O’Shannessy usually has an explanation when he puts up an irrational surge to the Liberals. After Abbott was booed by the women for having enforced an adoption on a woman now dead and Gillard crushed Rudd he claimed Abbott’s better numbers three days later, and Gillard’s opworse ones, were due to Labor being in ‘leadership chaos’. After Gillard came back from China with a terrific trade deal and the interest rates went down and the full time jobs went up and the dollar became more competitive and everone liked the broaddband, the NDIS, the Gonski deal and the very fast train, he said the people had ‘stopped listening’.

This week is more difficult. Abbott backed down on the Baby Bonus, boycotted the Disability debate, abolished Gonski, persecuted a baby and found himself in a bigpublic  fight with O’Farrell over the GST, but there were no upside stories about him, none at all; except, perhaps, that he delivered his Budget speech without a stutter and his family applauded him.

When O’Shannessy, tomorrow or today, shows a ‘counter-intuitive’ surge to the Liberals, and he will, he’ll have to have a reason.

And there isn’t one.

Joe Hockey says he may extend the GST but only after he ‘tests it at an election’.

Why not test it at this one?

Is he in favour of it, or not?

Why not make up his mind?

Labor seems to have picked up a quarter of a million votes since Tuesday night if Murdoch’s Galaxy is to be believed. All the polls had Labor on 44 last week but Galaxy now says 46.

Though this is a gain of 60,000 votes a day Skynews claims it is ‘insignificant’.

Fingers in ears, la, la, la, la.

A landslide, comrades, a landslide is coming.

A question to Joe Hockey:

Do you favour, now, a GST, or disfavour it? If your chosen committee wants one, will you bring it on?

The Mads Mikkelsen film The Hunt, about a witch-hunt in a small town of a man wrongly thought a pederast, reminds of me of Slipper, of Thomson, of Hicks, of Haneef and Assange and Kernot, and, yes, Lindy Chamberlain, and all those innocents Cult Murdoch has targeted for assassination in the past forty years.

An allegation is made; it is proved untrue; the smear continues. A life is ruined. The caravan moves on.

Craig spent money on milkshakes, taxi rides and restaurant meals at a rate of about a hundred and twenty dollars a week for seven years when there were no restraints on such spending. I don’t think he even bought a beer in that way. He is alleged to have bought the services of an ugly girl he twice didn’t turn up for with a union Visa card that others were able to use, in years when he was running for preselection for a socially conservative seat of retirees and young marrieds. It is implausible a man so placed would have done this – and not turn up for the fuck, especially – yet he has been albatrossed with it, and Pyne and Abbott scuttered out of the House because of it; because he was too vile a slimeball to vote alongside, for something they believed in.

And so it goes. It is called ‘niggerisation’: up the back of the bus for you, nigger, you no longer count. And an egalitarian society goes along with it.

Or do they.

I have my doubts about this now, in this age of omnivorous information and unfettered scrutiny and the arrest of most of Murdoch’s top floor. Hicks goes to work unthreatened. Habib got compensation. Haneef can work here anytime if he wants to. And I think that Craig, like Mikkelsen, may survive this calumny of crackpot accusation, as Katter survived, and Oakeshott, and Windsor, and Crook, and Wilkie (called by Howard ‘mentally unstable’), and Andren, and Mack, and Moore, as Independents in the new parliament. I think it could be so.

One sign that this is coming is the sudden silence in all the media today of most political news. It is not being said that Hockey greenlighted on Insiders O’Farrell’s deal with Gillard. It is not being said that he swore to mitigate NDIS. It is not said that Abbott is facing questioning over matters relating to Torbay and Obeid.

The move towards Labor is beginning, and they are covering it up, fingers in their ears, la,la,la,la…

We will see what we shall see.

Tony Abbott says there is an ‘emergency’ though revenue is rising; discuss.

I ask Skynews to supply me with a transcript of the Penny Wong interview on Thursday night or say why they will not.

The Hunt is one of the better films ever made. Like A Separation, it deals with consequence; like The Crucible with small-town suspicion, and, in a very real sense, ‘demonisation’.

Lucas is a kindergarten teacher, following the downsizing of the high school in the small, churchgoing, deer-hunting town he grew up in. He is divorced, and seeking more time with his teenage son Marcus. He has a dog Fanny, who is his constant beloved companion. His oldest friend Theo has a tiny daughter, Klara, whom he only once, when her parents are fighting, walks to the kindergarten, and home from it. She adores him, and offers him a present, and a kiss on the lips. He says she mustn’t do that. She turns against him.

One small thing she says troubles the headmistress. She is questioned, answers ambiguously. Soon he is suspended, then arrested, then released, refused service in the supermarket, beaten up in a carpark, has rocks thrown through the window at home. His son is refused service too and becomes enraged, and violent, and feral.

The poison spreads. Over all of it we hear unbearably beautiful Christmas hymns, in a postcard town with snow falling. Everybody in it is righteous, and civic-minded, and ‘correct’ on the face of it, and acting and responding appropriately, and even the little girl says she ‘said something foolish’.

Her performance is remarkable. Her name is Annika Wedderborg and she is about six and may have an Oscar before she is ten. Excellent as well is Lasse Fogelstrom as Marcus and Thomas Bo Larsen as Theo, a man of drunken affections, deep anger, laziness, delusion and implacable parental fondness, and Anne Louise Hassing, as Agnes, his tempestuous loving wife, and Alexandra Rapaport as Lucas’s foreign, English-speaking, horny, adventurous girlfriend Nadja. Best is Susse Wold as the mild-mannered, respectable, quietly punishing headmistress Grethe, who turns a borderline suspicion into a Way of the Cross.

Best, that is, apart from Mads Mikkelsen as Lucas. Already a legendary actor, along of the lines of the early Gerard Depardieu, he gave us last time in A Royal Affair a hard-drinking, brilliant, lustful, Enlightenment essayist, surgeon, whoremonger, Prime Minister and royal courtier. This time it is a mild, abstemious, careful, reined-in, unambitious, gun-loving, ordinary decent man astounded by the hatred massing around him and trying to stay sane and alive, in, as they say, difficult circumstances. In this quest he achieves a higher goodness which we used to call Christlike, unevenly intermixed with a despairing, mad-dog vengefulness which, at the end, veers close to murderousness.

Based on a true story, the script, by Thomas Vinterburg, the director, and Tobias Lindholm, is a model of cinematic minimalism. No courtroom judge is seen hearing evidence, or giving a verdict. A crucial reconciliation scene between Thomas and Theo is not articulated, merely begun. We know all we need to know. And, at the end, what not to know.

It will get an Oscar for Best Foreign Film and Mikkelsen get a big, villain roll in the next DieHard, I suppose, and play it well. And that is fine. But what it is about, which goes to the heart of our devil-seeking post-Christian Western society is very, very important. And it should be made a compulsory text in every teacher’s college, and every high school. It should, like The Crucible, be a gospel for our time.

O’Shannessy this weekend is in more difficulty than he has faced in many a year. He must be loyal to Murdoch, and go to gaol; or he must tell the truth and help elect Gillard and thereby lose his job.

It is the normal Newspoll practice to give the Liberals good news when common sense declares the news is bad. Thus, when the largest gatherings of human history were massing against the Iraq War and Howard was loudly for it, Newspoll showed Howard — ‘counterintuitively’ — picking up votes. When women booed Abbott at the Forced Adoption Apology because he had forced an adoption on a woman who had lately died young, and the Rudd ‘challenge’ imploded, and Gillard triumphed, Newspoll showed Gillard’s vote going down, and Abbott’s going up; counterintuitively, of course.

This weekend, though, it is very, very difficult. Abbott has been shown to be keen to impoverish the old, and to disadvantage all children in public schools and to enrage his friend O’Farrell by ripping up a deal involving billions he has already in good faith signed up to, and Alan Jones has bagged Joe Hockey for being a wimp. Yet O’Shannessy must show Abbott gaining 150,000 votes, or he loses his job. He works after all for Murdoch, auteur of the Romney polls and the Bigotgate lies and the Hitler Diaries, and no forged falsehood may be refused.

He will do it, of course; misallocating Katter preferences, diminishing Palmer and Thomson votes and calling only landlines when only old people are at home; for even 100,000 votes the other way (the actual number is 300,000) will show the momentum to be with Labor; and, if that occurs, they win.

I am in some sympathy with poor O’Shannessy. He is not the first man to have lied on a regular basis to keep his job. But in this case he is tampering with our democracy and he should have a care. Fraud is a crime, and gaol is what happens to those who commit it.

He should be very, very careful.

Tony Abbott said it wasn’t an economic crisis, it was a Budget crisis.

I thought the Budget was the economy.

In his first forty years of politics, he made no speech on the Disabled, ever. In his twenty-five years of journalism, he wrote no piece. He did not turn up for the debate on it; nor did any of his party. He is pledged to end the Levy at the first opportunity.

They — and we —should be very, very afraid.

I used to think we would lose by one seat, but that is no longer now a possibility.

Labor by a landslide.

You read it here first.

Mark down the day.

I should have put it in my Canberra diary. But Penny Wong gave the best performance that I have seen in politics since Obama’s response to the foolish, fervid rant of his good friend Jeremiah Wright in a speech that saved his candidacy; she did this on Thursday night on Skynews. Brief, tired, eloquent, dismissive, scoring bull’s-eyes every four seconds, she showed in five or six minutes the oafishness and fraudulence of Abbott’s priorities and, though clearly fearing Labor would lose, the manifest injustice of this likely outcome.

If it can be retrieved, or if it was transcribed, all of this readership should urgently experience it, and learn from it; and take courage.

Now that you have four hundred and twenty million more, what will you spend it on?

This question to the Leader of the Opposition:

Do you stand by your publicly stated view that Peter Hollingworth should not have been forced to resign for having defended pederasty while Governor-General? Will you say if you have changed your mind? Will you say what led you to do this?

C. Northcote Parkinson said once that the British Army was always perfectly prepared for the last war but one; and Peter Hartcher — ‘Malvolio’, I have coarsely nicknamed him — is, I think, of a similar cast of mind. He talks today, for instance, of the Swan Budget’s ‘old-fashioned responsibilty’ and how this is part of Labor’s darker purpose of a ‘dignified exit’ from power.

And he declares this exit inevitable though a million voters are Undecided and most of them voted Labor last time, and all were told on Thursday that their kids would not get a good education nor they themselves a comfortable retirement and this morning that Joe got some figures wrong by half a billion dollars. He notes, of course, that our triple-A rating, greater than Costello ever got, continues to outscore all others, yet fails to say why Labor deserves to lose.

