation, to get kids to school and boost their attendance by providing AFL training. I’m proud of the fact that we’re behind a commitment to create fifty thousand additional jobs for Indigenous Australians with the private sector, and I’m most proud of the fact that about here, we greeted the Stolen Generations.’

A long pause. The tears are visible now. Marcus wishes he was a thousand miles away. Two thousand.

‘As Therese reminded me, that was a big day. What I remember most about it, for those of you who weren’t here, was as the Stolen Generations came in from over there, they were frightened. Our job was to make them welcome. The Apology was unfinished business for our nation. It is the beginning of new business for our nation.

‘What I’m less proud of is the fact that I have now blubbered.’

Noon

All of us who were there underwent a similar feeling: the occasion was luminous, the language noble, the utterance honourable, the facts beyond dispute. And yet the speaker of the words, the fallen Prince, the saint brought low like Thomas à Becket by third-rate conspirators, was also a cocksure twerp who deserved his downfall richly. He had no right to the martyr’s crown of thorns he was bleeding under presently. He was a fucking cunt and a pest in fact and yet a humble upward-striving man of decency and probity and worth.

He thanked a lot of people, then, including his craven unsleeping incompetent staff, and said with a smiling sigh:

‘Now for the future. I will be dedicating my every effort to ensure the re-election of this Australian Labor government. It is a good government with a good programme, and it deserves re-election for all the reasons I have listed before, and many more besides. And they are a good team, led by a good Prime Minister – I mean Julia, not me. Because I’m still the Prime Minister, I think, for another quarter of an hour, so watch out, because we can still do things. Have you ever thought about this?’ A flicker of mischief passed over his beaming face. ‘I’m now not the leader of the Labor Party but…I’m the Prime Minister. Anything could happen, folks.’

We waited, with interest, for him to make a big announcement, but he did not.

‘As for serving the government in the future, I will of course serve it in any manner in which I can be of assistance. I will be re-contesting the next election in the seat of Griffith, and I hope the good burghers of Griffith are…understanding of my absence in recent times. Having said all of those things, what have I missed out? Therese?’

She looked at him with fond foreboding, with every inch of her big smile beseeching him to finish, now.

‘She’s always more succinct than me. And much better looking. The work Therese has done in the community is formidable. And whether it’s disabilities, homelessness, UNICEF. This is a very good person. A very, very good person. And one of life’s eternal mysteries is why she ever married me in the first place. She is a very good person, as are these fantastic kids of mine.

‘And having said all that folks, we’ve got to…zip.’ And he turned and he led them away through the big Babylonian doors into history’s forgetfulness.
And it was as painful an experience as any of us had ever endured. His son, of course, had endured much more. And soon they were gone.

An Englishman beside me said he’d heard that though Rudd knew he wasn’t contesting the ballot by midnight he didn’t inform his supporters of this. So they arrived in the morning defiant, and told the reporters why they were voting for him, and thus endangered needlessly their future careers.

‘What a cunt,’ Joel said. ‘What a cunt-act thing to do.’

12.22 p.m.

We were hurrying confusedly with the others to Julia’s press conference which was to occur almost immediately, following the puffing cameramen into doors, down corridors, past pot plants, past desks, past toilets, goddammit, I needed one, and not stopping.

‘Julia’s a fool,’ I raged. ‘A fucking fool.’

‘How’s that?’ asked Joel, not too interested.

‘She let him speak first.’

‘This is true.

‘And now he’s undercut everything she can say. With a record like that, why bring him down? What can she say? I bet Carl Green is rapidly rewriting everything.’

‘He’s not just a cunt, he’s a cunning cunt.’

‘Cunning enough to get where he is.’
‘And cuntish enough.’

‘A good new word.’

12.56 p.m.

We argued our way in, Joel yelling a bit, and sat at opposite ends of the front row, and saw Julia and Swanny come in.

She looked magnificent, and the speech went well, though I felt constrained to enrage world history by hissing her, just once. She thanked Kevin Rudd, acknowledged her share in the things that had gone wrong, emphasised her working-class upbringing, and the unchanging values of that sort of person she still held dear, implied that Australians had a right to suspect, just a bit, boat people, this was a democracy after all; and then, putting her stamp on things, and differing from Kevin, she said that Australians were owed a fair share of the nation’s mineral wealth, and:

‘We need to negotiate. We must end this uncertainty, which is not good for this nation. That is why today I am throwing open the government’s door to the mining industry and I ask that in return, the mining industry throws open its mind. And today I will ensure that the mining advertisements paid for by the government are cancelled. And in return for this, I ask the mining industry to cease their advertising campaign as a show of good faith and mutual respect.’

It was a zinger, a headline, a game-changer, a silver bullet perhaps. She can win it from here.

Or I think she can.

She really can.

2.30 p.m.

Question Time has been reinstated and Rhys believes we should watch it in the chamber. I tell him he’s a fool, we’ll have to queue and won’t get in.

‘Trust me,’ he says.

We end up getting lost and can’t even find the fucking chamber.

Then we do, and they point us to a queue of ten thousand school children, Malaysians and country visitors.

We go back down and find Don Dwyer and go to Jennie George’s office.

2.50 p.m.

When Julia enters the chamber and the Speaker addresses her as ‘the Prime Minister’ Rhys winces. ‘No,’ he says. ‘No.’ He puts his hands over his eyes.

Abbott gets up, and he has his ears back like a kelpie. Seizing the one chance he has, he says: ‘May I, Mr Speaker, offer commiserations to the Member for Griffith? A midnight knock on the door followed by political execution is no way that the Australian Prime Minister should be treated.’ He goes on to say that this is the first time an elected Australian Prime Minister has been sacked from office without a chance to go to the people. He leaves out of this plausible sentence Gorton, Menzies, Deacon and Barton. And Gough Whitlam of course.

Julia answers him well, and the old undiminished erotic contest between them strikes up, as it has before, and I say how good this is.

‘It’s the last time,’ Don says. ‘She won’t recall parliament. This is all we get.’

‘That’s unfortunate.’

‘That’s the way she’ll play it. Believe me, comrade. She will.’

3.30 p.m.

Jennie George’s partner Denis Lennen comes in shouting and evicts us. We didn’t watch her valedictory speech, he shouts, correctly, and we can’t use her fucking television.

3.50 p.m.

That seemed fairly argued and we watch the rest of it in a hall under two stairways, closely watched in turn by two security men.

‘What a horrible day,’ Rhys says.

Worst is the sight of Kevin Rudd in the back bench, looking precisely like a deflated yellow balloon. He turned up, amazingly. And so it goes.

4.10 p.m.

We go to Aussies and hang about but nobody’s there. We go with Rhys to a courtyard and watch him smoke and fulminate. Something seems over and it’s awful.

‘I’m going to The Lodge,’ says Rhys with finality and stamps out his durry.

‘Why?’ I ask.

‘To be with my friend. Come with me.’

‘No! I can’t.’

‘Yes, you can.’

‘I hate him. And he knows I hate him.’

‘Come anyway.’

‘No.’

‘Fuck you then, I’m off. This is history, and you won’t be there.’

He walks away determinedly.

I look at Joel and he looks at me. ‘What do you reckon?’ I ask.

‘Yeah, let’s go home.’

Roger Ailes, who runs Fox News, helped Nixon to the Presidency in 1968 by inventing the ‘character issue’ to defeat the ghost of John F. Kennedy and, a year later, Teddy Kennedy. Another ghost, a living one, Fidel Castro, has lately written a book about his early years, and is making new friends, the way he does, in his eighty-fifth year. This is giving Ailes, and Fox News, trouble. Castro is different. How do we deal with Castro?What is Castro’s ‘character issue’? Does he have one?

Ales knows he can’t deny him his big achievements: the 98 percent literacy that was once 16, the great and famous free health service, the best doctors in the world, the free universities, the free food for everyone, the honeymoon bonus night out, the freedom of religion, the superb musical culture, the fine films, the working multiculture, and Fidel’s own astonishing survival, ninety miles from the most powerful enemy in the history of the world, of the forty-eight-year-old banana blockade and the twenty-seven assassination attempts and the six hundred assassination plans; nor the unfeigned adoration which eighty percent of his people, the people that stayed, still show for his rundown, ramshackle, generous, unauthoritarian non-democracy still inspiring all of South America and most of the counterculture of the West.

We can’t even say he’s particularly brutal when he executes in a decade fewer dissidents than Rick Perry does Blacks in a fortnight in Texas; and any ‘freedom fighter’ who wants to live in Florida he usually lets go there, by rubber-ducky, or pedalo, or kayak, or whatever, to join his gangster relatives and plot, once more, his murder.

So what are we to do?

Because Fidel if you look at him shapes up like a combination of Robin Hood, Judas Maccabeus, T.E. Lawrence, Davy Crockett, Indiana Jones and Clement Attlee. He has no money in a Swiss bank account, and he writes really well, and all his old mistresses still adore him, and the Mafia want him dead, and … what, so challenged by truth and legend, is Roger Ailes, and Fox News, to do?

Well, he does what he always does. He finds the telling detail and calls it a fatal flaw; as he did when he declared Obama to be a lofty academic, a grubby machine politician, friend of terrorists, a predatory homosexual and a fanatical insurgent Muslim with a false passport and a forged memoir, Dreams From My Father, Bill Ayres, the terrorist he ‘pals around’ with, wrote for him, things people didn’t know about him before, which they found out on Fox News.

And, well … Fidel talks too much, it seems; some of his speeches are six hours long. And this is unforgiveable. Though two million people, probably, survived infancy and got to adulthood and university and marriage and happy grandparenthood because of his human decency, this is unforgiveable. He talks too much. And though he’s by any count the most successful politician in a thousand years he talks too much, and he’s proved by this he’s nothing more, he’s nothing more, than … a prattling buffoon.

A six-hour speech? That’s as bad as a ten-hour innings by Tendulkar. Insufferable. Insupportable. How dare he?  How dare he live?

And thus it is that Fox News and Newscorp and SkyNews and Bolt and O’Reilly and Akerman and Hannity and Salusinsky reduce the politicians around them. They find an ordinary human characteristic, and pretend it matters. Evince shock at it. Amazement. Outrage. Roared up an air hostess did he? To the gallows with him. Off with his head.

Thus Adaminejad and Chavez and Strauss-Kahn and Latham are all buffoons. Not men whose talents put them at the top of their profession. Not men with an idea or two, like Allende or the Castros. Buffoons.

An extension of this is what was done to Castro. Hit-men were sent out by the CIA and the Mafia to kill him, and twenty-six attempts were unsuccessful. So Ailes and his people began to treat these attempted murders as if they were practical jokes. The exploding cigars. The poisoned wetsuit. The old mistress with a pellet of poison in her face cream jar she was supposed to inject him with, postcoitally while he snored, and she couldn’t go through with it. Hilarious. What a joke. What a joke on Fidel that would have been.

And thus, dirty trick by dirty trick, the Murdochists erode and steal way our humanity. Buffoons. All buffoons. What a joke if they died.

It’s a way of treating Communists and Muslims and brown-skinned people fleeing tyranny or seeking a better life in the way that white Americans once treated slaves. Subhumans. The Other. The lesser breeds without the Law. The heathen beasts of burden we keep chained up over night and rape if they are pretty. Dehumanised. Expendable. Or, like David Hicks, unreadable. That’s it, he’s unreadable, he’s not worth considering as a human being. He writes in fact as well as Koestler, but you mustn’t read him. Just keep saying he’s unreadable, barely literate, a daft prat, a trained killer, a buffoon. A violent, daft buffoon. Like Castro.

Yet the dehumanised, expendable Fidel is still with us, and saying his say in a book well worth reading, it seems, and Ailes can’t stand it.

Discuss.

The Newspoll this morning shows Abbott three percent ahead of Gillard as preferred Prime Minister and a ‘margin of error’ of three percent which means Gillard could be three percent ahead of Abbott, as she was a fortnight ago. It also has six percent ‘uncommitted’ and two percent ‘refused’: this is about a million people who could make a lot of difference. The way you get ‘refused’ I hear is ringing at seven pm when people are eating or cooking and hanging up if you hear a migrant accent, thus reducing the Labor vote.

You can bring the Labor vote down further I hear by ringing homes (and never, never, never, of course, mobiles) on Friday and Saturday night when people under thirty, who vote Labor sixty-forty, are out of the house, and people over sixty, who vote Liberal fifty-five to forty-five, are at home, and this of course is what Newspoll does or sometimes does. You can get the Labor vote down further, or this is what I hear, by remembering Rupert Murdoch is your principal client, and sampling 1182 respondents and publishing only 1142, or 1042, and putting the others, wrongly, into ‘refused’ or ‘undecided’ or hanging up on them.

It is by these stratagems, probably, or so I hear, and this might be wrong, and I might be very unjust, you get Abbott up as Preferred Prime Minister after his worst week ever, and sow confusion, panic, mutiny, consternation and suicidal despair in the Labor ranks.

