Morgan shows the women voting or preferring Labor now on 50.
This will go up a bit after Bernardi’s latest go at homosexuals.
And the under-25s vote, already underestimated by 8 percent, will be on about 58 after that, and the menu, and the army porn, and the Abbott abortion one-liners becoming known.
A Labor landslide, as I told Phillip on Thursday.
You wait and see.
You know full well the Nielsen Poll was fabricated and the Morgan Poll contradicts it. There were admitted ‘margins of error’ in it, up to 9 percent in some states, that make nonsense of it.
Morgan says, correctly, that Gillard picked up 290,000 votes last week.
Please report this.
Do not make me think, after my admiration for you in the past two months, that you are as corrupt as the others.
As Oakes, Murray, Van Onselen, Akerman, and, especially, Hartcher.
7.50 am
Wake in Malvolio Towers and the radio is silent. Seek further batteries in briefcase but there is only one. Seek to make tea with lemon. Have brought a hot water jug, tea bags and lemons from Sydney but no knife exists in the building to cut the lemons. For fear, I guess, that I will go berserk and murder everyone. There is, however a teaspoon with which I am able to gouge the lemon, provoking juice. I drink green tea with lemon, get RN on the computer, put pillows on it because it is too loud and endure The Goon Show. It is bearable, as always, until the arrival of Bluebottle.
Stirton has Labor on 29 with Gillard, 35 with Rudd, and 50-50 two party preferred with Rudd; ‘a hung parliament at best’, Stirton says, meaning eighty days of a Rudd Prime Ministership would attract no votes. Does he take us for fools?
He does, and he is right.
The Goon Show is very loud in spite of the piled pillows and murmurations in the other rooms suggest it is penetrating the dreams of old men more soiled and sour of soul than I.
I get back to sleep and at 7.10 precisely, as before, the jackhammers wake me.
9.50 am
I shower and go by cab to the Manuka newsagency. Realise I have left behind my bag of books. Go back to Malvolio Towers and collect it.
I wait at the Reps’ entrance twenty minutes for Viv. Bronwyn Bishop enters and fails to greet me. Viv signs me in and I go to Aussie’s, greet Craig and Tony Windsor, buy yoghurt, coffee and two bananas and study the Stirton. To my amazement it is a total fraud, by its own admission. There are ‘margins of error’ in each of the states from 3.5 percent to 9 percent, and a margin of error for the 18-24-year-olds of 7.5 percent, for the 25-39s of 5.4 percent and of the 40-54s of 4.9 percent. This means a margin of error for half of Australia of 400,000 votes, enough to change everything. And that is just the landlines.
10.20 am
I am told by Tony Windsor he saw me on television last night. I find this hypothesis mysterious until he informs me I was in a film about the death and resurrection of my wayward wild friend Paul Cox, fixed up with a new liver one Christmas Eve and, under sedation, believing he was living in Venice in 1598 and amazed to be back in mere Melbourne among mere mortals, one of whom, who also had a new liver, he then married. I explain this to the attentive smiling Member For New England, who does not flinch and says, ‘Interesting man.’
10.55 am
David Cox arrives, and sits down at the next table, he has a baleful double-agent begoggled face like a Smiley villain and is the man who ruined the Labor Party twice and I am surprised he has not been murdered. He persuaded Ralph Willis to read out the forged letter in 1996. This did not cost us the election, but it cost us the three or four seats Beazley would have won with in 1998.
He later became a PM and changed his vote from Beazley to Latham in 2003, thus impelling the fool McClelland to abandon Beazley too. Beazley would have won in 2004 and be now retiring, after nine years, at sixty-five as our greatest PM.
Or indeed in 1998, and be now retiring after fifteen years as our extremely greatest PM.
He doesn’t look any older. Is it him? Yes, it has to be. Should I walk up and break his nose? It might be taken amiss.
11.20 am
John Whelan arrives and I give him my book. Baldshaven, extremely tall, a dedicated spin bowler for twenty-five years during which his knees were ruined, he co-authored with me a book, or the start of a book, called A User’s Guide To Sledging, and then went to Ireland in search of a milkmaid to marry. I composed and recited a poem farewelling him. He came back after a while and worked for Carr again, and then, in 2008, for Julia and is with her still. He wrote the dread line, ‘a good party that has lost its way’, in her initial speech as PM from which much misery descended. If it’s lost its way, why keep all its Ministers? Why go immediately, withoit significant change, to election?