This is a curious omission. Why not say what he believes? Is he behaving corruptly? You may say that, Mattie; I couldn’t possibly comment.

He is saying, amazingly, a hundred days out — a period as long as the time between Dunkirk and the winning of the Battle of Britain — that the outcome is certain. My information is that police inquiries into Abbott’s dubious activities in two jurisdictions, in Queensland and New England, will alter this, but even if I am wrong the incompetence of his economics will do for him anyway.

He is robbing some retirees of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, or two hundred dollars a week, in their most vulnerable years. He is robbing all schoolchildren of forty dollars a week at an equally vulnerable time. He is sacking a hundred thousand breadwinners and, by this depletion of the economy, threatening with dismissal two hundred thousand more.

And Malvolio is saying he is bound to win. And somehow saying he deserves to win; on a morning when he got his figures wrong by four hundred and twenty million dollars. This is a lot of money; more, even, than John Howard gave to Saddam Hussein.

Yet Malvolio says he is bound to win, and Malvolio is an honourable man, and seems to think an oaf like this is deserving of office. The man who mistook another man’s child for his own, and declared his sister would burn in hell for sodomy, and Christ’s living flesh is worth eating on Sundays, and Hollingworth should not resign for having defended pederasty while GG.

Malvolio mistakes the way he thinks for intelligence; but it is almost certainly the result of early brainwashing.

Or corruption, perhaps. One must never discard that possibility.

At all events it marks him as a significant fool: prim, cross-gartered, self-regarding, and raging at midnight at a world of enjoyment beyond his understanding.

Your voices, your sweet voices.

Okay, I will continue.

I will reduce the money I will settle for to one hundred and eighty thousand from frangipani (though nine of our children died, I do not regard my wife as a ‘baby factory’) and one hundred and fifty thousand from Bob Ellis’s Salad Dressing (I did not, like Goebbels, ask my wife to kill six of those children) if he reveals the name of the Labor minister who so nicknamed me, in order that I may sue him also; and he then sue Bob Ellis’s Salad Dressing for lying about him, I suppose.

I forgive Johnsalmond, who may have mistaken frangipani’s malicious hectic lunacy for harmless raillery, and also, after a week in the sin-bin, the boring Wombat.

I do all this because, in part, of the crumbling of Abbott’s numbers overnight (he is saving four hundred and fifty million dollars that are not there) and Hunt’s threat of two elections, not one, if we refuse to let them speed the ending of the world.

I need the phone numbers of two lawyers. The four hundred and twenty thousand dollars I will now settle for, or the six hundred and seventy thousand if the minister truly exists and said indeed what poor doomed Salad said he said, I will bet on Labor at eight to one.

And so, old friend, it goes…

Frangipani came back and insulted my dead children again.

I am suing her, and abandoning the blog.

Good night, children, everywhere.

It appears Julie Bishop thinks that Steve Bracks, an acclaimed and successful Australian leader of Lebanese extraction, should not be ambassador to anywhere, and she will sack him if he goes to New York, and make him give his wages back. No such outrage attended the appointments overseas of Brendan Nelson, Tim Fischer, Amanda Vanstone, Andrew Peacock, Richard Casey, Stanley Melbourne Bruce or Peter Reith, and it is odd that she made this exception; and hard to see why.

I therefore suggest Steve sues her for malicious libel, and they settle out of court.

I note that Peter Van Onselen called me ‘incompetent’ on The Contrarians, and my Budget ‘shameful’. I would remind him that my management of this country has earned a triple-A rating from all three big agencies, something Peter Costello never achieved, and I have been called ‘the world’s best Treasurer’ by a group of international commentators, something Peter Costello never achieved.

I am therefore suing Van Onselen for malicious libel. I will accept a settlement of two hundred and ten thousand dollars, and a comprehensive apology, broadcast eight times a day for two weeks on Skynews.

Peter Van Onselen will shave his head if Gillard wins. He talks now of ‘when, not if’ Abbott wins. He cannot imagine a universe in which this will not occur.

I would refer him to the million ‘undecided’ in Newspoll. Eight hundred thousand of them voted Labor last time. Seven hundred thousand have never voted anything else.

Abbott last night said he would sack a lot of people, and take a lot of money from their schoolchildren, and from their old age in reduced superannuation. It is likely that four hundred thousand of them instantly decided to stick with Labor; and, when Abbott is questioned by Commonwealth Police in the next few days over two matters, or maybe three, that I may not now reveal, three hundred thousand more will come back to Labor.

This is a swing of three percent from the 44 or 45 Labor is now on. Two more percent will move toward Labor when Abbott’s criminality is noted, or rumoured, or proven.

From there Labor can win.

How, then, can he say, ignoring a million voters, that anything is certain?

The man is a fool, and, like O’Reilly and Hannity, corrupt.

I used to think him intelligent.

Ah well.

I will discuss these matters with him any night, on his show.

I now ask Barry O’Farrell: do you agree with Tony Abbott’s promise last night, to cancel the deal you have already signed with me on the Gonski money for education? We can rip it up now if you want.

This is an unedited transcript of what Tony Abbott said to Sabra Lane this morning. It is strong evidence that he is an economic oaf and cannot now, on his present policies, win a fair election. If the ABC resents me putting it up, I will take it down.

SABRA LANE: Good morning Mr Abbott. Welcome back to AM.

TONY ABBOTT: Nice to be with you Sabra.

SABRA LANE: You’ve said that Australia is in a budget emergency. How is it an emergency?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, plainly this is a government which was promising us to get back to surplus this year. No surplus this year, no surplus next year, no surplus the year after and as the Prime Minister and the Treasurer told us again and again, the best thing you can do to take the pressure off families is to get the budget back to surplus.

SABRA LANE: But unemployment is low, we have low interest rates, low inflation, debt to GDP, the ratio is low compared with other comparable nations. How is that an emergency?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, I said it was a budget emergency. I didn’t say it was an economic emergency. Australia’s economy has some fundamental strengths thanks to the reforms of both the Hawke/Keating governments and then the Howard/Costello governments, but the budget is in crisis because this is a government which is just addicted to constantly spending.

SABRA LANE: If it is an emergency, a budget emergency, why are you pressing ahead then with delivering tax cuts?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, unlike this Government, we are showing clearly how we can fund the tax cuts that we want to keep and that means that under us the tax cuts and the benefit increases will no longer be compensation because we’re abolishing the carbon tax, they’ll be fully funded by sensible savings in government expenditure.

SABRA LANE: And you’ve said that prices will fall. Can you guarantee that?

TONY ABBOTT: Go back to the time of the introduction of the GST. The GST also involved the abolition of the wholesale sales tax. Now a lot of prices did come down at that time because the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) was very vigilant in policing the removal of the wholesale sales tax, which in many cases was considerably greater than the GST.

So we will have the ACCC policing the removal of the carbon tax and look, the Government tells us that the carbon tax has added 10 per cent to the price of power. It tells us it has added 9 per cent to the price of gas. If the ACCC is out there policing these things, presumably that means a commensurate reduction in the price when the carbon tax goes.

SABRA L ANE: So they’ll fall by 10 and 9 per cent?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, as I said I’m not, I don’t know what else might be happening in these markets at the time the carbon tax goes.
R
SABRA LANE: But you can’t guarantee it?

TONY ABBOTT: Prices will go down, power prices and gas prices will go down when the carbon tax is removed.

SABRA LANE: You’ve announced a Commission of Audit to review the size and scope of government. Who will you get to head it?

TONY ABBOTT: We will announce that at the right time but it is 15 years or so since the last Commission of Audit. In fact, it was something that the Howard government did very early on in its term. This is something that does need to be done every couple of decades because it’s important to be sure that government is doing only those things that people can’t do for themselves.

SABRA LANE: Will you get someone like Peter Costello or will you get an independent economist to head it up?

TONY ABBOTT: The important thing Sabra is to ensure that the audit that we do, that the review of the size, scope and efficiency of government that we do is credible and respected so you can be absolutely confident that the last thing that we would want to do is damage our credibility as an incoming government should we win the election by appointing someone who doesn’t have wide public respect.

SABRA LANE: To achieve the budget bottom line in the black, you are going to have to make further huge cuts, painful cuts that you’ve not yet announced.

TONY ABBOTT: We will be very upfront with people in good time before the election but one of the points that I made last night Sabra is that while much that the Government has done by way of cutting in this budget is objectionable. We can’t guarantee to oppose anything, can’t guarantee to rescind anything and indeed may well have to implement these things as short term emergency measures to get the budget back under control.

SABRA LANE: There is no clear difference though to the budget bottom line in what you’ve proposed last night. You’re cutting 12,000 public servants, delaying the boost in superannuation contributions to pay for other things. The measures that you announced last night will not measurably change the budget bottom line.

TONY ABBOTT: Well, Sabra, I don’t accept that. Certainly we are funding our measures and we announced how we were going to do it last night. We also indicated that we were prepared to accept all of Labor’s cuts but we certainly weren’t going ahead necessarily with all of Labor’s spending.

So given that what we’ve done is fully funded, given that we’re prepared to accept at least short term emergency measures all of Labor’s cuts but not go ahead with all of their spending, I think the budget is in much better shape under us than under this current government.

SABRA LANE: So short term, define short term. How long will these measures need to be in place?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, we will be responsible and I think that’s what the public expect. I think the public understand that this has been a poor government, a terrible government in many ways. Even this government’s strongest supporters would accept that it’s been a bitter, bitter disappointment so I think the public understand that there is going to be a fair bit of putting the house back in order.

SABRA LANE: With an $18 billion deficit predicted for the next financial year, Treasury is forecasting a growth at around seven, 2.75 per cent. The Reserve Bank is around 2.5 per cent, both down on what we’re expecting this year. How low would you be prepared to see growth go to see a reduction in the deficit even further beyond that figure?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, normally economic growth is good for the budget and I want to get economic growth up and the great thing about cutting the carbon tax, cutting the mining tax, getting rid of unnecessary regulation, moving the workplace relations pendulum back to the sensible centre is that we should get productivity up, competitiveness up and ultimately economic growth up.

SABRA LANE: What trade off are you prepared though to make between making big spending cuts which could trigger a recession and growth?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, if the private sector starts spending, that’s going to be good for the economy and as confidence comes back I think the private sector will start spending. One of the reasons why the private sector is not spending at the moment and the household savings rate is sky high is because people don’t trust the Government.

So I think there will be a very strong confidence boost if there is a change.

