Table Talk: Bob Ellis on Film and Theatre

Doug Quixote May 18, 2012 at 6:18 pm

First item is that nothing of interest was burned in the fire at “Shakespeare’s house”, for De Vere did not live there.

One of De Vere’s houses was sold in about 1590 and the lady who bought it mysteriously turned up with a Shakespearean poem in about 1591, later published. Very interesting as ‘Shakespeare’ published no poetry before the classics “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece”.

(Published in 1593 and 1594 respectively, that was)

The next item of interest is from Derek Jacobi :

“Like a growing number of interested parties, I have had grave doubts for some time now of the validity of the Stratford man’s claim to have written some of the greatest literature the world has produced. Indeed, I must admit that it still seems incredible to me that one mind could possibly have encompassed such a monumental feat–but if so, that man is most likely to have been Edward de Vere–possibly with a little collaboration. …

I have taken part in thirty-one of the plays so far, and I can imagine–I can feel–someone behind the words whose education and life experiences, whose knowledge of all strata of society, whose relationships and temperament simply do not fit the grain hoarder, the money lender and the entrepreneur, but chime accurately, and at times indelibly, with what we know about de Vere. And it’s not enough to say, “Oh, but the works of Shakespeare survive whoever wrote them; it doesn’t therefore matter.” Yes, it does! The disclosure of the real author would enhance not only the historical significance but also the contemporary excitement of these treasures for both actors and spectators; and it shouldn’t be regarded as potential professional suicide, heresy or an actor’s silliness to come out and say so. “ (Derek Jacobi)

Jacobi has lived and breathed Shakespeare for forty years, and may have aquired some insights.

As Eric Blair was ‘George Orwell’, so is Edward De Vere ‘William Shakespeare’.

….allthumbs May 19, 2012 at 12:51 am

Ah but Doug, John Bell of Bell Shakespeare is of the opposite hue, see his book “On Shakespeare” and draws the exact opposite conclusion.

Funnily enough I was reading Stephen Greenblat’s “Will in the World” and he makes reference to a view from a Stratford bridge, where the current of water does a strange curling back on itself and Shakespeare uses it in one of his plays, and Greenblatt notes something like only a Warwickshire lad would have noticed that, and De Vere is no Warwickshire lad. Not more than a day later I was persuing some of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and by sheer chance noticed the following lines from the story of Scylla and MInos:

Just as the Phrygian river Meander sports and plays in his running stream with the ebb and flow of his teasing course-
and keeps his wavering currents in motion, back to their headspring, or out to the open sea so Dadedalus’ warren of passages wandered this way and that.

Now, it is often said that Shakespeare used and cited Ovid often and lovingly, and his grammar school education would have had him learning the entire book by rote in Latin. And is it not uncanny that a Warwickshire lad would note the similarity of the eccentric way a river ran in the same motion, in Stratford as in ancient Greece? And would that not have been a moment of wonderful pleasure to notice such a thing and marry the two instances? Please don’t say, “and your point is?” I offer it as an observation.

…..Doug Quixote May 19, 2012 at 6:59 am

And thus do all the Stratfordian apologists.

They find a passage which might be twisted to support the illiterate man of Stratford, and then extrapolate “it must have” and “surely he did”
etc etc etc.

Have you looked at this site?

http://www.authorshipstudies.org/index.cfm

There are several articles, well researched and written.

De Vere loved Ovid. In his youth he lived with Arthur Golding :

“Scholars regard Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a leading influence on Shakespeare, second only to the Bible.

Arthur Golding was Edward de Vere’s maternal uncle, and Edward, when a teen, lived with him. Golding, in a dedication of one of his works to the young Edward de Vere, saluted his nephew’s interest in and command of history.”

(Mark Alexander and Prof Daniel Wright op cit.)

Third item is that De Vere had work in progress at the date of his death, and it seems clear to me that several of the later plays were unfinished, and other hands tried to complete them – as Schussmeyer completed Mozart’s Requiem, and as Barry Cooper has attempted to complete Beethoven’s “10th symphony”.

Since De Vere died in June 1604, the dates of the plays should be revised; but as we generally accept Mozart’s Requiem, so may we accept that Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Pericles and Henry VIII in particular were partly completed by other playwrights, but are still ‘Shakespeare’s’ plays.

‘If Class War means saying Clive Palmer shouldn’t get sixteen times the wage of Barack Obama then I’m all for it.

‘If it means saying he shouldn’t get a hundred times the wage of a night nurse, I’m all for it.

‘Why should he get that much? Can somebody tells us? He digs up stuff we own and he doesn’t even dig it. He doesn’t risk his life, as miners do, in any way. He merely provides the shovel.

‘If it’s Class War to say this is unfair then I’m a warrior.

‘Bring it on.’

The Australian premiere at the Randwick Ritz of John Duigan’s Careless Love, attended by Barry Humphries, Bruce Beresford, Hugo Weaving, Virginia Duigan, Anne Brooksbank, Denny Lawrence, me and four hundred locals, was a bigger success than I expected, partly because of the local Coogee locations freshly seen and Katherine Millis’s astonishing vistas of of grey-fogged, storm-washed Sydney Harbour in the opening shots, and partly because of its theme.

In the Q&A after I asked Duigan if this film about the choices faced by university students, one of which was part-time prostitution, was about ‘Howard’s children, or Dawkins’ children’; and he havered, calling it a ‘very interesting question’. Both, I would think, is the answer; how ridiculous that university students in this bitterly competitive postgraduate world should be forced into any extra work at all, and that rich parents are the crucial advantage in this world. A levy of a dollar a week on every taxpayer would end this inequality. Even at a dollar twenty it would be worth it.

Student prostitution is growing world-wide, with Asian females preferred: ‘the other’, as always, attracts. Though only two nude shots of Linh, the central character in this film, occur and they are tasteful, it is clear that this is so, and too much risk, too much shame, too much soul-distortion and heartbreak result from this Dawkins-led adjustment to lifestyle and urban corruption (Dawkins, born rich, never understood this) to let it continue any longer. They get AIDS, for Christ’s sake. They die of it. They get beaten to death. Too great a cost for a degree in Philosophy, surely.

The film is much funnier on the big screen; not exactly a hoot, but wryly and sometimes harshly amusing in its football-vernacular and student-tutorial scenes, and Duigan himself as an egoistic lecturer pleased to be called ‘sire’ shows that he gets it, on many levels, this awful question of what men need, or require, or quite like sometimes, and how dire is a woman’s task to now and then provide it. Barry Humphries thought it was ‘very good indeed’; and agreed, or I think he did, to play Noel Coward in my and Denny’s Intimate Stranger, an extra bonus for a good night at a great cinema, and a party afterwards.

See it in the next week if you can, lest it go off everywhere. It is a great Australian film, in the top ten, and a great enduring crown to our best writer-director’s career.

A broadcast (in the manner of Mr W. Churchill)

It was a long year ago I spoke to you first on this wavelength of the then assumedly invincible Hewson plague and I counselled hope, assuring the many who had already almost surrendered alas in their hearts to what they fear was the inevitable that the dread virus of Ferrari barbarism, so fatal in Britain and New Zealand, might yet be stilled, and our decent Australian civilisation preserved against the monetarist buffetings of the straiteners and the punishers who would enslave our workforce and bind our souls to a set of numbers and flog us into service of their avarice and their sadism and their greed like the braying mules in Pinocchio who one were little boys. A long year ago I stood alone and spoke alone, with only Paul Keating in distant echo of my trumpet call. And the word spread, and from that dim genesis last March the light of our promised salvation reached its glad beams nationwide. This week victory was in sight. Tonight it is uncertain. Some say the moment, with yesterday’s figures, has passed. It may be so. I hope, I pray and on the whole, grasping the larger hope, I believe that this vile infection of our national genius for kindly solutions will be expunged, and by tomorrow night, with a majority of five to thirteen – most probably nine – the crisis will be over, the boil lanced, the spreading cancer arrested, the day saved.
But if it does not turn out that way and darkness henceforth enshrouds our civility and our cheery hearts, and we again in its shadow revert to the wolf and the jackal and the shark and the leech that this late-blooming Thatcheristic viciousness would have us be, and Hewson, its wetly jogging prophet, would make us into. If we become again, as in other centuries and countries, but weasels fighting in a hole – no sisterhood, no brotherhood, no neighbourhood, no number other than one, no person other than me – and compulsory voting is, as threatened, abolished and election campaigns reduced to a week, and unions emasculated, and schools reduced to engines of profit for mindless philistine profiteers, and health services run on the noble principle of your money or your life, and boss and worker, as in olden times, again at each other’s throats, and Kakadu mined, and the Daintree logged, and the Hawkesbury dead and rank and stinking, we shall in that stark hour of tyranny have learned a lesson too late, as did those foolish democratic Germans who believed that Hitler could be housetrained. The lesson is one of eternal vigilance – the price of liberty– of discerning tyranny when it threatens, and moving fast.
It is possible that I shall not speak to you again, since I am on the list, and satire and thought are unwelcome under Coalition broadcast guidelines, unless it is some secret meeting of the democratic underground in a Bondi sewer or similar. If that is the case, and this is indeed my last such broadcast under the sort of democratic freedom for which till now we have shown, I fear, too little gratitude by half, I thank you for your attention and big you sincerely…take care.

(Spoken in the manner of Mr W.S. Churchill, 1940)

It is wrong that this great candidate should have to wait until even September for total power in this most corrupt and supine and sybaritic city since the Rome of Crassus and Pompey and Julius Caesar, whose language he shares and in whose night life he is yet but a fumbling amateur, alas, but learning fast.

Needless to say he is the best equipped lawyer-candidate for such high office — in looks, in voice, in rare male beauty, in policy innovation, in Fabian conscience, in charm and literary zest — since my great mentor and sometime lover Don Dunstan, and as great a hit, thus far, with the homosexual community, whom I trust he will not disappoint when the great night comes.

His policy of gay marriages on the Opera House steps, valid in Vermont, of happy couples sworn to honeymoon in that far jurisdiction within three years, will steal, I believe, the sodomite vote from the shorter-haired Clover Moore and see him early enthroned and full of patronal advantages for his mates by the Vernal Exinox, or very soon after.

It is WRONG that we should wait so LONG, but that is the law of the land, alas, until we change it by main force into a lifelong position of infinite royalty with weekly lobster-and-champagne parties in his Chambers for his growing circle of glutted, and drunken, insipid, and listlessly lustful fiends.

This is a Primates Candidate for the ages, and I recommend him to the ignorant electorate with confidence, a nod and a wink, and a toast.

To the Italian Ambassador, a man for all seasons, and for these greedy, troubled and interestingly variable times.

Spruce up Sydney!

The hurt feelings of James Ashby overshadow a Budget of a trillion dollars. Discuss.

The hurt feelings of James Ashby outweigh a Budget of a trillion dollars, the only one in the world in eighty years to spend less money than the year before. Discuss.

This hurt feelings are much, much more important. Discuss.

This is the shared opinion of Fran Kelly and Michelle Grattan.

They should be sacked for disproportion, and innumeracy and giggling, female triviality.

Discuss.

Ray Hadley has noted that I promised six dollars by return mail to every HSU member Craig robbed of that sum if they presented a union card and asked me for it in a letter with a stamped addressed envelope enclosed. This offer was sincere.

But I now find that he robbed them of, if anything, only seventeen thousand dollars, plus six thousand dollars for hookers, the Electoral Office having exculpated, praised and forgiven him. This would bring the amount owed to each Member down to twenty-five cents, and it would not cover the return postage.

I also note that it was not Craig who used the hookers (will one of them put her hand up? why not?) but someone else using his mobile innards falsely, ‘spoofing’, as it is called. And it may be no hooker was used at all, merely booked, cancelled, not fucked, and paid for.

This leaves me, customers, in a dilemma.

I will not pay a debt that Craig did not incur. The maximum possible debt now is less than the price of a stamp, and two stamps are required. A further sacrifice of tens of cents by the already bruised and suffering HSU members would be now necessitated if I persisted in this kindly project any further. And since their interests are those uppermost in my heart I cannot, I think, continue it.

With sadness and regret for those who have already bought, at great personal cost, the two stamps, and with profound and grovelling apologies, I now withdraw the offer.

I will make it up to you, somehow.

There are seven lies in Gerard’s well-crafted letter to me, all of them actionable, and a curious, touching denial of past thoughtcrime he should take to his next Confession with humility and regret. The lies, in no particular order, are these:

I have never proposed a bloody great pipe from the Fly River to Brisbane. It was a bloody great pipe from the Fly River to the sources of the Darling, some thousand miles to the north of Brisbane, or the nor’-nor’-west of Brisbane, if I have got that right. I never said no water would ever come again to Southern Queensland. I have never used the words ‘Southern Queensland’ in my life. My birthplace is three miles from the Queensland border, and the concept is bizarre to me. South-East Queensland, yes. Far North Queensland, yes. ‘Southern Queensland’, a concept unknown to cartographers, would be, if it existed, the size of France, Belgium, Luxemburg and San Marino put together. It is a worthless concept and of no use to a traveller coming from anywhere.

I do not believe the end of the world is nigh. I did so until I was fourteen and, as the semi-autobiographical movie The Nostradamus Kid attests, fell into doubt and atheism at eighteen and a half; which is fifty-one years ago now. I have written that human life on earth might end, if we are not careful, in a thousand years or so but that is hardly ‘nigh’. I have always thought the earth has billions of years to go; a billion years is not ‘nigh’. I never said Brisbane’s water would come from the Fly. It was the Murray-Darling’s water, where water was needed, it would come to under my plan from the Fly. Brisbane usually has a lot of water.

And water thus transported is not such a strange, or unprecedented, idea. Roman viaducts took snow-melt water hundreds of miles into parched regions in need of it a hundred years before Christ, a man Gerard eats on Sundays. Los Angeles’ water comes similar distances from the High Sierras today. Oil pipe lines go thousands of miles across Eurasia. A pipe is a pipe. It can be built. It can be any length. Gerard’s idea that I am insane to say so is an insult to Esso and Standard Oil.