I give him some lines about Abbott, but he seems uninterested, walking swiftly away.
11.50 am
Wedderburn appears, still Cary-Grant-handsome but greyer suddenly after a year with Carr, his unconsecutive eleventh, probably, since they first worked together in 1988, every day of which he has in a diary. I give him my book, and we talk.
Rudd failed in office, he says, for want of a Chief-of-Staff (like him) who would have stood up to him, sorted his schedule, given him time to sleep. He speaks, intriguingly, of the moment when, in March, the Rudd challenge was clearly on and Carr, in New York, was urged to fly back but did not do so lest it be seen as him throwing his hat into the ring. I ask why he does not do so now: even eighty days as Prime Minister would crown, surely, a fine career, and it might be longer, eight years, perhaps. Wedderburn thinks about this. ‘It’s not so much timidity,’ he says, ‘as not wanting to look a goose.’ Or words to that effect.
3.40 pm
Question Time is dreary and I am rung by 5AA and interviewed. In the middle of it Craig Thomson appears on the lawn and signals he wants to talk. I signal back I will be with him soon, but the interview goes on for another twelve minutes and he waits patiently.
We talk then inside over coffee of Labor’s woes in securing a candidate to stand against him in Dobell. Only one such sluggard exists, and he was a Liberal eighteen months ago, and Young Laborpeople are slyly assisting Craig now. It may be possible, I suggest, for Labor to not run a candidate, as occurred when I ran against Bronwyn Bishop in Mackellar in 1993. We talk of his Benefit, and I suggest as compere Paul Murphy, and he eagerly agrees to this.
I ring Paul, and he is too sick to do it, or too proud, perhaps, to appear on a walking frame doing funny voices. He agrees that Craig is innocent, and wavers, then suggests Mike Carlton who, he alleges, ‘loves the limelight’ and would come to the opening of a wound.
5.50 pm
I go with Carl Green and the irrepressible politics-buff Don Dwyer to a Canberra Branch meeting in the Caucus Room which Carr will be addressing. On the way I put the thesis that, like Carr and Carl and me, who all lost a sibling or a parent at a tender age, Rudd has been in a kind of humorous, joshing denial ever since, unable, lile me, to face the reality of a family death. You become, I propose, a spectator of life at that point of loss , and life becomes a kind of Muppet Show.
And Rudd, therefore, is not now, and has never been, a truly serious candidate. He is like a stanf-up comedian, with a tragic past he draws on for his jokey sessions on Sunrise. He is not, in fact, entirely there. Carl says, ‘Well, it’s a theory.’ He confesses to having been co-author of the ‘blue ties’ speech, but not the notorious paragraph.
7.00 pm
Carr is very impressive, talking with ease and energy and authority of Australia’s big reputation in Africa and the Arab world, which will be endangered now by Abbo tt’s reversion to the ‘Anglosphere’. He speaks with ardent acuity of the boat people and hiw many arriving Sri Lankans are fugitive Tamils — almost none — and how many are economic migrants, and about how almost no boat-bourne Iranians are minority groups; but, once here, will not be taken back to their home country. And how the people smugglers include this in their salespitch, ‘they will not send you back’.
,
With some force he curses the time spent on this wounding issue, and the damage it has done for twelve years now to Labor, which has greater things to offer the world than some detention cells fo dodgy sea-washed con-men and their relatively innicent families. It is ruining us, he says, and it isn’t fair.
As always his personality is bigger than his lean, long frame and his large voice a channelling of divine authority. We follow him down the hall afterwards, and I call out, ‘Co,e down from Rush ore and be Prime Minister’ and he laughs without relish and walks on.
7.40 pm
I get my stuff out if Shorten’s office and walk to the exit by a different route. I see Swanny in a room awaiting with a glum face caucus friends, and Craig Emerdon approaching down the hall. I make him aware of the 7 and 9 percent margins of error in the Niesen, and he says ‘I’m aware of your views in landlines.’