SABRA LANE: Is there ever an acceptable level of net debt?

TONY ABBOTT: Ah, I’m not against debt. For instance I’m very strong on infrastructure spending and I made a series of very important infrastructure commitments last night but if you’re going to borrow, let it be borrowing for something that lasts. You can’t just borrow to blow it and that’s the problem. This Government is…

SABRA LANE: But what is an acceptable level?

TONY ABBOTT: This Government is borrowing for a current spending. It’s not borrowing for capital spending, and that’s the big difference. If we’re borrowing, let it be borrowing to build something that is really going to help our country like WestConnex, like the East-West Link, like getting the Pacific Highway duplicated. This is the sort of thing that we understand.

SABRA LANE: You’ve put reform of tax and Commonwealth/State relations firmly on the agenda. You’ve announced white papers on both. If the tax review recommends broadening the base of the GST and lifting the rate as many economists say is now essential, is it possible that you will take those proposals to the following election?

TONY ABBOTT: Well, that’s a hypothetical question that you’re asking me. Sabra, we have no plans to change the GST. We don’t intend to change the GST. Anyone who wanted to change the GST and that wouldn’t be us, would have to get the agreement of every single state and territory because it is a state and territory tax and anything that we might do arising from our white paper, we would seek a mandate for – not at this election but at the election after. We won’t do anything without seeking a mandate.

SABRA LANE: Mr Abbott, thanks for your time this morning.

TONY ABBOTT: Thanks so much Sabra.

It is going well. Newspoll will show no change on Monday because it is dishonest but Labor is now on 47.5 or 48 and gaining.

What the Abbottites did not see was the difference between a thirty-four day campaign and a hundred-and-four-day campaign. In the former, one can use blurred panic and hysterical squawking exaggeration and get home by these means without discussing or defending policy in any detail. In the latter, one cannot.

Abbott has therefore already said he will take thirty or forty dollars a week from every school child in New South Wales although their Premier, Barry O’Farrell, has signed them up for it. He has also said he will cancel new promised fast roads that will get Blacktown and Pentrith commuters home to their familes thirty minutes earlier.

These two things mean he cannot win enough seats in Sydney to win government. It means he has already failed.

In order to stop a landslide ruining his party he will have to tell inland Australia why his cheap and foolish neighbourhood-defacing broadband is better than the one fifteen million Australians want. And why his pregnancy leave plan favours rich top-floor executive women over part-time waitresses, child minders and teachers.

In a thirty-four day campaign he could survive this. In a hundred day campaign he cannot.

He is getting the last thing he wants, scrutiny. And, oh dear, oh yes, arithmetic.

He now must ask people who have always voted Labor to give up two or three thousand dollars a year to vote Liberal. It is hard to see why they would. They were ‘undecided’ last week but they are not any more. And there are a million of them.

It is not as if he has promised a surplus earlier than Swan. Even if he did no ‘undecided’ voter, and there are a million of them, would think it worth the inconvenience. Put up a bus fare by twenty cents and you get trouble. Take away thirty dollars a week (or, in the case of superannuation, eighty dollars a week in your old age) and you will get more trouble than it’s worth.

And you will have lost it, probably, for good and all.

Discuss.

Dear Birmingham,

What is the name of your lawyer?

I will accept a settlement of two hundred and ten thousand dollars.

Yours,

Ellis

John Birmingham has compared me to ‘Goebbels in the bunker’ and is banned for life.

As is well known by my respondents, I would never collude in the killing of my children, having lost too many of them to ‘natural causes’, and the comparison is unfair.

Birmingham, if that is ‘Bob Ellis’s Salad Dressing”s real name, is a piece of Liberal filth and I will kill him if he comes near me.

Or, better, sue him.

It seems to be fixed.

People not getting through elsewhere should put their comments under here.

There is some evidence that no comment made today is getting through. My son, who fixes these things, is doing an exam and will get to it by, perhaps, noon tomorrow.

Sean, for his unforgiveable offenses against the mother tongue, is banned for life.

9.40 am

Waiting for Viv at the Reps’ Entrance I discern in the gloom Peter Slipper, hunched and solemn and fugitive, in what seems a second-hand suit signing himself in at the burping machinery. On the radio his fellow-sufferer Craig Thomson is being stoutly defended by his assassin Dastyari, as an unfortunate fellow making difficult choices in troublous times with dignity.

I must now get my friend Craig to sue Abbott and Pyne for defamation.

If running out of the chamber is not an act of malicious libel, nothing is.

10.32 am

Coffee at Aussie’s with Plibersek; we talk of the instantaneously famous neglected Greenway baby and what it forebodes. She is amazed that Pyne lied to the House; you can’t do that, she says, you just can’t do that.

She gets up and goes off to vote and I brood and ponder, as a working moralist, on what we have said and what it may, suddenly, signify,

It is amazing, comrades, is it not, how fast it can all turn round? After two years of running a ‘character issue’ campaign against the mean, disloyal, ungrateful, trustless, conniving harridan Gillard, who stabbed her leader, Christopher Pyne, of all people, has come out against Motherhood. He thinks it wrong a young mother should tend her sick baby and so miss his Dear Leader’s big speech two hundred miles from the rocking cradle. Wow.

What a silly, bitchy, poofter thing to do.

Is it a game-changer? Well … it’s helped in one of Labor’s most vulnerable seats where overweight mothers with two jobs and no bloke are kept awake by wailing progeny most midnights; beset, betrayed young women who understand with shared anguish Rowland’s guilty, divided schedule. Elsewhere it supports many women’s view of Abbott as a sexist, wall-bashing, hairy-chested bully. It helps. It helps.

And we will see what we shall see.

11.40 am

I am tackled from behind by Heffernan who calls me a cunt and I call him a cunt, fraternally and affably as always. He seems unfazed by my vile and baseless charge, posted here in March and a year before, that he had sex with animals at too early an age and this informed and shaped and in some sense enflamed his political views and his noisy, kerb-crawling jihad against my friend Michael Kirby and other homosexuals. He hugs me, breathes a curse in my ear and scutters off chuckling and whooping, as always; like Speedy Gonzales.

I sit back down and Windsor arrives. He reads my paragraphs about last night and gingerly, I think, with a broad pained rubicund smile approves them, saying only ‘I drank much more than that.’ He shows it to his staffers, who admire my ‘use of language’. The phrase ‘vivid as crablice in a nunnery’ attracts them especially.

11.50 am

Craig Thomson is abruptly in the room and I tell him to sue Abbott and Pyne while he is in the headlines and ‘hot news’. He grins and nods but I sense that he may not.

And it’s a pity.

12.20 pm

In the papers, the rules change almost hourly. For the first time in history, no ordinary suburban people are being polled and asked how many of them approved the Budget, or disapproved it. For the first time in history, tomorrow, no pundit, print or media, will say who ‘won the week’. Abbott’s massive backdown tonight — the Budget is incompetent, and we agree with its every brutal initiative — will be hailed as a ‘tactical victory’.

They will say anything, anything, to keep him on track and looking victorious. If he unzipped and pissed on the Speaker they would hail it, as ‘a courageous, defiant, frontier-pushing act; a robust affirmation of our democracy’.

What a scaly, flinching lot they are entirely.

And we will see what we shall see.

1.40 pm

Scientists, I see, have cloned a human embryo, thus promising that long dreaded thing, an aborted baby’s resurrection: hullo mommy.

A neo-Frankenstein first, I ween, my masters.

How guilty the ‘parents’ will feel then.

5.10 pm

Craig did well on Sky News, as he always does. David Speers appeared amazed that his constituents liked him, praised all he had done for his locality, and did not necessarily believe, or care about, his allegedly lawless enjoyment of ill-gotten ice creams, milk shakes and cab rides home.

More and more Sky News behaves like a cult: faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

What is not seen latterly by any Murdoch worshipper is Labor losing fights with the Liberals. The score is 6-0 in the past three weeks. And even their most radiant choirboy — Van Onselen, Paul Murray — must be getting fucking worried.

5.40 pm

Tim Wilson is shrieking evilly about Michelle Rowland’s baby: a stunt, he says, a bad mother.

Is he gay?

If he is, he should, like Pyne, be very careful.

6.10 pm

A disturbing, revealing encounter with Heffernan at Aussie’s.

Having heard the name of my book, The Year It All Fell Down, and having said, ‘I don’t read books’, he reckoned after a moment’s reflection that it was not 2011, or 1989, or 1968, or 1848 that was the big year in modern human history, but ‘any year of the First World War’. He speaks with piercing melancholy of the human race, as if he were a stranger in the world.’I know other species,’ he says. ‘I know farm animals well. I know them really well. I’ve observed a lot of moving , scurrying fish. But I can’t think of any other species that would hurl themselves up over the wire into machine-gun fire knowing full well they won’t survive the moment, the hour. Following orders. Following orders. Why would they do that? Am I in that species? I don’t want to be.’

Or words to that effect. We speak of the numbers of the dead. ‘Australia’s Bing Crosby died in the First World War,’ I note.’Our Jack Dempsey. Our George Gershwin. Our Charlies Chaplin. Our Picasso.Our Jonas Salk. Our Walt Disney. Fifty-eight thousand of our strongest and smartest. Plus three hundred thousand of their legs and arms and eyes.’ He said he agreed with me and he couldn’t undertand it.

He rose and loped away, like Lyndon Johnson or Tim Fischer or Wile E. Coyote, a big man becalmed in his seventieth year and gutted somehow by world history and facing the great last question as we all soon must and not liking it. How little we know of anyone. And how foolish we are to dismiss them. For any reason.

8.10 pm

I watched with interest, as they say, Tony Abbott’s Budget reply:

It was a smooth, competent, mostly likeable performance, if a bit self-deluded; with only one policy — garroting Gonski — that will lose a million votes before morning; others were less immediately disastrous, but will simmer in the coming days.

He seems to think there’s a nostalgia out there for a Howard-Abbott-Costello-Ruddock-Reith-Minchin-Downer-Vanstone Golden Age. It’s not like that. Howard lost his own seat. He waged a false war on Arab innocents that cost us tens of billions we might else have spent on dental care or theatre companies. He appointed himself the ‘Deputy Sheriff’ of the western world’s most hated man, and Hollingworth, a friend of pederasts, GG. And the noble Abbott vision of Howard as GG was condemned — by the Liberals — as a ‘scare campaign’. Costello is now the Torquemada of Queensland, proud auteur of the sudden sacking of nurses and firemen, and fourteen thousand surprised public servants. Ruddock is regarded as a torturing gaoler of children, Reith a heinous harasser and punisher of honest working stiffs. Downer is thought by some a traitor who gave Saddam Hussein two hundred and ninety-seven million dollars. Vanstone is a joke.