This is what Murdoch requires of you, or so I hear; he is after all the man who published The Hitler Diaries after being told they were forgeries, and commanded poor Hugh Trevor-Roper to back him up and say they were not forgeries; and claimed Gough and Margaret Whitlam were divorcing in November 1975, just after the Dismissal and just before the election, thirty-seven years ago. To believe anything else is to subscribe to the astonishing theory that a news organisation that would bribe Scotland Yard would never bribe Newspoll. It is very, very hard to see why they would not; or why someone in Newspoll, not necessarily the CEO, would not accept that bribe and adjust the figures along lines of Rupert’s desire, as it seems, it powerfully seems, he did this morning, Rupert their principal client, that is.

I do not say this is so. But it is I think a plausible theory.

The simple fact is that the Liberals are a busted flush policy-wise and they need all the polling help they can get. They have declared war on the auto workers and gone to water on gay marriage and said they could, and then couldn’t, and then could, get us into surplus next year, and found over Christmas the hatred of Abbott among women, Protestants and humanists is growing. The ‘turn back the boats and leave it to Indonesia to sort it all out’ policy was seen to be idiotic and their defence of Rhineheart’s unearned billions innumerate. And their defence of the Afghanistan War as moronic as Julia’s.

And yet the Newspoll shows them surging ahead, as it did nine years ago on the weekend of the greatest gatherings in world history that were then protesting the imminent Iraq War, which nobody wanted and they, the Liberals, were keen on. When the Liberals are seen to be losing it is Newspoll’s bounden duty it seems to show them, paradoxically, winning. Why else have a Newspoll CEO? Or so some say, or ask.

Why have a Newspoll CEO? Why? What is he there for?

The greatest proof of this hypothesis if one were needed is Newspoll’s failure to match up anyone other than Rudd and Gillard with Abbott as Preferred Prime Minister. Why not ask do you prefer Shorten to Abbott, Combet to Abbott, Smith to Abbott, Albo, Plibersek, McKew, Brown, Windsor, Turnbull? Why not ask would you vote Labor or Coalition if Smith, Shorten, Plibersek were Prime Minister? Why play only the Rudd card? Why? Because that’s what Hartigan wanted you to do? Because that’s what Kim Williams wants you to do? Or Rupert wants you to do?

Why not ask that essential question, who else would you like to be Prime Minister? Why would you not do that? Why did the obvious not cross your mind? Will you do it now? I ask any Newspoll person, past or present, to answer this.

Why not test how popular Abbott Liberals are? Why not? And if you forgot to, will you do it now?

Newspoll has served too long as Rupert’s WMD and it should be exposed.

A Royal Commission would be nice. A Senate enquiry would do.

See, as in London, which frightened Murdochists start singing.

Or not.

They may be innocent of any wrongdoing.

But they don’t look too flash this week, as more and more Newscorp executives go to gaol.

If Newscorp goes, can Newspoll be far behind?

See above.

Monday, 13th February, 10.12 pm

After tonight’s Four Corners it seems as if my wary prediction of a new Prime Minister by Friday February 17 (Smith? Shorten? Albo? Swanny?) is not as cluey as it sounded an hour ago. Though the date still seems to me about right, give or take fifteen hours, the range of likely candidates should now I fear include Tony Abbott; and, just possibly, just possibly, Kevin Rudd.

Abbott will be on the phone to Wilkie, Oakeshott and Thomson as I write these dread words, offering Cabinet positions, ambassadorships and uncontested seats, and promising no new election before February 2014, with a lot of hectic new Jesuitical persuasiveness and vigour, and one of them may come across and make him PM by Friday with a swiftness like that which attended Whitlam’s sacking thirty-six years ago. And the worst of times may then begin. And it’s a pity.

It is utterly amazing that the PM did the interview that will be hereinafter seen as her hari-kiri, but there you go. Bad judgment is not a passing two-day flu, it’s a genetic predisposition, and she always had it, and there you go. Her persistent reputation for double-dealing, mendacity and bad acting is now affirmed in the minds of those already resentful of her atheism, single status, philistinism, cruelty to refugee children, apparent homophobia, hatred of live theatre, ignorance of history books and films with subtitles and there you go. And there she goes, I think.

I think.

I have been wrong before. But this looks pretty scary. A caucus meeting tomorrow at 9 may yield up a new PM, or a new Foreign Minister, or notice from Swanny of a spill in twenty-four or forty-eight hours; or not. But Gillard cannot now I think survive till Budget night.

I have been wrong before.

And we will see.

Tuesday, 14th February, 3.35 am

Not sleeping well.

Thinking too much.

At the heart of the trouble that this Prime Minister is in is the story, never believed at the time by the ordinary people, that she was overwhelmed by sudden events and did not decide until 6 or 7 on the night that she would take up the burden of office for the nation’s good, and she did so with great reluctance. I myself believed it, acceding just once to the cock-up theory of history, and I was wrong.

I suppose it was because the image of the ‘scheming woman’ is always less attractive than that of the ruthless, driven, ambitious, highly talented man — like Keating when he displaced Hawke, and Hawke when he displaced Hayden on the day an election was called — that the ‘cleanskin Julia’ or ‘little me’ version of that seismic, troubling day was put about, and convincingly put about. But it meant her innocence or guilt became the primary argument for months afterward and gave the Liberals an issue to run on then and now. If she had merely said ‘he had to go’ or ‘he was holding up good policy with his chaotic interventionist micromanaging of everything in the wee small hours of the morning’, she would have shifted the question from how to why, from her character to his, and probably won enough seats in the election to get rid of him altogether. But her obsession with how she looks — evident every day with her new hair styles and bizarre collations of clothing — undid her once again; her feminine side, it might be called by someone braver than me, her need to be seen as ‘not just a politician’ but something loftier.

What a spoiled baby she seems overall, wanting, in Mike Rann’s phrase, ‘to be, not to do’; and failing as always to join the dots between what is said and what is done. For you don’t say ‘a government that has lost its way’ and then keep all the ministers of that government, that errant government, in their jobs, even the four or five (Debus, McMullan, Tanner, Faulkner, Kerr) who are leaving parliament at the next election. You show the new way. You wield the new broom. You clear out the cobwebs of the old. You get on with it.

And you don’t keep Rudd dangling. You give him his new job on day one, and send him off on his important world travels as our Foreign Minister. You don’t leave him festering and plotting and leaking. You give him things to do. And you don’t, above all, call an early election, with the effective slogan, ‘Vote for us, we’ve lost our way’ or ‘Vote for the real Julia, whoever she is. Give yourself a big surprise.’

At the heart of it also was a failure to understand what a Prime Minister is. He, she, is one who knows enough to react with acuity to world events. Which means one educated in the meaning of world events. Which means reading a book or two, or seeing a film or two, on overseas cultures and why they do the things they do. Why the East Timorese, for instance, mightn’t want a refugee-crowded Green Zone in the middle of their impoverished, ramshackle, war-smashed former colony, and mightn’t like hunting down and recapturing escaped freedom fighters who now and then remind them of Xanana, Joe and Che. Why the Arab Spring’s young heroes might rate Julian Assange a good man and even a great man and not, as Julia does, a contemptible sex-crazed criminal. Why Afghanistan is a missionary war that became a gang war between drug cartels and wasted a trillion dollars. Things like that. A Prime Minister is one with a rudimentary education in human tendencies and not, like Pauline or Scott or Barnaby, a blithering, ignorant fool.

The only question now is who has the luck; and who, if it comes to a lost No Confidence vote on the floor of the House, the Governor-General first asks to try and form a new government and test its numbers. It might be her fellow Queenslander Rudd, who appointed her. It might be her son-in-law Shorten. It might be Tony Windsor who has the respect of almost everybody. It might be Malcolm Turnbull, a capable, consensus figure with close friends in every party. It might be Tanya Plibersek or Nicola Roxon or Julie Bishop, a woman, like herself. Or Bronwyn Bishop. Or Jason Clare. Or Kim Beazley if he can be found a seat, and of course he can. She can ask who she likes.

It’s an unusual week, in short, and the caucus meeting in a few hours’ time will not be a decorous, polite, colegiate one for certain. The government that saved us from world recession has got itself into a fix by neglecting the surface of things and not getting its story straight. And it’s a pity.

And we await Question Time with interest.

See above.

A tale of young men maddened by war; of mud and shelling and fright and high explosives; of mateship, self-sacrifice and bonded memory; of a village wooing and letters home from the front; of stupid Anglicised officers and wily working class larrikins and the biggest man-made explosion thus far in world history; of death unsought and evaded and the friendship of men that goes deep and beyond words.

It’s Beneath Hill 60, the best Australian film thus far (even Samson and Delilah is a little worse), the best film on World War One I’ve seen, just finished in a cinema near you. And I nearly missed it too.

And I understand mateship at last, and Anzac Day, and that convocation of ugly bibulous loyalty the RSL in the 1940s that my father went to once a week. I realise what was lost in bluster and booze and never retrieved.

As the multiculture advances and the Anzac-unanimity recedes into myth and verse and song and caricature, it’s worth seeing, I think, at last, how it was back then, up close. Men shamed by white feathers into joining up though they knew they could die of that shame. Men asking the girl’s father if they can write to her from the front. Educated, literate working class men huddled underground and thinking about things as the war-noise nears. Men who could write a rhymed verse, dig a trench, mourn a comrade, question a deity, curse a Pom, improvise a lethal explosive device, lose their minds in the roar of battle and piss themselves laughing, dead in their tens of thousands, the gene pool bereft of their excellence, gone for good.

Our Jack Dempsey died in that war, our Bing Crosby, Charles Chaplin, George Gershwin, TE Lawrence, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walt Disney, that War of Three Cousins that never should have been authorised and never should have been fought. It was the willed, consensual suicide of the best of Europe and the British colonies that gave America world mastery, Hitler the nod and Stalinism seventy years of menace, paranoia and expensive wasted rocketry.

It should never have been authorised and should never have been fought. The Islamicists will beat us now, because we were so traumatised by those trenches, mud and noise. The dead cry out to us from our cenotaphs and we hear them still, and we will never, never fight a war as big or as hard again.

Jeremy Hartley Sims, David Roach and Bill Leimbach made the film for ten million dollars, one-fiftieth of what we paid all up for Baz’s dumb-arsed Australia (enough to sustain seventy small theatre companies for a thousand years on the interest alone), or this is what I hear. It introduces a new star Brendan Cowell, who in equal parts resembles Colin Friels, Russell Crowe, Jack Thompson and (aptly) Richard Todd, and can act as well as them all put together, plus the electrifying Steve Le Marquand who is Australia’s Sean Connery, and a gang of muddy-faced blokes (Harrison Gilbertson, Guyton Grantley, Anthony Hayes, Alex Thompson, Alan Dukes), two of them playing father and son, joined up together for mutual comfort, you soon feel you’ve known all your life.

Seven of them are still alive at the end, in a wedding photo, one of them gibbering mad, the others holding it in, the bride smiling bravely, knowing what’s coming to her in the next forty years of nocturnal screaming and smashed furniture. And we see it all in that photo.

We meet some Germans too, dedicated and decent in the same way as our boys, with muddied postcards from home and faces very similar to the Aussies we have come to know. We numbly cheer both sides on as we might at a football game while simultaneously knowing there’s no sense to it, no purpose, no good end, only ingenuity and bravery and horror and suspense like that in The Hurt Locker, a Homeric joust with Death the only victor.

It’s a gang-show, like Sunday Too Far Away, The Odd Angry Shot, The Club, Stir and Gallipoli with males predominating as they do in Shakespeare’s best play Henry IV Part One. And one wonders if this is the natural Australian style, a mob of blokes up against it and joshing one another as they go over the wire and perish needlessly in a stupid cause. A memory of our convict past perhaps, when there weren’t many women and our primary friendship were with the mob, the unit, the road gang, the old gang, the comrades, the mates.

Unlike all other war films with muddy faces you can work out who is who. Not much is said but the spaces round the words, the looks exchanged, the memories channelled, the words repressed, are vivid and resonant. As a film director Hartley Sims resembles most not Richard Attenborough nor John Ford nor John Huston nor Bruce Beresford nor Fred Schepisi nor Clint Eastwood but William Wyler, whose spacious pauses and assessing looks exalted The Best Years of Our Lives (about American servicemen coming home) into cinema Valhalla and what might be called the memory of the tribe. It’s the best American film even now (with Flags Of Our Fathers a close second) as this is the best Australian one.

And the design of course and the special effects are exemplary. It’s a pity you’ll never now experience this film as I did (you have to be in a cinema to share the claustrophobia) but that’s how it is with the movies these days in this, the golden age: in, out, good reviews, no audience, bad luck, next. Yet I note it anyway as a great act of unashamed, nationalist regret and pride and grieving, like ‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ and The Sentimental Bloke whose tunes of glum glory will outlive our agnosticism and cynicism and sarcasm and deck with wattle our proud passing as a culture.

Though events in Britain suggest the Murdoch top executives bribe police, bug royalty and ‘target’ selected politicians for destruction, no thought is given to the probability that Murdochists do the same things here. That they set up Della Bosca, Mike Rann, Evans and Kernot, David Campbell, Matt Brown, Paul McLeay, and the false rumours that Keating was homosexual, Beazley had lost his mind, Latham somehow likely to assault the Prime Minister, Wilkie the whistle-blower suffering mental collapse, David Hicks a blue-eyed crazed killer, Dr Haneef a supplier of weapons to Muslim terrorists, and so on.