Then Albo approaches down the same hall, looking grim. His expression softens slightly when he sees me, and I say, ‘Good luck’. ‘Thanks,’ he says, and walks on.
9.10 pm
I go through security, shedding my pass, call a cab, saying ‘yes’ and ‘agent’ to the apologetic machine which twice does not hear me, and see as I wait Kevin Rudd, grey head high, going past me. He seems both resolute and downcast. He gets into a Commonwealth Car with a young man and is gone.
Craig Thomson immediately appears and offers me a lift. We talk with warmth on the way to the Kingston Hotel. At the end of the journey I say, ‘Whatever happens, we should play some pool together.’ He is touched by this, and I go on in and cook my own steak.
11.40 pm
Oakeshott goes past me with a tray of glasses saying he is reading the book and liking it. I cook the steak twice and, eating it with lots of beetroot and three pints of cider, begin reading my book too. It is very good indeed. Three literals deeply upset me, one the misplaced adjective ‘famed’ for ‘feigned’.
I walk back to Malvolio Towers and find, to my surprise, it has an upstairs television room and a number of intelligentnfellow guests are watching Q&A. I watch it, doze off, am impressed by Fiona Stanley and Kate Lundy (she too would have made a good Prime Minister), go downstairs, brew a hot water bottle, read The Ancient World by Robin Fox Lane, and sleep
It is quite surprising, to me at least, how crooked this morning’s Nielsen Poll turns out to be. I had thought it was the honest poll, but I was wrong.
For there are no Undecided. This conceals a million voters’ intentions, or indecisions; for, I think, the first time. All the calls were on landline. No young people, therefore, were rung. One third of it was on Thursday night, which is late night shopping, when many prosperous landline owners were out of the house, or commuting. One third was on Friday night, when most healthy persons were out of the house.
And there are, for the first time, state-based margins of error. 4.6 for NSW, 5.3 for Victoria, 5.9 for Queensland, 9 percent for South Australia/Northern Territory, and 7.9 for Western Australia. This might mean the Labor vote, two-party preferred, is 43.6, 56.3, 42.9, 49.0, and 55.9 in those states.
(Is Stirton, perhaps, with these figures, preparing an alibi? It could be so, old friend, it could be so. Why else would he do it?)
And there is mention here of Family First, but none of the KAP, the DLP, the PUP and One Nation; they come, apparently, under ‘other’; all 600,000 of them. It would be nice to know which of these got what and whether, in some seats in Queensland, Katter is getting, as he might be, 40 percent and Palmer, I hear, 60 percent.
It would be good to know too what the average age of the respondents was, and whether it was asked. I would put it between 69 and 72.
There is also the allegation that a million people are ‘uncommitted’ on who would be the better Prime Minister. A million haven’t made up their mind. It would be good to know how this question was asked; through a language barrier, say, or of a housewife anxious to get back to the stove. Because if all of the ‘uncommitted’ went to Gillard, the result would be 50-50. Do you know any of these million ‘uncommitted’ people? You should know one. You should know ten.
That Stirton is lying, and uncomfortable with his lies, is attested by his use, for the first time, of the word ‘landlines’, and his peculiar view that Rudd Labor getting 50 would not mean, could not mean, could not possibly mean, that he would win the day. Though Gillard won office with 50.1 percent he could not possibly, starting at 50, pick up as much as 0.1 percent in the coming eighty days; how could he? Let’s be realistic, how could he? There is a 2.6 margin of error and he could not possibly make it from 50 to 50.1; no way. With eighty days of Prime Ministership behind him, and four television debates, and he did cream Abbott in their last one, he might pick up the necessary ten thousand votes, eleven thousand, even, I would have thought. But what would I know.
But no; but no. The compulsory scenario is Rudd gets more votes but loses, and Stirton, on instruction, obediently says, yes, sir, that’s what’s going to happen, yes sirree Bob. It cannot be otherwise.
… We are talking about corruption here, for these things cannot happen by incompetence. Rudd losing for certain with 50 percent is not something you say out of incompetence, for Howard won with 48.1 percent in 1998, and Stirton knows this, it has to be, simply, corruption.
I ask him to sue me for this.