Yet all these people dance in the stained glass windows of the cathedral of his mind and he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t understand, they are not seen thar way by some of us, most of us, all of us.

Has he lost it? Not sure.

9.10 pm

David Ettridge just rang to say Mark Dreyfus has passed on his case to the Commonwealth Police. If they act act on it, Tony Abbott will be in the same legal fix as Peter Slipper: suspected, wriggling, haemhorraging, mocked and shamed. An smh story on it, he says, is ‘on hold’.

Of course it is. Of course it fucking is.

We shall see what we shall see.

9.35 pm

Shorten’s offices are mostly empty and I watch on Skynews the vile cane toad Paul Murray dismissing Michelle Rowland as a conniving bitch who doesn’t give a toss about her sick child and my old friend Mikey Robins, a Murdochist now, smiling along. A pity to lose even him to the Dark Side.

Can they get away with this? It’s possible. It’s possible.

11.40 pm

I go by cab to the Kingston Hotel and there encounter Tom Cameron, a big, husky nice man from Shorten’s office, xxx his girlfriend, whom I knew in the Nathan Rees backroom fora couple of years, a sharp and beautiful no longer chain-smoking creature, and Peter Lewis, a physically and conversationally impressive Murdochist major criminal who stalked and helped frame poor Peter Slipper.

We talk of this and that. I plead that most Australians care, they really care, about sums like two dollars, twenty dollars, ten dollars — cheap movie night, bananas at bargain prices, Happy Hour — and would rather read, at Wayne’s corner shop, in Palm Beach, my newspapers than buy one of their own for two dollars. And Abbott filching, what, eighteen hundred dollars a year — that’s thirty-five dollars a week — from schoolkids, little schoolkids and their parents is a big thing to do and a hard sell.

They get bored with me and go away. I have one more beer, pick up my things and walk back.

On the door, I notice for the first time, is a further instruction. ‘Please do not let the cat in.’

Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We’ll keep the redhead flying here.

8.40 am

Headlines diabolical.

The Telegraph is pure Fleet Street Sun/Murdoch, with Gillard cartooned as a screeching, decomposing diva beside the dread pun, saved up over long years for this day, I imagine, this very day: ‘PM’s Swan Song!’ Elsewhere in the coarse lewd southern realm of Cult Murdoch it is ‘Labor Pains!’ In The Advertiser; ‘Flogging A Dead Horse!’ in The Herald Sun, and ‘Swan Puts Up The Bomb For Abbott To Catch!’ in The Australian; and, a little more fairly in the smh, ‘Labor’s Last Stand!’, and a cool piece by Gittins half-praising a half-good budget ‘from a government that knows it’s a dead duck’.

A tense whinge moreover on Fran Kelly’s breakfast show from Joe who won’t even say if the Baby Bonus (which he lately, glumly opposed and was rolled on) will under his imminent austere imperium stay or go. Hard to believe the heroic Swan performance (and immortal speech) of last night is what they’re talking about.

I wake in the night, get out my hot water bottle and find there is no electric jug. How does this punishing lack of comfort on the cusp of a raw cold winter assist, my masters, the advancement of world civilisation? In any way? I ask you.

Eez, as Yul Brynner once sang, a puzzlement.

9.50 am

Waiting for Viv to sign me in.

I reflect on our talk last night — three gay men, three straight women, and me — about a programme called America’s Fattest Bride and her probable sexual difficulties on her wedding night which Viv luridly and gorily enumerates; and then, in a logical segue, of Mrs Chifley’s prolapsed womb, and whether Ben was indeed in all those desolate celibate years in hugger-mugger banging his bossy red-headed secretary Phyllis. I think not; and I aver too forcefully perhaps, thumping the table and upsetting glasses, that Ben, so remorsefully Catholic that even after excommunication he stood every Sunday at the back of the church observing the faithful take the sacrament and praying along, would never, never have bought french letters in Kings Cross, as David Day has him do, nor have funded abortions nor, like Abbott, adoptions, in the long years of Phyllis’s tempting fertility.

It seems unlikely now, when everything is done and everything said, but it was a commonplace back then that men and women — in tennis clubs, church choirs, amateur dramatic societies — would have an intimate closeness that did not go into midnight, and morning, and risk like that.

10.58 am

Write lines for Swan, McTernan and a nameless other most of the morning. My current work practise is two bananas and two big lattes every couple of hours at Aussie’s, a nod to Windsor and a wink at Katter, who likes me. I got a cold stare from Julie Bishop at the entrance, but I guess everybody does. It is entirely possible she is nearly blind; or always furious; or jet-lagged, perhaps.

The mini-orations went well I hear from Bill and a witness, and Swanny’s people are consequently now perusing, with enforced and flagging interest, my recent rancorous additions to the national chatter. I hope soon to get my recent coinage ‘sado-Thatcherism’ into the language; in the next month or two; by pretending, perhaps, it is an old one. It’s a kissing cousin of Denis Healey’s wonderful fabrication ‘sado-monetarism’; an illumination, then and now, of the way some paleo-hayekians think. He is ninety-eight and sensate still, and I should visit him. In England, which I should go to. Soon.

He is the author of the best definition of English Fabian Socialism yet. ‘An obstinate will to erode by inches the conditions which produce avoidable suffering.’

What a wonderful man.

11.05 am

Gillard choked up, genuinely, as she introduced the levy for the Disabled; a good accident at last, it is worth sixty thousand female Undecided votes and fifteen thousand male ones. It also puts Abbott’s laughter and crude male bullying into sharp relief. Though I hear the caucus meeting is funereal it is hard to see how this will not help Labor in the suburbs that matter — disabled care is no difficulty for the rich — in the west of Sydney and Melbourne, and in the country towns where disabled care is infrequent, rough-hewn and costly.

2.40 pm

I am about to watch Question Time in Aussie’s when Viv and Patrick arrive with coffee and Carr-backroom nostalgia. Patrick says, ‘Well, I guess it’s the last time we’ll meet here’ imagining there will be no more Labor MPs to work for soon. Viv speaks of her admiration for Tony Windsor who is sitting nearby and would, she says, have made a good Prime Minister. ‘Like Chifley,’ I say. ‘Yes, exactly,’ she says. ‘Like Chifley.’

3.30 pm

They go away; and I watch, in the last two thirds of question Time, a revived and ardent Swanny in his best performance in, perhaps, his lifetime. He is not just defending his record, not just putting down his marker in history, he is campaigning. And he is beginning to win.

5.15 pm

I do a lot of writing, and miss an email from Carr commanding me to his office for ‘tea and sympathy’, urgently. I rush up an hour late and have twelve rousing minutes with him.

We speak of things I must not reveal. He reads to me from his diary. He is … well … magnified; and stoic; and Rushmore-large; a world statesman at last who, though maddeningly foreshortened in this, his last career, is glad to have got at least a glimpse of his ideal Platonic destination; a glimpse, as it were, of the Promised Land.

7.10 pm

In Shorten’s office I see, on various news services, Gillard’s tears repeatedly acclaimed. Is it a game-changer? No, but it’s an overture; it’s a softening; it’s useful; it plays.

And the Opposition’s absence from the chamber while she was crying is devastating.

Fifty thousand more votes, I reckon. And gaining by the hour.

11.10 p.m.

After the usual angel-wrestle with machinery (‘I’m sorry. Did you say “Bungendore Sewage Facility”?’) I go in a taxi to the Kingston Hotel, where I am told, first, I must cook my own steak and then that this option is not available to me this evening, sir, and sent to another room where I am told another will cook it for me. It is a good steak, and while eating it I am approached by a beaming stranger, who proves, in one of those moments of tightening focus, to be Tony Windsor.

I join his crowded table and over three shouted schooners we talk for perhaps two hours. He proves, as I suspected, to one of the most informed, fair-minded, unaffected, decent and persuasive men in politics. He speaks of his regard for Gillard, and of the chaotic day when, after Katter’s ‘meltdown’ in his, Windsor’s, office it was clear that she was to be trusted, and no assurance by Abbott (on the date of the next election, for instance) could be believed and any arrangement between them would ‘last two weeks’.

We discuss Abbott’s complicated neo-Papist conscience and swaggering Flashman tendencies, his abandoned fiancee Cathy O’Donnell’s weirdly convenient early death (imagine if she had turned up at the Forced Adoption Apology and held his hand) and the power-itchiness, vivid as crablice in a nunnery, that lost it for him among the once-wavering Independents, whom he intemperately offered his arse. Oakeshott came up, was greeted as ‘Buckshot’, and said to me grinning, ‘You know our secret, don’t you? We make it up as we go along.’

He goes away, and Windsor tells of their wary blooming friendship and how his chances in Lyne are ‘better than they were’. Of his own in New England, he recounts how Joyce and Abbott walked into a Tamworth hall containing five hundred people and ‘not one clapped’.

His own particular local success (he used to get 82 percent of the primary vote) came in part, he said, from employing in his electoral office ‘local people, not backroom careerists’, and the sternly egalitarian region he grew up in, ‘black, white, poor, prosperous, we treated each other all the same’. He spoke with warmth of Peter Andren who convinced him to oppose the Iraq war and how good a man and role model he was, and of his huge regard for Bob Brown, who civilised and dignified a raggedyarse party which was lately, without him, alas, unveiling its raggedy arse again.

We spoke as well of things I mustn’t reveal which are likely, not certain, to break and upset the known universe in the next few days. At the table were the suave urban Magyar Harald Muller and his wife Trish, who used to run the East Sydney, the best pub in the inner city (an eccentric with a budgerigar on his head and for a while Harald’s horse frequented the front bar) where Tony stayed when he was a state MP and described as ‘a little patch of Old Sydney Town’.

They missed it sorely, having created it, and felt displaced now. Their daughter, amazingly, used to go out with my son. In Australia, Tony agreed, it was always ‘two degrees of separation’, no more.

11.35 pm

I walk home recalling how, in our first conversation, Windsor explained his political success. ‘I don’t doorknock,’ he said, ‘I don’t leaflet. I don’t hold public meetings. I don’t campaign. If someone wants to ring me up and ask me a question, I’ll answer it.’

‘Why … not doorknock?’ I asked.

‘People don’t like it. I find that if you have to ask people for their vote, they won’t trust you.’

What a good man. I attain, exhausted, after twenty minutes the Motel From Hell, write up our conversation and am quickly asleep.