It is said the Murdochist ‘culture’ is different here and though Australians serve Murdoch here and in the UK and in the US and some, like Les Hinton, have worked in all three places, all Newscorp criminal tendency stops at the Channel. Why would it? Americans and Australians run it. Why would it?

If proof were needed that business as usual continues here in Australia as in the UK (where the Murdoch bugging of a good Prime Minister saying nothing remarkable in the back of a car was used to bring him down), it lies in the Orwellian dirty tricks I have been lately bringing to light in these pages as they have occurred to me. How it is only left-of-centre politicians who ‘lash out’ and ‘spit the dummy’ and only unions who have ‘bosses’ while corporations have CEOs. How all these words imply emotional instability as do, of course, the reports of irregular sex by Thomson, Bartlett, the left-wing Liberals Buswell and Brogden and (of course) Assange. Abbott is not said to have ‘lashed out’ against the events of Australia Day or ‘spat the dummy’ on surpluses, nor is Rupert Murdoch asked to resign for saying ‘Do you know who I am?’ to a hotel clerk, as he lately did, I hear. These hanging offenses apply only to figures of the Left. Abbott’s early desertion of his pregnant fiancee, Howard’s alleged adultery with Pru Goward are presented as mere bagatelles, but Della Bosca’s dalliance with a comedienne (a Strauss-Kahn-type set-up by the look of it, in my view) and David Campbell’s unsecret bisexual variety of nocturnal outing were touted as grounds for their exit from public life.

The curious numbers that Newspoll offers Murdoch from time to time should be looked into also. How is it Newspoll showed Gillard losing badly one weekend, and Nielsen showed her significantly gaining, and in with a chance, the next? How is it Newspoll showed, this morning, Abbott ahead as an economic manager after last week publicly doubting he’d have us in surplus in the next five years, to the horror of his team? Does Rupert ask by nod or hint for this sort of result in particular needy weeks? When the Liberals would otherwise take a hit and require a Monday Surprise? Does Newspoll cravenly give it to him? Is this why it has a CEO, or, as we used to say, a boss? Do numbers need to be bossed? How precisely is that number-bossing done? How are the numbers changed? Are they changed? And on whose instruction? Or is it just fraudulent sampling? We have a right to know.

One remembers the forged Hitler Diaries, and Murdoch ordering Hugh Trevor-Roper to swallow his doubts, and recommend they be published against his better judgment, and a great historian thus ruined by Rupert’s implacable need for a splash, a headline, a scandal, a revelation, a Big Lie. Is Newspoll likewise thus bullied? Was it thus bullied in the last twenty-four hours? We have a right to know.

And who should be arrested here in Australia, as tge Big five were in Britain? Hartigan must be a Murdochist of interest, surely. What dealings did he have with Chantelois and Phillips before the assault on Mike Rann, or after? Was money discussed? We have a right to know. (Nice to be writing Murdoch-type sentences about Murdoch and his flatterers. Does me a power of good.)

Rupert’s recent addled twitterings which show him seemingly in decline, may be of course his rallying of the Pinochet Ploy — this man is too sick and old to stand trial or serve time — and his latest fabrication, his latest cover-up, his latest alibi. The Murdoch miniseries Paper Tigers I am currently co-writing suggests his tricks, his wriggles, his illegalities, his prurience and pantie-sniffing have not altered too much down the years, and this is another poker game with his destiny, another roulette-spin against the odds, another two-up game of tails for the thirteenth time in a row, that he well may survive.

Or perhaps you disagree.

Only one correspondent in the past nine weeks has defended David and Kristin Williamson against the charge of limelight-hogging and drama-queening at the expense of fifty-nine writers of better plays than his at his best, a man called ‘Bob’ who seemed unusually well acquainted with their financial details.

I asked him to identify himself; and he disappeared from these columns. I asked if he were David; no answer.

I now suggest the strong possibility that he is, was, David; and I warn him of the laws against impersonating another, and the gaoling for it that sometimes, not always, occurs, depending on the jurisdiction. In Queensland, where they hanged rapists well into the 1960s, they might well be very severe.

I ask again ‘Bob’ to identify himself.

And David to say how much money he has.

I have added a good few more gerunds, nouns and verbs to The Santorum Variations (4), published a few columns down, and I will shovel more in as they arrive from Iceland, Siberia and Pasadena over the weekend. It is exciting work, and my friend Noam Chomsky, who rings in hourly, is planning on the basis of this burgeoning anthology of old addled words a whole new theory of human memory and becoming a pest. I will try to sleep a while and get back to you.

Watch this space.

To my fourteenth attendance of Debt-Defying Acts, the seventeenth Wharf Revue, at five o’clock tonight with Annie and Jock Buzo, Alex’s widow, and Anton, my chiropractor. Asked why I go so often by people who think me barking mad, I explain how it’s only thus that I might make others go with me, who might otherwise think this vast exuberant soul-altering experience an optional, not an essential one, to show them how far high happiness on earth can go without chemicals or fundamentalist unhingement, how good it can seem for a while to be alive.

And the result is always the same. They have a superb time. They thank me profusely. They buy me food. Faded, abeyant friendships rekindle. They realise I am a good person, and a kind of moral guide, at least when it comes to entertainment, they should henceforth heed.

Al Clark, who produced Chopper, Priscilla and Nineteen Eighty-four, came on Wednesday night and said how youthful it made him feel, as did Monte Python at first sight, how thoroughly engaged and besieged in his intellect every four or five seconds, and how educated he became in those ninety minutes in the folkways of his adopted country, and in that wild collusive rush of heart and brain, that open door to knowledge it provided.

I thought about this a bit on the drive home to Palm Beach through washing rain and beating windscreen-wipers; and I realised there was something else as well. It was an enlargement of Australia and its politics by the level of exhilarating art and music and dance which Biggins, Forsythe, Scotty and Mandy Bishop — surely the most talented foursome in one room since the Beatles were like them jointly struck by lightning –uproariously, abundantly, lavishly fling back at it.

A proof, too, that Australia is not such a bad place. Though Alan Jones was crucified, Bob Brown coarsely mocked, Barry O’Farrell rudely lampooned, and, in the Phantom of the Opera sketch and the nursing home sketch, four living Prime Ministers reduced to Stoppardian pantaloons, no Commonwealth Police arrived to arrest and punch the actors, trash the set and immolate the theatre, no libel writs were issued, no questions asked in the House or the Senate. For we were a democracy. We let laughter occur. We gave thought free rein.

And Barry O’Farrell came; and Gladys Berejiklian; and Bob Carr; and Mike Rann. Nathan Rees is coming on Thursday, and Wedderburn and Hawker, and Bill Shorten when it comes to Moonee Ponds, as he did last year, complaining only that it ‘let off Rudd too lightly’. Bob Hawke, Frank Sartor, Walt Secord and Reba Meagher in other years.

But Simon Crean, the Minister for the Arts, has never heard of it for twelve long years thus far, which is much like saying Walter Ralegh missed thirty-four Shakespeare opening nights, and I’m sure he did. He’s going instead, he proudly and perkily asserted, ‘to Yes, Minister for my light entertainment.’ And Gillard of course, that perpetual tabula rasa, that impenetrable Terra Nullius, would never come, she does not like the live theatre, nor understand it, I imagine, even for a minute. What was this French Revolution? Why wasn’t I told?

I have written about the Wharf Revue in my books and columns for a decade now, calling it ‘my spare religion’, calling this one ‘the best thing of its kind in world history, but no better than that’ in these pages two months ago. And the grief I feel for those, and those friends of mine in particular, who imagined they had something better to do on the four or five hundred nights they could have seen it, driving to Gosford or Lismore or Bathurst or Wollongong or flying to Hobart or Nunanwading, grows to murderous resentment sometimes and I want to waterboard the lot of them, and speak to them severely while they choke and plead and suffer.

But what can you do. There are pearls, and there are swine. There are wise men and women, and fools. And never the twain shall mingle on a joyous night like this, of pure champagne of the spirit, of uplift and pleasure and ribaldry. They have better things to do.

And it’s a pity.

(From And So It Went)

Friday, 1st December, 2006, 12.05 a.m.

‘Rudd hasn’t got the numbers, has he?’

‘He’s got five votes, that’s all,’ said Lou, and Karen nodded. ‘I don’t know what this is all about.’

‘Kim’s confident, is he?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Quite confident,’ Karen added.

‘I’m very confident,’ Michael said firmly.

Were they cracking hardy? It didn’t seem so. Rudd was known as a loner, a leaker, a workaholic with no political friends and few caucus allies. Yet on Wednesday Phillip Adams at the Chifley play said Rudd had the numbers, and he’d had them for six months courtesy of Mark Arbib and was waiting for the moment to spring them. Bob Carr was at the play too and said it was a tragedy for Kim but it was probably on.

Two Fridays ago moreover at a journalists’ banquet in Glebe where guest speaker Rudd gave an uproariously funny speech that was roughly entitled ‘How I and Gareth Arrived at Long Last in North Korea and What Befell Us There’, a ‘dream ticket’ of Kevin and Julia was being mooted excitedly with pamphlets and ribbons to my disgust.

From Beazley’s office I rang Bill Shorten who was rumoured by some journalists to be about to overthrow Beazley eighteen months ago but who had loyally spoken up for him, and was a logical successor (in my view anyway) in five or six years to the Labor leadership, and Shorten said, ‘It doesn’t look that crash-hot, mate. He might survive but he was wrong to bring on the challenge on Monday. You should never put yourself out there. You make them come after you, challenge you, overthrow you. A critical two or three mightn’t have the stomach to do that.’

‘How do you read it?’

‘Well, the phones will be running hot.’

Kim that day addressed a massed rally of workers in Melbourne in a heroic, old-style way like Aneurin Bevan or John L. Lewis. ‘We will rip up these laws,’ he royally snarled, and they cheered in their trustful multitudes, and it might be his last hurrah. So late, so close, so stupid, so much to lose. Rudd is too clean, too suburban, too like an ad for Pelaco shirts in Women’s Weekly in 1958. He has no fire in his nostrils, meat on his bones.

After a few spare words of comfort and unbelief to Jim and Tim and Tim in Kim’s office I drove to Sydney. I rang Bruce Hawker on the way and asked if he was supporting Rudd and he said he was. ‘The punters have stopped listening to Kim, and it’s a pity,’ he assessed, ‘but it’s incurable.’

‘He doesn’t deserve this.’

‘Deserve’s got nothing to do with it, as Clint Eastwood winningly said in the movie. It’s the way things are.’

‘Will Rudd make it?’

‘I dunno. It’s close.’

Or words to that effect. I stopped at the Paragon for a charred steak and an adequate VB. The people have stopped listening to him, my son Tom had also been lately saying. He’d passed, perhaps, at fifty-eight that shadow-line of sexual confidence and moral energy that winners radiate. He’d lost weight, like a fool, and seemed nervous and flabby. He’d had his teeth capped and the dirty, gold-tooth smile – so appealing in its humility and self-mockery, in the jovial share-misery quality it added to his bigness, his meatiness, his wide shoulders and close-up confidential eloquence – had gone.

And of course he’d confessed, like a fool, to his harmless, irrelevant brain-leaking disease and everyone now suspected him of losing his mind. In June he’d mixed up McFarlane the Minister and McFarlane the banker. Two weeks ago in obedience to the woo-the-philistines policy of his younger staffers he commiserated with Rove McManus who’d lost his young wife but called him ‘Karl Rove’ – because, I guess, George Bush’s electoral puppeteer Karl Rove had in the mid-term elections lately lost his mandate and magic and many, many Republican seats.

These are the things that at fifty-eight you tend to begin to do. But they were enough, and Arbib pounced. He’s losing it, Arbib said. Labor’s on 54 but he has to go.

Sunday, 3rd December, 2006, 10.30 a.m.

‘What are the pros and cons of change?’ Michelle Grattan wrote yesterday in The Age.

‘Much of the argument being mounted in favour comes, obviously, from a desperate feeling that Labor can’t win. It is possible (but not inevitable) that it can’t win with either Beazley or Rudd – that Howard’s skills, a strong economy and the power of incumbency make victory a bridge too far. If this is the case, the question becomes: would Beazley or Rudd make up more ground?

‘The worst thing Labor could do is change to Rudd and have Labor go backwards, as happened in 2004, or make no net gains. That would burn the party and also burn someone who should, at some stage, have a bright leadership future.

‘Rudd and Gillard would have the attraction of fresh faces, a Christmas honeymoon, a flurry of publicity. People would be curious about how Rudd, who has not had a domestic portfolio, would handle areas other than foreign affairs. Gillard is lively, accessible talent.

‘But voters are a different kettle of fish from the media. They might find Beazley lacking but that doesn’t mean they’d entrust the country to those they felt they didn’t know sufficiently, especially when it is easy enough to stick with Howard.’

It doesn’t look too good. Gillard and Rudd appeared jointly on Meet the Press this morning looking like Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby – not exactly a couple but adequate members of a weekend fling. They wouldn’t be doing this if they didn’t have the numbers. Rudd wouldn’t be moving if they didn’t have the numbers. He just wouldn’t. He’s too careful. Jenny Macklin was good and loyal on Insiders, arguing Kim’s experience, but I think it’s too late.