And if, as I constantly aver, the Katter preferences are being misallocated, and there are half a million of them, and the landlines understate the Labor vote by 1.5 percent, this result, even this result, puts Labor on 48 percent, and Abbott as preferred Prime Minister and Gillard on 46.
So there you go. I hereby state that this is a shonked, corrupted poll and by its wording it even admits it is, and I await court action from Stirton, or another.
Only God Forgives showed, in scarlet light, a number of arms being cut off by men with expressionless faces and I left after fifteen minutes, not because of the violence but the pretentious lack of emotion with which Ryan Gosling greeted the news of his brother’s murder, and his mother, in an allegedly comic scene, did too. There may be humans like that, out there somewhere, but this film seemed to be crawling with them.
We Keep Secrets: The Story Of Wikileaks was a big experience encompassing not just Assange, the Swedish women (one interviewed in darkened profile close up) and his occasionally disaffected lieutenants, but Bradley Manning and some CIA men who say after 9/11 the American priority was ‘openness’, an analysis that seems, in the light of this last week, bizarre.
It is very well made, and may get an Oscar. Its director, Alex Gibney, who made Enron – The Smartest Guys In The Room, is no slouch. But it emphasises Assange’s character too much, I think, and says his ‘honey-trap’ analysis and fear of Guantanamo torture was/is unfounded; this too was proven wrong in the past two weeks.
It also suggests his revelations caused deaths, though no deaths were listed. It does not mention how many lives he probably saved, with the helicopter gunship footage (one victim a man taking his children to school in a van, of whom a US soldier says ‘Serves him right for taking his children into a battle’) that caused the US military, thereafter, to behave better.
It is very skilfully made. We are first engaged and charmed by Julian; but then, in a tightening silence, we hear he likes to engender children and the ‘torn condom’ may be his accustomed method of doing this. The audience went off him then, and it is hard to believe they were not meant to, and the film was not a skilful pro-American brainwash of, in particular, women in the audience.
It argues that wanting to have children is unforgiveable, and killing children with helicopter gunships somehow, therefore, okay; or acceptable in certain circumstances. I am unconvinced of this.
The film will assure Assange of a Senate seat; and, if he is still locked up, and by July 2014 unable to occupy it, another Wikileaks candidate, the second on his ticket, will.
He is a fascinating man, and a resolutely Australian man in a particular way: like Don Dunstan or Tim Costello or Bob Brown he fights the good fight for almost ethereal reasons. It is likely, I think, he will be assassinated and become, like Dreyfus, or Che, a glimmering legend, or a T-shirt, and we will not hear the last of him.
I will write more of this film when I see it again.
Betrayal is like a Polanski film: erotic, troubled, morally challenging, with murderers you come to like. A woman doctor informs a patient, correctly, that her husband is having an affair with his wife. He does not believe it; investigates, finds it is true. An affair with his informant is attempted. She is ‘frigid’; it fails. The initial adulterers are killed in an accident; they fall off a balcony while copulating naked. A very ugly female police detective suspects it was murder; they themselves were attempting adultery on a higher floor of the same building.
The film seems to end about twelve times, but continues, remorselessly, through twists and turns down seven more years. They have different partners now, and he has more children. They strive to commit adultery again. Her new husband suspects them. And so on.
It is both like a Polanski and like real life. Those coincidences which occur in life appear, uncensored and unremarked as they are in life, in this drama. It is a remarkable experience, unfolding unstoppably like life itself, and should be seen. It’s director Kirill Serebrennikov and co-writer Natalia Nazarova are masters of their craft. Its German star Franziska Petri has a sombre saurine face that adds mystery and dread to her character, and all the male actors look similar. A funeral scene with an open coffin and a beautiful woman in it is particularly affecting. The silences are remarkable. More to come.
It’s only ninety days
Until mid-September,
And we can’t let down
Our local Labor member…
Though the winter weather
Turns affections cold,
We’ll remember Gough,
And that memory hold…
While the votes trickle down
From Bob and Clive
From Oakeshott! From Windsor!
And these few preference votes
Keep hope alive
These precious votes …
Help Julia … thrive!
It is not likely that Piers Akerman, never a favourite of Barrie Cassidy, will appear again on Insiders. He repeated Sattler’s Tim-is-gay line about six times after Cassidy told him not to.