As to his not having ‘wanted’ the ABC privatised, this is not my recollection. I recall a gathering of Rightists in, I think, 1997 in a basement room of Balmain Town Hall which I briefly invaded but was told I must leave, containing him, Paddy McGuiness, Alan Jones, Piers Akerman, and others, whose purpose was ‘The Future Of The ABC’. Kerry O’Brien was there too, speaking up I imagine in the embattled institution’s defence, and noticed my eviction, more with humour than dismay, and would testify as to whether Gerard, who attacked the ABC a lot in those days, had put his hand up when privatisation was discussed, or voted on. Perhaps he only wanted the ABC abolished; and advocated this lethal punishment of its unremitting ‘left wing bias’ in those early, heady days of John Howard’s hegemony, Howard the man for whom he was once Chief of Staff. Perhaps he can tell us which. He certainly did not belong to The Friends Of The ABC and therefore, logically, wished it ill. I ask him to deny this, and lie again.

In his letter he makes no mention of whether or not he works for the CIA. Slipped his mind, no doubt. I ask it again.

I am tempted, of course, to go him for libel with malice since his letter implies that I am not in my perfect mind, and his malice towards me turns up in his paragraphs every three months or so and has done for twenty-five years and the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars plus costs is tempting. But I hear his wage has been lately halved by Fairfax and I would not want to further emaciate his earnings in his imminent crotchetty eighth decade, or inconvenience the CIA if that entity is also what he works for.

So I will merely reiterate my offer to Fairfax that I will accept Gerard’s job at not his wage, nine hundred dollars, down from eighteen, but six hundred for a trial period of a month, to see if I can bestir more readership than he. If I do not, he can be re-employed.

In the meantime will someone give me an instance of when Gerard was right, about anything.

From Shakespeare In Love you get – between the boisterous anachronisms – some vivid sense of the sheer uncertainty (Black Plague, censorship, duels, arrest, theatre closure, the likely instant bankruptcy of all concerned) in which the great man did his writing.

You sense too that Romeo and Juliet, his first big hit, written when he was twenty-nine, was derived from some actual event in his own life, some great thwarted longing for an unattained beloved by cruel fortune lost and always mourned. Would that I were a glove upon that hand, That I might touch that cheek! You do not get from this much sense of the Victorian Gentleman image of Shakespeare, chastely at work with his quill in his Blackfriars boarding house, each night writing home a letter to his doting, distant wife.

It seems more roisterous, promiscuous and risky than that, more fuelled with ale, and flighty wives and one-night-stands. The contemporary diaries of Simon Forman – astrologer, herbalist, psychologist, necromancer and surgeon, the model for Dr Tench in the film – show a blithe attitude to sex in Elizabethan women, many of whom he himself had stand-up encounters with in his surgery, rapidly, between appointments. Though contraception was unknown and pregnancy likely, they did it anyway, and let the risk of death by clap or jack – as fatal as AIDS then – come and go as it may. It has been through the ages – in bed, park, alley or brothel – a popular pastime, no mistake. It is rarely foregone, even in times of the closest scrutiny, five people in a room, wakeful children, chickens on the bed. The Great Urge will out, that’s certain.

Whether Shakespeare was as promiscuous as Forman (who came to some of his opening nights) or as obsessive and true-hearted a lover as Romeo or Hamlet will never be known. His letters and diaries and play-drafts were burnt in the 1660s by the man who bought his house and needed the room they were in to breed pheasants, the worst act of burning since the ninety lost plays of Sophocles and Lord knows what else were destroyed when Caesar’s army unintentionally set alight the Library of Alexandria, and the destruction of Jerusalem burnt much that was written, I guess, of Jesus Christ and his followers.

So Shakespeare, like the mysterious Nazarene rabbi, has become a tabula rasa, and to some extent therefore the eye of the beholder. We mould him in our own image, find evidence in his work for Christian belief, agnosticism, spiritualist summoning of dead fathers, love of countryside, love of metropolitan squalor, love of battle, hatred of war, love of revelry, respect for temperance and getting early to bed, whatever. What he was really like, unless the Dark Lady’s diaries turn up, will never be known.

How he wrote, however, at the rate he did, two and a half plays a year while acting, directing, theatre-managing and the occasional acrimonious visit to Stratford, is easier to guess.

What he did, I think, was this.

He would stay up late, drinking and quarrelling and (possibly) wooing and swiving in stews and alleyways and then before he slept would go to his desk and write, without preparation, while his mind was tender and wounded, whatever was there, unpurged, in his head. Tomorrow and tomorrow. To be or not to be.

He would then put it in a drawer, and forget about it. Days or weeks later, stone cold sober, he would begin the writing of a play. It would always be based on something, a history, a legend, an Italian novella in translation, or, as in the case of The Yorkshire Tragedy or The Tempest, a sensational contemporary event, the equivalent of a headline story of the day.

And he would write it like a modern television hack – with exposition (‘What news on the Rialto?’), character, motivation, plot points, act breaks and the rest of it. But when he came to a certain point, the point where you might, in a Broadway musical, need an aria or a big song number, he would go to his drawer, and pull out one of his spontaneous night ruminations, and paste it in. Whatever it was, it would always fit, somehow.

This immediately explains how he was able, unlike any dramatist writing since, to give us both the workaday and ordinary, and the unspoken, nightmarish parts of the lives we lead, the hidden depths, in the same play. It explains why he never lost control. He was as a writer a puritan in the workplace by day, and a demonic reveller by night. He was, like all of us, to double business bound, but he admitted it.

And so he could be a respectable burgher in Stratford, and a tempestuous barroom roué in London (a reverse of Oscar Wilde’s pet formula ‘Ernest in town and Jack in the country’), a faithful husband when under the scrutiny of a close provincial (and largely Catholic) community, and a passionate bisexual cruiser in a poxy violent metropolis, where every day might be your last.

I suspect he knew too, what has only lately become plain to me, that human personality is not a constant, it is situational. We are each of us a wandering archipelago of random impulses, and in another place, where the plane lands, or the ship docks or the train pulls in, we are another person. Romeo might have settled down with Rosaline, and met no trouble. Instead, he found himself booked, as it were, into another story (O I am fortune’s fool!) and played it out.

We all do this, and might have done otherwise. And Shakespeare shows us this great truth all the time. Each of his heroes is given a task, to which he is inadequate, and it brings him down into ruin, or the climactic laughter that soon heals all. He is enduringly popular because of this. He shows us how changeable we are, and how readily we can look into his dreams, and go with them.

This letter came in the post from Gerard, and was duplicated in these columns as a response. It is humorous in intent, very well written, full (of course) of cheerful fabrications and best imagined in Gerard’s own dismissive lofty voice which is also, for some reason, the voice of Kevin Rudd.

Dear False Prophet

I was disturbed, deeply disturbed, to read on your Table Talk blog yesterday that The Drum Unleashed – now called The Drum Opinion – “no longer prints” your “pieces” and you “don’t get invited on The Drum any more let alone Q&A” .

This is tantamount to a national disaster. As someone who has to fill a Media Watch Dog blog each Friday, I need your contributions. I look back in appreciation on your pieces in The Drum where you:

▪ referred to Liberal MP Jillian Skinner as “like a long-detested nagging landlady with four dead husbands and hairy shoulders” and

▪ described Julia Gillard as “short, crow-voiced, intermittently bulbous and living in sin with an affable barber”.

Nancy and the team at MWD need copy like this. Desperately. So I propose to unleash another OCCUPY ULTIMO campaign – this one aimed at restoring your rightful place in The Drum Opinion, on The Drum and on Q&A. I’m working on a campaign strategy – but, right now, I’m inclined to go with “Bring Back the False Prophet of Palm Beach – Bang The Drum for Bob Ellis”.

I still remember your proposal on Q&A in 21 May 2009 that the only way to solve Brisbane’s water crisis was to build a “bloody great pipe” from the Fly River in New Guinea to Southern Queensland. At the time we were on different sides of the river, so to speak. I argued, then, that Brisbane’s drought would be resolved by, yes, rain. Whereas you – believing in the end of the world, as we know it, was nigh – maintained that there would never be substantial rain in Southern Queensland again. However, I did love your contribution to the debate to get Brisbane’s water from the Fly River – and it got a run in MWD. Hence my OCCUPY ULTIMO plan.

One final point. In your blog yesterday you wrote that, in 1998, I “wanted” the ABC privatised. I have never advocated this. To use an Ellis-ism, prove that I lie.

Best wishes

Gerard Henderson

… I will reply to this in an hour or two. It is well written and very effective and contains no more than a dozen barefaced lies which I will enumerate after my toast and eggs. For the twentieth year I ask him to debate me on a topic of his choosing anywhere, anytime.

It now seems Ashby, the only thirty-four year old male in world history to complain of sexual harassment in the workplace and sue a government for it, may have done this in order to bring down that government. For he did it after meeting the Opposition Whip and a man once defeated for preselection by the alleged harasser and currently anxious to replace him, both of them keen to overthrow a duly elected government in the middle of a war, which, in some jurisdictions, in ours too perhaps, is treason.

Worse than that, it seems now, Ashby (hereinafter known as ‘Kabuki Jim’) made his complaint too early. He should have tried to ‘resolve the situation’ before taking it to the media and accusing the second highest official in the land of sending text messages that made him ‘uncomfortable’ (the horror, the horror) and thus ‘overshadowing’ a trillion dollar Budget with this heinous wrong, and the further atrocity of Cabcharge dockets that ran to scores of dollars, according to the Commonwealth Solicitor.

He has since withdrawn the Cabcharge allegation, his horror having miraculously abated, but boosted the workplace charges saying women and heterosexuals were treated more kindly in that office than he. Can this government long survive these allegations? How long, oh Lord, how long?

The greater wonder is that Fran Kelly and Michelle Grattan, not to mention the entirety of the Murdoch media in Australia, said this ongoing persecution of Kabuki Jim ‘overshadowed’ a trillion-dollar Budget, the first in the world in eighty years to spend less money than the year before, and merited the standing-down of the Speaker, and speeches intended to bring down a government grown ‘toxic’ with the ‘stench of corruption’.

Fran, Michelle and the railing Murdochists in this, the hour of the arrest for corruption of their prettiest CEO, have culpably ignored, I think, the arguable treason of Kabuki, Brough and Pyne, and what may have been an harassing phonecall to Kabuki from the Whip in his passion to shame and drive to constitutional perdition the highest official in our Parliament and end his considerable achievement as the sheep-dog of that institution in a holocaust of slimy headlines.

This disproportionate response to an event which involved no physical violence, no workplace denunciation, no sacking, no threat of sacking and no bathroom invasion and no touching-up, saying it ‘overshadowed’ a the expenditure of a trillion dollars and its effect on the world economy, and the cover-up of treason, if any but I dare call it treason, adds up in my view to a sacking offense, and all these culpable journalists should now be brought before the Bar of the House and suffer interrogation by the Speaker as to their motives. Did they collude in the persecution of a good government by the magnifying of trivialities for any reason? Or for no reason, out of mere ignorance of the harm they were doing to our democracy?

Whatever the cause they have acted culpably, and the Government should examine closely for what cause they should not be evicted bag and baggage from the building, and not let back in again until they have explained themselves to the shocked and horrified nation, or issued a joint Apology speaking in unison on parliament lawn.

The usual ferocious Maori bull-dyke seized my wife by the shoulder when she was on her way to the toilet shouting ‘I said it was full! Go back!’ in an all-too common skirmish of the unlettered versus the learned at The Sydney Writers’ Festival again this year. This need to have Guantanamo-trained goons to keep readers from writers I have long disputed since I was on the Committee that first created it. But it continues, and septuagenarian females are bruised and cursed and shamed for wanting a seat at a lecture, and made to queue for hours in blistering sunlight or drenching rain in order to be told they have just missed out on the last seat and the other sessions, too, are full now.

I have a solution to all this that halves the cost and triples the happiness and abolishes the anxiety of everybody. It is this.

You have a roll of tickets equal to the number of seats in the venue, a different roll for every session in that venue. The tickets indicate the row but not the number in that row. Row L, say, Row M, say, and you shuffle along, the number of Row L tickets being equal to the number of Row L seats.

Half these tickets are handed out three hours before the session, and half of them thirty minutes before. They are shown to ONE PERSON at the door, knowing there will be a seat in Row L for you, somewhere in Row L, and the ONE PERSON lets you in.

You do not have to queue up for two hours. You can do other things, like buy and read a book, or have a glass of wine with a friend.

I have suggested this many times, but the sado-masochists in charge of punishing the literate for their love of writing have kept spending tens of thousands on these barbarian gauleiters trained in Woomera and Baxter to hurt the disobedient and making life miserable for those in their old age, like my poor wife, who would like a piss now and then and would like to have one in a toilet.

I humbly ask that this plan be taken on. It will save twenty thousand dollars which could pay for a few more guest writers with Nobel Prizes to come here before they die.

The thirty hours between 8 am Tuesday and 2 pm Wednesday saw the end of the Abbott adventure, probably, and put paid to his party’s hopes of governing Australia in this decade.

In those hours Rebekah Brooks, the intimate of Cameron and Murdoch was arrested for hiding and shredding evidence; Bob Katter launched his book; Christopher Pyne was shown to have phoned Jeff Ashby after swearing he hadn’t; Craig Thomson was shown not to have thieved or misused two hundred and seventy-two thousand dollars; Mitt Romney was shown to have beaten and terrorised a homosexual at college; Greece was forced to a second election which the anti-austerity forces would win; Francois Hollande’s plane was struck by lightning but he didn’t die; and Joe Hockey said he mightn’t give money to the Disabled which Gillard had promised them. There are as many Disabled as there are Tasmanians and as many Disabled Carers as there are South Australians and as many relatives and close friends of the Disabled as there are Queenslanders and this alone could landslide Joe’s party out of politics forever.

It is interesting how these things feed into each other. The arrest of Brooks, the CEO of News Limited, for concealing things the police want shown casts doubt on anything said by News Limited and Newscorp or Sky News or Fox News reporters. The Thomson exculpation opens those reporters up to individual quarter-million lawsuits.  The Katter book reminds us that Newcorp’s numerical hit-man O’Shannessy concealed polls showing Katter’s party doing well — or so his silence every time I asked this portends. Romney’s assault on a homosexual will energise the young vote and assure his defeat by Obama, a Social Democrat. Hollande’s survival means Socialism is back, and merciful, and popular, and confident in Europe. Rebekah’s arrest meant Cameron would fall and Miliband would be PM or Deputy PM to Clegg by year’s end. Greece’s imminent default would mean that Europe goes belly-up and Swan’s Budget now looks like an act of prescient wisdom. And Hockey’s proposed persecution of cripples shows the Liberals (though not necessarily Abbott, who is DLP) to be a pack of bastards.