I should go down to Canberra tomorrow but I don’t want to. So much was lost when Robert McClelland emerged from the shower and changed his vote from Beazley to Latham to avert the spectacle of an abashed and blushful Labor Party narrowly choosing Beazley, as they would have, on a re-vote. For Beazley, aged then fifty-five, would have beaten Howard in 2004, like almost anybody. Latham, the addled bruiser, the womanising bully, the medicated, foul-mouthed breaker of an uppity cab-driver’s arm was bound to lose where no-one else was.. And so it goes that the best lack confidence (Beazley, Gore, Kerry) and the worst are full of passionate intensity (Bush, Latham, Blair, Howard) and prevail. Gillard organised the numbers for hLatham and I will not forgive her.

Monday, 4th December, 2006, 5 p.m.

Kim lost 49 to 39 and arrived in the press conference room looking officerly and stoic. As he tends to do in hours of defeat he gave a fine speech and during it seemed, as he always does, like the best Australian Prime Minister we never had.

‘This is my last press conference as leader of the Labor Party, I suppose,’ he said. ‘My commission is terminated; and caucus, as you know, decided to change leadership to Kevin Rudd.

‘I said to the caucus today that the Labor Party needed to get in behind Kevin Rudd and give him the best chance he possibly can of becoming the next prime minister of this country. Kevin is a very able man, a very intelligent man, with a very wide base of knowledge and an absolute determination to do the right thing for the Australian people. He will be a very good leader of the Australian Labor Party. He will take us to victory at the next election.

‘I wanted to stay and finish the job, but that was not to be. We will win the next election. The public mood has changed. The public has come to understand that John Howard is no longer on their side. There is major product differentiation now in policy between the Australian Labor Party and our political opponents.

‘I take some pride in that. In my many years too long in Opposition, there has never been such a clear-cut division between the parties, and it’s never been so clear that the Australian Labor Party is on the side of middle Australia . . .

‘I want to thank my caucus colleagues. I’ve been in the caucus a long time and I’ve always enjoyed the company of my caucus friends. They are a very good bunch and they deserve the opportunities that government will bring. I want to thank the party organisation too. They are an effective party organisation, as evidenced by the fact that we govern in every state.

‘Finally I thank Susie and my family. Family is everything.’

Family is everything. Here he paused, and tears came. He had heard just a few minutes before that his mentally disabled brother David had died round sunrise this morning. The news was kept from him by his parents, his sister, his wife, his daughters until the vote was taken, a vote they knew he’d win.

Asked if he’d stay on he said, ‘For me to do anything further in the Australian Labor Party, I would say would be Lazarus with a quadruple bypass. And so the time has come for me to move on. I think the time has come for the Labor party, having made a decisive decision to turn to a new generation, to turn to a new generation. And I have no part in that.’

‘Have you any regrets?’

‘Regrets? After twenty-five years in politics? I’d go for twenty-five years in politics without a single regret? Only about four thousand three hundred and thirty-two of them!’

Jenny Macklin, it turned out, could have stayed on as Deputy but chose not to stand. Asked about this, he said: ‘I want to say about Jenny, you could not want a more loyal deputy. She has been an absolute tower of strength for me; a very small tower, but nevertheless a very solid tower of strength for me.’

Soon he was on a plane, flying through five hours of turbulence, calm, remorse and remembrance to the corpse of the brother who adored him and the steel-blue gaze of the father, the impatient demanding father who disdained him, who thought him a blundering incompetent and a waste; the longest pilgrimage , the longest Trail of Tears he could imagine journeying down. No-one deserves luck as bad as this, I thought. No-one.

I sent Rudd a text message saying, roughly, Congratulations I suppose you will do well but I beg you offer Kim defence or there may be another dead Beazley before year’s end. I got a prompt answer, Thanks Bob. K., its frigidity somehow unmistakeable.

There will be a time to mourn for Beazley, I suppose, a man of Churchillian dimension and Shakespearian misfortune, and time to wonder how and why those wrinkle-free cardboard cut-outs Rudd and Gillard, as free of significant feature as the cartoon figures in South Park, have surfed the wave of destiny and not he. Rudd would have lost his seat had Kim not campaigned so valiantly and well in 2001; up against a world war and a media that kept him on page 17 till election day he nonetheless got Labor’s vote up from 40 to 49, winning the Debate and all the days he had to work with, including the day of the sinking of the SIEV-X; and so Kevin survived, survived to challenge and replace him.

I still can’t get my head around it.

At nine I rang Shorten and I said, ‘If he’d done as you said and not brought on the vote, the news of his brother’s death would have come through this morning and they wouldn’t have dared bring it on today, in this, the hour of his grief.’

‘Probably,’ Shorten said. ‘But they would have in February. They were determined, mate. And they had the numbers.’

‘How do you feel?’

‘Mate: we are where we are.’

I heard the phrase and rolled it over in my mind. It defined him somehow.

‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

‘He’s the leader. He stays the leader. It’s how we do things. It’s called the Labor Party. We do the process. We stand by the outcome. We fight the election. We probably win. We probably win now.’

‘And not before?’

‘And probably not before.’

Wednesday, 20th December, 2008, 2.30 a.m.

To my Chifley play A Local Man with Bob Hawke and Blanche, and a hug, some tears and red wines in the Ensemble foyer afterwards. Both were surprised by Chif’s desolate childhood, as Gough had been two days before. I mentioned the coincidence that Kim Beazley had been in the Kurrajong, a few doors down the hall on the night Chif died, being baby-sat with his sister Merrilyn by Mrs Calwell. Bob said, ‘Is that a fact?’ and shook his head.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I thought it was too good to be true.’

‘It’s been a tragedy, an absolute tragedy for Kim. He was like a son to me.’ Bob shook his head and looked thoughtful.

‘Were you surprised by what happened?’

‘No, no. Disappointed. Upset. Not surprised. I can see what they were thinking. As in my case. There’s nothing you can do when it happens. You can yield to bitterness or you can get on with your life.’

‘Will Rudd do well, do you think?’

‘I think he might. The ladies like him.’ He looked at me with sardonic alertness. ‘And that’s a plus. And the Christians of the western suburbs always have. And he’s got a rich wife at his back, with millions, millions she made on her own. And if you’ve got that, you’ve got . . . a big advantage. You’ve got . . . freedom, permission to pursue your . . . political career in the way you can’t if you’re the breadwinner. You can travel, entertain, make contacts. Achieve a circle of confederates. And so prevail.’

Or words to that effect. I’ve been amazed by Bob’s generosity and forgiveness (he wrote, for instance, a plug for the play) after what I said about him in Goodbye Jerusalem. ‘Life’s too short,’ he said, ‘for grudges.’ I fear Kim won’t accept his fate as gracefully. I fear it will simmer, and rankle, and it may do for him.

To have come so close. And to have been, as it turns out, one more victim, however distant, of Karl Rove. Bob hugged Tony Barry and wept a bit and then went with Blanche to their car. Being Prime Minister has its hardships, I reflected, but being an ex-Prime Minister is tougher. Keating, depressive and resisting all comfort, grieving for Annita, insulted, insulted by Howard’s persistent smug victories, is in a bad way I hear. Whitlam is fine, bobbing up at many first nights emitting zingers and flying all over the country to attend significant funerals. Fraser too in his way, a kind of hovering conscience these days, an eight-foot Jiminy Cricket on the shoulder of the Liberal Party.

But I do fear for Kim. We will all of us always owe him everything, as Godard said of Orson Welles, because he saved the party from splitting, from disintegrating, from fucking itself altogether. In a year when there were eight Liberal governments and Labor held power by only one seat in New South Wales he kept the party together, he kept the show on the road, and within thirty months he won more votes than Howard, half a million more votes than Howard, in the great comeback of 1998. And he counts himself a failure, an anticlimax, a dud, and, agreeing with his fierce unforgiving old father, a waste of genes.

I’ll send him a Christmas card, our great lost leader, but he’ll never believe it.

A mudslide in Enniskillen uncovered last night an unsuspected archive dating from St Columba’s time which revealed more Gaelic, Saxon and Icelandic gerunds and rare nouns on faded parchments dedicated to ribald gossip from Arthurian, Plantagenet, and even post-Tudor eras.

Among these were ‘crabb’, a pubic irritant of the mighty which in the time of Henry VIII the Master of the King’s Stool would on Queen Katharine’s orders add to the monarch’s nether bristles during his morning anal ablutions in order to infect, some say, his mistress Anne Boleyn with what became known as ‘the annabel’, a pustulant sore which Wolsey held to be God’s wrath on beautiful, adulterous red-headed women; ‘shanahan’, a tedious, bumbling lackey of low peasant origins keen and able to say over and over what his master had said the day before as if it were his own opinion, the term becoming synonymous in King John’s time with ‘unwelcome grovelling social climber at the Hunt, forever falling off his horse’; similarly, ‘muldoon’,  a sort of hectic stowaway, ofttimes clutching the king’s stirrup and dragged thus willy-nilly on his journeys; ‘akerman’, a venemous toad-like swamp creature distinguished by the ugliness of its nocturnal mutterings, a term that in Queen Anne’s time became slang for ‘ugly Dutchman wanting sex at inconvenient hours’; ‘savva’, a pretense of being informed or ‘in the know’ among elderly chambermaids reputed to have serviced a monarch forty years before on two occasions; or, in pre-Norman times, the smug and lofty demeanour of one who affects to have mastered Latin and Greek and can barely get by in pidgin; and ‘salusinski’, in the original Polish, one addicted to salacious fabrication who hopes to rise in the king’s court by describing the bed-tricks of the king’s mistress to his queen and is thereafter amazed to find himself with his own testicles in his mouth awaiting the fall of the headsman’s axe; or, in the underworld slang of medieval Gdansk, a sexually boastful eunuch, a drunkard who preaches against strong drink, a Pope with a love-child, a railer against brothels with a gold pass to twins on Thursday night, a thundering hypocrite, in short, often underpaid for his turbulent midnight iniquities.

Further discoveries will be posted as the surviving sodden manuscripts are dried out and decrypted. The difficult Old Gaelic word ‘cassidy’, which may or may not mean ‘impressive rock-like false oracle with chin of clay’ is undergoing further study.

Habit is a powerful thing. It has for nearly all of us the force of principle, for some of us the force of religion. Because of it, the Press Gallery continues to behave as if Tony Abbott will form a government soon, or, at the worst, by November 30th next year.

But Abbott cannot now win, or survive till Budget Night as the Coalition’s leader. When he said he ‘couldn’t guarantee’ surpluses in his first term he ensured this. And the Press Gallery, as always, is furlongs behind what is actually happening. As they were when I said Abbott by two votes, one disputed, and they said Hockey by twenty.

Because on Budget Night Wayne Swan will announce a surplus. This will show that Hockey and Abbott either cannot add, or cannot get through the Upper House a series of numbers that make any human sense. Swan’s numbers will be voted down in the Senate, of course, and no surplus will be posted, but he will have shown he can do numbers Abbott flinches from.

At the time of writing Labor according to Nielsen would score 47 percent two-party preferred; a meaningless figure since nine parties now sit in the House, and the nine-party preferred figure has never been posted or even, I think, imagined.

But it is fair to say that if Gillard were gone and Labor under a different chieftain that figure would rise to 50. Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, Queenslanders, pregnant women, possessive husbands, teachers, unionists, homosexuals and pro-refugee Green-leaners would come back to Labor under any other leader and this amassing of new Labor votes Tony Abbott could not, I think, turn round.

This leaves Abbott losing anyway. But if another Prime Minister said forcibly that the Abbott-Hockey-Robb team cannot add, and said why, the Labor-leaning vote would go up to 52, and landslide back in. And these are the current probabilities. Labor cannot now lose if Abbott is the alternative.

If Turnbull were, it would be a contest. If Costello were brought back he might secure them government.

This is not too hard to imagine. Robb might stand down for him, pleading depression. Kevin Andrews could be booted out, and promised Washington. Or Nelson, or Greiner, or Peter Collins, or Hewson, could replace Bronwyn Bishop in Mackellar and be made by acclamation Opposition Leader. He might face Beazley, brought back from Washington, as the sitting Prime Minister. Or Bob Carr, or Peter Beattie, or Geoff Gallop, or John Faulkner, slotted into Garrett’s, Melham’s, or Rob McLelland’s vacated Sydney seat, and have a fight on his hands.

These are fluid times. But the one certain thing is that Abbott cannot now win, and the Liberal Party habit of sacking as leader a one-time loser will again reassert itself (it has the force of religion), and he will be gone by May Day.

Discuss.

(From And So It Went)

Monday, 11th February, 2008, 10.10 a.m.

Joe Ramos Horta has been shot and may be dying.

12.05 p.m.

It turns out he was on his morning jog, and insurgents shot their way into his ill-guarded residence when he wasn’t there. An Australian fellow-jogger, hearing the shots, offered to get his car and give Joe a lift to safety but he said, ‘No, it’ll be all right’ and jogged into a hail of bullets. Two went into his chest and one, by the sound of it, his arse. He lay on the ground making phone calls but no-one came to help him for, perhaps, twenty-five minutes and he lost sixty percent of his blood. UN troops a few hundred yards away dared not assist him. Finally an ambulance came.