Interesting how this, plus the menu, plus the men-deciding-abortion lines, have done Gillard a power of good in the past five days.
I’d be surprised if her vote among women is not now over 50.
And, once the Kathy Donnelly stuff is properly aired, over 60.
The Galaxy Poll showing Labor winning 50 percent two party preferred under Rudd is a measure of the crookedness of the Murdoch process — which did not, by the look of it, report Blair’s affair with Wendi for the ten years it was well known.
50 percent exactly. If it was 50.1 it would signify the same vote with which Gilard formed government. At 50.2 it would mean Labor in government on its own. At 50.4 it would mean a majority of seven or nine.
All of these results are signified by the ’rounded down’ figure of 50.
And once you correctly allocate the Palmer and Katter preferences it becomes 52.9 and a majority of, oh, twenty-five. And once you correct the landline bias it becomes 54.5 and a Labor avalanche.
Which is what I predicted in Phillip Adams on Thursday night, while the poll was being taken, and the Howard Sattler impact was only just beginning.
Which would bring it up to 55.5.
I ask Galaxy to deny any of this.
50 point what?
And what if Shorten or Carr or Clare or Combet or Plibersek were leader? What would the Labor vote be then.
What a pack of crooks they are.
It is probable the Rudd Moment has passed.
The abortion speech (Rudd opposes abortion), the quail menu, Joe Hockey’s false denial that he saw it (he gave a speech in part about it, I am told), Sattler’s ugly invasion of the Prime Minister’s bedroom, his rapid sacking, and, at 9.20 this morning, Peter Garrett’s avowed refusal to serve under Rudd, which raised the spectre of five weeks of leaks, old scores, bad blood, bad language, and the old familiar Kevin Chaos in the run-up to an election, made it difficult for him to put one more boot into an already bruised and flinching female just as the nation was rallying to her side.
It is hard to see now many women voting out the first female Prime Minister. They have gone from saying, ‘She’s not like us’, to agreeing ‘No woman should be treated like that’, and Abbott, Abbott especially, who dumped his pregnant bride a week before the wedding and got his mum to make the phone call, parting thus his beloved from her son and ruining her life, is the man least likely to be preferred by them, in a week when army generals who filmed girls having sex with them and showed it to their fellow officers, the way you do, were sacked for having done so, and the Prime Minister’s genitals were joked about at a Liberal Party function.
The ‘soft and feminist’ Tony Abbott will be henceforth judged by the company he keeps (Howard Sattler was to host a Liberal Party fundraiser; discuss) and his history as a football jock, a boxing blue, an arse-baring hoon, and a rooter of an unknown number of women while dressed as a priest will be more emphasised, and harder to defend.
She may not win from here, but she has, I think, enjoyed a reversal of fortune which the Nielsen Poll tomorrow, probably, will show, with the women’s vote going up to past fifty, two party preferred.
And the days dwindle down to a precious few.
And we will see what we shall see.
The phrase ‘Deep Throat’, nickname of the informant of Woodward and Bernstein, derived from the name of a film about fellatio starring ‘Linda Lovelace’ who earned 1250 dollars from it and her producers 600 million; and a film about her, Lovelace, by Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman and Andy Bellin, is as desolating a picture of America as I have seen. Sharon Stone plays Linda’s unforgiving puritan mother, and Peter Skaarsgard her coke-whacked brutal pimp/husband (bullying her into gang bangs with ‘business partners’) ‘Chuck Traynor’, James Franco plays Hugh Hefner, Chris Noth (Carrie Bradshaw’s Big) a threatening gangster/producer and the remarkable Amanda Seyfried, freckle-sprinkled, fresh-faced, radiant and underinformed, as the buffeted innocent Linda whom the two male directors of this film, wisely, do not obscenely humiliate, like her predecessor, on screen.
It is nonetheless a shocking experience, an Underbelly, if you like, of the Swinging Sixties, which leaves you loathing the male gender and unusually keen to join Hillsong or the Sunnis or the Sallies. Peter Skaarsgard is particularly good as a neo-Shakespearean rogue like Edmund who, having lost Linda, married another porn star and exploited her too.