Historians will show that these were the hours when it all fell down, and the Australian Liberals received five bullets to the brain, or possibly six
.
It might be worthwhile asking now if Christopher Pyne has ever used prostitution services of any kind in any country, and if he paid for them with his parliamentary wages, money the taxpyers gave him these last twenty years.

For me the most fascinating moment was when I asked who Craig’s whore was and why Laurie had not interviewed her. It then became plain that ‘hookers’ to most people had no human meaning. It meant rather something like those blow-up life-size female rubber dolls that young men take to Antarctica. The idea that some actual young woman with a birthplace and a biography went to Craig’s room suddenly seemed very, very unlikely. And if she did, where is she? Who is she?

This question may be the coup de grace to everything.

Interesting to see Kate McClymont, who broke the story of my illegitimate baby, in the smh this morning failing to note that Craig was innocent as charged of a lot of what the smh had said of him, and saying only that he had ‘refused to name’ the people who set him up, the ones he’s naming in Parliament on Monday, under privilege.

She recounts, though, some sparse details of a ‘settlement’ Craig made with Fairfax, not saying who paid what, not much I would think, saying only that a court case could have endangered his pregnant wife and unborn baby and he was therefore disinclined to continue it. From what she did to me and my family and my spare baby it is fairly clear it was she who wrote the original offending article and is now scrambling not to be sued again.

It would have been nice, though, to admit the figure Fairfax published a lot of misused funds, if any were misused at all, was nearer twenty thousand than three hundred thousand dollars, a figure which Craig, or a whip-around, might pay back tomorrow.

I imagine a lot of journalists will be ringing their accountants and their company lawyers on Monday after Craig speaks. If his attested scenario of having been set up with hookers is plausible, and it will be, and the alleged crooks he accuses of it plausible candidates, and they will be, it will mean I imagine that each abashed hack (Oakes, Henderson, Grattan, Blair) will be in the gun for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, the maximum currently allowed in Australia per published defamation.

This could run to twenty million dollars. Craig might spend half of it on his electorate and win it back as an Independent in 2013.

Wrong of Kate not to mention his innocence in her piece. It might cost her dearly.

With his infinite gift for getting it wrong, and getting it wrong at the precise moment when it makes him look more like a tremendous fool than any other, Gerard has suggested that Craig was guilty as charged, and I was a fool to think him innocent, and my offer to pay the union for the hookers to get Parliament off his back was insincere.

He points out, correctly, that I took ten years to pay off a bet I had with him for a thousand dollars, one witnessed by John Ralston Saul who was interested to hear that Gerard, in my view, was CIA and unhinged and so stirred the conversation along a bit.

The bet was that John Howard would lose his seat, and it was a bet I lost. This was because I said he would lose it not in 2007 but 2001, when his party was on 40 percent two party preferred, a month or so before the Tampa saved him. I was irritable that a world war was declared on the first day of the election campaign in order that Howard keep his seat and cost me money and I was raising a teenager and funding two students and was slow, very slow, paying it because I think Gerard is a cunt and a probably underpaid spy. No other person I have borrowed money from (Chris Neal and Denny Lawrence in 1992 I think and the list is at an end) have I failed to pay back within a month. It is a libel, in fact, to say I do not pay my debts as a rule or my bets. I sold my house to pay 280,000 dollars off a mortgage a year ago. I rarely take on a debt, never in the last twenty years.

Gerard has used ‘the false prophet of Palm Beach’ on me for years though I got Tony Abbott’s winning margin right when everyone else was calling Hockey a shoo-in, the cliff-hanger Gillard win right, the Rudd win right, the Obama win right, the British Hung Parliament right, the Mike Rann margin right within one seat when everyone else was saying he was cactus, the Tasmanian hung election right, the Baillieu narrow win right, the Bligh and Keneally defeats right but not the margin, the new insurgent Katter vote right within two percent, the Beatty squeaker victory right in 1997 and the Bracks victory right in 1999 when everyone else was saying he had not a chance. I got the two narrow Wilson wins right in 1974 within one seat, the Hawke margin, a 25 majority, exactly right in 1983, and so on.

Gerard by contrast has got nothing right in forty years; or this seems to be the case since in six months nobody has listed in these columns one instance of his accuracy on anything.

Yet I am the ‘false prophet of Palm Beach’ in his mind, which is clearly failing.

Again I challenge him to debate me anywhere, any time, on any subject he chooses, before any audience he invites.

Or say why he will not.

It seems Craig is not guilty of spending two hundred and seventy thousand dollars wrongly on his campaign and another seventeen thousand is in doubt.

This means Laurie Oakes and Abbott and Pyne and perhaps fifty Murdoch journalists and television stars have libelled him and might now each be required to pay him a quarter of a million dollars, or at least apologise cravenly to him on prime time television saying ‘This is the most humble day of my life.’

As usual, I was the only commentator to have thought him innocent as charged, and as usual I was right, or pretty nearly right. I thought him innocent because I had spent a day campaigning with him, thought him straight in every sense, not mad in any way, uxorious, ambitious, level-headed, mild-mannered and politically astute. That he could be such a Jeckyll-and-Hyde as to seem so normal in daylight and yet steal a quarter of a million dollars from his union membership at night while seeking and holding a swinging seat full of pensioners and young married couples seemed unlikely to me; and his adamant assertion of innocence, like Lindy Chamberlain’s, convinced me. People who say they are innocent for long years nearly always are.

I now require the apologies of Simon, Frank, Sir David Black and Spleenblatt, for the libels they put in my columns, lest I grow splenetic, and ban the fuckers for  life.

They have twenty-four hours.

I also ask them to produce, name, and get a confessional statement from the hooker, the one that cost twelve hundred dollars a night, a confessional statement naming Craig and describing his genitals.

And so it went.

Things are turning over quickly now. It was mooted on The World Today that Rebekah’s friend Cameron would resign soon, round August, say, and the FBI would now have cause to find Rupert party to Rebecca’s cover-up, a gaoling offense in America. It must soon be embarrassing for Abbott and Howard too who now can be asked in the McCarthy way, ‘Are you now, or have you been, a dinner guest of Rupert Murdoch? What undertakings did you give him, by hint or nod or word? What undertakings did you fulfil?’

Proof positive that Rupert is as guilty as Rebekah lies in ‘Bigotgate’. A Prime Minister was bugged in his car by Sky News reporters and overheard saying the word ‘bigoted’, accurately, of a woman he had lately conversed with. This minor event even was blown up into a hundred Murdoch headlines in tabloid papers and television editorials and cost Brown the five or six seats that would have saved his position and his party. And yet Rupert made no remonstrance against this malpractice. Sacked no-one for having done it. Made no apology to his Prime Minister for this invasion of his privacy. That he was unaware of this bugging, and the hundred headlines in his own media that followed it, beggars belief.

It follows therefore he knew, or probably knew, of most, or all, of the other buggings and by his silence approved them, or by his words of congratulation to Rebecca year after year showed his pleasure in them.

His wicked campaign against Brown is further evidenced by the Second Debate, the only one Sky News broadcast and from the control booth edited. Whenever Brown was performing well, his face would be removed from the screen and replaced by forty-eight faces in the audience looking bored and chewing gum and this wide shot held, against all the rules of telecast debating, for thirty seconds. It is likely those forty-eight bored, sullen faces were brought in by Murdoch’s people for just that purpose.

A radio record of that Debate would show Brown winning easily. But, telecast, with his voice softer than the others, and the lighting, which made him look like a waxwork, and the lengthened cutaways, he looked like number three, and the verdict in the Murdoch papers went unsurprisingly to Cameron, who was better lit, made up, shot, heard and understood.

Murdoch cheats.  It is what he likes to do. But the cheatings are coming home to roost.

And it will not be long now before his indictment in America, and his search for sanctuary here. Abbott PM would have given it him last week but, after Rebekah, no longer.

Discuss.

I have an even better idea. Since the maximum amount of HSU funds Craig might have spent dodgily was half a million dollars, and since there are eighty-five thousand members of the union, and since the money he cost each member, if he did it, was six dollars, no more than six dollars, six dollars only, I will make the following offer.

Any union member who wants his six dollars back, will he write to me, including a photo of his union card and a stamped addressed envelope, and I will send it to him.

Is that fair enough?

Will that sort it out?

Okay?

Rebekah’s arrest for obstructing justice leads me to think what the Ashby case might now portend.

A charge of treason perhaps against Brough, Pyne and Ashby for seeking to entrap and overthrow the nation’s second highest official in time of war.

It’s a charge that may well have legs, and should be followed through.

I ask that Pyne absent himself from the service of the House while it is under investigation.

I note that the sum spent on hookers by unknown members of the HSU was six thousand dollars and the membership of that union is eighty-five thousand persons. This means the whole thing cost each member ten cents, and for this heinous loss a government should fall, or so it is reasoned by Tony Abbott, Rupert Murdoch and Christopher Pyne.

I suggest Craig gives the six thousand back; or I will.

Compared with what Rebekah Brooks did, or is alleged to have done, it is peanuts. It’s the price of a second hand car, paid for by eighty-five thousand people.

What are we talking about here?

The name for it used to be ‘a beat-up’.

Let that description stand.

Rebekah’s arrest and certain gaoling for years not months will mean Rupert’s gaoling too and the end of his newspaper empire here and the end of the influence of Andrew Bolt, Janet Albrechtsen, Steve Lewis, Imre Salusinski, Tim Blair, Piers Akerman, David Speers, Laurie Oakes, Denis Shanahan and the contemptible Newspoll tweaker O’Shannessy. It was a big day for democracy and the Social Democrat parties which will have a wind at their back hereafter as the net widens and more and more high-stepping Murdochists are hunted down and punished. David Cameron may go to gaol, and John Howard and Mark Vaile for giving two hundred and ninety-seven thousand dollars to Saddam Hussein. Ed Miliband or Nick Clegg may be Prime Minister by Christmas. And so on.

Murdoch’s gaoling was always on the cards and I alone on earth have been predicting it. Under Delaware law, where his company is constituted, the CEO of any company that seeks to corrupt foreign officials — Scotland Yard, for instance — goes automatically to gaol. He has no friends left and the number of his allies dropped by half with Rebekah’s arrest and bailing.

‘Murdoch cheats; it’s what he likes to do’ is what I’ve been tediously saying for years now.

It’s now official.

Or perhaps you disagree.

Hard to see how The Social Network is not the most important American film since Wall Street nor the most ideologically stirring since Platoon. American greed, American competitiveness, American hubris, American vengefulness are exposed as never before, and the thin-sliced layers of Harvard frat-house snobbery observed with Cheeverish keenness, as never before. Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue is a miracle of concision, sharp as Mamet and rapid as Cagney, rewriting as it goes film rules a century old. No, it is not a visual medium, dialogue is the driver, and, yes, it can be repetitive.

Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg is the Graduate of our time. Nerdy, intense, afraid of girls, snarky about everything, secretly pious, losing the few friends he has, obsessively acquisitive, he steals (or does he?) an idea for a meeting-girls website from the athletic upper-class Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer plus a fair bit of sweat-stained computer cloning) who belong to a club that won’t let him in – the Porcellian, where Teddy Roosevelt preened and blathered – and turns it into The Facebook which, with his wet-eyed mate Eduardo’s help (Eduardo puts up money), gets twenty-one thousand hits in a night.

This attracts the attention of Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), a west-coast coked-up computer-tycoon/hustler already bankrupt and famous. And then…triumph, and a sort of tragedy follows, a kind of pimply Dr Faustus, which is also the hottest true – or presumed true – story of our time. Based on Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaire, with which Zuckerberg, ‘the world’s youngest billionaire’, did not co-operate, it stirs my screenwriter’s narrative bloodlust like nothing since Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

What a generation this is. Wired, texting, romantic, impatient (two weeks ago is ancient history), coked up, diffidently promiscuous, cowering before mad Asian girlfriends (an almost compulsory adjunct to their luxury), Gatsbys on the make, they see Harvard as a ‘millionaires’ factory’ like Macquarie Bank and what they study there a mere down-home rehearsal for making billions in cyber space. And even the billions don’t matter. Beating the crap out of rivals, fairly or cheatingly, is the thing that really turns them on.

This is a seismic film experience. I saw it three times in three nights and on the fourth, bewailing its absence, met a teacher of film studies who called it ‘today’s Citizen Kane’. Which it is, of course. The talented, stony-hearted loner with women troubles inventing a media empire and ending friendless, rich and alone.

See it or I’ll kill the lot of you. Oscars for Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, Sorkin and, oh yes, David Fincher the seamless, fearless shot-holding director, a slam-dunk certainty. And it’ll run a year.

Monday, 1st September, 2003

A raw bright blue day over Pittwater. A magpie rising; a white launch tacking as it turns again through wrinkled blue to the north. Also a momentous week at home and abroad. Pauline Hanson gaoled for poll fraud. Abbott in the gun for sabotaging her. On Sunday night last at Cibo’s in North Adelaide I introduced Mojgan to Brian Deegan who swore his endless availability to look after the Bakhtiyari children, teach them football, Scrabble, criminal law, put them up in his five spare bedrooms and give them bikes to ride round his two-acre bush-fringed cul-de-sac property, paying their school and, if need by, university fees. His resolute blond chiselled handsomeness and Galahad valour, astonishing to all present – Annie was there as well, meeting him for the first time – seemed a few hours afterward, well, a bit much. It was all very well to so promise the moon, but it would almost surely not end so happily, before one of the boys at least committed suicide: ‘Maybe I make the choice soon and I go to paradise,’ Alamdar said to me twelve months ago.

Annie had gone that day to see Roqia Bakhtiyari, sullen, fraught and eight months pregnant in her grimy prison motel on Glen Eira Road.

Unusually for Adelaide (she wrote) it was a day of cold, slanting rain. There was a hotel and motel with the same name in the same road, and I had gone to the wrong one first. By the time I got to the right place, I was late and the box of fruit I had brought at Mojgan’s suggestion was beginning to disintegrate. I was met at reception by an overweight young male guard and taken to a motel room where a female guard watched television.

I had seen a photo of Roqia before – Ali had once shown us a rare and precious group photo of the family altogether in a bare room in Woomera when he had been allowed to go there once for a visit and return to Sydney – but I had no clear memory of her face. She was shorter than I had expected, with a broad, kindly face and anxious dark eyes, in flowing Afghan shirt and long pants and a head scarf, of course.