3.20 p.m.

Mike Rann rang in some distress, since he, I and Joe were supposed to be carousing together in Adelaide soon at the Festival. He asked for some words he might say and I wrote the following:

Among Nobel Peace Prize winners only Martin Luther King, Yasr Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin have thus far attracted assassins, but peace is always a risky business, and Jose Ramos Horta, Nobel Peace Laureate, has been for thirty-two years on that pilgrimage, patiently, assiduously, delicately, shrewdly, for the long, long years of the Indonesian conquest and occupation when it seemed that hope was gone, in second-class airline seats and cheap motels and punishing jet-lag and uninfluential gatherings, persistent in his wearying quest for freedom, democracy, independence and at least the hope of prosperity in his native land.

Two brothers and a sister died in that same pursuit, and his mother often begged him to give it up, but he had by then no other choice, no other spiritual nourishment but this arduous road to national justice, this patriotic imperative, this unstaunched vision, this audacity of hope, that no selfish reasoning, no lingering thought of a quiet life could diminish or deny.

He is a man I know and admire and, yes, love. And today, as he hovers between life and death in an Australian hospital in a town agog with murmurs of civil war, the stricken leader of a nation, and a resurrected culture, and a way of local thinking that he in no small measure helped create, I extend to him, if he can hear these words, my esteem and my government’s anguished prayers for his recovery, and our thanks for his magnificent life on earth.

It is the best of those who strive for the good, it seems, who are thus cut down in the moment, the very moment, when they are most needed, and I hope, I pray, that this great, good man will soon come back to us in the health and strength and wit and jollity I remember, and if not this week, as was planned, and if not this month, and if not this year, I and he and his Adelaide friends will meet and carouse and share jokes and furious opinions and at evening’s end say thank you, thank you, Joe; we imagine the world without you as a cruel and desolate place. Jose Ramos Horta, President, laureate, hero, cunning politician and roistering companion, good luck, be well, and note if you can our unending gratitude that you were here, and we knew you.

Mike’s son David was working with Joe till a fortnight ago but came home for Christmas. He could have been under fire beside him. And so it goes.

Friday, 15th February, 2008, 3.10 pm

We drove back to Goulburn and the same motel, woke at 5.30 a.m., ate a McCafe breakfast and made our way to Sydney. Joe after long delays was flown to Darwin, operated on and put into an ‘induced coma’ from which at one point he woke and shouted ‘Don’t shoot me! Don’t shoot me!’ He may die, or recover. They’re not sure.

Joe is, was, a tremendous womaniser, Rich married women go to his hotel room at inconvenient hours in surprising numbers. The attraction, Mike Rann thinks, is his voice — that calm deep crumble-bar-brown monotone that women go towards like moths to a candle flame or iron filings to a magnet. ‘Men fall in love through the eye, women through the ear,’ Mike said, slyly deepening his own voice as he said it.

Whatever its incidental clitoral effect it is one of the better voices in world history. Not as good as Robeson’s, better than Martin Luther King’s, FDR’s, Churchill’s, Reagan’s, its deep, rough-stubbled organ tones emit a godlike tranquillity and confidence that most politicians would kill for, even Bob Carr, who agrees it’s the best on earth. When people die, it strikes me as most amazing that I won’t hear their voices again. Joe’s, whose hand I shook once in the State Theatre foyer, had a voice you would think outlives death, hovers in the cosmos waiting for a fresh earthly larynx to nest in. Pray God it will not be absent long.

Rick Santorum’s triple win last night and his reconfigured new eminence as a Presidential possibility (he wants, poor man, a constitutional amendment forbidding gay marriage and another compelling raped pregnant girls to bear and suckle the ill-gotten babies of even underage incest) brought to my mind the contentious definition of ‘santorum’ which two Pasadena-based Latin scholars lately uncovered in old sodden manuscripts in a Florence priory: ‘a loathesome aggregation of expended fluids and fecal matter in the anuses of male homosexuals’. My team’s further exhumations of the meanings in Old English, Gaelic and Norse of other lost lamented words like ‘plibersek’, ‘heffernan’, ‘albanese’, ‘abetz’, ‘pyne’, ‘tuckey’, ‘beazley’, ‘keating’ and so on, have been published as The Santorum Variations (1) and (2) in these pages.

Since then, my researchers have not been idle; and I hereby offer this exclusive readership some further intriguing verbal relics of an ancient and simpler time. This include ‘hartcher’ a sneeze; also, in some Lincolnshire dialects the legendary stupid bowman ejected from the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest for aiming at a deer and twice hitting Little John in the eye, and in the early thirteenth century a synonym for ‘missing the mark every time’, as on a disastrous wedding night, or breaking wind inadvertently when bowing to a monarch; ‘grattan’, a large and rugged woman-shaped mountain for centuries on the brink of ruinous avalanche but somehow, though monstrously disfigured, still standing, with a gaggle of plaintive ravens in a dead tree at its top; ‘dempster’, a wooden wheeled corpse-collecting vehicle pulled by a pale, unageing leper with a bell; ‘uhlmann’, a wintry vigilant presence visible after midnight in a dead fireplace, an unsleeping reminder of unadmitted sins; ‘coorey’, a crow-like harbinger of doom, found sitting on the teapot on the morning of a significant death or suicide; ‘albrechtsen’, an avalanche of frozen faeces that in the seventh century wiped out an alpine village — set off, some surviving aldermen believed, by the echoes of a nasty gossiping woman, the faeces derived from a section of hillside used as a mammoth-toilet in early Cro-magnon times; a secondary meaning, ‘bad news brought by an evil woman’, is perhaps related to this event; ‘speers’, a two-headed tapeworm lured from the anus of a retreating giant by the smell of fresh horse meat in a time of unusual famine; a secondary meaning, unwanted passenger on the third horse of the Apocalypse in the time of Last Things, may be unrelated linguistically to the first; ‘murdoch’, a poisonous weed whose delicious taste and widespread wind-borne prevalence caused many a hungry Highlander to die dry-heaving to bagpipe music in the time of Robert the Bruce; and ‘gittins’, a large marauding murderous nocturnal feline able to seem in daylight a harmless, purring, domesticated cat.

Further discoveries will be posted as they come in. A seminar discussion in the Opera House between myself, Bob Carr, Tim Flannery and Bronwyn Bishop, and five new featured songs by Enya, is already selling out.

‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ Hodge, the oyster-eating cat, might have said to his owner Dr Johnson in some alcoholic stupour chronicled by Boswell in the Great Cham’s last sick babbling stertorous year. It describes well the Prime Minister’s eloquent apologia to Parliament yesterday for her unfair dismissal of the bearded, pale young man whom history now knows as Hodges the Manuka Martyr.

‘I accepted his resignation,’ she declared in a performance judged by many to resemble that of Gloriana at the Tilbury Docks, ‘because I viewed his conduct as making a grave error of judgment, particularly seeking to introduce a note of partisanship into what should be a bipartisan  day. That was inappropriate conduct and, as a result, I accepted his resignation. If my standards are too high for the opposition, well, so be it.’

Her words were impactful, the ‘so be it’ emphatically so, and her body language heroic, and no observer would have doubted that she had won the hour, and perhaps the day. It was strange, though, to see her obediently overturning, along prescribed Rupert Murdoch lines, the known rules of the universe.

For if Australia Day is not a day for partisan argument, why then do all politicians who speak at it — and none do not — use it to emphasise the success of our multiculture, our Apology, our living standards, our heroic athletes, our Anzacs, our basic wage, our pension plans, our peacekeepers, our image in the world? Are these assertions not political? What else are they? Why do many Aborigines protest at it, calling it, correctly, Invasion Day? Should those Aborigines, too, be punished for this, for ‘playing politics’ with it, like the Blessed Anthony Hodges? Why not?

Poor Hodges will not now I imagine recall the moment when the Prime Minister first told him he must assist her politically at all times but not, of course, on Australia Day, a day on which he must not even come to work; but it will I suppose under waterboarding come back to him. Nor will he recall being told that he must not quote what the Opposition Leader says on an Australia Day, nor helpfully reveal where he is. He will not now remember these ludicrous commandments, but his memory will be jogged, I guess, by retrospective remorse and recreational chemicals in his thirties and forties.

The worst of it is the Rove Rules have again prevailed. If your foe says you have done something wrong, and he is correct, say no, it is he who is the wrongdoer, and call for his arrest and imprisonment. Thus Bush, a draft dodger, said Kerry, a war hero, was not a war hero but a war criminal, and shifted the emphasis from his own inescapable cowardice to the hitherto unexplored evil in Kerry’s heart.

In this case, Abbott breached the Race Relations Act by telling the First Australians to ‘move on’; presumably to some other country, like boat people. Certain elderly Aborigines already accustomed to this sort of prejudice and angry at it still, came after him. He then responded not by denying what he had said, he knew what he had said, but calling it criminal that someone had reported what he had said. That person, he asserted, should be punished, and the horse he rode in on.

And the Prime Minister fell for it, hook, line and sinker. One must not play politics with the Aboriginal question, she cravenly concurred; adding that one must not play politics with the unemployment of car-workers also. Soon there will be no subject of which a politician can speak. That would be ‘playing politics.’ Politicians must never do what they are paid for, play politics. That is the new Murdoch rule. Do not say anything political if you are a politician, lest Dennis Shanahan frown upon your impertinence.

I will continue to list the Murdoch Tricks as they come to me. One is to use the phrase ‘lashed out’ not ‘said’ when one is quoting one’s adversaries. We do not hear it said ‘the Governor-General lashed out’ or ‘James Murdoch lashed out’ or ‘Dame Elisabeth Murdoch in her 103rd birthday speech lashed out against the current plague of cross-bred blue geraniums.’

And thus we did not hear it said that Tony Abbott ‘lashed out’ against the continued presence of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on Old Parliament lawn, or that he ‘spat the dummy’ on surpluses yesterday.  Murdoch’s side never lashes out, or spits dummies. That is what the bad guys do. And the bad guys criminally say where a Leader of the Opposition is, or, more shockingly, ask ‘do you know who I am’ of a Liberal-voting Woy Woy waiter. For these heinous high crimes and misdemeanours they must now lose their chance in life. For they are the bad guys, and can do no right.

And the Prime Minister fell for this hokum, this new Murdoch rule of capital punishment for everything, hook, line and sinker. Instead of asking if Tony Abbott should have been charged under the Race Relations Act and gaoled for a statutory month, like Hinch, for beseeching the First Australians to pack up their tent and walk into the sea, instead of calling him an ‘inciter of race hatred’, she in effect apologised to him for having quoted him accurately.

And sacrificed young Hodges, the subject of these chronicles, for merely doing his job.

Curiouser and curiouser.

And so it goes.

(An extract from The Year It All Fell Down, co-written with Damian Spruce and Stephen Ramsey)

On Tuesday, February 14, Mardian El Ibrahimy flew for ten hours from Christmas Island to Sydney, on the same plane as the frozen corpse of his eight-month-old daughter Zahra. She, his wife Zmar and his son Nzar, had drowned when a boat sank and was filmed enormously heaving and lurching and splitting and passengers falling off it, near rocks in tumultuous seas and furious weather off the island on December 23. Zmar and Nzar had not been found and Zahra, he had been lately told, would not now get a proper Muslim funeral — a simple white cloth over a known, beloved and farewelled face on a stretcher unenclosed by a coffin, and open to the sky. ‘He’s very bad, very bad, very upset, very angry,’ said his brother Uday, who lived in Strathfield. ‘They’re two months in the fridge.’

They needed not just to see the body, Jemiah Daoud of the Social Justice Network explained, ‘but to wash the body, clean the body, dress the body and say goodbye to the body.’ The surviving families feared the bodies could have been interfered with, or suffered ugly decay and this was, literally, a cover-up.

After the tragedy, one witnessed by millions in epic, shocking detail within an hour of the event (a man in the water holding up an infant, calling out, in English, ‘baby dying!’ and then both disappearing), Prime Minister Gillard gave a memorial speech in which she named none of the dead, and none of the surviving bereaved, and extended her condolences only to those Australians who had watched the shipwreck through telescopes, binoculars and phone cameras, and felt guilty about not having been able to help in the ten or twenty minutes it had been possible to make, perhaps, a difference. She made no particular mention of any of the dead, the widowed, the orphaned, the traumatised, bankrupted and bereaved, and then herded them into a crowded funeral unsuited, and insulting, to their religion.

To this funeral came Sinan Acklacky, a nine-year-old Iranian, to bury his father but not his mother and brother, whose bodies had not emerged from the sea, though he waited for them every day on a hill overlooking it for six weeks. Very upset by the graveside, he kept saying, ‘I just want to be with my father, I just want to be with my father,’ and trying to throw himself into the grave. His many relatives in Sydney asked that he be allowed to stay with them but this was denied him, and he was dragged away from the grave, given ten minutes with his newfound kinfolk, ordered onto a bus and into a detention centre where he slept, or did not sleep, alone, then encouraged with a cattle prod (a detail some found hard to believe but seems to be true) onto another bus, and an aeroplane which was delayed for thirty-six hours in Broome, in whose airport lounge he slept, or did not sleep, and back to Christmas Island, the last place he wanted to be. There he sat on the same hill waiting for his mother and his brother to come back out of the ocean alive, resolute and unblinking, as before.