They were laughing. They were laughing at a cancer survivor talking of a treatment of cancer and the solace of cancer sufferers. They were laughing at a nation in trauma, and a good man doing big things to try and sort it. This is what they are like, Madam Speaker. This is what they are made of. This is the kind of cruel clowns they are.

7.20 am

I am accorded a towel but no soap; a bedside lamp but no radio; no TV; no phone. A toilet across the hall has threatening requirements on it, demanding I ‘be considerate’ to my fellow guests and flush it. I dread what will be said by these hellcats when I ask for a taxi.

Some chapter of the Afterlife will be like this, I am certain.

I must discover if they are Seventh-Day Adventists.

Many signs point that way.

7.50 am

Once more Fran Kelly claims ‘Nobody’s listening’ to Labor any more.

Well, they were listening when Gonski was announced and 72 percent wanted it. They were listening when a fast train was mooted and 90 percent wanted it. They were listening when Turnbull’s broadband was announced and 66 percent wanted Labor’s. They’ll be listening tonight when Swanny estimates what the deficit will be and how, in the next ten years, he will deal with it.

She should stop telling lies; she really should.

People are listening now as they listened to Howard alleging mothers threw their babies into the sea. They are listening attentively.

8.35 am

The shower is tepid-warm; I have, aha, my own soap. There are no hooks or shelves to put things on and my clothes, on the floor, are soon soaked by sideward-seeping grey water and what Robin Williams would call ‘gravitational predominance’.

I wonder what is gained, in the management’s view, by this lack of hooks and shelves. A sense of just punishment, perhaps, for the stranger within thy gates. He may be a sinner. Otherwise he would be rich.

8.55 am

I need to do big jobs; and, having made a run for it, am in the toilet confronted by this message:

‘Now that we have you seated –

**Please book and pay for your room before 8.00 pm on the NIGHT BEFORE — We can only guarantee you a bed if it is paid in advance.

**Checkout is BEFORE 10.00 am — If you checkout AFTER 10.00 am you will be charged for an extra night’s accommodation.

**There is NO SMOKING anywhere inside the building.

**If staying in a dorm please use ALL the linen provided and return it with your key at checkout.

**For everyone’s comfort please keep noise to a minimum especially AFTER 10.00 PM.

**Please drink your tea & coffee ONLY in the dining room or outside.

Thank for choosing to stay at xxxx & if we can help you please see us at reception.

9.40 am

I dress, pack a briefcase and in due course in the front office timidly ask the younger Brunhilde for a taxi. ‘Certainly, sir,’ she says, beaming serenely, and one arrives almost immediately. I am so abashed I leave my pillow, an essential tool on Budget Day, behind.

The taxi driver looks exactly like Michael Boddy — vast, red-bearded, rancorous — and propounds an incendiary Katterite farm-loans agenda most convincingly. We arrive at the Reps Entrance and I tip him four dollars.

10.30 am

Viv signs me in and I go through the assassination-prevention machinery with my concealed Swiss army knife undetected, as usual. But at Aussie’s I find my Visa card is missing — left in the taxi, probably — and I have twelve dollars to eke out over four days, and rapidly wonder what backroomer, or Minister, might lend me money. All, in my mind, seem cold-hearted, menacing, suspicious and fervidly unkind.

I queue for coffee. My mobile rings and my card is at the entrance, a good man unexpectedly and warmly avers. He must have rung Viv to get my number; the heavens bless him.

11.20 am

To Shorten’s office where I write, and type up, the first part of his banquet-compering utterances this Budget evening.

I then realise I have put it inadvertently on the blog, and panic. It needs to be taken down eftsoons lest some good jokes leak betimes to the Van Onselen Insurgency and hit the airwaves before they are historically uttered.

Happily my wife is at home and within three minutes of publication is able to preserve, erase, and send it back to me.

11.40 am

Shorten emerges with a pleased, flushed, smiling Oakeshott whose firm handshake near disables me. I call him, Oakeshott, ‘a great speechwriter’ and Shorten thinks I am speaking of myself. ‘No,’ says Oakeshott, ‘he’s talking about you.’ Shorten enumerates my failings with increasing bitterness, or irony perhaps, until they reach the lift and the moment passes.

11.55 am

Shorten returns and I convince him — I think — that Abbott’s Motherhood Money Machine is rortable. ‘Any man can employ his wife on any wage as his Social Secretary,’ I plead. ‘The money need never leave the house.’

‘But .. to what end?’ he asks, in the baffled tones of Dr Watson.

‘The seventy-five thousand dollars,’ I reply; and his eyes glint.

He understands.

12.25 pm

I have a keen ear for voices (I once picked a black American to Cleveland, Ohio) and have noted, this day, that Shorten’s chief speechwriter Tom Cameron has the same voice as Joe Hockey and Shorten the same voice as Wayne Swan. This, on top of Arthur Sinodinis sounding exactly like Richo, Clive James sounding exactly like Errol Flynn and Dennis Waterman like Tony Llewellyn-Jones, makes me wonder if voices come with genetic trappings and lead us into the same professions, like ABC newsreaders.

I must look into this further.

2.20 pm

Abbott mourns Margaret Thatcher in a speech to the House. ‘She changed the future, and she changed the past,’ he says; which is one way of saying her admirers printed the legend. These admirers did not include any men or women who served in her Ministry; or any of the thirty million Britishers and North Irish whose lives she ruined, and the thirty thousand, probably, she drove to suicide, like Bobby Sands.

I spent four days with her and found her barking mad; as did Francis Pym, her Minister for Defence, who let slip that she was barking mad in the days before the Falklands engagement and implied as much, when sitting beside her in a press conference I was at, for which she promptly sacked him.

It is hard to see what good she did. She effectively trashed the North and Scotland and Wales and enriched the corporate hoodlums of the South, and made houses unaffordable anywhere. The money that poured from North Sea Oil was squandered on the unemployed benefits of sacked miners; decent, harmless men who need not have been sacked. The collieries were still making money, and might have piled up in those years coal that could be selling to China now.

She is a remarkable case of someone with no achievements and no particular philosophy, only attitudes, sharply expressed. Get on your bike. The lady’s not for turning.

And gender of course. She had a useful gender. And because of it, none dared ever speak ill of her; not even today.

4.05 pm

I write the rest of Shorten’s many brief speeches (introducing Gillard, intriducing Swanny, thanking the sponsors, acclaiming the band) at Aussie’s, and am there approached by Craig Thomson’s assistant David xxx, and asked to perform at a benefit. I say I will, pledge a thousand dollars and ask if Labor has a Dobell candidate yet. He says no, but he isn’t confident how long they will wait for Craig’s difficulties to be sorted.

If they dump him, he will stand, probably, as a Labor Independent.

5.12 pm

Pyne in Question Time accused Bradbury, justly perhaps, of a kind of insider trading. Word leaks out that Swan will abolish the Baby Bonus. As always, reality speeds up and pixillates.

I talk with some ACT Young Labor people for an hour in Aussie’s.They ask me who is Labor’s future and I say ‘Clare’. But it turns out they mean September not 2020: could Carr be drafted? No, I say, not to be in Opposition till he’s 68, having been in Opposition from when he was 40 till he was 47. He’s done Opposition and he hates it. They predict Shorten as Opposition Leader till, oh, 2015, then Clare.

They’re sure we’re going to lose in September. I tell them no we’re not. Katter’s preferences have us on 48 already and a million Australians are Undecided. We need only 300,000 of them and we win.

6.05 pm

They invite me to an ACT function and we get lost seeking it. In the corridor we encounter McTernan, looking more like Estragon than ever, and he says he’ll ‘catch up’ with me tomorrow at ‘your office’, meaning Aussie’s.

We go down many corridors seeking the Caucus Room which seems to have moved north since I was last in it, watching Gillard’s first speech as Prime Minister and, it was reported, hissing her. We find it, and are rapidly told in the melee inside that Craig Thomson has lost his Labor preselection.

Dastyari, the word is, has ‘dumped him’.

6.40 pm

I drink beer and eat cheese at an excellent, crowded occasion, with Kate Lundy, Gai Brodtmann, Andrew Leigh, Mike Kelly and the candidate for Hume makiking good brief speeches, Kelly’s the best.

I explain to the young people how he accompanied in an over-heated helicopter at great risk to himself, the lately hanged body of Saddam Hussein to Tikrit, his tribal fiefdom, and handed it over to his fanatical mourners and did not die; how he persuaded Saddam to stand trial; how he administrated the rouged and bloated corpses of Uday and Qusay into a sort of press conference that proved it was them indeed; how he was forbidden to shoot Moqtadr al-Sadr when he had him in his cross-hairs; and so on; and how he was consequently, gratefully made by Gillard Minister for Cheese.

The candidate for Hume thinks broadband will help him get the eight percent swing he needs to win.This year. In Hume.

8.20 pm

We watch the tired, husky Swanny deliver a great speech. The Liberals laugh through it till Swanny says, ‘As a cancer survivor myself’, which makes them look like cruel clowns. How dare they laugh? At a nation in trauma, and a good man trying to fix things?

Fuck the lot of them.

9.10 pm

A man in the corridor, an MP, I think, Perrett was it, says Shorten’s speech was ‘very, very fine’. In his office I am given beer and asked to improve some lines they are giving to local candidates.

How, I wonder, does one say, convincingly,‘Sorry about promising a surplus’? It needs to be a very, very good line.

‘If you can’t trust Treasury, who can you trust? Singo?’

11.30 p.m.

At the Lanterne in Campbell with Viv, Gillard’s melancholy speechwriter Carl Green, the head of Hawker Britton Justin di Lollo, whom I worked with first in Beazley’s office in 1995, and Patrick Muhlen-Schulte, a cluey, witty Carr staffer now in the ‘private sector’, gay, impressive, dismissive, unageing.

Justin believes it’s winnable but the others are resolutely, doggedly gloomy. Why not fight? I ask. Why give it away?

After the others have gone Justin and I reminisce about Beazley, our great lost leader, and how Faulkner’s vote, and Melham’s, and David fucking Cox’s and, yes, Robert McClelland’s, put in fucking Latham instead. And we wonder why.

Kim would be in his ninth year as Prime Minister now, and just about to hand over to Shorten. Or Combet. Or Plibersek.

We curse for a while, and then, in separate taxis, go home.

I have known Swanny for seventeen years, have campaigned for him and used to sleep under his house, and I trust him. He is always underrated, though he beat Peter Costello (the Worm said) in every debate they had.