Mojgan was with her in the small, bare room off the main room. There were no pictures on the walls and room only for two single beds, no chairs, and a sewing machine which Roqia had been using to make clothes for the family. She enjoyed sewing, Mojgan told me. There were no bars on the one window that looked out onto the street where the rain still dripped on the footpath, but it was tightly locked and covered in a wire screen.

Roqia made us long glasses of milky sweetened Afghan tea, and Mojgan and I sat with her on the two single beds. The door stayed open, and the guards watched TV. Roqia’s English was better than Ali’s, but usually she spoke in Farsi and Mojgan translated. Through Mojgan, Roqia said she was very pleased to meet me, and very pleased that I had driven Ali to the doctor for his back, and that I had gone to the Refugee Tribunal appeal to try to help him. I couldn’t do much, I said, and meant it.

We talked about her children, and our own children too, but no mention was made of the coming baby as if that was bad luck somehow. She cried a little when speaking of her youngest daughter Amina, who cried out for her often, she said, especially at night. Mojgan thought special leave had been approved for Amina to come from Baxter, where they now were, and spend some time with her mother, but had no idea of when this might happen or how long Amina could stay.

I asked Roqia about her brother, who had recently been deported from Baxter to Pakistan; I asked if she could speak to him by phone. She said no she couldn’t because he planned to cross the border into Afghanistan to try to prove where they all came from, and there were no phones.

Mojgan said that Roqia was very frightened of the future. There was nothing much comforting to say to her; there was nothing to say that the future would be any better than the past or the present, and it could well be worse. I stayed with them for about three-quarters of an hour, and then went back out into the rain.

Wednesday, 3rd September, 2003

‘We’ve won,’ said Jeremy Moore looking dazed as he turned off his mobile. A Family Court in Melbourne had just ordered that the five Bakhtiyari children be released, immediately released and brought to Adelaide, in, yes, Ms Mojgan Khadem’s custody.

The unbelief spread around the upper floor of the court building in Grenfell Street, this can’t be happening, Mojgan amazed and beaming, Julian Burnside glowing, silent and calculating fast. A clutch of reporters arrived, wondering what the fuck they could say without mentioning the children’s names. Yes, we were told, the children could see their mother, each day in her prison hospital.

Forty minutes went by while we waited for our courtroom to finish another matter. Then we went in. Did anyone object, asked the judge, to what had been done? There were no objections. The lawyers agreed to let it proceed, extraneous matters to be held over to another hearing, and the judge endorsed it.

Mojgan meanwhile had organised a minivan and was about to leave for Baxter. Her mother was already on the way from Ballarat to an undisclosed location where the children could live, attend school and visit each day their mother, under guidance from Catholic Welfare.

She rushed down the steps and drove away. Julian Burnside, who would have been played in the film by the young Paul Scofield, invited us into a private room and talked. The whole thing started, he said, when Roqia was shown some Afghan currency and did not recognise it, and was then thought to be an imposter.

The currency was the currency of the Northern Alliance.

And the translator who went with the Age team to Charkh was from the Northern Alliance. And the village, seeing an enemy, lied to him, and lied down the phone to Ali, protecting him.

It felt too good to be true. The minivan would be intercepted and the children re-arrested as Akram al-Basri was, before he secured his second release, but soon thereafter was sent back to Gaza, and mortal danger.

It took hours and hours, but then it was all right. They were all there at the gate, with little bags of belongings.

Mojgan drove and drove through the night and Alamdar kept leaning out and looking upwards. Del the Catholic representative asked him what he was doing.

‘Looking at the stars,’ he said. ‘I have not seen them for a year. The lights in the compound were always too bright.’

As they were driving Ruddock was replaced as Minister by Amanda Vanstone.

Wednesday

I took the train home, still fearing flying too much to wait and greet the boys. I saw in the paper that on Thursday Mars would be closer to Earth than it had been for hundreds of years. I rang Natasha Stott Despoja’s office and her people organised for the Bakhtiyari children to go to the observatory and there, at the crucial hour, see the great red planet loom in the telescope.

‘It was wonderful,’ said Mojgan. ‘It was just… there! You know? The boys loved it.’

The Budget was obviously a success and Murdoch and his minion O’Shannessy had some difficulty with the Newspoll that followed it.  The numbers were obviously around 47, a gain of a million votes, and they had to squeeze them down a bit.

What they did was post a lot of ‘uncommitted’ (you can get this by pushing for an instant answer a migrant uncertain of his English and talking fast and patronisingly to him, or her) and claim there were eight hundred thousand of them. And you can preference-flow the vote the way it went in 2010 when there was no Katter Party getting ten percent in Queensland and preferencing mostly Labor and Bob Brown was still with us and much more even handed between the parties than he became.

And thus they got it down to 45, still a gain for Labor of half a million votes but not enough to hope to win by. With the Katter preferences in ( and his party is not even mentioned, though it gets already as much as the National Party), Labor would be on 47 or 48 and when the schoolkids-money comes in on 50 or 51.

In the meantime, the lies go on. That Labor is gone for all money, the people have made their minds up (though half a million changed their minds last week), that the Coalition will always outscore Labor on the economy (though Costello called Abbott an ‘economic illiterate’), and the people have ‘just stopped listening’, though they’re obviously listening very closely, or half a million of them are.

And, of course, that people don’t want a’class war’. They want nothing else. Every lottery winner is a victor in the class war. Everyone who resents Clive Palmer getting sixteen times the wage of Barack Obama is in the class war. Everyone who covets a McMansion or a yacht is in the class war. Everyone who resents Gina Rhinehart is in a class war. Everyone who loves Hoges, or Warnie, or the anonymous kids who do well on Voices or Australian Idol is in a class war. Of course they are.

And Abbott is too. He is saying the poor can’t be trusted not to steal money from their children so they mustn’t get any.

And so on. So it goes. Discuss.

Any contributions to this argument I would appreciate.

As an occasional speechwriter for the Governor-General I thought I might be welcome in the ABC last night but I was thrown out of the Green Room by a man afeared I might ‘harass’ Joe Hockey after Q&A, which I myself once starred in, though I got on well with Joe the one time I met him, and wrote of him fondly in three books and five columns.

What is going on here? Why am I so abhorred? The Drum Unleashed no longer prints my pieces though I always get more responses to them than anyone but Paul Keating, and I don’t get invited on The Drum any more let alone Q&A which I thought I did well on. I wouldn’t normally raise this, it bespeaks a sense of entitlement that I, a prizewinning columnist, screenwriter, playwright, miniseries writer, feature film and documentary writer and essayist, occasional poet, comic novelist, actor and mob orator of some note, Gore Vidal, Gough Whitlam, Bob Carr and John Ralston Saul among my admirers, am perhaps less entitled to than is Gerard Henderson the world genius, but in this, my eighth decade after my seven sackings by the ABC and my two throwings-out I begin to wonder if I should persist in being nice about it, calling it, as I always do, ‘Our spare university.’

It may go back to my campaign in 1998 to prevent Phillip Adams being fired and the ABC being privatised when Gerard Henderson and John Howard wanted that, or to the ruckus when Sandra Levy didn’t want to do The True Believers and John Button made her, or when I outed Tony Jones as a Liberal, but I feel in a way foreshortened, and unjustly so, given Newsfront, King O’Malley, Goodbye Paradise, Fatty Finn, The Nostradamus Kid, Goodbye Jerusalem, Night Thoughts In Time Of War, A Local Man, The Word Before Shakespeare, Shakespeare In Italy and my reputation as a lively essayist on film and theatre sometimes, not always, as good as Tynan and Anthony Lane. A better explanation than mine might be in order.

Earlier in the night I befriended Bob Katter and we agreed to have a dialogue at Gleebooks on the economy and this may have given me ideas above my station which the good Lord may have punished by my fraught evicter saying ‘I don’t need this. I have a show to get on’ and leading me to the lift.

I’m sorry for shouting at him and Rhys but I am old, infirm, unthanked and seventy.

And so it went.

Terrance is banned for life for trying to make Mel kill himself but I am suspending the sentences of Greenblatt, Frank and Simon. Their contributions have been of so much help to the Labor cause, and their mental connections so idiotic, that I quite enjoy rebutting them.

Greenblatt, for instance, lately said Craig urinated into the hooker’s mouth.

I emphasise that this is his opinion, or his information, and it is nothing to do with me.

The certainty that Craig and his wife will each get a quarter of a million dollars from this young fool is of great comfort to my old age.

In one of the Debates Obama could ask Romney:

‘Was there a time in the last fifty two years when you believed no black person could enjoy an afterlife? For this is what your church taught till I was twenty. Did you ever in your life believe that a man of my colour could not go to heaven? Do you believe it now? Do you believe it still?’

(Romney was thirty when his church changed its view that Blacks were akin to the beasts, without souls and unfit for ordination. It’s a fair bet he believed this when he was a young missionary and, like his fellow teetotal, coffee-abhorring proselytisers, avoided converse with people of colour.)

I have heard the Bakhtiyari boys Alamdar and Montezar are dead. They were friends of mine and I ask that Amanda Vanstone’s action in removing them and their four sisters, baby brother, father and mother during the tsunami and dumping them on a winter street in Islamabad with no money be now examined by a Senate Committee, and Phillip Ruddock’s legal opinion as Attorney General that they deserved this though they were doing well at school here should be examined as well, and he be asked to leave the service of the House until his guilt or innocence of the charge of obstructing justice be established in a court of law.

If anyone has any further information can they let me know, publicly or privately.

Doctor Kuruvilla George says it’s unhealthy for a child to grow up without a father. This means, must mean, that about three million Australians are unhealthy in precisely the way he suggests.

For they, like me, spent their first four years, or five, or six with their mothers and aunties while their fathers were away at World War 2. And some fathers, like Clive James’s, did not come home from that war at all. Clive’s mother never remarried. He must be a real mess.

My father came home in 1946. After that, as a commercial traveller, he was home only nine days a month. I’m a mess too, according to Professor George. It were better I guess had I not been born.

And this, of course, is the logical point. If children should not be conceived by IVF or a sperm donor and raised by, say, two mothers, as in the film The Kids Are All Right, it must follow, logically follow, that they are not conceived at all. And never born. And have no life on earth of any kind. This is precisely like Nazi eugenics, or the compulsory abortions enforced even now in China and professor George is a practising fascist I would think. Ask him to point you to an IVF procedure if you are gay and see how far you get. I understand he attempts to’cure’ homosexuals if they ask to be cured as well.

Wow.

Wow.

I wonder what Tony Abbott, who for a long time believed he had a son he had never seen, and tried to outlaw the morning-after pill, and has a lesbian sister, and opposes gay marriage, thinks about all this.

He must now say if his sister’s lover should have a child in this way. And he must say no.

If he’s against it, what a fool he is.

If he says he’s against it, I think he’s lying.

In the Lindy Chamberlain murder case only I noted that Lindy was allowed to go home and look after her other children between her trials despite the risk that she would murder them too. The public never thought of this because they’d come to two separate conclusions, one that she was innocent, and two, that she should be punished anyway, possibly because she was a Seventh Day Adventist.

This was also the case with O.J. Simpson, who would not have hacked off his wife’s head, or nearly, while his children were sleeping upstairs, and left her body where they would find her in the morning, and get unbloodied into a car with no bloodstains in it, and fly to another town almost immediately, with no time to wash the car or his clothes or burn them. They knew he was innocent but felt he should be punished, like Othello, for being a big black man with a beautiful white unfaithful wife.

It was also the case with Strauss-Kahn: they knew mouth-rape was impossible without a lethal weapon, but felt he should be deprived of the French Presidency anyway.

In the case of Craig Thomson they know he saw no hooker, because her name and face and testimony has not been supplied, yet they think he should be kicked out of parliament because that would, or could, bring the Government down or ‘overshadow’ their good Budget, a Budget that might save them.

Where is the girl, or girls? Will she testify it was him she saw? Why would she not put her hand up? It was a legal transaction, in a town where prostitution was legal, policed and health-checked. Where is she?

Once again we have this phenomenon, a simultaneous belief in innocence and punishment, in punishing the innocent (like the children of boat people) for a larger, higher cause, the victory of the Murdochist filth-battalions over civilised reasoning on this continent.

That cause has been joined by nearly all the journalists. Why have they not found the girl? A couple of enquiries would do it.

The reason is it would help Craig Thomson.

And that would never do.

I await a sensational Laurie Oakes interview of the girl who was paid twelve hundred dollars, about what she thought of Craig and what they did together.

It could happen tomorrow.

The fact is, she doesn’t exist.

If she did, she would put her hand up. For, like Chantelois, an interview. And like Monica Lewinski describe his member.

She doesn’t exist.

I await proof that she does.

She is not a person, she is a figure of speech.

It is now clear there will be no successful No Confidence motion or any motion to remove Craig from the House for even a day. Windsor and Oakeshott and Gillard will put up a motion recommending a referendum on future parliamentary rules and Katter and Brandt and Wilkie may or may not vote for it, and the Liberals will certainly vote against it.

And yet the headlines suggest the Government is at imminent risk of overthrow. This was never going to happen. Oakeshott, Windsor, Wilkie and Katter knew that their power to influence events will end at the next election and they were never going to hasten the day of the vanishing of that power nor give up the money they would lose when Abbott, PM, sprang an early election in, say, July.

It was obvious they were never going to do that. Yet the papers, sensing a good Budget, cried crisis, extinction, hookers, homosexual harassment, cabcharge fraud and the rest of it, as though the expenditure of half a million dollars outweighed the expenditure of a trillion dollars. How creepy and corrupt are they.

And a man not fit to run an international company is printing polls he has paid well for which show his enemies doing badly. Why should we believe those polls? Why?

And why would we imagine families getting two thousand dollars in the mail in the next three months would vote against getting the same amount next year? Why would they?

This has been classic Murdoch sliming and fabrication, as in Bigotgate, Iguanagate and the blowjob-rape they charged Strauss-Kahn with, denying him the French Presidency.

While Rupert has breath in his body, he will continue this cheating, this persecution of innocence, this foul play.

Prove that I lie.

It is the nature of brotherless men to seek and find spare brothers everywhere, and in this gathering today are the many, many spare brothers of Clayton. His was a pretty male world, of Irish humour and backstage mischief and epic pub yarning and mateship and crazy experiment – I recall him once attempting to raise devils on Wollongong station at dawn, the way you do, trying to find the secret, the book, the music, the mixture of words and friends that would unlock it all.