The Shadow Minister for Immigration Scott Morrison said the government should not have wasted the taxpayers’ money on the air fares of the refugees to the far-flung funerals of the dead. ‘Any other Australian,’ he said, ‘who wanted to attend a funeral for someone who’d died in tragic circumstances, would have put their hand in their own pocket.’ This was thought a bit much by many Australians and also by his Leader Tony Abbott who, however, praised him for ‘having the guts’ to reveal his true if heartless opinion, and cop criticism for it.

After eight days of public outcry the visibly contorted Immigration Minister Chris Bowen relented, and Sinan was again removed from Christmas Island and flown ten hours to Sydney and made to stay with an auntie, his drowned mother’s sister, who was herself so traumatised by family loss she was frequently hospitalised and medicated and was said to be ‘incapable of looking after him.’

The Prime Minister Julia Gillard then declared that no more children would be so endangered by wild oceans, and their parents would be ‘deterred’ from risking the journey by the threat of lifelong imprisonment in Malaysia, a non-signatory of the Human Rights Convention, if they tried it.

As after the Queensland floods, this coolness in the face of human suffering eroded her vote and she tumbled down into trouble from which, at year’s end, it was thought she would not emerge.

Gerard says thirty-eight people have been accused of terrorist-related offences in Australia (in, presumably, two hundred and twenty-three years), thirty-seven of them Australian born, and twenty of them were Lebanese Muslims, and this is worth writing about for some reason, in his column yesterday.

He doesn’t mention how low the overall figure is. Lower, for instance, by a factor of eight hundred percent than the number of priests who have terrorised children — the verb I think is the right one — with sexual demands and threats of hell, and were of Irish descent and born here, since 1900; lower than the number of Australian citizens dead by red-back spider bite since 1900; lower than the number of infants drowned in backyard swimming pools since, well, 1960; lower than the number of drunk-driving-related deaths since last Christmas Eve.

But what he says is much, much sillier than even that. Because no death, in fact, no death at all, from a terrorist incident has occurred on Australian soil ever; or not since the tiny submarines attacked Sydney and Newcastle in 1942, the year of my birth; or not unless you count the couple of hundred bikie murders in their various wars since 1950; they too I suppose could be called terrorists; hard to see why not. And it’s hard as well to see now I come to think of it why any established religion — like Gerard’s — that promises hellfire is not a terrorist organisation, either. There have been a good few deaths by suicide caused by Gerard’s terrorist bunch, the priests, which his ASIO friends might look into, if they have the time. And lots and lots of ruined lives.

But no, no, no, that’s not what Gerard meant at all. He meant swarthy people of the Muslim persuasion, all twenty of them, are or have been or will be a monstrous danger to our society in a way that pederast priests are not. They do, or can do, more harm, Gerard says. In two hundred and twenty-three years we’ve arrested twenty of them, at a rate of one every eleven years, and their number is clearly growing hourly, and this is worth a lecture at The Sydney Institute, and a column in the smh; whose sales numbers go down each time he brings it up, I hear.

And it’s because Gerard is a part of the Right, and the Right never make anything, never build anything, never imagine anything large and generous and useful, oppose all big good works like the Opera House and the ABC and Medibank and the Shooting Gallery, they only have bogeymen, and their plans to flush out and punish bogeymen, to talk about instead of policy, as Gerard does here. Twenty Lebanese Muslim terrorists, a smaller number than the average bikie gang, menacing our entire society. More dangerous than anything. More dangerous than drunk-driving. More dangerous than tobacco sold to children. More dangerous than smack or Ice or Ecstasy. More dangerous than problem gambling,

It used to be Communist spies in Evatt’s office, and, yes, there was one: a man I know called Fergan who was never imprisoned for anything. For a while it was a swarthy man with four billion dollars to buy back Australia’s mineral wealth, called Khemlani; we stopped him just in time; what a disaster that would have been if he had succeeded in getting all our mineral wealth back to us, the people. Whew. Now it’s Muslim terrorists. We bomb a whole country to smithereens to flush them out, and then we find it’s the wrong country. What a good idea that was. We kill children by mistake in search of them, and call this ‘acting appropriately in difficult circumstances’; killing children, that is; acting appropriately, that is. Acting appropriately. Kiling children. What a good idea that is.

And it’s nothing to do with a real danger. We are much more endangered by floods, melanoma, Qantas. It’s about giving a facade of policy, and foreign policy, to greedy bastards who only want to make more and more money they don’t want to give to health care, or better schools, or a National Theatre. They’d rather have whole wars on a whisper that someone or other might be hiding somewhere or other, thinking bad thoughts.

Or wars on Sydney Muslims who might or might not have once called one of our wars a big mistake.

In such wars Gerard, who is always wrong, will be in there fighting eloquently, and he does write well. Terrorists. Terrorists. Suss them out. Flush them out. Kill them before they kill … before they kill … as many innocent Australians as the red-back spider has. In the next two hundred years. It’s urgent. Urgent. Flush them out.

Poor old Gerard. Sad, sad, sad.

I invite him to respond.

Bewail the fate of Gillard, J.,
Who looked a prat on Australia Day,
Nose down, bum up, dragged by headshaven hoons,
Pursued by blacks, or octoroons,

On the first day, it seemed, of the Aboriginal Spring –
When freedom called, and hope took wing –
To a getaway car she shared with Tony.
They chuckled, and mocked the surrounding baloney,

They cuddled, they flirted, they had a nice ride,
They talked of old times, they held hands and sighed
As they parted; and then, oh shit, young Hodges,
Auteur of the backroom’s dirtier dodges,

‘Fessed up, named names, and copped the sack,
Took his cardboard box with him, and never came back,
Having sobbed of how he had set up Tony,
A worse man, he’d sworn, than Berlusconi,

Who wanted to banish the first Australians
As we would Afghans, or other aliens.
Those lesser breeds without the Law
He would treat like dirt, he would give what for,

Thus fomenting affray, nay, revolution,
And Hansonite cries of the Final Solution.
And all this was said, with no here’s-the-rubs,
Of a man who’d feasted on witchetty grubs.

And the sun came down on Australia Day.
She looked for comforts, and where were they?
Across the world headlines, dragged by the nose,
Marie Antoinette in her final pose,

She was gone for all money, and suddenly too.
The tumbrils had gathered, helas, adieu.
The old knitting women were counting the thunks,
The ancien regime were queued up in blue funks,

And her turn was coming. Her hair roots grew pale.
She looked in the mirror. More lipstick. Wassail.

The Fatah-Hamas unity government of Greater Palestine and the undaunted murder each day of heroes in Syria has put America in diplomatic difficulties which the closet pro-Palestinian Barack Obama will not be enjoying, much, in the next few days, I think.

For while his diplomats rail against Russia and China for their green-lighting of the ongoing Assad massacres of protestors — freedom-fighters, we used to call them — he has been green-lighting the Netanyahu ‘incursions’ into Gaza in which, over time, more ‘innocents’ have died, probably, than in Syria in twenty years.

Assad, like Netanyahu, will no doubt assert it is all about noise: if protestors keep us awake, like the impotent, irritant rocket-firers of Gaza (less lethal, mostly, than stone-throwers), why, then, we have the right to mow them down with helicopter-gunships, don’t we, and shoot up their funerals the day after, don’t we, in defence of our sleep? In defence of the sleeping-patterns if the housewives of Ashkelon? And north-west Teheran?

And Obama, who hates Netanyahu these days more than even the jelly-back Boehner, has to grit his teeth and support the one, and curse the other, for shooting freedom-fighters out of hand. Israel murders children in self-defence, he has to say, and Assad murders demonstrators to prop up a tyranny. And there’s a difference. There really is a difference. The children deserve it. The demonstrators do not.

What must irritate him most is that his present reputation as an ineffective first-term President and a diplomatic Paper Tiger dates from those dread dog days before his Inauguration when a full-scale Gaza War was launched by Olmert and Livni to test him in the interim before he had official power to respond to events with enormous armies at his back.

If, instead of doing what he did, which was say he wasn’t President yet and Bush, poor man, had to deal with it, not him, he had simply and confidently asserted, ‘No, I am not President yet, and I won’t be for a fortnight, but I have an opinion on this question presently, I really do, and my sincere advice to Israel is this: Go home; go home now, leave within five hours, go now, do not pass go, go now’ — and if they had done so — he would have loomed as large in world affairs thereafter as he did as candidate for President (in Berlin, in Cairo), and he would as President have carried all, including most of his domestic agenda, before him.

Cringing before Israel, as he did then, and as all Presidents but Carter have been made to do, in the fortnight before his presidency, did for him as a mighty force in the world. It’s a primacy in the Great Game the US will not now recover, not now, not ever. And, in his case, it’s a pity. He’s the best diplomatic thinker of our time, and the best orator (which means the best emotional thinker) of all time. And it’s a pity.

And it’s to be wondered, after this, how long the veto power of the US, the UK, France, Russia and China over UN resolutions of belligerent substance will now continue, and the inevitable big bust-up of the whole shebang be delayed. The dead are being counted in Syria and Tibet as they never were in the Palestinian Territories, and the idea that the KGB tyrant Putin, a fiercer foe of free speech than Assad, will ever vote responsibly on matters of self-determination (after what he did to the Chechnyans) is to be morbidly and gloomily doubted. That UN veto has been the sole guarantee of tyranny in the world these last sixty-seven years. Without it we’d have a planet-wide equivalent of the EU.

And it’s a pity.

As I said, the Newspoll was taken on a holiday weekend and the Labor vote therefore falsely reduced by three or four percent because the younger Labor voters were out of the house, which the Nielsen, taken on a normal weekend, shows.

Yet Nielsen still keeps up the fiction that a Gillard versus Rudd poll is useful when all it does is allow Liberal voters to say which Labor leader they most want to lose an election. The only polls that make any sense are Rudd versus Abbott, Gillard versus Abbott, Shorten versus Abbott, Smith versus Abbott, Beazley versus Abbott, and so on. They would show, I think, in order, 50-50. 49-51, 53-47, 51.5-48.5 and 54.5-45.5. They are as easy to take as any other poll, and it would be surprising that there have been none taken except for the fact that the polling company CEOs choose not to take them.

Why, when polling, have a CEO at all? Can no-one else count? Why do polling companies need CEOs? Why are they paid so much? What do they do? Why, especially have a Newspoll CEO? Only to tweak the figures, is my guess; or to say, in this case, which figures to avoid — in order to most please Murdoch, the biggest client.

I invite Stirton to say why he does not do the obvious at Nielsen, and say which politician if made leader would be most likely to beat Abbott.

Why not do it?

Why not do it?

Who’s telling you not to?

Attend the tale of David Hicks,
Who could this day hit Bush for six,
Put paid to Howard’s craven rule,
Or just keep silence; April fool.

Though Channel 9 or the Sunday Mail
Can coin it if they tell his tale,
He must count of little worth
The tortures of his life on earth.

Though Chopper Reid or Albert Speer
Or Ronnie Biggs can without fear
Profit from a life of crime,
It seems Dave can’t, or not this time,

And though the wicked Anthony Beevor
Pursues through Holocaust his gold fever,
Through Guernica, Stalingrad, Berlin,
And hauls his bloodstained millions in,

Though Primo Levi made his pile
From fewer years in durance vile,
Though Donald Trump and Conrad Black
Will for their crimes get millions back
,
No such joy soothes Dave Hicks, not he,
No Denton cabcharge, no cup of tea,
No shouted round while he tells his tale:
If you drink that beer, son, you go to gaol.

If capitalism, Primates, means
A man’s life’s worth a hill of beans,
If the market rules, and speech is free
And no tyrant censors you and me,

We should, I think, call up young Hicks,
As one would John Doyle or Hans Blix,
And bid him at this feasting hall
To sink some jars and tell us all,

And if for this we end in gaol,
We’ll sell our story then. Wassail.

I hadn’t thought Peter Van Onselen a Murdochist. He seemed to me a bright and honest young fellow, albeit a Liberal voter. But here he is, lying, like the rest of them, in his teeth.

‘A Rudd return is Labor’s best option,’ he says. ‘Rudd is popular,’ he says. ‘Marginal seat Labor MPs won’t be too proud to beg him to save them,’ he says.

What part of Narnia (with Rudd its resurgent Aslan) is he filing from? Rudd as PM with limitless powers would sack Wayne Swan (with all the added venom, as Oscar said, of an old school-mate), thereby speeding him, Gillard, Garrett, Ferguson and Crean out of parliament, lose his majority, advise an election, lose forty seats and end as unpopular as Billy Hughes in Labor’s demonology.

No other choice, the young dill says.

No other choice? The Liberals, faced with extinction in 1995, called back their last leader but four, John Howard, and won handily in 1996. Labor’s last leader but two, Kim Beazley, could be put in Robert McLelland’s seat, McLelland sent off to Washington, and Beazley as PM outpolling Abbott by June, with no party split and only Rudd miffed, and what would he do then? Rudd, I mean. If he quit his seat, Labor would win it. If he crossed the floor and forced an election, Labor would win it.