Alex Van Warmerdan’s Borgman resembles a Polanski film in which the Devil arrives and takes over the lives of some ordinary people. Set in and around a modern house and its grounds and a run-down gamekeeper’s lodge, it involves a muddy, Christ-faced prison escapee (like Whistle Down The Wind) and his curious, growing power over a perhaps neurotic bourgeois housewife and her all-too-gullible angelic children, augmented by various lethal potions he wields with skill and a few Satanic associates, members of a cult perhaps, who murder people for him, put their heads in buckets of cement and leave them anchored, legs-up, at the bottom of a nearby lagoon.
It would be unwise to reveal much more. It is very Dutch-perverse (it felt, for me, at times, like invading the dreams of my friend Paul Cox), amoral, absorbing, evilly attractive, unclassifiable, irresistible and ethically worrying, a post-Christian parable of ‘the stranger within thy gates’ and what may happen if you let him, for whatever good reason, into the house. All the performances are wonderful, and you emerge from what the programme calls ‘a vision that is eccentric, wild and indelible’ worried about your own sanity and secret desires.
A different sort of thriller, Monsoon Shootout (director/writer: Amit Kumar) steers through drenching rain and high-level Mumbai corruption three scary stories, all beginning at the same point, when a rookie cop shoots, or does not shoot, a scrambling fugitive called Shiva who is struggling in pelting rain to get over a fence near a railway line with a train passing. As in Sliding Doors we see the consequence of each decision. As in Incident At Owl Creek Bridge we suspect it may all be a single, instantaneous dream at the moment of death.
This plot device, however, is not its principal attraction. The colour photography is among the best in cinema history, and the serpentine corruption at every level of a hot, wet, perspiring, post-colonial society keep us engrossed, repelled and exhilarated as few films lately made. As the rookie Nawazuddin Siddiqui is excellent and a writhing menagerie of supporting players improbably sympathetic as the body-count grows. It is to be compared with the Godfathers as one of the best gangster thrillers yet made. More to come.
I was in the film festival when my phone rang and a voice like Loughnane’s, claiming to be a member of the Labor Sussex Street Right, and using words Labor people never use, like ‘lame duck’, offered me a very silly ‘scoop’ with a lot of holes in it, predicting a July election.
None of the Sussex Street Right has my phone number but Tony Abbott does, and it sounds to me like Bigboxgate is rattling them. Their polling will have shown a surge of the female vote up to 55 or 56 percent two party preferred (it was 48 a month ago) for Gillard Labor after Sattler and the male vote steady, probably at 45 or 46.
And they need, they dearly need, another story to distract the punters from what Hockey said at Richards&Richards after reading, and chuckling over, the infamous menu.
They know this big-thighed fried quail can wreck them, and they are very, very afraid.
What did Hockey say in his speech?
We have a right to know.
Keep asking Hockey, the speaker that day at Richards&Richards, how much of the menu he knew and when he knew it.
And why he concealed having known about it. For three months.
Find the waiters, and ask them if the menus were on the table.
Record their facial twitches.
Ask for a transcript of what Joe said that day, and if he referred to the menu in his speech.
476 owners of landlines in Wednesday and Thursday night preferred Abbott to Shorten by 49 to 36, Morgan says, and the Coalition to Labor by 59 to 41.
… Well, 476 respondents nationwide is nowhere near enough. Landlines favour the tories because only the old have them now and only the very old answer them. Thursday night is late night shopping. The average age of the respondents was probably 72. It is certain no-one under 25 was rung.
Morgan’s multi-media poll has the Coalition on 56, Labor 44 — because, Gary Morgan explains, phone polls artificially favour the party expected to win, and face-to-face plus emails plus landlines corrects this. So, adjusting the figures accordingly, on Morgan’s advice, we have Abbott on 47, Shorten on 38 and 15, presumably, undecided.
No poll of Rudd versus Abbott was published. Why is this?
Once you add in the mobile owners and the late night shoppers you get, probably, Abbott on 44 and Shorten on 41. Shorten can win from there.
Why Morgan used such a small sample is inexplicable. One explanation is haste, another corruption. Another, I guess, incompetence.
Our Dobell figures from shopping malls have Shorten on 54.5 and Abbott on 45.5.