He got us through the GFC. He saved a million jobs. His decency is apparent. The Opposition cannot call him a mean mother. They cannot, plausibly, call him a dill either. He will do well tonight. Hockey will do badly in the week that follows. Abbott will fall, most likely, and Turnbull return by D-Day. Thomson and Slipper will be exonerated. Katter and Palmer will pick up many, many Queensland votes. And the election then will be very close. And we may win it.

But no-one seems able to address the two things that matter, and everyone seems in denial of them.

One is the fact is that rents in our country are now the highest in the history of the world. And when taxes go down, and interest rates go down, rents go up. And unless rents, all rents, are reduced by a third the economy is cactus.

Money that should be spent on living is being shovelled into the furnace of Rent. And a simple enacted law would stop all that. We cap wages in all jurisdictions, for even footballers. We should cap rents. Paying three thousand a week to sell shoes in Avalon is ridiculous. Paying three hundred dollars a week for a studio flat in Ultimo is ridiculous. Discuss.

The other is the dollar. Floating it has been a catastrophe. If it was at 82 cents there would be a hundred thousand businesses still profitably working, and three thousand farmers who have suicided still alive, and a million parents able to spend time with their kids. It should be unfloated, and defended, as the Chinese currency is, the currency that has conquered the world.

Until somebody grasps these two nettles our citizens will be always on the knife-edge of desolation and working too hard and banking little money, with everything they love at risk.

I ask Swanny to just do it, if not tonight then as an election promise foreboded soon.

It will be hard for Joe to come up, after tonight, with any figures that do not threaten a quarter of a million jobs and scare a million breadwinners, and the million Undecided will move Labor’s way. And it will be hard for Tony to stay Leader. It is very close now and we still could lose it; by one seat, my nightmare is.

But it would be good if somebody (even Turnbull; even Palmer; even Windsor) addressed the two essential problems.

Anything else is window dressing.

I command Joe Hockey to say what he would have done different in the past four years, and what surplus he has in mind and how many hundreds of thousands of breadwinners he plans to sack to achieve it and when it will occur.

I command him to give me these figures by next Monday.

I am not amused.

9.20 am

I am going to Canberra today on the bus (I was nearly killed last time driving down and my wife has forbidden the car) and may know more soon of how the Budget is going and the Hawke-Turnbull putsch developing.

It well may be that the same silly fundamentalist Papist kooks who stopped Abbott winning last time will do so again. Or they may know more about page 68 of the Duffy book and be striving to get rid of him for that reason.

Are any of the young victims of page 68 dead now? Did one of them suicide?

This should be revealed, and perhaps Hawke is planning on some such disclosure. He is certainly determined, and if Paul Sheehan is to be believed, capable of these dangerous methods.

I assume the deficit will be under twelve billion but Hockey’s how-can-you-believe-them whimpered cry will be effective. And the only thing to do will be to ask repeatedly (or ask the Governor-General to ask) what Hockey’s deficit will be, and by how many hundreds of thousands of sacked innocents it will be achieved. Joe seems earnest and well-meaning and stupid a lot of the time and if he does not answer these questions it may go hard with him.

Will the No Confidence motion succeed? It is possible Wilkie will vote for it but Katter, Thomson and Slipper will not. Wilkie believes he can get a better gambling-prevention deal from Abbott, and he probably can, and will get Abbott’s preferences if he votes that way.

But Katter, Thomson and Slipper need time — and, indeed, money, which flows to them at the rate of two thousand two hundred dollars a week for as long as this parliament sits — to finance and bed down their campaigns. Katter is sworn to support the government on questions of Supply and Confidence, and he lately got out of Gillard two farmer-friendly measures, the drought ‘dole’ and the cheap loans, which he would like to have enacted and guaranteed in the Budget measures for the Bush.

This leaves Abbott moving, again, a No Confidence motion he loses, and looking a goose in the same night when he refuses to mention figures and Swan’s look plausible.

And Turnbull moves against him.

I can see no other scenario that explains Hawke’s present flurry. Or Turnbull’s continued presence, at 58, in the Chamber. He must overthrow Abbott lest Abbott win the election and sideline him, and he lose his moment forever.

There is no other timing that makes, now, sense.

5.35 pm

I saw Far From Heaven with Michael Wilding, ate Chinese and just made the four o’clock bus from Central. It is dark now and I am surrounded by sleeping Chinese. Are they better able to sleep than us and therefore better at passing exams? Or are they just plain smarter?

The latter, I think.

The smh has a lot of pro-Labor articles. Is there a Nielsen we haven’t seen that shows Labor on 48 and gaining? It could be so. Abbott’s Direct Action, Vaucluse Babies, Luddite Broadband, Surplus Now and anti-local government policies are under attack and they fear, perhaps, that a Budget that sacks hundreds of thousands of breadwinners would not be voted for and they are picking Labor now.

We will see. We will see.

9.35 pm

It is with dismay I learn my motel room contains no television, the ablutions are shared, smoking is banned and breakfast compulsory. The two young women running it resemble Seventh Day Adventist landladies of my youth and are amazed when my credit card fails, and they bestow on me pitying looks as they would on a cannibal heathen.

I pay in cash, dissemble delight at these malvolian restrictions and urge my stoic black taxi driver to take me to Manuka where I eat oysters kilpatrick, tom yum gum and strawberries and ice cream. McTernan, I hear, has been rousing the troops with the first scene of Patton, which Nixon used to show himself before invading some new country — Cambodia, Kent State — and I am pleased by this.

I must write Shorten a speech by dawn.

And so it goes.

The Mother’s Day Massacre in New Orleans begs, again, my solution to gun violence in America.

It is to ban every male under 26 from bearing a gun outside the house or the gun club and to put each such male in prison for six months if he does.

This will reduce gun deaths from 28,000 a year to 8,000 and gun wounds from 90,000 to, probably, 30,000 and those traumatised by these events from a million to 100,000.

It costs no money, threatens no gun manufacturer or gun collector and saves a lot of lives and money.

The only people who will lose from it are funeral directors.

Frangipani and reader1 have been abolished and technologically locked out of this correspondence by my wife and will never return.

Those who wish to know why can look up their exchanges under Allons Enfants, Oops.

I saw the new play lenny bruce: 13 daze undug in sydney 1962, at the Bondi Pavilion twice in four nights, charmed by its mixture of jazz, nostalgia, stand-up, social history, moral debate and world class acting talent, and engrossed by the fact of having myself met most of the dramatis personae (Tina Date, Richard Neville, Lee Gordon, Abe Saffron, Lenny Bruce) in what I guess I now should call a former life.

It tells a story of drugs, booze, jet-lag, cultural cringe, a three-day bender and jokes that didn’t travel too well (the night I caught his act at Aaron’s I too, at twenty, added my silence to the bourgeois dismay around me) and a career that, already in downward spiral, crashed and burned after his no-show at the Wintergarden, Rose Bay, and sped him to his death at forty.

(I met him backstage and saw a sweaty, distracted, unhandsome smallish man with a limp handshake in grave need of a stimulant of some sort and was not impressed. In his act he referred to ‘bull-dykes’, a concept then unknown to me, and Elizabeth Taylor’s moustache.)

It has been compared to The Legend of King O’Malley, and it does indeed echo that Australian theatre form (Flash Jim Vaux, Marvellous Melbourne, Manning Clark’s History of Australia) that might be called musical-historical-comical-ramshackle-piratical-vaudeville-pastiche which flourished in the seventies and was wiped out by the Williamson Paralysis (one set, five actors, bourgeois concerns, a shimmer of adultery firmly resisted) that swamped the subsidised theatres in the eighties and has not yet, alas, abated. This show reminds me in my senescence of so much that was lost, or was shuffled backwards into the Fringe where, undernourished, underpopulous, pale and sidelined, it became a poor cousin of haughty pretentious drawing room abominations like Fury by Joanna Murray Smith, currently wasting taxpayers’ millions at the Wharf.

The show starts with what seem to be jazz musicians, jamming; after a while Sam Haft, who plays Lenny, sits down at the piano and joins in. The music continues, in different styles, throughout the show, with fine resurrections of Charlie Parker, Tina Date, Bojangles, Frank Sinatra. Lenore Munro sings amazingly well. Damien Strouthos and Dorje Swallow manage a range of accents and characterisations (journos, strip-club bouncers, parsons, cops, American entrepreneurs) that Mike Carlton would envy. The four of them populate the stage, containing multitudes, with a world long lost, of ‘colourful Sydney identities’, grimy drag shows and bohemian strumpets and the famed Push doctor, Rocky, who prescribed uppers and downers for needy celebrities and mates. Lenore impersonates Patricia Rolfe, and her shocked newspaper articles recounting Lenny’s bad manners and his ‘eight letter word’, cocksucker, back when fellatio, in my remembrance, was infrequent and by both genders not a little feared.

The author, Benito de Fonzo (I pray God that is not his real name), does not let Lenny off lightly: he is drunk and gross and blithering most of the time, and misusing nice Tina, and undergoing that not unfamiliar medical syndrome, the American Ego Trip In A Lesser Country, and it is only when we hear his actual recorded voice, his own unique in-the-moment verbal jazz, that we realise what a formidable frontier-pushing talent he was. Bob Hope called him ‘the best of us’; and it is not a tribute one should sneer at. Woody Allen called Bob Hope ‘the best of us’; and there you go.

I assume this show will ‘evolve’ (it needs in fact to be twenty minutes longer) and recur in other venues in the next year or so. I pray it does. The cast is as talented as that of the Wharf Revue. They can do almost anything, including, in Sam Haft’s case, emit tragic force, particularly in the final song, ‘All Alone’, composed by Bruce himself. The direction by Lucinda Gleeson is first-rate, with a lovely diversion at one point, involving a female shop dummy at the back of the theatre: ‘We’ve got to get her out of there,’ cries Lenny, ‘she’s trapped in Sydney.’ Or words to that effect.

The sound design, by Nathaniel Edmondson, is particularly good. We are, in that strange half-moon small room plagued by poltergeists, engulfed, transported, illumined; and at interval we see a gibbous moon over Bondi Beach and feel good to be alive.

(First published by Independent Australia)

It is likely that Ariel Castro, the Cleveland Ohio bus driver who kidnapped, raped, impregnated, aborted and chained up for years three girls and fathered — and, in some sense, raised —another, will be executed for it in four or five years’ time.

His fate will be watched keenly by hundreds of millions of men who have done similar things in religious and secular contexts around the world.

