10.50 am

On my way to the wrong venue (it is a brisk, half-mile walk from the right one) I meet Liam Kennedy who runs the Youth Theatre now and in a bright blue water-glittering day admire the ‘perfect village’ that comes but once a year, he says, ‘like Brigadoon’, in Writers’ Week, to these harbourside spaces when everyone you want to meet is buying books and reading them out loud and drinking coffee and rehearsing their memoirs and asking each other penetrating questions in late middle age.

I say that merely opening a book shop here would extend the life of that village but Liam (who played Macbeth to my son’s Macduff at the Newtown School of Performing Arts in 1992) says there is a a better plan, by an architect he knows, for these drab grey buildings to be immortally transformed into Ozimandian magnificence, including, at one end, a vast glass theatre with a wraparound harbour view. I ask if there is money for this, and he says, ‘Not a sausage.’ I tell him my friend the Minister for the Arts will fix it, after Labor wins in September. He laughs, ‘You’re priceless, Bob,’ and we begin fighting.

2.10 pm

Cold grey day, no rain. I walk out of session on sex between female academics and their younger students, a frequent occurrence lately, it seems, and goodly thrill to be savoured by influential women, drink coffee and eat a brownie. Robert Manne bids me sit with him on a low grey ledge in the wind by the water. He thinks only of climate change now, he says, now it’s too late, and we wonder what difference President Gore would have made. More than Obama, he avers (‘avers’ is a good verb for Robert), Obama whose biography, he says, will be called Words, Words, Words. We fight about the polls, which he says are ‘the most accurate on earth’, and I say ‘only on election day they are’, and, avoiding fisticuffs, agree on the excellence of modern miniseries, emphasising Mad Men, Enlighten, and Borgen.

I and Annie queue for his session. A smiling American woman assures forty of us that we will not get in, but we can huddle in the rain around a loudspeaker. I inwardly beg her to go home to Minnesota, sit on a pile of sodden newspapers and blog.

2.55 pm

An octogenarian former lover of my wife is ahead of us and allows us to join him and jump the queue. Robert’s address is gloomy, emphasising the Industrial Revolution’s coal-fumed alteration of everything on a planet now doomed; and the next speaker, Antoinette Aboud, recounts how the neoliberals made lunacy seem like common sense. The carbon price was never meant to work: it was brought on to buy time for the uglies to dig up even more coal and make even more money.

3.40 pm

My octogenarian cuckolder rises like like an Old Testament prophet and in a stentorian bellow, seizing the microphone, adjures the lily-livered multitude abashed and amazed around him to take to the streets, overthrow world government and claw the pollution back from the skies. I squeeze his elbow beseechingly and the panel look alarmed. Applause and cheers, however, acclaim his thunderous peroration, and worse abuse is then heaped on world capitalism and its evasive, gimcrack ‘solutions’, like ‘a trillion mirrors hanging in the sky’. The session ends in mutinous rabble and threatened affray and I give Robert my book and flee. He warns me as I go that Nick Cater has denounced me and I must watch out for this shallow madman, who knows not what he does.

3.55 pm

The rain returns. I drink coffee, eat a brownie, and blog. The phone rings. Drew Forsythe says our new play The Bookworm will get a reading next year and could we write it please. I talk to him intensely. Phillip Adams sits down meekly beside me unnoticed and, after four minutes, gets up, blows me a kiss and goes away, leaning on a walking stick. He encounters my wife, who asks after his health. ‘Not good,’ he says, and limps on, parting the crowds, into the blowing rain.

5.05 pm

At the Sydney Theatre some actors read a memoir, a poem, and two short stories. The memoir, read by Jacqueline McKenzie, brings the audience to tears. It is of a stolen child and her six siblings in their Sunday best watching, as their train pulls out, their mother and aunties, also in their Sunday best, receding and sobbing on the station. They are split up, adopted by different families and apart for twenty years. William McInnes, in a score of individuated American voices, does Pat Hobby and Orson Welles, a zany Hollywood story by Scott Fitzgerald. Stephen James King does a worthless, windy Walt Whitman rant (he contains multitudes, I hear, and endlessly, messianically farts them out), and does it very well, and Claudia Karvan, quite wonderfully, a short story about a strict, implacable country husband paralysed by a tractor accident and his bullied wife’s fleeting hope that he will die and what follows. A startling number of older women laugh at this grim tale, familar I suppose with the territory.