More likely, I think.
A question through you, Madam Speaker, to the Minister for Workplace Relations.
To the best of the Minister’s knowledge, were there physical threats to any of the employees of Richards&Richards this week?
Were any of the persons threatened constituents of mine?
Were the threats made by Mal Brough, or Joe Richards, or Joe Hockey, or any of their staffs?
Was the Leader of the Opposition aware of these threats? Did any of these threats in the Minister’s opinion constitute a crime?
And, if so, have police been informed?
If not, will the Minister investigate?
I ask Tony Abbott:
Do you know Joe Richards? Have you eaten at his restaurant before? Will you again? Did you, personally, threaten any of his waiters? Do you know somebody who did?
Did Joe Hockey eat quail there that day? Did he read the offending menu? How did he know it was quail, then?
Is this the first political banquet in world history without a menu? Why was there no menu?
If you learned Joe Hockey had read this menu and not told you of it, would you sack him? If he said you knew of it would you resign?
If Peter Slipper is a bad person because of what he wrote in a private letter, is Joe Richards a worse person for what he wrote in a private menu? If there is no comparison, can you say why? If Peter Slipper deserves to lose his job and his posterity because of it, what does Joe Richards deserve to lose?
What does Joe Hockey deserve to lose if he covered it up?
If anyone has threatened the waiters should the police be informed? Should the Minister, Bill Shorten, be informed?
If you deceive the Parliament about this on Tuesday, should you resign as Leader?
The Howard Sattler questions are a culmination of the Karl Rove Method now dominating Coalition tactics: deride, slime, demean, diminish, keep saying your opponent is not fit to be on the earth, drive him to breakdown, ask him to consider suicide.
This was done quite blatantly to Slipper and Thomson, with the good Doctor Mal asserting they would do away with themselves, probably, and, a while back, to Cheryl Kernot, who they said fucked little boys, and Carmen Lawrence, who they said caused the suicide of Penny Easton, a disturbed girl hounded to her death by a news crew much like the one that peered at the pregnant Zoe Thomson in the shower.
In Gillard’s case, it happens every night on the Van Onselen and Paul Murray shows: this woman’s very existence is ludicrous, and like Tony Abbott they ‘can’t wait’ to see her humiliated and ruined. This despite Gonski, Broadband, low unemployment and NDIS, as big a reform as the US Civil Rights Act of 1964. She must be shamed, pulverised, laughed out of power.
But … because they’re not very good at it, they sometimes unsettle the public with what they do. Running out of parliament because Craig’s vote was unclean, unclean, did this. The menu advertising Gillard’s ‘big red box’ (implying she was promiscuous) did this. And asking if her bloke is gay did this. And like dills they admitted having done the red box thing at the same time as many army men were shown to have filmed themselves copulating with army women, in Jedi brotherhood, secretly.
Last night on Phillip Adams I said Labor would win in a landslide. I wasn’t kidding. And it was in part because a lot of this hurled slime is seen to hang off Tony Abbott now, like snot, and to vote for him, not Gillard, will be henceforth very hard for many, many women to do. Gillard was on 48 percent of the female vote two party preferred a month ago. She will be on 52 now, and 56 when the ‘red box’ joke plays out, and Abbott goofs when defending it.
A big thing happened this week, which was the Liberals lost the high ground. Their self-righteousness about the evil Labor does to Australia no longer works very well. And Joe Hockey’s dumb petulant whingeing while jobs hold up and the dollar falls and the schoolkids’ money comes in, is less and less convincing.
Gillard’s standing is not high. But, after this week, Abbott’s is lower. He looks like a grub, with maggots at his back, licking their lips in expectation of power.
It has been said the Prime Minister was wrong to raise abortion before her sisters, and deride the ‘men in blue ties’ who knew better than women how their bodies should be used. It was said she had stuffed up when she did so, displaying, again ‘poor judgment’.
… But this was said too when she frontally assaulted Abbott for his sexism in parliament last November. She had really stuffed up, it was said, almost universally; until the applause was heard world-wide and her judges changed their tune.
Women are 51 percent of us; and of them twelve million, perhaps, feel thwarted of their chances in some way by men, the enemy. It loses a woman leader no votes to say so.