Teenage brides are delivered, protesting, to older husbands by Amish, Mormon, Scientologist, Pitcairn, Aboriginal, Catholic and Muslim community leaders, occasionally after genital mutilation, and sometimes discarded after enjoyment by all-powerful males. Aboriginal girls were thus ill-used by their white owners for two centuries in Australia.

Secular westerners have forced abortions on their girlfriends and, sometimes, wives, in numbers that approach, by now, a billion. Two-thirds of all Rwandan girls have been raped. Children are trafficked and enslaved throughout Africa, and young girls sold into prostitution in the Philippines by impoverished, eager parents who then receive a percentage of their earnings until they die of AIDS.

Hundreds of millions of girls are thus ill-used every day. Yet only Ariel Castro will go to gaol and be killed for it. He suffers for them all.

A case can be made that Hugh Hefner acted similarly – acquiring, paying, accommodating, seducing, photographing, shaming and discarding hundreds of beautiful young women who did not know what they were in for. And Daryl F Zanuck, who had a new ‘starlet’ at three p.m. almost every day. And Howard Hughes and David Lean and Mao Zedong and many a Catholic priest.

The enslavement by the Magdalen Sisters of girls who had their babies taken away from them is an echo of what Castro did, unpunished and often applauded in Catholic Ireland for nigh on a hundred years. What has been done to girls for thousands of years echoes Castro ninety percent of the time. The prostitute saved from stoning by Jesus has equivalents in Africa today, deprived by AIDS of her parents and risking it to make money to raise young siblings by schtupping truck drivers as in the great film Life, Above All. It is the blind-spot of most societies.

And only Castro of Cleveland will die for it. Had he been not Hispanic but Anglo he might have got off more lightly. Had he been Joe Kennedy or Jack, or Grover Cleveland, or Thomas Jefferson who first impregnated a mulatto slave Sally Heminges when she was fourteen, and sent his light-skinned male progeny away, and out into the world, never to be seen again, when they were grown.

It is centuries of slavery and slave rape and miscegenation that America is punishing today as they rail against Castro so earnestly and righteously. It is their primal eldest curse and they will never be free of it.

How will the six-year-old girl, the child of rape like so many million others, feel when her father is killed for having improperly fathered her? When she is thus informed she should never have been born? She will be ten or twelve by then, and not likely to take it well.

The fine Fowles novel, The Collector, is about such things and was popular because it touched on fantasies, both male and female, that are common to humankind. The leather-and-chains of S and M, legally available in most western cities, the dildoes and whips and nose-rings and studs, show how prevalent these thoughts are.

And only Castro will die for them.

If he should, we all should.

A postscript from Tynan of the Old Vic Henry IV of 1945; no better words on theatre exist.

‘The most treasurable scenes in these two productions were those in Shallow’s orchard: if I had only half an hour more to spend in theatres, and could choose at large, no hesitation but I would have these. Richardson’s performance, coupled with Miles Malleson as Silence, beak-nosed, pop-eyed, many-chinned and mumbling, and Olivier as Shallow, threw across the stage an autumnal golden veil, and made the idle sporadic chatter of the lines glow with the same kind of delight as Gray’s Elegy. There was a sharp scent of plucked crab-apples, and of pork in the larder: one got the sense of life-going-on-in-the-background, of rustling twigs underfoot and the large accusing eyes of cows, staring through the twilight. Shakespeare never surpassed these scenes in the vein of pure naturalism: the subtly criss-crossed counterpoint of the opening dialogue between the two didderers, which skips between the price of livestock at market and the philosophical fact of death (‘Death, saith Psalmist, is certain; all must die’), is worked out with fugal delicacy: the talk ends with Shallow’s unanswered rhetorical question: ‘And is old Double dead?’ No reply is necessary: the stage is well and truly set, and any syllable more would be superfluous. The flavour of sharp masculine kindness Olivier is adept in: and for me the best moment in his ‘Hamlet’ film was the pat on the head for the players’ performing dog which accompanied the line: ‘I am glad to see thee well.’

And it was in the very earth of this Gloucestershire orchard. Olivier was the Old Satyr in this Muses’ Elizium; ‘Through his lean chops a chattering doth make, which stirs his staring, beastly-drivell’d beard.’ This Shallow (pricked with yet another nose, a loony apotheosis of the hook-snout he wore as Richard) is a crapulous, paltering scarecrow of a man, withered up like the slough of a snake; but he has quick, commiserating eyes and the kind of delight in dispensing food and drink that one associates with a favourite aunt. He pecks at the lines, nibbles at them like a parrot biting on a nut; for all his age, he darts here and there nimbly enough, even skittishly; forgetting nothing, not even the pleasure of Falstaff’s page, that ‘little tiny thief’. The keynote of the performance is old-maidishness, agitated and pathetically anxious anxious to make things go with a swing; a crone-like pantomime dame, you might have thought, were it not for the beady delectation that steals into his eyes at the mention of sex. (Shallow was, as Falstaff later points out, ‘as lecherous as a monkey’.) His fatuous repetitions are those of importunate female decrepitude: he nags rather than bores. Sometimes, of course, he loses the use of one or more of his senses: protesting, over the table, that Falstaff must not leave, he insists, emphasising the words by walking his fingers over the board: ‘I will not excuse you, sir; you shall not be excused; excuses shall not be omitted; there is no excuse shall serve; you shall not be excused’ — and after his breathless panic of hospitality, he looks hopefully up: but Falstaff has long since gone. Shallow had merely forgotten to observe his departure; and the consequent confusion of the man, as he searches with his eyes for his vanished guest, is equalled only by his giggling embarrassment at finding him standing behind him.

Of all the wonderful work Olivier did in this and and the previous Old Vic season, I liked nothing more than this. A part of this actor’s uniqueness lies in the restricted demands he makes on his audience’s rational and sensual capacities. Most actors invite the spectator to pass a *moral* judgment on their own appearance. A normal actor playing a moderately sympathetic part will go all out to convince the audience that he is a thoroughly good man, morally impeccable; playing a villain, he will force them to see the enormity of the man’s sins. He will translate the character into the terms of a bad nineteenth-century novel. An attractive actor playing the part of a jeune premier will try primarily to arouse the admiration of the women and the envy of the men; a player of farce will rely on grotesque make-up to establish a character for him. But most actors insist on a judgment of one kind or another: and they are better or worse actors according to the degree to which it is obvious they are *insisting*. Olivier makes no such attempts to insist, and invites no moral reponse: simply the thing he is shall make him live. It is a rare discretion, an ascetic tact which none but he dares risk.

All republics overthrow unsuitable kings. The sniffy, God-bothering Charles I; the mad King George III; the limp and gilded Louis XVI; the half-mad, blood-drenched Kaiser; the Rasputin-cuckolded, war-losing Czar; the cruel, Yank-backed, torturing Shah: all lost their subjects’ affection, as Hirohito did not, nor Sihanouk, nor Phoumiphon, nor Haakon, nor Beatrice, nor Juan Carlos, in specific ways.

No such affection has been lost by the present Elizabeth, or Prince Wills, or Kate’s foetus. Charles certainly suffered a setback when his divorced wife Di, pregnant to an Arab, died in a Paris tunnel while fleeing paparazzi at the hand, some said, of MI5; but his quirky-greenie-Buddhist noblesse oblige and Betjemanite esteem for the charm of old buildings have won some of it back, and Helen Mirren’s version of his mother and Colin Firth’s of his grandfather (staying in the palace under the Blitz) have made it hard not to admire the Guelph-Windsors, for managing in sometimes difficult circumstances to — unlike their cousin Mountbatten — avoid assassination.

And so it is, and so it goes, that the Turnbull-Keneally relaunch of the shrunken republican impulse this week is too early or too late. In the wake of Di’s death it would have gone through, and indeed, did go through if you added, preferentially, the Turnbull-Stott-Despoja-Vizard minimalist vote to the Reith-O’Shane direct-election vote in 1999. And it might go through when a doddering red-nosed blithering Charles and an ugly, snaggly, waspish old Camilla provide the target.

But, at the moment, while Kate’s belly blooms and womanhood watches in envy and consternation, it has no hope and no traction; and should, with regret, and old affection, and a further heaped curse on the corpse of John Howard, be for twelve or fifteen years postponed.

For denying you our cattle, we are sorry.
For denying you the pleasures of slaughtering them carelessly, we are sorry.
For denying you the pleasure of their meat and their screams of pain we are sorry.
For denying you the satisfaction of cutting their throats whilst still fully conscious, we are sorry.

(“We are, aren’t we? Who writes this stuff?? Malcolm, why are you sniggering?”)

—Doug Quixote

We’ve had a universal triple-A for five years now. John Howard never had one. Peter Costello never had one. Campbell Newman lost his. Barry O’Farrell lost his. And they’re the better economic managers? Wow.

We’re going to apologise to Indonesia for criticising their cruelty to our cows, are we? And we’re going to apologise to Japan for criticising Changi?

Van Onselen tonight slammed Abbott for not bringing back WorkChoices and bagged the business community for not sticking by it in 2007 and thus applauding the ghastly Marxist Rudd into office. This piss-weak Abbott policy, he said, is your just reward.

He seems to me complicit in the current Hockey push to bring down Abbott by D-Day and not (as I have tiresomely emphasised heretofore) in his perfect mind.

For he seems to think there are Western Suburbs votes in having to work on Christmas Day or not getting overtime or taking home old, tired pizzas in lieu of pay. He imagines keeping unions out of unsafe workplaces, in the wake of the Bangla Desh clothing factory disaster — a thousand dead now in an unsafe workplace — is a popular policy idea this week. Give up your safety, chaps, and your money, and the second child you can now not afford, and vote for us.

He believes, it seems, like other Minchinite sado-Thatcherists, in punishment not reward for a hard day’s work and unceasing terror for a struggling family. He believes in the terrorism of the Free Market. He loves it. He worships it.

What a ghastly little fellow.

Let us begin to slow-clap him off the national stage.

I was filming in Bondi today, with Robert Menzies, Terry Clarke and Heather Mitchell, some scenes from two novels by Michael Wilding.

Then I ate, saw Olympus Is Fallen and drove home.

On the way I heard, or thought I heard, on NewsRadio that Tony Abbott is planning an official Apology to Indonesia’s carnivores and meat-workers for the months when, noting they were torturing our cows, we didn’t let them have any.

If true, it is like apologizing to Japan for having criticised their treatment of our men on the Burma Road.

It can’t be true.

If it is true, poor man, he has lost fourteen percent of the right-leaning female vote and seven percent of the male. And Labor wins by, oh, forty seats.