He was forever on pilgrimage, another voyage, another town, another opening, another show. He had the restlessness of one forever dissatisfied with what he saw in the mirror or clutched in his heart. He wanted so much to be better, and he never knew, or could be convinced, of how good he was.

As an actor he had no known Australian equivalent. Eli Wallach, Karl Malden, Gene Hackman among Americans, Bob Hoskins, Tom Wilkinson and Albert Finney among Englishmen, and Johnny Cash among singers come near him but did not have that mixture, the self-distaste, the tender strength, the furious questing, the burly, kindly menace, reminiscent of both bear and dog, that Clayton brimmed and beamed and simmered with in such abundance.

He did Tennessee Williams’ Mitch in Streetcar twice, of course, and a goodly share of Jim McNeil and Alex Buzo and Arthur Miller and G.B. Shaw and Brecht and Becket and Shakespeare and David Williamson, and five roles I wrote for him, tolerating no-one else. He could play the whole male human species all at once. He could share a stage with Mel Gibson and Geoffrey Rush and not be outclassed.

He dazzled in theatre where lead roles were there in abudance, and merely shone in film and TV, where cops and crims and aldermen and the last rewrites of the script editor were mostly his meagre lot. The career he might have had, like Walter Matthau’s or Bob Mitchum’s or Richard Harris’s or Gerard Depardieu’s was not to be.

For he never thought he was any good. He was never out of work, and forever praised for what he did, but he chafed around his imagined inadequacies and never believed the acclaim all round him was real. He thought there was a nasty punchline coming. On his deathbed, awash with unending admirers and family hour after hour, week after week, he got at last a glimmer of the magnitude of the love that had always been there for him, but he didn’t believe that either. There had to be a catch; it wasn’t real.

I promised him we would go to Ireland together, and I’d teach him to write, and ghost his memoirs, but the days grew short and the cancer was swift and it all never happened. I wrote him a miniseries as a football coach that Penny Chapman wanted equal female content and that was that. I dedicated my latest play on Chifley to him and asked him to be in it as a voice on the radio forever, but I asked a day too late. I mourn, as we all do, the missed long hours and months, the ursine companionship, the unique way with English, the rails against everything, the tone of voice. It is hard to believe the voice is no longer there.

Auden in his poem on Yeats said that when we die we become our admirers. Clayton I fear is a difficult gig, entirely memorable and completely unrecapturable. Just try to mimic him now. It isn’t easy.

As he went into what seemed then to be his ultimate silence I searched for and couldn’t find the song I had written for him, to sing him down, and miserably fudged up a version and Bill Charlton sang it beautifully, improvising a sub-Irish melody. An hour later I looked in my jacket pocket, precisely where I remembered putting it and there it was, and the actual words are these, Clayton, the tune is yet a work in progress.

You do not know how much you are loved.
You do not know the grieving.
There is no cheer
Or joy back here
In the shit-hole you are leaving.

You should not fear the frown of the great,
You’ve been there, done that, Clayton:
Your name in lights,
You’ll hit the heights
In the halls of Christ or Satan.

We’ll miss you heaps, but what the hell,
We’ve known you and that matters.
You’ve trod the miles,
You brought the smiles
And left us all in tatters.

You’ve left the world a warmer place,
You made it glad and bonny,
And until when
We see you again
We’ll miss you, winsome Johnny.

Romney and Obama, both descended from heathen polygamists, are vying for the Christian-monagamy vote in different, interesting ways.

Obama is saying monogamy, not pagan promiscuity, should be a choice available also to those who live with their own gender and sometimes, as in The Kids Are All Right, have children and raise them in an otherwise normal way. Romney is saying those children are bastards and always will be bastards, if he has anything to do with it, and the engendering of them was wrongly done, and the God who (presumably) made their parents perverts thinks they should have married someone else: a woman, for instance, or a man.

Whether these offspring of perversion can be Mormons later in life and get, after death, their own planet, their own coffee-free planet, he has not yet made clear.

Though Romney, whose great-grandfathers, on both sides of his lineage, all eight of them, each had several wives (and he would not be here if they didn’t) struggles with the logic of what he is saying, he may yet gain votes in those states — the Carolinas, Alabama, Iowa, Pennsylvania — which dislike shirtlifters, and Obama may lose the election on this issue alone. But it is probable that he won’t, if he uses his own history and argues for it.

‘I was born of a white mother and a black father,’ Obama could say, ‘in a year when interracial marriage in some jusdictions — in South Africa, for instance — was a gaoling offence, and many South African Christians, of the Dutch Fundamentalist persuasion, believed my parents’ marriage was a form of bestiality. And yet here I am. Definitions of lawful marriage have changed since then.

‘It was a year too in which Mormons believed no Negro had an afterlife and a coffee-free planet of his own. And yet here I am, the child of an unfashionable marriage, as homosexual marriage is now, what many thought a sinful marriage, a marriage agaisnt God’s law, here I am, doing fairly well in the world, making each day one sixtieth of what Clive Palmer makes for much harder work. Here I am. Vote for me. Yes you can.’

Some would see this pitch as a call to bigotry, a smearing of the chosen faith — unpolygamist, unracist Reformed Mormonism — of Mitt Romney and a punishing of him for those sins of his forefathers he does not repeat. But it is very much the way politics is now. One cannot run in America as, say, a Shi-ite or a Satanist. One must make adjustments. Obama had to repudiate his Muslim upbringing and join, in Chicago, a happy-clappy church to get on in the world. Romney had to repudiate, in some sense, his polygamist forefathers, and, in some sense, his own consequent existence, to gain traction in a largely Christian, and Christ-eating country.

He too has had to make his way in the world, and is frustratedly hoping this misery of adjustment will end soon, and he will have a planet of his own, free of strong drink and difficult choices. like this one.

For he has to run a bigoted campaign. But bigotry of another sort may bring him down, the widespread Baptist bigotry against those antebellum orgiasts whose multiple tuppings brought him into the world. ‘They never should have engaged in those vile couplings,’ he will have to say, ‘and I should not be here. But here I am, the facelifted smiling product of sin. Vote for me, and I will eradicate this new curse of monogamy spreading like a virus across our fruited plains. Vote for me, and a proud return to homosexual promiscuity, AIDS and anxiety. You know it makes sense.’

It’s a hard sell, but he has a lot of money, and maybe he can do it.

A few preliminary questions on a matter not yet before the courts.

What is the name of the hooker Craig prefers? Is there one? Or two? Or does he take whoever turns up? Does he meet them at the hotel? Are there hallway images of the girl, or girls, arriving? What do they think of him? Is he generous and courteous? Does he treat them in an ugly way? Does he give them a tip?

These are some of the questions that would be normally asked by investigative journalists if they believed for even a minute what they are writing about. But they don’t. They are interested only in creating a smear, a corrupt, implausible, fouled impression of a man who has, on the face of it, committed no crime. Even if he paid for hookers with union money for himself or others, as Frank Sinatra did for John Kennedy, and Robert Menzies did for Soekarno, it is not an actionable offence.

Will the girl come forward? I doubt if she exists.

Why would a man seeking preselection and a ministry do this? Why would he risk venereally infecting his pregnant wife? Why? What would his motive be?

But these questions are never asked. Because, as in the case of Lindy Chamberlain, or Dominique Strauss-Kahn, or Teddy Kennedy, or O.J. Simpson, or Peter Slipper, journalists with a mission don’t ask about motive. They follow only one trajectory. They have only one aim. Blood. More blood.

I know Craig Thomson and I know Tony Abbott and by the look of it, and a stress-test lie detector would confirm or disprove my impression, Abbott was lying on television today and Craig was not.

It seems to me much more likely that union foes of Craig would set him up than that he would be such a fool. Buy hookers when you’re seeking preselection for a swinging seat full of Anglo-Celtic young marrieds and retirees? Really?

And from this time forth, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, I will read no text-messages and take no phone calls from Tony Abbott. He is my friend no longer. He wrote a good book and he seemed to me to have some smatch of honour in him and I truly enjoyed his company and respected his sinuous Jesuit intellect and secret Santamaria-socialist ideals.

But this is a lie too far. A man like him who for twenty-five years was wrongly accused, and self-accused, and publicly accused, of abandoning his bastard child should be very careful about what he says of the lives of others in the coming days. His own life is too blotted with secrets, past and present, for him to any more risk that.

And his career I think is now, or soon, at an end.

And it’s a pity.

Fairfax brought out today a Nielsen Poll showing Labor two party preferred on 42, the Coalition 58, Abbott’s performance admired by 44 percent of the respondents, disliked by 60 percent, Gillard admired by 35 and execrated by 60, and Abbott Preferred Prime Minister by 50 to 42.

The poll was taken, however, during Wednesday and Thursday, nine-tenths of it before Abbott had completed his reply and all of it before Craig had made a fair fist, some think, of his innocence and Kroger had bagged Costello for bagging Abbott, his party leader, as ‘an economic illiterate’.

So the figures might well have been right on that particular Wednesday, but they were, in context, in the scheme of things, very, very unfair.

What has happened in the meantime is that Abbott has been ruined. He has been shown to have been in the dock for sexual assault, a crime, though unproven, worse than any of the venal sins that Slipper and Craig have been bewhispered of. And he has been shown as well to be the sort of class warrior and private school snob who says the lower orders can’t be trusted with the money we give them to look after their children with, they might go out and spend it on drink or greyhound betting.

What has happened in the meantime is a civil war in the Liberal Party’s Victorian Branch, which is one byelection away from losing power there.

The poll moreover pits only Gillard against Abbott as preferred Prime Minister (on the day before he made an innumerate klutz of himself on the floor of the parliament, and was revealed to have been accused by a famous Protestant former Treasurer of being ‘a DLP Stooge’.

It’s almost certain the numbers would be 45-45 now for preferred Prime Minister and 48 Labor to 52 Coalition two party preferred (though there are nine parties sitting in the House and five in the Senate; discuss). It’s almost certain too that Abbott cannot survive what is on page 48 of the Duffy book whenever it is brought up by Albo in Question Time, and he cannot survive the libel suit Craig will bring against him and Pyne for prejudging and smearing before a proper process of law a man innocent of most, if not all, of the charges levelled against him by his grimy union usurpers, whoever they were.

Nielsen also did not do what they had to do, a poll of Shorten versus Abbott as Preferred Prime Minister, Combet versus Abbott, Albo versus Abbott, Smith versus Abbott, Carr versus Abbott, Faulkner versus Abbott, Clare versus Abbott, Plibersek versus Abbott, Roxon versus Abbott and so on, and thus give a clear picture of how many Labor voters or Labor leaners or oncers or old timers were still in the mix if Gillard went. And how Carr Labor or Shorten Labor would go against the Abbott-Truss-Joyce Coalition.

They cheated, in short, as Murdoch always has, this once, if only this once.

And they should be ashamed. And they should not do it again.

They should do a call-back poll tomorrow night, and see how different the numbers now are.

And prove that I lie.

Michael Costa at fifty-two, Peter Costello at fifty-one, Alan Carpenter at fifty-one, Brendan Nelson at forty-nine, Morris Iemma at forty-seven, Reba Meagher at forty, Matt Brown at thirty-six, all ended their careers in these last two weeks. The most interesting of these was Costello. Smug, smirking thug or great lost Prime Minister, lightweight jesting sado-narcissist or saviour of the nation’s economy, he it was who had the magnetism, the star quality, the zest for the joust, the way Keating had. He it was who should be better known.

I read his memoir on a train and in a hotel room and an office with mounting unease in one long night and a dreary day and was none the wiser at the end of it. He was a smirking, evasive enigma still; a buffoon or a great lost leader according to your taste, a mocker, a drone, a Hamlet, a Coriolanus, a Billy Bigelow, Mark Antony, Pal Joey, Bart Simpson, Bugs Bunny, the Fonz.

It was hard to tell.

For he told us almost nothing of himself. What quarrels he had with his parents, what marks he got at school, what it was like to share a bedroom for eighteen years with the Reverend Tim Costello. Why he was caned so often, and left his parents’ religion and joined his wife’s. What he thought about God, and Christ, and why he thought Christ anti-union. Whether his fundamentalist parents liked him wedding an Anglican. How long he was in and around the Labor Party and why he left. What his close Labor friends the Eassons thought of his defection to the anti-Christ, the dark side and his boots-and-all marriage to a Liberal leader’s daughter.

We don’t know if he ever saw a movie, or went to a play, an opera, a ballet, read a novel or bet on the Melbourne Cup. We don’t know if he was raised teetotal, and what pain attended his first alcoholic drink. We don’t know if he had a pet dog, or a visiting parrot he befriended and fed. We aren’t told where he stood on Apartheid, Nelson Mandela, Bobby Kennedy, the hanging of Ronald Ryan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Pogo, Peanuts, Pink Floyd. His grandparentage, parentage, childhood, school days, undergraduate years, adolescent comradeships and rapid marriage take between them twenty-two pages; the fight for the GST seventeen.

No great emotion troubles the rising young mover and shaker – no lust, no fleshly disappointment, no drug-bust, no hangover, no detailed love of a football team, no hot, rousing day at the cricket, no beloved eating house, no details of how he fell in love or felt at first sight of his firstborn baby. No thrill at first putting on a lawyer’s wig or walking at thirty-two into Parliament House.

Few feelings of any human sort are admitted. We seem to have an ambition-machine here, or, worse, a policy nerd, a number-wrestling corporate accountant, a two-legged White Paper. The caustic clown, the parliamentary Groucho, the happy Houdini, the unstoppable Woody Woodpecker has gone missing. The jesting gladiator we love to boo and clap and curse has vanished into air, into thin air, and into the Official Version, rewritten history.

This is par for the course for the Liberals, of course. They admit no lesser emotions, merely their desire to serve, their love of party, their unflinching loyalty to a stumbling leader, and their tumble-wash of humbled gratitude when chosen like Turnbull to guide the nation through troubled times; this they profess in tearful abundance. No aggravation, no anger, no furious chariot-ride to the cliff edge of spleen and vengeance, only (occasionally) disappointment, sadness that a colleague has erred. Peter Costello at no time wished a plane on 9/11 had hit and spifflicated John Howard. You better believe it, buster.