Van Onselen is lying, or sadly mistaken, or not thinking things through. Why would Labor put Rudd, its most divisive figure since Evatt, into the Lodge again when the Great Unifier Beazley is eagerly and affably available, and once won 19 seats his predecessor Keating carelessly mislaid, from Howard at his canniest?

Similar scenarios could give, overnight, the Prime Ministership to Faulkner, Tanner, Beattie, Carr, Gallop, Clare Martin, Maxine McKew, Tanya Plibersek, Nicola Roxon, Albo, Smith, Swan, Shorten, Richo, Dawkins, Refshauge, Jason Clare and Mike Rann, all of whom would get more votes than Rudd, and it’s not a problem.

Rudd alone in politics, and the Murdochists alone in the media, think Rudd the only option.

It would be like putting back Mark Latham, only more divisive.

What a wank. What a beat-up. What a pack of lies.

It’s the Oselen response to the Murdoch First Commandment: Imagine the most damaging, the most divisive, the most destructive thing Labor could do to itself, and say it’s their only option.

He can debate me anywhere, any time.

The young fool.

Why won’t he reply to this?

Where is he?

‘I, of course, was privileged,’ Quentin Crisp once told me, ‘as was my generation. For we saw silent films with silent eyes.’ Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist, almost impossibly, lets us know what that lost, lush, molten miracle was like.

It brings it off with considerable courage. Imagine going to, say, Miramax with this pitch. ‘It’s a silent film about the coming of sound, with elements of Singin’ In The Rain, A Star Is Born, The Lost Weekend, The Kid, City Lights, The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari, The Count Of Monte Christo, Limelight, Broadway Melody 1935, Blue Angel, Sunset Boulevarde and The Last Command; and it has a lush, hundred-piece orchestra playing at all times for no more than a hundred and ten minutes and this cute little dog who saves the hero when he’s burning himsel o death in a flaming tangle of his movies. The stars are two unknowns, and he’s got big bright snaggly teeth, but they tap-dance together very well.’

‘Tap-dance, in a silent film?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Get out of here.’

Nonetheless, it works in a way that, for me, brings back the threepenny cinema I used to run in my father’s garage, with Charlie Chaplin and Donald Duck films in 8mm weaving the kind of participative magic that small children watching Punch and Judy undergo. You give so much to the experience, and it gives you more back.

It’s a kind of willed dreaming, or, as Ralph Richardson once defined acting, ‘dreaming to order’: qualitatively different to sound-and-colour-and-3D cinema, which is piggy-backing on another’s reality; this is dreaming you do alone. This is what Crisp meant by ‘silent eyes’. You are hooked in, you are part of the show, like one hypnotised.

So: George Valentin’s career as an adored action-comedy and romantic-comedy star is going well: his big bright crooked smile and lively moustache, his athleticism, self-mockery, flirtatious autographs and limelight-hogging (he upstages his female co-star thrice in the first two minutes) seem forgiveable foibles while the going is good. But then sound comes. He dismisses it, refuses to be part of it (the reason we do not know till right at the end), spends a fortune (like Chaplin) writing, directing, producing and starring in his own jungle film, whose ‘artistic’ ending (he sinks in quicksand and is not saved) loses him a fortune, and he loses mansion, wife and self-regard, and goes on the skids. And …

Whoa, let’s go back a bit.
MORE TO COME

Andrea Demetriades is the only actress to have made sense of the first, whingeing-Cockney scenes of Shaw’s Pygmalion: she gives the shrieking termagant what Denny Lawrence, beside me, called a ‘sullen dignity’, a ferocity of aspirational bitterness and working-class spleen that motivates the rest of it.

But ‘the rest of it’, as written, is surprisingly thin, when compared with Alan Jay Lerner’s rather better libretto My Fair Lady: no Ascot Races, no Ambassador’s Garden Party, no confrontation with appalled royalty, no showy dressing-up in Cecil Beaton’s finest frippery, not even the arduous ‘rain in Spain’ montage (derived, it should be admitted,p, from Shaw’s Oscar-winning screenplay) in which she and her petulant Svengali work around the clock with blow-lamps, mouth-pebbles, metronomes, tuning-forks and Edisonian recording-devices rejiggering her vowels and pacifying her mutinous bad language; none of all that; goodbye to all that; just an under-characterised Higgins, a vacuous Pickering, an invisible Freddie (he speaks about ten words), one truly well-written character, Mrs Pearce, a lot of ill-motivated, flamboyant bickering, and no happy ending, and that’s it. ‘She’s going to marry Freddie!’ are the text’s last words, to which the director, Peter Evans, has added a video sequence in which he stalks her backstage and there either strangles or weds her; or snares her, maybe, into Shaw’s own curious ‘mariage-blanc’ (foreplay, cooked breakfasts and Fabian lectures on the economy), leaving her childless, furious, fuckless and thwarted as before.

One feels by the end that this is a first draft that not only needs work — which Asquith and Pascal and then Lerner and Moss Hart gave it, of course — but is also a kind of middlebrow cover-up of one of Shaw’s affairs with actresses: the one, perhaps, that he and Yeats were simultaneously fucking, if that is the right word for his first fresh ardent soggily-contracepted days as a philosopher-roue, of which Beatrice Webb said, ‘If Bernard Shaw ate meat, no woman in London would be safe’; and largely because of the fifteen-minute lovers’ barney that climaxes the evening, whose lacerous post-honeymoon woundedness (and verbal brilliance) can only have come from life. For he it is who seems to be cock-teasing her: domestic bliss my sweet sad bruised Lolita, but nothing between the sheets; just you wait, ‘Enry ‘Iggins, just you wait.

As Higgins Marco Chiappi is pretty good, tall, woolly-haired and crashing into the furniture — channeling, it seems, both Geoffrey Rush (whose voice he shares) and Robert Downey Junior’s unhinged coke-addict Sherlock Holmes;  with a whiff of Groucho Marx, perhaps — though he is not on my top ten castings of it (Rush, Hugh Grant, Stephen Fry, Colin Firth, Kevin Spacey, Dan Day-Lewis, David Warner, Michael Fassbender, John Waters, and Nicol Williamson now alas unavailable owning to death). He lacks the lofty-bohemian-scapegrace quality that led George Cukor to offer the part first, correctly, to Noel Coward, and then, correctly, Cary Grant, and then, correctly, and triumphantly, to Rex Harrison; fifteen years later it would been O’Toole or Plummer or Peter Cook. He lacks, like Downey, that touch of class.

Kim Gyngell is very fine — but too thin — as Pickering, and far too young; Vanessa Downing very good as the shabby-genteel Mrs Eynsford-Hill (with many more dull tea parties to get to that afternoon), Harriet Dyer superb as her daughter Clara, glitched by images of the free-thinking, foul-mouthed New Woman and the simultaneous imperative to hunt down a sleepy fat rich husband; and Wendy Hughes perfectly fine as Mrs Higgins, an inspiration, surely, for Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia.

And as Alfred Doolittle, David Woods … well…

He’s the first thin Doolittle, the first tall one, the first headshaven one, the first one presented as a gangster and, probably, hit-man, the first who seems not above molesting his daughter (when he hits her on stage it has Aeschylean force), and the first Mephistophelean one: I give you her soul to trifle with, and you give me, squire, five pounds. He makes it work, but he seems to have sauntered in from The Threepenny Opera or Assassins or Blood Brothers, disrupting the genial Ayckborne mood of the neighbourhood with rants against class and hypocrisy. It is rather as if Nicely-Nicely Johnson, instead of singing ‘Sit Down You’re Rockin’ The Boat’ began reading aloud with fury from Dawkins’s The God Delusion.

It sort of works. What doesn’t is the bare stage with dragged-on seats and tables and couches, in the Brechtian manner, and the chosen era, which seems to be about 2003, agog with computers and phone cameras but none of its costings adjusted upwards (Alfred sells his daughter for five pounds; three ha’pence is offered the flower-girl Eliza as a tip; a taxi-ride is thought an uncommon luxury), and there seems to be no consternation when two ageing bachelors adopt a teenage girl, burn all her clothes, dress her exclusively in kimonos, work her round the clock and pay her nothing (like an illegal Wetback immigrant in America) for her copious housekeeping duties — an arrangement, surely, that in any year after 1920 would have been looked upon with suspicion.

Nonetheless, it is worth seeing. Demetriades carries all before her and the wounding post-coital spat at the end has force that will last a couple more centuries. And it’s proof, I guess, if proof were needed, that a strong idea whose time has come, however flabbily dramatised — and the first twenty minutes are nearly as bad as the opening of Williamson’s Nothing Personal — will tend to prevail.

And change the world.

Attend the tale of David Hicks,
Whose human rights were hit for six;
In a room the size of a double bed
He’ll shriek and plead until he’s dead.

No end in sight for his sad story,
Says his friend Major Michael Mori,
His trial process still unshaped,
His night thoughts death, his manhood raped.

His crime was youth: a passing fling
With his belief he could do anything:
Like Rambo fight for the Taliban,
Take up the cause and be a man.

And ‘mid descending cluster-bombs
That shredded Afghan dads and moms,
His war crime was to guard a tank
And read the Koran; what a wank.

Attend the tale of David Hicks,
Laid low by Howard’s dirty tricks:
Tortured, sleepless, black and blue.
Beweep his fate; he could be you.

30/12/2007

Peter Hartcher is a Ruddist now. He buys the nonsense that Rudd’s poll numbers mean something. He quotes these numbers: Rudd 44, Gillard 19, Smith 10, Crean 8, Shorten 5, Combet 4.  They shake down, for what it’s worth, to Rudd 44, Anti-Rudd 46, Undecided, or Other, 10.

But for all we know Crean’s 8 might be Liberal voters, wanting a proven loser as Labor leader, as they would. And 20 of Rudd’s 44 might be Liberal mischief-makers too.

And why those names and not others? Where is Plibersek? Roxon? Albo? It is likely that if they were in the mix Rudd’s vote would fall to 38, or 18 likely to vote for him, and 32, after preferences, for Plibersek. Or Shorten.  Or Swan. Of those likely to vote for Labor, that is, whom Hartcher, the high-stepping klutz, has forgotten.

Or, if you add to the first list Beazley (another ex-Leader some yearn for), the numbers might be as follows: Beazley 31, Rudd 22, Gillard 7, Smith 6, Crean 4, Shorten 4, Combet 4. So if you yearn for a leader who on the day of his exit had Labor on 54 two party preferred, why not Beazley? Slot him into McLelland’s or Melham’s or Garrett’s seat and give the banished bunny the US Ambassadorship and have Kim by in place as Prime Minister overseeing his good friend Swanny’s Budget by Mayday, Labor on 52 two party preferred and all well. Why not? No reason. No reason at all. Would Kim say yes? Of course he would.

Rudd, a classic Asperger’s Syndrome child, my expert old friend Ramsey tells me, is like all so afflicted utterly convinced that no-one else exists on earth and he is, as it were, the star-child of the universe, the Messiah, the Chosen One. And Hartcher, the drongo, has bought this. Rudd is the only choice, he swears. No, he’s not, Peter, no he’s not. He’s nowhere near it.

Beatty at 59, Carr at 62, Rann (the most successful Premier ever) at 58, Gallop at 60, Refshauge at 62, Goss at 64, Dawkins at 67, Keating at 67, Richo at 61, Tanner at 57, Faulkner at 57, Kerr at 58, McMullan at 61, Beazley at 64 would all say yes to the big gig, or nearly all would, and so would Hawkie at 82, and all beat Abbott easily, in a walk, in a doddle. But Hartcher has bought this Asperger’s nonsense that the known universe contains only one celestial body and we must all therefore cravenly crook the knee before its radiant mightiness and bring Rudd back. And have half his Cabinet walk out, Thomson cross the floor, the Government fall and be wiped out because of the squabbling disunity in a June election which quadruples the number of Greens and ends the Labor adventure altogether.

I ask Hartcher, the bright fool, to answer this in these columns, or debate me anywhere. He is only  one of many sufferers of the Rudd Resurrection Retrovirus, and he needs to take the cure.

We’ve got used to a lot of the nastier Murdoch tricks in the past forty years and no longer remark on them. One is the publishing of only ugly pictures of the left-of-centre politicians in his cross-hairs. Mike Rann scored four handsome pictures in twenty-three years, three after he announced his departure from the premiership, one when he and Sasha became engaged. He was once allowed a campaign column and the picture above it looked like one taken in mid-sneeze.

This goes back as far as Whitlam after the Dismissal in 1975 being photographed as he was about to blink or in an ugly sneer. You will find the same treatment, the same visual swindle, applied to Murdoch’s particular enemies Prince Charles, Ted Kennedy and Neil Kinnock. Obama he was more subtle with. He would be filmed in an over-the-shoulder-from-behind-shot that made him look both hunchbacked and simian, and with lighting and backgrounds that emphasised his dark complexion and flat nose.