8.10 pm

We hail in the rain four taxis and in the last of them get in time to Town Hall where Graham Morris, Neil Lawrence and the Obama backroomer Joe Rospars tell Leigh Sales how they win elections. I find I like Morris more than I want to after I hear he came from the country and went to NIDA in Mel Gibson’s time and only narrowly opted for journalism and the life he is now in.

A familiar young loud fool at an aisle microphone claims Rudd was brought down by the Jews, who ‘control everything’ and is told by Leigh Sales to go awayand he, amazingly, does.

It is a terrific session of the right length, ninety minutes, with old political commercials up on a big screen (the best by far is Rudd’s down-on-the-farm two-minuter in February 2007) and brief, thoughtful questions from the floor.

We leave promptly, get a taxi and head off in pelting rain towards Neutral Bay where our car is parked. On the Bridge the cab starts backfiring, and in the traffic-thronged six-lane road up to North Sydney thuds and groans and gas accumulates inside it and it seems we might soon die. The perplexed African driver asks what may be wrong with it, and I say ‘Your cab is about to explode!’ and he says ‘What can I do about this?’ and we try to clamber out into roaring, hectic, rain-swept multitudinous traffic that may kill us in a more straightforward way — Septuagenarians In Fatal Bridge Fiasco — but he continues in ignorant bravery and we get out on Military Road and gasping and shuddering soon eat an excellent Chinese meal with Tsingtao beer and read, in The Literary Review, of Oscar Wilde’s part in the Dreyfus affair (he became a fascinated friend of Esterhazy while fellating Dreyfus’ lawyer) and begin to plan a movie.

11.10 pm

We find a further taxi after quarrelling in the rain over where to hail one, achieve our beloved grey Volvo, and Annie, driving home in it, has an asthma attack and begins dying.

We make it to Mona Vale hospital, and park there for a bit while her breathing improves. An official says we can’t park there, if she’s dying she should come inside, and we drive home, feed the possums and the resident white pigeon, and sleep.

And so it goes.

It is somehow thought that the hacking to death and partial beheading of Lee Rigby is in some way worse than killing him with sniper fire or a bomb dropped from thirty thousand feet. It is thought that what happened to him in the last six minutes of his life was more important than the absence, forever, hereinafter, for all eternity, of life itself.

This, in my view, is wrong. What is bad is killing people, not how you do it. The killing by Australian soldiers of two Afghan boys in March was worse by far than the killing of Lee, a professional soldier (i.e. killer) on a London street unexpectedly by machete. A hundred and forty years of lived life were lost on the one hand, sixty or sixty-five years on the other.

It all derives, I suspect, from the weird post-Christian belief that suffering is worse than death. It is not. Mandela suffered more and longer than Biko but Mandela lives, and Biko died young. Ergo, what was done to Biko was worse. David Hicks suffered more and longer than Jesus Christ but Jesus Christ was killed, and Hicks is growing oranges in Forestville. The little naked running girl with napalm burning her is alive. Six million of her fellow citizens are dead, from shellfire, napalm, Agent Orange and area bombing. Ergo, they had a worse fate than she.

Children traumatised by Auschwitz who are now alive, and old, suffered less than their relatives, who died there.

Death is the question. Death, above all. Get it right.

It is therefore meaningless to ask who is using chemical weapons in Syria. It is meaningful to ask how many are dead, and what bribe or drone will stop the killing.

Get it right.

Just get it right.

(From The Hewson Tapes)

LATER….I was awoken by a Mercedes crunching into our stone fish pool and distressing the carp, and what proved to be Nick Greiner, stumbling and drunk and ill-shaven, and physically struggling with his co-religionist Mrs Heaney, who decked him with a rudimentary right cross and laid him out on the couch and then poured him a gin and tonic.