If ever there was an uncompassionate conservative, a cool head for the wrong figures and a shrivelled heart, it is this unended revenant Member for Higgins, this ever-menacing Bolingbroke, this Banquo’s Ghost at the feast of reason, this deathless pretender and eternal tease. When party or country needed him, he was the man who wasn’t there. When kingship looked like too much hard work, he didn’t bother to reach for it, preferring a bottle of Bollinger on a yacht or lobster mornay and a chat with friends in Toorak.

Like most lazy men he groans and sighs about the hard work he does, for twelve hours a day sometimes, he says. This is news, I hear, to his public servants, and it may be his fatal flaw. He was elected unopposed as Deputy six times. He could have been leader four times. But he didn’t campaign for it, he didn’t intrigue for it. In this, as in life elsewhere, he couldn’t be bothered.

He deals lazily, too, with his Christian values. Imprisoning children and warping their lives is okay with him, even when their parents afterwards prove innocent as charged. Not finding WMD after killing scores of thousands of children while seeking them is okay too; Saddam behaved as if he had them, fooling everybody, and the scores of thousands of dead children are better off without him. Aboriginal drinking is a problem he admits, but he blames this on the laws that raised their wages and made them too expensive to employ as rouseabouts or drudges. He finds fresh hope for the future of Aborigines when he sees Noel Pearson, in an aircraft seat beside him, reading Hayek.

He makes no mention of Haneef or Habib and skirts round Hicks. He swears no sailor knew where SIEV-X was on that night, and neither did the Prime Minister. He swears the Children Overboard photos were an honest mistake. He swears blind that he and Howard and Downer and Vail knew nothing of the AWB funnelling hundreds of millions to Saddam.

He does not speak, amazingly, of the court case that filled front pages and clogged the airwaves for long days against me and Random House over an ill-written sentence in Goodbye Jerusalem. He does not say why it was worth a quarter of a million dollars to him, Tony, Tanya and, amazingly, Tony’s wife for me to have said it wrongly. The book, the case, the public furore don’t even make the index, or a footnote, or a sub-clause. Funny that. Nor the harm that his cock-eyed self-righteousness that strange week did to his Prime Ministerial prospects thereafter. Why all the fuss, people wondered? Why all the money?

No mention of that. His noble narrative, purged of anguish, unease, self-doubt, resentment, embarrassment and guilt, continues unheckled to its righteous and plaintive end, a great leader sacrificed, a golden age lost, by a lying worm.

The last fifty pages are clearly aided by diary notes and deal with Howard’s refusal to walk the plank. They read grippingly and suspensefully and are written well. Had the book been only about this and a hundred pages slimmer it would have been an honourable work, like Bobby Kennedy’s memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a certain bestseller.

But what we have instead is a campaign biography but alas after Tuesday no campaign. A blandly written work of narcissistic obfuscation enlivened now and then by well-aimed shafts of jovial malice at Howard, the evasive stubborn weakling and Janette, his keeper. Written by a man who sees reality through three thicknesses of glass, one of them a mirror, and always has, since his years as an angry latchkey kid watching Rocky and Bullwinkle and festering at home alone.

A good deal of it seems to have been drafted by his public servants, the chapters on the Future Fund, the Asian Meltdown and the failing Federation especially. This seems ill-advised, like ordering a House of Commons Committee of Review to draft the first chapters of Portnoy’s Complaint. The harsh Melbourne gutter slang is missing (he was Ginger Mick I’m sure in a former life) and a crisp emollient Sir Humphrey bureaucratese uneasily tap-dancing in its place.

The biggest surprise in the book for me was the lack of hidden depths in Peter Costello. There seems to be no hinterland, no secret Christian agenda, no merciful neo-Baptist perspective, no thinking heart, no salute at journey’s end to his brother Tim and his faith.

What you see instead, I fear, I fear greatly, is what seems to be the face of a sneering, simplistic, sadistic church-hopping hypocrite and this is what, from this book, or so it seems to me, you get.

I have often written that Costello is an impatient, lazy, sometimes drunken man of large talent and smugness and verbal wit who believed always that he did not need to lift a phone or shout a drink or collude a policy double-shuffle to be elected Leader and so become Prime Minister. His closest lifelong comrade-in-arms and ideological bedfellow Michael Kroger seems now to share this view.

‘I’m at my wit’s end with Peter,’ he told Jon Faine. ‘He could have been Prime Minister… now for five years he’s been like a bear with a terribly sore head … attacking everyone. Lunch with Peter is an agony. It’s a nightmare. You sit and listen to him unload on Howard … He doesn’t like Hewson, he doesn’t like Turnbull, he has never been all that friendly with my former father-in-law, the great Andrew Peacock … he doesn’t like Alexander Downer .. and he’s been publicly critical of Tony Abbott, calling him a DLP stooge and an economic illiterate … he was a Rhodes Scholar, for God’s sake.’

This is the equivalent of Chifley bagging Curtin, and it may go back a fair way to, say, when Kroger married Ann, the daughter of Costello’s factional enemy Peacock, ally of his sworn foe Kennett, a betrayal, surely, of the blood-brothers oath they swore as boys to take over the country, Kroger as a Liberal, Costello as Labor, if I’ve got that right. Or it may go, in its present intensity, back to Abbott’s unexpected getting of the leadership, and to the bizarre court case Costello confected against me and Random House, and dragged the nervy, wriggling Abbott into.

The facts were that Abbott took Tanya Coleman, later Tanya Costello, out on eight ‘dates’ (according to Abbott’s close friend Christopher Pearson in The Courier Mail at a time when Abbott was sexually active, wrongly thought he had engendered a child and left the bride, as it were, at the altar and was known as an arse-baring student rowdy and football jock and up on a charge of sexual assault, later thrown out. It was not explained why there was no ninth date.

And it may have preyed on Costello’s mind. And he may have got the case up, despite his wife’s avid protests — she might have to testify to her unbreached virginity in 1978, an unfashionable year for it, and on her wedding night, and Abbott might have to admit the pregnant girl he shared with her landlord — because he had to be free of the doubt, and publicly free of the doubt, that Tanya had been in some sense Abbott’s girlfriend before she was his.

Why it should matter is hard to say. A girl in the 1970s goes out with one brilliant student and then, a few years later, with another and marries the latter and talks politics to both, luring the latter, Peter Costello, away from his Labor friends and into the Liberal Party of which her father was leader in New South Wales.

The usual view is Costello didn’t like being outed as a Labor defector (after his affiancement to Tanya he changed not only his party friendships but his religion), but it is possible, just possible, that some resentment of his wife’s connection to Abbott was at the heart of it. As I said on the court house steps that week, ‘I myself would not humiliate my wife in public for even a million dollars, but tastes vary’; and it was widely thought then (by, for instance, Kerry O’Brien) that Costello in thus exposing her to unsavoury scrutiny had made a fool of himself and bruised, if not sunk, his chances of the Prime Ministership. And he may think this himself, and resent Abbott doubly for having thus distantly deprived him of the Lodge by taking out his wife so long ago and rousing him into fatuous litigation and nationwide suspicion and catcalls.

Or it may be for some other different reason he lately despises Abbott and says so at lunch, in drink, to whoever is listening, frequently by the look of it. The net result, though, is the preferred leader of the Liberal Party calling the present leader of the Liberal Party an ‘economic illiterate’ and a ‘DLP stooge’.

Can Abbott survive this? Maybe. But on top of the Class War utterances of his party, and the money coming in June to the parents of schoolchildren, and Craig Thomson’s manifest innocence, and the libel actions he will then launch against Abbott and Pyne, and page 68 of the Duffy book, he will find it harder now.

And so it goes.

And now this: it is what is most feared.
No No Man’s Land, no barbed wire and no mud
Between what is, and what now cannot be withstood,
Not Falstaffed, Hamletted or King Leared,
Now this: the question of how long
In brain grown white will stay the song
In memory, in mind, in stirring blood,
How long the blest, the curst, the good,
And all the rainbow hues of right and wrong;
How long, since vision first appeared
To the last swift solemn setting down
Of mask and doublet, sword and wig and crown,
The play now done, the curtain call too brief,
The march of too few friends through autumn leaf
And rain, and jokes twice told, to where
No thought survives, no cloud in air
Looks down on what, no longer there,
Was once a lustful, struggling man, or beast,
No longer influential in the least.

At seventy, of course, the question comes:
At night, in bed, ere sleep, we do the sums,
We count the days, regrets and worst mistakes,
We do the numbers, till the morning breaks.

Gladiator is the first such toga-decadence-colosseum epic since, probably, Von Sternberg’s unfinished I, Claudius of 1936 to have an actor of the first rank in the lead role and a cast that is not elsewhere unnerving (Tony Curtis, you will remember, was a bit of a worry in Spartacus, Victor Mature a pungently heaving menace in The Robe, Charlton Heston a teeth-flexing hunk of marble in both The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur, Edmond Purdom an oily Mediterranean gigolo in The Egyptian, Elizabeth Taylor a shrill spoiled shrieking schoolgirl in Cleopatra, Jeffrey Hunter just a pretty face in King of Kings and John Wayne’s Golgotha-surveying centurion in The Greatest Story Ever Told – ‘Surely this man was the Son of God’ – an instant world classic of Coarse Acting, while their various co-stars Laughton, Ustinov, Harrison, Burton, Hawkins and Thring as a rule were excellent).

For I found Russell Crowe’s impersonation of blood-drenched Roman honour – integritas I think it is called – every bit as good as Brando’s Antony or Olivier’s Crassus or Ian McKellen’s Coriolanus on the stage. What he does is a kind of deep telepathy: his is a deadpan as communicative as Ian Holm’s and as charismatic-heroic (I refer in particular to Romper Stomper) as Richard Burton’s or Anthony Hopkins’.

The film is not, I suppose, good history (there were as few gladiator-demagogues then as there are wrestler-messiahs now), but it is refreshingly and, for Hollywood, unusually free of all taint of Christianity (a minor cult then and for two hundred more years till Constantine converted to it and forced it down the throat of the Roman world), preferring as its underpinning theology Maximus’s yearning for an old soldier’s Other World and stirring and scary throughout, very like The Duellist, the director Ridley Scott’s other sword-flick, set in revolutionary France.

The story is this. Maximus (Crowe), a dedicated warrior-general too long steeped in barbarians’ blood wins yet another famous victory in the snow-swirling forests of Germany and asks his philosopher-emperor, Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) if he might go home (deep shades of Doug Macarthur in Korea) to his wife and young son and his farm in Spain. Aurelius the gentle stoic says no, he wants him, not his pampered insipid son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix plus hare lip) to succeed him as First Consul and reveals this to Commodus too. Commodus smothers him and brazenly and unpopularly seizes the succession. He orders Maximus’s execution. Maximus escapes and galloping vainly arrives home just in time to beweep the corpses of his crucified wife and son in the courtyard of his burnt-out farm. In Learish grief he is captured by what our local Caesar Wiranto would call rogue elements, sold into slavery and bought in a Levantine meat market by Proximo (Oliver Reed), a Roman showman specialising in gladiatorial butchery and fallen on hard times, who sees promise in him after he wins proficiently many fatal battles in the ring.

He arrives at last at the Colosseum where Commodus and his noble sister Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) severally recognise him and the fickle mob applaud his victories against chariots, tigers, new cutting-edge weaponry and impossible odds; and the insipid, envious and increasingly crazy Commodus grows less popular by the day. Will Maximus achieve the consulship at last? and the bed of Lucilla who loved him once and loves him still? Will he have his revenge on Commodus at last? Will Commodus beguile his noble sister into incest with murderous threats to her son the imperial heir? Now read on.

It has a few faults, some of them historical. The actual Commodus, for instance, had no surviving sister and did not die in the Colosseum fighting with a mere gladiator. No slave-trading butcher of captured men was ever as beloved as Oliver Reed. No Spaniards in Roman times had, to the best of my knowledge, Australian accents. The battle sequences, moreover, are overcut (like rock clips) and very hard to follow. Maximus’s unending survival, like Ben Hur’s and Indiana Jones’s, exceeds belief, and so does his post-battle chastity. He would so placed have rogered, in Emma Thompson’s fine phrase, anything with a pulse.

And yet it rings true in larger ways, as Julius Caesar does despite its ghost, and Hamlet, another revenge tragedy with considerable flaws. We never doubt Maximus’s love and grief, or the oedipal well-springs of Commodus’s wickedness, or Lucilla’s mother love, romantic nostalgia and watchful corridor-tiptoeing guile. We never doubt the danger everywhere in this bloody pagan world of perpetual battle and spectacular slaughter before hooting and cheering crowds, the DieHard or footy fans of their day. We never doubt the aerial shots of ancient Rome or the random decapitations or the locker-room comradeship of gladiators who must someday soon perhaps kill one another for the multitude’s amusement.

It’s a work that ranks high, therefore, as cinema and as drama, and I yearn in vain for the two missing scenes of Oliver Reed, a mighty carbuncular furious presence who died carousing on the shoot, but there you are.

Friday, May 11

6.20 am

Strange to see how quickly it all shakes down into blithering debacle for the Coalition, and how good Malcolm Turnbull now looks in retrospect.

They have lost all chance of a No Confidence-led parliamentary coup now Katter (as I alone predicted) has opted for eighteen more months of his parliamentary wage and time to build his party and both Slipper and Thomson prove not to be sexual beasts and corrupt finaglers but sad, sombre, harmless human beings, and Abbott, in his reply, a fucking fool (goodbye, old friend, adieu; when it ends with friends it ends), by asserting his family man’s credentials and yelling Class War and Moral Stench and urging Labor to do away with Gillard when her achievements have at last reached critical mass. He seems not to know his arse from his elbow and his considerable Jesuitical debating skills have gone a-glimmering as his own dark past as a student groper came breathing heavily and leering behind him in the mirror.

He has a few weeks as Leader, and he is finished.  It is he who chose Class War by saying the lower orders would steal their children’s money, and he who voted against them getting, in some cases, two thousand four hundred dollars a year for two kids in high school and two in primary and thus lost a million voters he had on Monday, or perhaps a million and a half. It was he who said he would find, somehow, fifty billion in cuts when he knew, or should have known, and must have been told by Robb or Hockey that this would cost four hundred thousand people their jobs and one and a half million pendant children, aunts and mothers-in-law their hope, life plans, addresses, self-esteem and and peace of mind.