Fox News worked overtime with Obama, calling him at different times a predatory homosexual, a crooked Chicago machine politician, a disengaged academic, a man who ‘palled around’ with terrorists (a new Murdoch verb that suggested co-conspiracy in basements), a crazed Christian fundamentalist, a racist, an unreformed Muslim who took his oath on the Koran, a passport-forger not born in America and therefore President illegally, a man who paid a known ‘terrorist’, Bill Ayres, to write his autobiography for him, a secret Socialist, an enemy of Israel, an ally if Bin Laden, and so on. In one pre-election interview O’Reilly shouted at him so much it had to be released in five-minute segments lest the audience think his bullying unfair.

When Obama won the White House, Fox News helped invent the Tea Party, paying millions a year each to its proselytisers Hannity, Huckabee, Beck, O’Reilly and Palin and giving limitless time on air to Bachmann, Santorum, Paul, Rove and Perry, and applauded their tactic of rejecting everything he put before them, including every single clause of a Health Bill that, for instance, meant children could not be denied treatment for having had a ‘pre-existing condition’ and would not therefore automatically die. They started calling him a ‘one-term President’ very early, comparing him to Jimmy Carter, and alleging his plan to close down Guantanamo meant American prisons would suffer nuclear attack; this in spite of Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian terrorist who murdered Robert Kennedy, having been locked up in an ordinary Californian prison that went unbombed for forty years. They hired black commentators to denounce Obama, who initially had no black enemies, and began to chip away at his credibility. In two years, the number of those who thought him a Muslim born in Kenya had quadrupled, and those who thought him a rabid ‘European-style Socialist’ sextupled. Because they repeated their programmes around the clock, they got to a lot of shift-workers and early-risers, many of whom believed their contention that Obama planned ‘death-panels’ who would ‘pull the plug on granma’ as part of his wicked European-style health scheme. It was not there to heal you but to kill you.

One of the more skilful things the Murdochists did was to interfere with public political debates. The Democratic candidate’s head would be very small in the frame, the Republican’s very big, thus giving him larger authority. The Democrat’s microphone would be softer, and his face seen more in profile than the Republican’s, whose eyes would engage the audience. This is best seen in the Edwards-Cheney debate of 2004. Some of course they could not manipulate, but those they could they worked wonders on. SkyNews had free rein of only one of the three TV debates with Brown, Clegg and Cameron and it is worth looking at for a particular trick that was used again in the SkyNews ‘debates’ between Abbott and Gillard a few weeks later.

The trick was this. Every time Brown was doing well, speaking with authoritative eloquence and getting up a head of steam, giving a good performance, the image would change to a wide shot of fifty or sixty people in the audience looking bored, and hold on it for twenty or thirty seconds, and thus deprive the Prime Minister of authority and momentum. Hearing the debate that night on radio you would think Brown won; but looking at Murdoch’s warmed-over images of widespread audience boredom — an invited audience of course, one SkyNews could rely on — you would get the opposite impression. Thus Brown SEEMED to lose the second debate, but as it turned out was still ahead, and it took the Murdoch bugged fabrication Bigotgate to defeat him.

MORE TO COME

I rang on Monday morning to check Don Dunstan’s health for the filming on February 7th and 8th. He would walk, I hoped, round some of his favourite saved buildings; cook a meal; have a Last Supper with friends, or a Don’s Last Party; play on the grand piano the Liszt and Schubert pieces that would be our soundtrack; dig his garden; revisit his restaurant, Don’s Table; read some favourite poetry in that famous golden Tennysonian voice; reflect, perhaps, on sexual McCarthyism in the age of AIDS and Monica Lewinsky; curse Hinch; denounce with his dark angelic fury the Quislings that have sold Australia’s economy to the crazy feral animal whims of the free market; remember Adele; add his particular stoic grace to an unbeliever’s death…

And then he came on the phone in the hospital ward. His voice had worsened, and had that blurry, thick-tongued imprecision you get from a dentist’s injection. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said. ‘I can’t be heard like that.’ I said it might get better. He said he knew it wouldn’t.

‘I’m in the home stretch, old mate,’ he said. ‘I’m truly sorry.’

I realised that this was our last conversation, perhaps. I told him I loved him very much, and gloomily added, ‘I’d normally say Godspeed but it’s the wrong theology. And,’ I added, ‘the wrong velocity.’

A pause, no laughter; then: ‘That it is. See you, mate.’

‘See you, Don.’

I then kicked the wall for a while, and drank, and cursed, and pined, the way you do, for the most significant Australian since Chifley, since Federation perhaps, the man whose political brilliance hacked out the path that Whitlam followed, and to some extent took credit for. And I went feeling foul and frail to Jim McClelland’s memorial service in Sydney Town Hall, where Whitlam and Killen with much inner grief told of the adjacent deaths of Jim Cope, Cleaver Bunton and our vivid Brisbane friend Brian Sweeney, and the final stages of the fading from life of Neville Bonner and King Hussein, who survived, I think, twenty-two assassination attempts but not, like Don, the mutiny in the blood that was cancer. That was an enemy with bite. No-one noted much the enormities of this week, so enraptured were they with Mark Taylor quitting, and Monica testifying, and the entire IOC in unison murmuring that drugs in sport were okay.

On Thursday Mike Rann rang to say Don could see us both on Saturday morning, but his breathing wasn’t good and he had tubes sticking out of him, and we had perhaps about an hour. That would have to do, I decided, and booked my ticket, wondering what you say apart from thanks for the memory to such a man at such a time. Mike cursed himself for having donated, like the good citizen he was, all his Dunstan tapes and photos to the Constitutional Museum, which the present Liberal Government of course (like the pharaohs who defaced and hacked to rubble the monuments of their predecessors) closed down. Where were the tapes and photos now? He didn’t know.

Mike went to work for Don in 1977 and in one intense period, sitting up each night till 4 a.m., wrote five major speeches for him in a week. Don, he explains, was not only the architect of policy change in the Labor Party but also the initiating Prospero (a role that in his old age he might have played well) of its tardy professionalism. He invented the press release, the testing by poll of policy (you do not change party policy, he said; after testing it, you work out how to sell it better), and the then-novel notion that you have to win the second election, and the third, and the fourth, and entrench yourself in office in order to get things done. Nine years before Wran, seventeen years before Hawke, twenty-two years before Goss, twenty-four years before Keating, he was leading a moribund party and a somnolent country (and a state in philosophical rigor mortis) in ways that, after ferocious intellectual quarrel with himself, he had decided were best. Aboriginal equality. Female equality. The inevitability of the multiculture. The actuality of democracy. The possibility of Australia (even South Australia) leading, not following, in the Arts. A sorrowing Chris Schacht (in a five-hour conversation at Bridie O’Reilly’s in Sydney) remembered him at a Norwood branch meeting telling a dumb-struck congregation that an Australian film industry could start in South Australia. In 1974 it did, with Picnic at Hanging Rock; then came Storm Boy, then Breaker Morant.

So too did the flashier, shallower things – the sidewalk cafes, the art-gallery wine-tastings, the orchestra performances among lions at the zoo, the heady trail of international celebrities – Yevtushenko, Rushdie, Burgess, Vidal, Nureyev, Grotowski, Arundhati Roy – that year by year raised Adelaide’s Festival of the Arts to parity with Edinburgh’s, an ultimate Good Time you would remember all your life.

But it was important, Mike added, not to lose the real Dunstan under the glamorous honeymoon icing of his era. This was a man who, in Parliament since 1953 (when Churchill and Stalin were still in power), pursued a vision of social equality and union rights and worker participation and architectural sacred sites poand minority equality and cultural independence and ungerrymandered representative government (he lost the 1968 election with 54 percent of the vote), and a skilful humanistic balance between government intervention and personal initiative – between individual incentive and cautious bureaucracy – that had few echoes anywhere (in the Erlander-Palme years of Sweden perhaps or the New Deal Thirties of F. D. Roosevelt perhaps or the first two years of Harold Wilson, or Gough Whitlam).

This was no mere flashy magazine editor slumming, for a time, in electoral politics. This was no dilettante in pink shorts. This was twenty-six years of hard slog in the branches, in the Caucus, in party committees and national conferences, turning around things as basic as the White Australia Policy. This was a man who paid, as they say, his party dues; who worked in his retirement, unlike some, for his party’s good; who just about invented Aboriginal land rights, and certainly invented Meals on Wheels; who in 1957 was in Cyprus bargaining for the release of Archbishop Makarios. This was a man who changed his country, not single-handedly but by years of persuasive discussion, and changed it, with a persistent eloquent selflessness, for the good. If any have cause to doubt this, let them speak now, or forever, etc.

Mike was in Sydney on Friday at lunch with Bob Carr when he suddenly got word that Don, after an agitated Thursday night, was in a coma now with only a dimly flickering pulse. He left the restaurant, rang me, rushed for the airport, was caught in traffic, missed the plane. I agreed to come down anyway, as I said I would. I was up at 4 a.m. and write this now exhausted, remembering, not happy. So many remembrances now lost, of a great – or minor – Renaissance prince.

There was a farewell occasion in December at which he movingly, wonderfully spoke; unrecorded. There were dinners with friends in his last autumnal journeys to Sydney and Melbourne; unrecorded. And the promised film, too late, unmade. There remains for us now but a slow trawl now through the footage not yet destroyed by those in fear of his legend, those who went after him in life, whose enmity, he said, was a constant source of comfort to him.

Like many public men of charm and magnetism, his private life was uneasy. He was shy and uncommunicative at parties, and even in his restaurant (goat on toast, fine wines) where most nights he was waiter he was stiff and tired with customers who loved him. He was betrayed more often than most politicians are – by lovers, staff members, ministers, old friends – or he thought he was. He would nurse a wound long years and not reveal it. He felt, as the nights drew in and the tumours bloomed and spread, a little unregarded, a bit let down, forgotten even. He saw the dismantling of his radiant Athens, his Felicia, by double-dealing dwarves and was not content.

And in his last years, as in his first, he was torn between his love of the Labor Party and his dismay at what had become of it. He detested (and in his obituary interview with George Negus said he detested) the mindless factionalism that was now but a squabble, dogs over rotting meat ‘for the spoils of defeat’. He hated the Hawke-Keating lurch towards Global Economics that, however, it was bandaided, in the end meant only surrender to foreign uncaring boardrooms of our national Self, our society, our destiny. He was not at one with the Muscular Cowardice of these millennial times. He believed in a better world. He was the kind of man of whom his fellow Fabian G.B. Shaw once said, ‘Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.’

Don was a why-not kind of man. He was a doer in a world of postponers. A maestro of the possible. A leader. A hero of that better polity he saw in his last days shrinking from the world. One of his favourite quotes, and he read it magnificently, was, unsurprisingly for an old St Peter’s College man, from Tennyson.

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Vale, Don Dunstan. Godspeed.

It’s hard to see that this will not end badly. The Prime Minister’s particular gift for not only getting it wrong but getting everything adjacent to it wrong as well (as when she said the government had lost its way and then kept every member of that errant government in the same cabinet post and called an early election so we could punish her for keeping in their present positions all those dumb fucks who had lost their way) was evidenced this time in her running from Aborigines as if they were assassins on Australia Day and sacking Hodges for saying that Abbott was with her, co-compering a famous public occasion, and then, after that, saying he did nothing wrong, the young fool, but let that be a lesson to him, the young fool, for giving out explosive information of that kind, to wit, where Abbott was speaking on Australia Day; and then not re-employing him after having copiously established his innocence of any crime under any law of any land in any century since early Sumerian times.

And for losing her shoe, of course, and not going back for it.

Did she believe she would be killed by a black man with a knife or a pistol if she went back for her shoe? Could she have been that wrong?

I know it all happened pretty swiftly and the shaven-headed blusterers in charge of her protection were briefly running the show and enjoying, no doubt, the melodrama and the world fame. But this was Australia Day for fuck’s sake and you have to get a few things right if you’re Prime Minister and not make it look like the first hours of the Aboriginal Spring.

You have to unify your nation on Australia Day, unify it, I would say, and not flee from it shoeless with your head under the armpit of a wild-eyed paranoid walloper. Images count. Images count. There is no such photo of Thatcher emerging from the bombed ruins of the Brighton Hotel. She came out looking composed; and dignified; and resolute; and unfazed; and determined to carry on; as you do. She knew that if she had not been on the toilet when the explosion occurred she would have come out dead on a stretcher, like the others. But she looked calm and dignified and brave. A leader. You have to do that. You really do. The tribe expects it of you.

You really do have to do that.

A young friend of mine just rang and he says the atmosphere in Parliament House is like that of ‘a morgue after a massacre’ and he thinks there’ll be an election soon.

For what it’s worth, and I’m often startlingly right about these things (I got Abbott’s leadership numbers right for instance and was the only pundit that picked him to win against Hockey and Turnbull), and less often dead wrong (I thought Gordon Brown would survive as Prime Minister), my prediction is there’ll be no election, and there’ll be a new Prime Minister by Thursday fortnight, February 16, after Gillard compliantly stands down saying she wants to spend more time with her hairdresser, and there’s a lot of evidence she should.

And it won’t be Rudd but a compromise-unity candidate like Swan or Crean or Smith, or the one who though apparently more divisive looks like he might just win an election, Shorten; or Albo; or Plibersek, maybe. Or Jason Clare.

We’ll know soon enough, alas.

And so it goes.