He clearly had something on his mind, and proposed to tell it to me.

I therefore got into my dressing gown, mixed myself a vodka and ovaltine, and sat down opposite him.

‘G’day, old mate,’ he said feebly. ‘Old college…mate.’

‘G’day, Nick,’ I said warily. ‘How’s it been?’

‘Been?’ his voice rose a decibel. ‘It’s been great.’ He aimed a soda siphon at his glass, and wet himself. ‘I…sit on a lot of…second-rate boards. I travel a bit, I’m an urger to the Asians for New South
Wales. I…do auditions.’ His eye roved round my quarter-acre living room, enviously I think. ‘Lotsh of auditions. I was on the short list to replace David Dale, but David Hill – that’s a coincidence, Hill, Dale – said I had a voice like a cicada gagging on DDT.’

‘It’s tough,’ I said. ‘Tough what happened.’

‘ICAC?’ he asked. ‘Metherell? Moore? The Independents? No, that wasn’t it. What happened was…inevitable for a Catholic Jewish Hungarian Riverview Harvard Rationalist who needs to shave on the hour. You weren’t Harvard, were you?’ he added cruelly, the blue-chinned little tick.

‘No.’

‘What were you? Oh, yes, Baffin Land.’

‘Saskatoon.’ My lips thinned.

‘Look, don’t worry, I understand.’ He gave his awful orthodontally worsened smirk. ‘After you got a Second, and I got a First, you had little choice. But you were a WASP, you see. That was the problem. You have less motivation than me.’

‘I was working class,’ I said angrily. ‘That’s motivation. Working class,’ I got up and secured more vodka, wrenching the bottle from his pathetic grasp, ‘from Welfare Avenue, Beverly Hills. You live on Welfare, they’d say. You’re a bludger, are yer? Nya nya.’

He looked round the room. His toadlike moist eyes filled up with grief.

‘They called me a Transylvanian blackhead. At school. At Riverview.’

‘Why’d they do that?’

‘I come from Transylvania. It was quite a setback I can tell you. You can’t say anything like “from log cabin to White House” if you come from Transylvania. From vampire’s castle to Macquarie Street? It doesn’t have the same ring.’

‘Nick,’ I said firmly and frankly, ‘why are you here?’

‘I saw you on TV. I had nothing else to do. The days are long. My God, Johnny, I…’Tears sprang to his eyes which, in his volatile Magyar manner, he did nothing to curtail. ‘…I used to have power. Influence. Glamour. Richard Wherrett returned my calls. I was invited to opening nights. I coulda been a contender. I could’ve gone all the way. And now…I’m just a no-good bum.’

‘It’s not as bad as that.’

‘Yes, it is. Remember how it was at Sydney Uni, Johnny? Sidere mens eadem mutato? When we were there together? Swots at the same classes, dating the same nurses? How we were going to go out, warm dry economists, no nonsense Friedmanite arse-kickers, and change the world?’

‘We will. You have my word, we will.’

‘I got to think what a pernicious place Sydney Uni is. Everyone comes out of it convinced they’re going to change the world. Malcolm Turnbull. Germaine Greer. Michael Kirby. Gough Whitlam. International wankers like Geoffrey Robertson and Clive James.’

I held my peace. ‘Well, some of us make it,’ I said gently.

‘But don’t you see, Johnny? Don’t you see my point? If we’d been there ten years earlier we would’ve been Keynesians? You and me. And today we’d be fashionable again, and in work. Not just…doing auditions. We picked the wrong era to be at Sydney Uni. And that’s fatal.’

‘Listen, you may be tempted to backslide. But I’m keeping the faith. I am.’

‘What, with Slideback? I don’t believe it.’ He seized the vodka bottle. I struggled with him. ‘No, no, you’re going halfway to where I arrived at, a bit earlier. And you’ve got to go the whole way. It’s the realisation that people get used to living well. And if you, say…confiscate the Jaffas as they enter the cinema in order to save cleaning costs, you end up with a very empty, very clean cinema. And that’s why it can’t work. They won’t stand for it. That’s democracy. Democracy is the sum of things people won’t stand for. One of them is us.’ He looked at me. ‘Two of them.’