6.10 pm

And then came Kroger and what he told Jon Faine. Amongst what he told him was that the Liberals’ preferred Leader, a devoutly esteemed Federal Treasurer for eleven years, thought Abbott, who once took out his wife, was an ‘economic illiterate’; and this on the day after it was revealed he was once up on a charge of, what, inappropriate touching, rather worse than what Slipper was charged with, and righteously suspended for. Page 68 now awaits him, whenever Albo, Gillard or Carr or Crikey chooses to spring it; and he will soon look as cornered as Thomson, as pathetic, sad, abashed and fucked overand pleading in the dock.

Twenty-four hours is a long time in politics, and I ask Fran, Michele, Steve, Laurie, Piers, Andrew and Barrie, who have thought Labor to be on the mat unconscious and being counted out, to apologise in these columns for being so shallow and silly.

And to realise that Murdoch’s fate and the Liberals’ fate were closely connected; and neither will prevail.

Seeing Yes, Prime Minister on my seventieth birthday with Stephen Ramsey, with whom I wrote The True Believers, and John Bell, for whom I co-wrote The Legend of King O’Malley, after some antipasto with Denny Lawrence, with whom I wrote Goodbye Paradise and Shakespeare In Italy, and seeing on stage Phillip Quast, for whom I co-wrote two unproduced musicals, and Tony Llewellyn-Jones, with whom I invaded the Hawke-Keating Economic Summit in 1983, a formative experience, in a play about the backroom of politics, where I have spent (thus far) eighteen years, was a satisfyingly affirmative septuagenarian experience, and the show even more so.

It had elements of a Restoration comedy, a Wilde, a Shaw, a Hare, a Stoppard, a Monte Python, a P.G. Wodehouse, a Gilbert and Sullivan, a Somerset Maugham, a William Douglas-Home, a Ray Cooney, an episode of Fawlty Towers, an episode of The West Wing, and almost every Shaftesbury Avenue play of the 1950s. Yet it was about global warming, asylum seekers, child prostitution, the economic meltdown, the Special Relationship, the death of God, Middle East oil politics and CIA assassinations.

And, of course, that educative Shavian comedy series Yes, Minister, by the present writers Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, which Bob Hawke once said was the closest equivalent of what he went through each day as Prime Minister that a drama had brought to him, and of which Kevin Rudd had said, ‘I have been Bernard. I have been Sir Humphrey. I have been the Minister. And I am the Prime Minister.’ 

I myself wouldn’t go quite that far — I rate The West Wing and The Ides Of March and Frost/Nixon and The Queen higher — but it echoes life in a Leader’s office very closely.  The great man’s tantrums. The BBC’s nudgings and proddings. The informed and paranoid scuttering little guy, Bernard, who was around in Plautus and flourishes still in the Michael J. Fox roles in The American President and Spin City. The Jeeves-Bertie dialogues that so resemble Wedderburn and Carr, Lance Worrall and Mike Rann, Freudenberg and Whitlam, Gerard Henderson and John Howard.

All this in a show that runs a hundred and three minutes, and never leaves Chequers or suffers anything worse than a thunderstorm and a testing BBC interview. And feels a little slight and shallow, in the end, though it deals with wit and guile and profundity the moral choices that afflict world politics lately.

Like whether or not to get into surplus by providing the Kumranistan Foreign Minister with an underage prostitute — not a virgin, that would be morally wrong — and securing a trans-Eurasia oil pipeline deal which would save the euro, a currency Jim Hacker detests but fears he must now join, the child whore brought in from Soho on the Queen’s helicopter, a misuse, it could be argued, of taxpayers’ money, though it could be seen, too, as a great patriotic adjustment to modern necessities. 

To Sir Humphrey Appleby Philip Quast, unfussed possessor of three Laurence Olivier Awards, has added, in a sort of declaration of independence, a moustache; and the unintended effect, a close resemblance to Clark Gable, is to add a sexually attractive quality Nigel Hawthorne always lacked to a role that is, of its essence, a malevolent eunuch. And this, plus the addition of Caroline Craig, a dish, as Claire Sutton, to the Prime Minister’s backroom, selectively available for ministerial rogering on pertinent weekends, does harm, though not terminal harm, to the lofty chessmaster’s vengeful strategies which lie at the heart of the show’s chaste ongoing amusements in this, its thirty-third year.

All the cast is very, very fine, Tony Llewellyn-Jones not least as the Director-General of the BBC, both baffled and conniving, and Alex Menglet as the amoral Balkan-sounding Kumranistan Ambassador,a righteous, moustached equivalent of Paul Cox. John Lloyd Fillinghan is remarkably agile, like a wounded ferret, as the spinmaster Bernard, and Caroline Craig a sumptuously accoutred muse — and mistress perhaps — for Hacker in his bunker in his final days of power.

But it is Mark Owen-Taylor who narrowly filches the honours from Quast, a perfect Jeeves to his Bertie, and Fillingham, the hyperactive rodent. His rare combinations of stupidity and shrewdness, amoral multinational sexual tolerance and dim bigotry, suicidal despair and boyish sunniness, simmering lust (he nearly kisses Claire once, then stays his fumbling hand) and traditional English boarding-school-bred frigidity, put one in mind of Derek Nimmo, with a splash perhaps of Jophn Cleese. Or David Cameron. The set by Shaun Gurton is fantastic and the direction by Tom Gutteridge very fine.

There are two more performances in Sydney, then others in Brisbane with Lewellyn-Jones (what a coven of hyphenates the cast list is) as Humphrey, and you should see it if you can.

…It should be seen. So too, and not just for the Australian content, should Elizabeth, a film that gets to the nub of the mad Celt punch-up that was Elizabethan England (I do love thee, Essex, and though alas I must have thy head by the morrow morn, I shall view it, my dear, dear love, with regret; then breakfast early and go falconing), a country then more Spanish, even Moorish, in its tendencies (with knightly chivalry, Christ-fever, thumbscrews and regular palace poisonings in its briskly blended paella) than, say, Queen Victoria’s England – or Queen Camilla’s – where executions were less frequent or, in the case of Diana’s (or His Royal Highness Jack the Ripper’s), more deftly covered up. This is why Sir Richard Attenborough, who plays Lord Cecil as the perfect pompous Tennysonian gentleman, is the worst thing in it, and Christopher Eccleston as Norfolk, a slope-shouldered nostril-flaring rottweiler prepared to slay his anointed virgin sovereign for the sake of Pope and Holy Mother Church and equally prepared to perish on the block for his ferocious faith and incidental treason is one of the best.

It is good, I think, that the film is directed by an Indian, Shekhar Kapur, to whom both the past and England are foreign countries, for he does not (as, say, Attenborough would have done if directing it, or Alan Parker or Ken Branagh) try to make familiar and modern its tribal barbarities and bloodstained superstitions. He also, thankfully, does not do a Shakespeare on it, needlessly ennobling the shoddy motives of the shrewd but lucky winners or the tragically wrongfooted losers. Elizabeth, as besmirched by royal hypocrisy as any of them, promises clemency to her old Catholic rescuers, and, coldly, with a long pale drifting look that tells us everything, does not provide it. Shakespeare would have expended a soliloquy on that moment: one long fleering look from Blanchett is enough.

Of Blanchett’s already much-honoured performance little else needs now be said. She is as good (of course) when playing the breathless warm fluttery adolescent virgin as she is when playing the determined icy Thatcherish mistress-monarch of 1550s realpolitik with the toughness of a Kissinger in petticoats. The film tells us what hardened her, but the gradations of her performance – better, for instance, than those of V. Redgrave in Mary Queen of Scots or G. Jackson in Elizabeth R or L. Ullman in Pope Joan – arouse, delight, appal and freeze the marrow by turns as her saga proceeds.

She is very good indeed. Geoffrey Rush as Walsingham, the first Elizabeth’s murderous manipulative Machiavel (or Mandelson), is, if anything, a little better. Both explicable and yet unknowable, with a self-servingness that is also (for such interesting times) a stupendous loyalty, he gives us emotions we recognise but cannot name. When it seems for a time he is defecting to Marie of Guise we have no way of guessing, so superb is his grave and magnetic dissembling, whether he is actually doing it or only pretending to. Everything he does, as in a great Shakespearian performance, is both intellectually surprising and emotionally correct. His reading of the climactic line, ‘No, they will forget’, ranks with Charles Laughton at his best. It is an astonishing performance, and so is that of Kathy Burke as the hysterically pregnant, lovelorn and womb-cancer-crazed Bloody Mary, Joseph Fiennes as the double-dealing-besotted-monarch-swiver Robert Dudley (who, had she wed him as she wished on that fiery night of oars and ripples and queenly coquetry and stabbings, might have prevented, by thus bestirring Christendom to a Holy War fought on English ground, the entire modern world). Likewise Eric Cantona, the football player, as the double-dealing Monsieur De Foix, Vincent Cassel as the petulant transvestite ratbag Anjou (whose appearance in beard, bra and garters is an unexpected surprise), and a scurrying melee of solemn dwarves as assorted courtiers and chambermaids.

I have said elsewhere that the coupling of Rush and Blanchett, like the coupling in L.A. Confidential of Crowe and Pearce, adds to an elderly genre (the costume spectacle, the film noir) an Australian edge, a gem-like hardness of purpose over unwavering inner flame, a perfect apportionment of innocence and cynicism, romantic attack and weary world wisdom, that few other actors (the Irish excepted) can give. It is good to be part, however distantly, of an international triumph because of it, and a worthy one at that.

An exchange that might work in Question Time today:

BACKBENCHER: Since Christopher Pyne is currently suspected of colluding in a conspiracy to overthrow the second highest official in the Commonwealth, can he be suspended from the service of the House for fourteen days, and then questioned?

ALBO: If Thomson can, he can. His offence comes under Treason, and he could be away longer.

In his doomed organ The Australian this morning Murdoch’s headline Reform Agenda Lost In Class War suggests that class war is a bad thing; and class envy is a bad thing. That it’s wrong to resent Clive Palmer getting two thousand dollars an hour, eighteen thousand dollars a day, ninety thousand dollars a week, plus expenses, while Barack Obama gets only eighty dollars an hour, six hundred and forty dollars a day, three thousand two hundred dollars a week (plus expenses) for doing what some think a harder job than Clive’s is; and an Afghan cop gets five hundred dollars a year plus sandwich money for a riskier job than either of them. That it’s wrong to be so ‘aspirational’ as to want eight hundred dollars a year for new shoes and school outings for your children. That it’s wrong to want a good education, as good as a rich boy at Knox.

The really silly thing is that Murdoch’s man Abbott yesterday made utterances that had class war all over them. The working classes, he swore, will steal money from their children if they are not watched. How do we know they will spend their money wisely? They’re the lower orders. How could they? They hate their children that much. It’s well known. Well known.

Abbott had better divest himself of Murdoch fast, if he can. His opposite number in Britain David Cameron will fall soon, and never rise again, some say, for having done no more than send kindly text-messages to Rebekah Brooke in the week of her sacking by Rupert. Murdoch is so ‘on the nose’ now, so notorious and reviled now, that being nice to anyone close to him is a resignation or sacking offence. He is as reviled and suspected as Senator Joe McCarthy was in 1954.

Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Murdochist Government Blackmailing Syndicate? You must answer this question, sir, before this Committee or go to gaol. How many Murdochists work, to the best of your knowledge, in the Central Office of the Australian Liberal Party? No, sir, you will not be allowed extra time to answer, you must answer now. Was it on Murdoch’s orders, or at his suggestion, that you and Pyne and Brough and Ashby connived the maddening by blackmail of the second highest official in the land? You refuse to answer? Take the prisoner away in chains, he has not answered the questions of this honourable Committee and must suffer encarceration, trial, imprisonment and ruin. Next accused Murdochist, please, Senator Nixon. Bring in the accused.

It was class warfare, and class envy, that brought on the Arab Spring. And the French Revolution. And the other King’s speech I Have A Dream. King dared think a lower order of people should envy better lives and dream of them.

What a disgusting bunch they are.

We should not envy Clive his three hundred and eighty thousand dollars a month, you say?

Why, precisely, Tony, Tony, old friend, do you say this?

Please tell me why.

Chopper is a great film, one of the three or five Australian films yet made, and it’s very hard to describe. It shows us above all the world, the moral universe, the dark night of the soul, that the crims and lags and urban gangsters live and fester in, and we share while we watch it, its utter lack of the normal rules of life. Killings occur, and do not move us, not to pity anyway. Stabbings by friends of unresisting friends (‘Mate, you ought to think about this’), that make us laugh uneasily. A self-mutilation (he gets a friend to cut off his ears) that makes us go pleasurably aaargh. It shows us these things flat on, with no moral squint, and no judgmental signposts. We wince at last when Chopper beats his woman, but before that we applaud him, and after it applaud him again.

Does this film then applaud bad values, make a hero of a proto-humanoid beast? Almost certainly yes. Should it then be banned? I don’t think so, any more than Scarface or Guinness’s Hitler: The Final Days. We would not, I think, after seeing it make Chopper Governor General or a moral counsellor to our children, which are surely the only things that matter.

And we learn a lot of what we know of humankind by scrutinising rats, and geese, and wolves, and gorillas, and foetuses and corpses and John Elliott, by pondering Nazi Germany and cannibal Melanesia and racist Alabama and Kennett’s crazed Victoria for what they can tell us of human cruelty and the reportage by Plutarch and Suetonius and Josephus of the blood-soaked eras of Cleopatra, Augustus, Caligula and seeing in what way our times are similar and asking what this means.

Chopper is like that. To say one shouldn’t see it because of the cheerful violence and worse, the threatened violence, engrossing almost every moment of it, is like saying, ‘Gorillas are overweight, and smelly, and dangerous in small rooms. They are, as a rule, poor house guests. We must therefore let no-one study them, and see how they behave.’ This would be wrong.

Eric Bana gives a performance as good as Brando in Streetcar Named Desire and De Niro in Raging Bull, with all the coarse dark humour of the original (‘Even Beethoven had his critics. Name three’), a man simultaneously alone in the universe yet chirpy with it, a man who suffers from what I call ‘situational claustrophobia’, which means that after two hours anywhere he wants to kill somebody, and immediately say sorry afterwards. Vince Colossimo as his amiable fairweather assassin and eventual close friend Neville Bartos (‘all in the past, mate’) and Kate Behan as Tanya, harried hooker and soiled, tenacious love, and Serge Livistra as Sammy The Turk give peformances that in better organised countries would be showered with Oscars while Andrew Dominik, the auteur, would get at the very least Die Hard 13.