Her vote last time went up to 52.5 percent in Morgan in December and 49 percent in Newspoll in January. It was only after Rudd began rumbling again — and after the Nevis foolishness — that her vote went down again.
Watch, after this — and after Broughmuffgate — her vote go up. The Reddy gene is quickly stirred. It is in all classes and suburbs. It contains, and rouses, multitudes.
We will see what we shall see.
Mal Brough, who lied about James Ashby, did not lie about Joe Richards’ menu, he never saw it, it was not on the table, there was no menu on the table. Though they ate quail, it was not so described, not ever, not on the menu, not on the menu that wasn’t there, in a restaurant famed for its menus, Joe Richards’ restaurant, the man who wrote the menu, and admitted writing the menu, and elaborately printed it out in flowery calligraphy, and showed it only to his son. How could it be otherwise? A restaurant famed for its mischievous menus concealed this one. Lest it offend .. somehow … its … Liberal .. clientele.
Though Mal Brough lied about James Ashby and was found by a Federal Court judge to have so lied, and so impeded the course of justice, is not lying about this, your honour. And he never would.
Well, perhaps that once.
Umm …
Vote for him, not Peter Slipper.
Peter Slipper derides molluscs.
I note that the waiters have refused to deny the menu in question was on the tables on the night, miserably fearing, however, loss of their jobs if they affirm it.
Not that it matters, but I do think an apology from Brough would have sufficed.
But now he is denying it ever happened, and lying about his complicity in it, he should be deselected.
Which means Palmer’s candidate, or Labor, or Slipper, will win the seat.
I am suing George Brandis, Tony Abbott, Christopher Pyne and Julie Bishop for calling me a terrorist and a murderer. These ignorant malicious false charges have impeded my hopes of a good life on earth for me and my family, and a citizenship of Australia which I dream of.
I will settle for two hundred and ten thousand dollars from each of them. I will not accept any lesser sum.
The money will buy me a house and a shop in the Adelaide Hills.
I will be starting up a radio station, or its computer equivalent, at 6.30 am Eastern Standard Time on Monday, July 1, 2013. It will be on air, playing music, doing editorials, poems, readings from Classic Ellis and interviews, some of them conducted by other people, until 9.30 am each week day for the eighty-three days till the election and for seven or ten days thereafter.
If it seems to have a separate life, I will continue and extend it.
More when I know more. I am doing this in response to the enthusiasm for the idea under Certain Housekeeping Matters (31).
I am ordering the arrest of James Ashby, Mal Brough and Christopher Pyne for conspiring to overthrow in wartime the second highest official in the land. This comes under treason, and was in times past a capital offence.
If they are found by the High Court to be not guilty of that offence, I will prosecute them further for perverting the course of justice.
Tony Abbott’s painful, crafted spin-line, ‘It was a bad taste menu that never made it out of the kitchen’, is not a very good one, in my opinion.
For menus are not printed in kitchens. They are designed, as a rule, by local printing businesses, and worded, mostly, by advertising professionals. The calligraphy is carefully chosen and the layout accomplished. It is not, by the look of it, the work of a chef or a restaurateur.
This means a lot of people will have seen it, and contributed to it. Who were they?
Joe Richards knows, and, when the Prime Minister sues for malicious defamation — and she is a lawyer and knows how to do this, and how to negotiate a settlement — should look to his back and say who did the printing, and who the auteur was.
And where the real menu went to.
And show us one, as a souvenir.
It looks like I will get more than fifteen thousand ‘hits’ today.
Would it be a good idea if I started up, next week, the equivalent of a radio station? In which, between 6 and 9 am, I gave opinions, played music, and interviewed selected eminent persons up till Election Day?
Would you listen to such a station? How often?
I invite responses.
It seems that Mal Brough, who lied about his connection with Ashby, has lied about this menu also. He first of all apologised for it, then he said he had never seen it, then he applauded Rydges for saying no-one had seen it but him and his son.
He is now refusing to supply the real menu.
It would seem he has lied to the media about this.
For this, he should be deselected.
The apology was fine. The lie is unacceptable.
Or perhaps you disagree.
Name:
Bob Ellis
Location:
Sydney,
Australia
Recent Comments