‘You drove all the way down here to tell me this?’

‘No. I was auditioning for a summer gig as disc jockey in Goulburn. It’s work. I need the work.’

‘Nick,’ I said. ‘This is my life. This is what gives my life meaning.’

‘Like your Baptist faith.’

I looked at him smiling. ‘You’re in the consortium, aren’t you?’ I said without rancour. ‘The Catholic ASIO consortium? You and Heaney and Unsworth and Coggins. And Richardson. And McLeay.’

‘I’m not following you.’

‘Get out!’ I raged. ‘Get out.’

He got up, stumbling and retreating.

‘I thought I’d stay the night. Mrs Heaney is drumming up some roast lamb.’

‘You’re in it together!’

‘No, John, no, John, no, get a hold of yourself. We’re old friends.’

‘We’re not old friends!’ I wept. ‘Not after you got a First!’

‘Oh, yes! Now it all comes out!’ he said.

We quarrelled bitterly thereafter, until 2 a.m., with Mrs Heaney bringing intermittent roasts and pumpkin scones and port and coffee and joining in, calling us a pair of focking Laodiceans, tepid in our prupper Christian faith, not caring enough, not caring enough about the cummun paple and eventually she and Nick went off to early confession together, the silly pair of prats, inviting me in a note they left to join them there, and begin to receive Catholic instruction. What a half-witted indoctrinated faith it is. Pack of superstitions really. I mean the Virgin Birth for instance. It’s like saying you can become Prime Minister without undergoing a little necessary soiling, the political equivalent of a lot of other people coming and pissing in your shower, to get there.

It’s reasonably clear what’s happening.

Murdoch has a secret deal with Abbott by which he sells the ABC cheap to Lachlan.

Greiner, a former proud purveyor of the addictive poison tobacco to teenagers (including, I am told, his children), has been removed for corruption, again, or maybe just for being a stormy, hubristic pest.

He is the fifth Liberal leader to be overthrown in five months (Redmond, Baillieu, Humphries, Giles, Greiner) and, with five Queensland MPs walking out on Newman and Palmer not only walking out but forming his own party, and their star recruit Torbay under arrest, and O’Farrell fighting Abbott over gays and Gonski, and Napthine fighting Abbott over the GST and the ABC, and Hockey fighting Abbott over pregnancy leave and cracking down hard on the poor, the halt and the lame without mercy, and Pyne unapologetically persecuting babies, and Joyce losing big in New England, and Thomson holding up in Dobell, and Slipper about to be exonerated and Brough to be sent to gaol, it is hard not to describe this fratricidal bunch as ‘a party in chaos’.

Or perhaps you disagree.

12.40 pm

At the rainswept Sydney Writers’ Festival. I meet in the big theatre foyer Maxine McKew who offers her hand, then, confused at my outstretched arms, kisses me. She is pleased she will be played in the Rudd miniseries by Miranda Otto, not having thought, in her shy, self-diminishing way, that she might be in the narrative at all. I strive to get a cancelled ticket for her session (usually someone dies between booking and performance) but there are none, and I go, as planned, to The Origins Of Sex with the sleek young Anglo-Indian historian Faramerz Dabhoiwala and Richard Glover.

2.10 pm

This proves excellent. We learn of a pregnant woman allowed to have her baby before she was hanged for adultery in England in 1689. We learn of an eighteenth-century English gentlemen’s club whose revels climaxed with all the gentlemen tossing off into the one silver bowl simultaneously. Of how hangings for homosexuality were were still a public spectale in Dickens’ lifetime, in London, in the 1810s. He is a shrewd stand-up historian who will, I imagine, have his own TV show soon.

Worst, perhaps, was the adulterous couple stripped and whipped and paraded and beaten and outside London’s gates released and never again allowed in the city, where their work was, and their family, and their life; this in the 1590s, the era of women’s first legal empowerment, when aristocratic adultery, to judge by Simon Forman’s diaries, was the norm.