No praise is sufficient for this remarkable work of art, which will play for months I think, and do for violence what Praise did for sex – make you wonder, Alfie, what it’s all about, and not before time. See it again and again.

Take in small boys under your coat. This, for them, is Bart Simpson, but for real.

Most Labor people in the parliament building are convinced they have only months left and they will have to ‘rebuild in Opposition’ when Abbott is PM. That Opposition Leader Shorten or Opposition Leader Combet or Opposition Leader Clare with thirty people behind him, or twenty-five, or 0pposition Leader Plibersek or Opposition Leader Roxon, can win back enough credibility in the next seven years to be Prime Minister in 2019 at the age of 51, 58, 47, 49 or 51.

But in calculating thus they fail to note another date on the calendar that makes all this impossible: Saturday, April 25, 2015. On this day Prime Minister Abbott will be at Gallipoli speaking at dawn in a slouch hat about a hundred years of Anzac bravery and on Saturday, May 2, 2015, one week later, there will be a Double Dissolution election which he will win.

And on Sunday, May 3, 2015 Labor will have eighteen seats and and the Katter Party nineteen and Bob Katter, 69, will be Opposition Leader and Abbott will have a majority in both houses and thirteen more years as PM.

So losing the 2012 or 2013 election is not an option.

We have to win it, or be extinguished as a party.

How is this to be done, old friend, how is this to be done?

Well, it’s not too hard. One way would be to have a Senate Enquiry into the question, ‘Why did our Deputy
Prime Minister give two hundred and ninety-seven million dollars to Saddam Hussein?’ Another would be to use page 68 of his biography to destroy Tony Abbott. Another would be to recruit Barry Cohen, 77, to run for Dobell in a byelection if Craig is forced out of it. Or Graeme Wedderburn. Or Michael Lee. Or that wellbeloved local John Della Bosca.

Another would be to pull out of Afghanistan by September 1. None of these things would win the election outright, but in combination they might.

Another is to have a series of Town Hall Debates, Swan versus Hockey, about the economy, and Carr versus Bishop, about foreign policy, telecast on eight Sunday nights on SBS in August and September. The serial block-headedness of the Liberals would then become plain, and pick us up, oh, about two percent of the voter base, a quarter of a million retrieved, or newly recruited, Labor voters.

Another is to trust Baillieu, who is one byelection away from extinction, and Newman, who is a joke, and O’Farrell, who is refusing a second Sydney airport and a safe Pacific Highway, to win back two percent for us.

Another is to sell the Budget well.

Hockey, the adipose beaming klutz, opposes us giving eight hundred dollars to strapped families so their kids can go to school camps and buy new shoes, and he voted against it yesterday. There are a million votes for us in this. If we are on 43 or 44 now and we probably are that wins it for us.

It’s really easy to win. The trouble with Labor people, and particularly young Labor people, is a Hamlet-like temptation to despair and self-slaughter. They have a lot of personal guilt — they wouldn’t be in public life if they didn’t — and they feel they are being justly punished for this or that past sin. John Faulkner, teetotaller, is a great example of this. And like most people so traumatised they give way to a sort of moral paralysis: yes, we could win that way, comrade, but surely it’s better to go into Opposition and cleanse ourself of our impurities.

The trouble is, the hundredth Anzac Day will do for us.

So we can’t go into Opposition, not this year, not next year.

So we have to win.

I actually think it’s possibly won already. Hockey’s dithering flabby fatuousness in the last day or so, and Abbott’s fool evasive speech tonight, will show they can’t add, and they don’t care, and they can’t think, and they love the rich very much, and they think the working class thieve money from their children. Murdoch’s imminent arrest in Delaware will mean The Australian is abolished, a tabula rasa, by year’s end, and it could be bought cheap by the government and given to the ABC. And the question, ‘When did you last see Rupert Murdoch? What did you talk about?’ could be asked by a Committee of Enquiry of Abbott and a kind of McCarthyism thereby shame, smirch and shrink him. When Cameron falls, and he will, because of his Murdoch links and his chaste love of Rebekah, revealed by his own biographer today, the Liberal grandees down under will have nowhere to go but repudiate Murdoch or embrace him. And they lose either way.

And the Slipper-Ashby-Brough-Pyne thing still has a way to go too I think. To conspire to entrap and blackmail the second highest official in the land is, like conspiring to entrap and blackmail Quentin Bligh, a serious offence in Albo’s eyes and if proven may put Liberals as eminent and respected as Pyne and Brough in gaol.

We can win from here. We’re on 47 already after the Budget and we can win from here.

Or perhaps you disagree.

It is remarkable how quickly things in Europe have changed and how utterly the old solutions are seeming, suddenly, a little silly.

Growing an economy by sacking a hundred thousand public servants? Really? And halving the old age pensions? Really?

What will happen for sure now, I surmise, is what I recommended six months back: a two-currency Greece, with the euro and the drachma, the drachma not to leave the country; a two-currency Ireland, with the euro and the punt; a two-currency France, with the euro and the franc; and so on. Food will be grown and marketed, jobs created moving it about and cooking it, wages paid half-and-half, or two-to-one in the local and the universal currency, and sanity, all over, restored. If Tsipras nationalises the banks as he is planning to (and Chifley wasn’t able to), the whole thing could happen pretty rapidly.

And we could do the same here after trialling it in, say, Tasmania.

If Greece goes the way it seems to be going, and Cameron falls now his dates with Rebekah have been revealed, this EuroSocialist Tsunami (EST) is a near certainty.

Or perhaps you disagree.

Budget Day May 8

6.05 pm

Strangely anticlimactic Question Time. Lionel Bowen, Murray Rose and Jimmy Little were mourned, Peter Slipper looking nothing like a sinister sexual beast made a slim sad speech and vacated the chair, Christopher Pyne shrieked about the foul smell hanging over the Thomson allegations unaware, it appeared, that he was in the thick of what I suppose must be called the Slipperstream, and the vote expressing shock and revulsion and horror that Thomson was a good host but nowhere near Berlusconi in his lavishness and recommending he be suspended from parliament for a month was lost after the Deputy Speaker threw Pyne out and … that was that.

What should have been High Noon turned into Truly, Madly, Deeply with Slipper as the unwelcome, lingering ghost. What should have been a gladiatorial joust for the hairy-chested hunk Abbott the gladiator shrank from. He knew perfectly well what was on page 68 of his authorised biography and the danger he was in if the Slipperfest went on. And the attention of the House moved to, well, the Budget. Abbott said the figures were dodgy but his heart was not in it. He will have to say soon what measures he would oppose and what deficit seemed a good look to him, and it … fizzled, really.

6.44 pm

Strange how arithmetic eludes the pundits even now. Because the vote was 72-72 to bring Harry back — and therefore passed in the negative — and Oakeshott signalled he might well ‘consider his options’ in the next few months, and might vote to remove Craig from parliament if the evidence is totally against him — they seem to be under the impression that the government is in some danger.

But even if Craig was told to leave and Oakeshott was to vote No Confidence in the government and thus ensure his own defeat in an early election (why would he?), the vote would still be 75 all and pass in the negative because Katter would never vote No Confidence and lose his seat, or risk that. He just wouldn’t do that. He needs all the months and all the MP’s pay he can get to build his party, and get, as he will, three or seven seats, or ten, in the next Federal Parliament, when he will be 67 or 68. He needs the time, and he needs the money.

And it’s all a big beat-up really. The numbers for Abbott will never be there.

The day looked good on SBS.

Wednesday May 9

5.1O am

A tightening silence indicated at about 7.47 that Swanny was hitting home, and there was nothing much the Opposition could oppose with any conviction. The dentists for the country towns? No. The boost for superannuation? No. The huge relief for the carers of the disabled, the whole million of them? Amazingly, Joe went after the ‘sugar hit’ eight hundred for schoolkids, no forms to fill out, in June, which with his usual adipose baffled sunny smiles he found ‘not tough enough’, losing a million votes in about two minutes.

Or a million votes for now. One commentator who said ‘They’ll take the money and hate you anyway’ may have hit the mark. Maybe it is too late. Maybe the nationwide revulsion, physical and aural, currently affecting both women and men who can’t stand the thought of Gillard, PM, any more is here to stay. Some listless talk in the corridors of Carr and Garrett swapping and Carr being PM by August occurs, then trickles into the sand. I go with Wedderburn, Viv, Gillard’s speechwriter Carl Green and some gloomy public servants and a Pommy journalist to a Manuka pub with too much noise, eat pizza and shout until midnight, and wonder how badly things will go. I rail for a while about Labor’s fear that they will be sent up to see Matron if they stray from the economic orthodoxy that Hollande is currently hurling in the dustbin, and we reminisce about working for Carr in the nineties and how good that was.

I drop Wedderburn off at his flash hotel astounded that I have known him for twenty-two years and esteem him still as a great, imminent Prime Minister. I said this of him first in 1996 in Goodbye Jerusalem, nominating also Swanny and Latham in that year as other possible contenders. The taxi driver has heard of me and once owned an original Goodbye Jerusalem which was stolen from him and believes Abbott, not Gillard, is finished and Turnbull bound to be Prime Minister by Christmas; and I go on the second last day of my seventh decade drunk to bed in a good motel and sleep like a corpse.

7.25 am

I’m on the early train to Sydney and have just been told I can’t play the radio any more. Joe has been on Fran Kelly and said it wasn’t the Liberals’ fault that big business didn’t get their one percent tax cut even though the Liberals were pledged to vote against it; it was the Greens’ fault because THEY would have voted against it and Labor always negotiated with the Greens, not the Liberals. So it wasn’t our fault and we wouldn’t have done it but Labor was wrong not to do it, you’ll see, you’ll see. He didn’t sound mad but just a bit … off the air. Daft might be the word. Is he intelligent? Not muvpch sign of it. And to think the exoerts Grattan and Kdlly had him as the Liberals’ Man of Destiny only two and a half years ago.

I think things are changing but you can’t be sure.

8.58 am

An hour’s sleep on the train during which I try to compose the perfect opening sentence on Thomson, whom I think I like. ‘From Pleistocene times, the supplying of hookers to visiting unionists has been a Cro-magnon commonplace,’ one draft of it goes. Then I give it up.

It’s certainly a different era. I remember when Louis Malle’s film Pretty Baby, a warm and gentle comedy about the training of a child prostitute in New Orleans, was thought by Sylvia Lawson a good and broadening thing to go to and everyone was reading Candy and Lolita and admiring the convicted pederast Oscar Wilde and the arse-fucker Norman Mailer and the nudust smack-head John Lennon. Morality follows medical science, I long ago decided, and when AIDS came that strange amalgam Wowser Feminism made it impossible to live any more the way we used to, with separate holidays, visiting lovers, time out, time away; and going to a hooker, a commonplace then, became unthinkable.

I would normally say ‘it’s a pity’ at this point or ‘so it goes’ but of course times change and the findings that having too many lovers gives a girl cancer down the track and the smack-hooking-AIDS continuum is a universal commonplace in much of the West gives one pause, as of course it must, and Craig was perhaps unwise in his hospitality if the story is true that he supplied girls to unionists as Frank Sinatra did to John Kennedy not so long ago.

But Murdoch’s success in eliminating policy from the reporting of politics and putting sex and bad language, or incorrect language, at the heart of it is a trivialisation and a sliming of the practice of governance not to be bourne. And I hope Slipper survives for this reason and Brough, Pyne and Abbott go to gaol for conspiracy to entrap and blackmail the nation’s second highest official (or is he the third?) and this vile Murdochist tsunami of dumbing-down and prurience and panty-sniffing bluster abates.

So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light,
And with no language but a cry.

In Breaker Morant, an Australian film for the whole world to admire, certain traditional Australian characteristics are depicted more accurately than they have been in any other film. They are manliness, comradeship and sardonic dignity.

The men, accused of murder beyond the call of duty in the Boer War and court martialled in an act of international politics to appease the Kaiser (Bryan Brown, Edward Woodward and Lewis Fitzgerald), arrive on the screen as full men who have lived whole lives before we meet them. And we do not need to see the ingredients of those lives, so thoroughly focused are the performances and so well chosen are the words they speak.

The screenplay, culled by the director, Bruce Beresford, from a screenplay by David Stevens and Jonathon Hardy, a play by Kenneth Ross and a novel by Kit Denton, is breathtaking. Beresford has got better and better with every film he has made. This is a masterpiece, and in an era of Kentucky-fried movies, a proud joy in its brooding succinctness, its brazen courage, its exhilarating Australianess.

Jack Thompson, as J. S. Thomas, the bush lawyer improvising a brilliant, lacerating defence out of the shambles of a case left him by Lord Kitchener, embodies these qualities as truly and directly as he did in Sunday, Too Far Away, his only other short-back-and-sides role. Especially good is his arrival, bored, dull-witted and apparently out of his depth, yet with a determination not to be made a fool of.

He is no better than the others (international awards or no). Each serves the film in different ways: Bryan Brown with his larrikin defiance, Lewis Fitzgerald with his troubled innocence, Charles Tingwell, Rod Mullinar, John Waters and Chris Haywood with their uptight variations on the hated British, and Edward Woodward, in a performance worthy of Peter Finch, as the many-layered central character.

Poet and soldier, horseman, womaniser and remittance man, burnt-out colonial exile and full, honest, vengeful Anglo-Australian human being, he conveys all these characteristics with a stoicism and a tenderness that merit our national gratitude. Actors Equity should accord him permanent status as an honorary Australian. It’s not the Poms who should be kept out of our industry. They have a historical right to be here. They are part of our society – as are the Greeks, the Italians and the Chinese. It’s the Americans who are not us and never will be.

I myself will pay back the six thousand dollars Craig Thomson spent on hookers for visiting drunk unionists plus ten percent interest if the Parliament leaves him alone.

Okay?

Who do I send this offer to?

I spent a day campaigning with Craig in 2007 and believe his firm denials to be probably true.

Let’s have done with this nonsense, and ask why Mark Vaile gave two hundred and ninety-seven million dollars to Saddam Hussein.

That’s a big figure, worth bewailing.

A Senate Enquiry, perhaps, taking four months, beginning Friday.

With Michael Kirby in the wig and the chair.

And a significant witness, Tony Abbott, in the dock.

Okay?