It can’t be true.

It can’t be.

Can somebody tell me if it is?

So that’s it then: no tyranny, no tyranny in the workplace till 2016, but tyranny after that for sure, and forever.

Who does the Leader of the Opposition think he is kidding? He was Minister for Industrial Relations for two whole years.

What friends in the workplace did he make back then? What working person comes to his birthday parties? What working person does he invite? Can he name even one?

Ken Tynan was not present when I gave my Falstaff in Lismore High in the autumn of ’56, but he said, correctly, of Ralph Richardson’s fat knight at Stratford-on-Avon eleven years before:

‘There were no deliberate farcical effects. This was the down-at-heel dignity of W.C. Fields translated into a nobler language: here was a Falstaff whose principal attribute was not his fatness but his knighthood. He was Sir John first, and Falstaff second, and let every cock-a-hoop young dog beware.

‘The spirit behind all the rotund nobility was spry and elastic: that, almost, of what Skelton in a fine phrase called ‘friskajolly younkerkins’; there was also, working with great slyness but great energy, a sharp business sense: and, when the situation called for it, great wisdom and melancholy (‘Peace, good Doll! do not speak like a death’s-head: do not bid me remember my end’ was done with most moving authority). Each word emerged with immensely careful articulation, the lips forming it lovingly and then spitting it forth: in moments of passion, the wild white halo of hair stood angrily up and the eyes rolled majestically: and in rage one noticed a slow meditative relish taking command: ‘Marry, there is another indictment upon thee, for suffering flesh to be eaten in thy house, contrary to the law; for the which I think—-thou—-wilt—-howl!’: the last four words with separate thrice-chewed pungency.

‘Richardson never rollicked or slobbered or staggered: it was not a sweaty fat man, but a dry and dignified one. As the great belly moved, step following step with great finesse lest it overtopple, the arms flapped fussily at the sides as if to paddle the body’s bulk along. It was deliciously and subtly funny, not riotously so: from his height of pomp Falstaff was chuckling at himself: it was not we alone, laughing at him. He had good manners and also that respect  for human dignity which prevented him from openly showing his boredom at the inanities of Shallow and Silence: he had inly recently sunk from the company of kings to the company of heirs-apparent. None of the usual epithets for Falstaff applied to Richardson: he was not often jovial, laughed seldom, belched never…’

… And so on, in some of the best prose ever written by a seventeen-year-old. It was not, in fact, this quote I was looking for, but another, from Tynan: Curtains, a wellbeloved oft-purchased book I always lend and lose, in which he describes the two Henry IVs as ‘the twin summits of English theatre’, consummate works that give us an England riven, slum-stenched, gangsterized, corrupt and shamed, and with ramshackle melancholy coping unfitly with the sad, poxed end of the Middle Ages.

Or words to that effect. Bell Shakespeare’s version, trimmed back by, perhaps, fifty minutes, and over-emphasising, perhaps, a lewder and fouller Jack than Rafe’s, is nonetheless an enormous experience I am going back to with nonagenarian friends who may need to be reminded in their nonage of what ‘Shakespeare’ is, and how modern, cruel and black-hearted, how close to Quentin Tarantino his world and his vision were.

It resembles that company’s Troilus And Cressida, and, at times, the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch. Here are bumptious mobster-dukes at roaring war over trifles, and Falstaff, like Blackadder, disdaining ‘honour’ (‘Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday’), beseeching bribes from dim draft-dodgers, and proudly accepting a medal from the king for an eminent corpse he did not kill.

With his bland Paddo accent, he resembles Les Patterson, Bert Newton, John Hepworth, Bruce Venables (the King of the Primates) and Singo more than somewhat, deliberately perhaps, with a fairy-glitter of John Meillon ever hovering at his shoulder. Eschewing Harold Bloom’s bizarre description of Falstaff as ‘the soul of goodness’, he gives us a shifty, trimming, ball-scratching rogue-buffoon somewhere between Dogberry and Edmund. He is not altogether likeable (he drinks, early on, from his own piss-pot), and, like many of the Bard’s aspirational adventurers, a rat with women. The scenes between him and Quickly and Tearsheet, where threesomes loom and blowjobs shimmer and debts are never paid, are among the strongest, and somehow tenderest, of a grimy, noisy, troublous but shapely evening.

Its flaws are several, but they do not damage it much. One is the worst sets and costumes since early Pleistocene times (the records before then are unreliable): piles of milk-crates and bikie leather and chundered-on t-shirts and hot pants in Cheapside, and piles of milk-crates and boardroom business suits and silk ties like those in Margin Call for the royal war room.

Another is the accents, not rough-trade Cockney and BBC-lofty as Will intended, but a kind of blurry off-Ocker like 2UE in all directions. If you have to make it Australian (and why do you?) you could at least have had Don Dunstanese on the one hand and H.G. Nelsonese on the other. But no such distinction is made. Hal and Falstaff sound like Triple-J, Bardolph (a wonderful cherry-nosed melancholic by Terry Bader) and Peto (Arky Michael) like something out of Yes What.

I am grumbling overmuch, mayhap, my masters, this midnight. But it seems to me that this most English work of the Stratford canon should (unlike The Winter’s Tale or Much Ado or Twelfth Night which can have any accent you like) stay put in Britain. The accents can be Edwardian or Estuarine or Swinging London or Punk, but the voices (one of the stage directions says ‘They speak in Welsh’) belong where they are set.

Another is the mobile phones. You can have that, or sword-fights, but not both.

That said, there is much to praise. Tony Llewellyn Jones, insouciantly unchanged from Yes, Minister and wearing, I think, the same suit, gives a smooth Civil Service Westmoreland. The seven-foot Nathan Lovejoy, on the brink at all times of breathily shouting ‘Well may we say God save the Queen’, or wrenching into a Silly Walk, is an excellent German tourist bereft of his Leica and a slithery, stoat-like bodyguard. The three-foot Arky Michael hops about amusingly in several marsupial small roles. Yalin Ozucelik is a fine, defiant, pissed-off Poins, Jason Klarwein a chubbier Hotspur than I would have liked but a fine foul-hearted Latin-spouting Pistol.

As the divided Prince Matthew Moore, eschewing the simmering ur-Hamlet of Branagh and Burton, gives a ‘normalised’, meeker Hal. He is any mutinous Barker graduate cutting up in Schoolies’ Week in Coolangatta. He has the ominous ordinariness of Craig Ruecassell: unamused by Falstaff’s demonstrative, joshing affection, prepared to see him hanged if need be, he reminded me a good bit of what FDR once said when asked what he thought of Churchill. ‘I like him,’ he said, ‘but not half as much, I fear, as he likes me.’

Matilda Ridgeway and Wendy Strehlow are particularly good as Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly, fat Jack’s ill-used Cheapside scrubbers. Their scenes have the rapid fluency of Noel Coward’s heartsore Cockneys, and some lines evoke Edward Albee. Tearsheet’s bare legs all over Falstaff’s belly and crotch give hint of the two-backed beast the old ram seems capable still of summoning like a ghost, and Doll’s wet-eyed farewell on battle eve, knocked up and stuffed without him, is truly upsetting.

(There follows, soon after, a moment not in the text, where the cast, coming forward through smoke, like the cast of The War Horse, and singing with increasing volume Blake’s ‘Jerusalem,’ and the audience’s hair stood on end. It was an angel-brush with directorial genius.)

David Whitney as the wily Bolingbroke, now illegitimately Henry IV and defending his patch like a prowling puma is very fine, playing him as a corporate bastard like Murdoch. His rise has cost him his soul, and rebellion bedevils and heckles his every initiative — as it does, say, Gillard’s. The famed line ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’ he tosses off, almost in passing. It is all to familiar a point for him to emphasise.

Sean O’Shea is superb as Silence, an elderly judge imperfectly recalling his wild, wenching, sottish youth, like a Rumpole walk-on, Erskine-Brown perhaps, in a murmurous nursing home; and Arky, in a wheelchair, assonantly Pinteresque or perhaps Beckettian as his fogged companion Silence. Terry Bader is a lovely underplayed Bardolph (when later in a subsequent play he is hanged on Hal’s orders for chicken-theft, it is nostalgically recalled by his comrades that Falstaff once described a flea on his vivid red nose as resembling ‘a poor soul suffering in Hell’) and gives a mild-mannered moving epilogue, falsely promising Sir John’s return.

…. And John Bell, of course; of course. I acted with him first in 1960 and saw from the wings a Malvolio unbettered in any century; and, after that, an Edmund, a Coriolanus, a Henry V, a Hamlet, an Arturo Ui, a Lear, a Cyrano, a Richard III, a Ulysses, a James Tyrone, and several Prosperos that deserve a Roll of Honour carved in marble on a cenotaph of remembered theatre.

And here we have his stout Jack: priapic, lewd and slippery, gulling old fools out of sheaves of money, conscripting peasant lads into doom and shell-shock, creeping round cool Hal like a grimy, rotten-toothed Mephistopheles, he gives a portrait of makeshift criminality laced with charm that was familiar, later, to Oliver Twist in Fagin’s lair and, rightly, marched off to Newgate at curtain-fall.

He grasps us by the throat, and leers, and fondles our privates, picks our pockets and leaves. There have been such men since, in Sumerian times, our species first lived in cities. And Bell, amazingly, gives us them all.

I should not say it, mayhap, mayhap — for we are not friends — but for this Sir John he should be made Sir John. Perchance the affable, monarchist, once-plump theatre fan Barry O’Farrell could suspend, this once, our needless egalitarian fashion, as New Zealand still does, and raise and lower, at last, the sword.

It is hard to see how any husband cannot pay his wife a notional 2,700 a week to be his ‘social secretary’ and so get 75,000 from the Government for her first baby, 75,000 for her second baby and 75,000 for her third.

The 75,000 can be ‘paid’ by any man on 150,000 a year and shared between the colluding couple and used to buy groceries or cellar wines or a new car.

It could even be ‘paid’ by a man earning 120,000 a year, who pays half now, half later, with cheques that are not immediately cashed.

What are we to do about this? Prevent a man from employing his wife? How do we do that? Many, many small businesses are run that way, and we would lose our voter base.

It seems our Leader is keen to subsidise an upper-class rort, and reward with taxpayer money sly rich couples who would quite like 225,000 dollars to help buy a house, or yacht, or a chalet in Switzerland.

Or even 300,000 dollars.

How are we going to get away with it? With this criminal policy?

Can we not do something else?

Under, perhaps, another leader?