2.50 pm

I walk through light rain to the Wharf where, eating a lamb wrap, I am shyly approached by an oldish Balmain couple who prove to be Craig Thomson’s parents, thankful for my persistent, persuasive defence of him in these columns. He is ‘optimistic’, they report, and more convinced than they are that the Dobell voters, who know and like him, will stick by him in September. They too hate Kate McClymont very much, and the Channel 7 crew that besieged Craig’s house and peeked in his bathroom window at his pregnant wife showering.

I suggest we organise a phone-and-supermarket-face-to-face-poll of eight hundred respondents, asked by six students who they will vote for, who they will preference, and if they think Craig guilty, with a respected pollster, Murray Goot perhaps, doing the final count. It is agreed we do this.

I suggest as well that Craig sue Pyne and Abbott for having by running out of the chamber defamed him, and offer to withdraw the suit if they apologise and pay costs. They doubt that he will do this, but they will ask him to consider it.

4.50 pm

I and Annie hear some good writers read their work. One of them, Sheila Heti, a Woody Allenish Toronto Jewish female reading in front of her mother for the first time, enumerates the blow-jobs that she gives dutifully and vigorously and frequently though they make her gag, and looks forward to giving blow-jobs in heaven. A subsequent writer, male, and possibly gay, wryly avers that his life might have been different had he been able to speak with similar geniality of his blow-jobs to an audience containing his mother.

8.10 pm

We have tickets to a dialogue with Darren Hanlon in The Green Room, doors open at 6.30. We search and ask, despair and search, find two Green Rooms, both empty and locked, and a lot of young official people shrugging in the French manner when we ask where this particular fucking Green Room is. It proves in due course to be in Enmore, and the show starting in ten minutes’ time.

Aggravated, we eat instead an excellent meal in a restaurant hard by one empty, desolate Green Room with a good house red. Angela Katterns and Wendy Harmer, at the next table, engage us in conversation. Wendy, a Peninsula neighbour, has been asked to stand against Tony Abbott and was keen to but received many death threats against her family if she did and probably won’t.

We agree on the excellence of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, about one man who witnessed the Black Plague, the Peasants’ Revolt, the first French Revoltion, the era of two Popes (like this one) and the last crusade, which I for a long time called the best book I had read. Wendy met her husband Brendan at a benefit for us after our house burned down, and is vaguely grateful for our tragedy and always friendly. She is running a website called The Hoopla and I agree to contribute to it.

After we have left I remember Angela Katterns and I both come from Lismore and wish I had spoken about it.

11.30 pm

Get home, and feed the possums. Am sorry to see Paul Murray back on the air, attacking McTernan as unintelligent (he was a Thinker In Residence) and asserting, again, that nobody listens to Gillard any more (she picked up a million votes in a week). He claims there will be two more busloads of Liberals in parliament in October, but sounds less convinced than he used to be and looks pale and flabby and affrighted by me, lerhaps.

I read more of Clive’s Dante, and am soon asleep.

And within ten minutes awoken by Darren Hanlon ringing to enquire where the fuck I was when he was being brilliant in Enmore.

I am reading Clive James’s translation of Dante, the book he will be remembered for.

Its excellence is almost indescribable. A quote perhaps would help.

‘But all at once there stood
Before me one who somehow seemed struck dumb
By the weight of a long silence.”Pity me,
And try to tell me in what form you come,”
I cried. “Is it a shade or man I see?”
And he replied: “No, not a man. Not now.
I was once, though. A Lombard. Parents born
In Mantua. Both born there.” That was how
His words emerged: as if with slow care torn,
Like pages of a book soaked shut by time,
From his clogged throat. “Caesar was getting on
When I was young. That’s Julius. A crime,
His death. Then, after he was gone,
I lived in Rome. The good Augustus reigned.
The gods were cheats and liars. As for me,
I was a poet.” He grew less constrained
In speech, as if trade-talk brought fluency.
“I sang about Anchises’ son, the just
Aeneas, pious, peerless. When proud Troy
Was burned to ashes, ashes turned to dust
Which he shook off his feet, that marvellous boy.
He did what any decent hero must:
Set sail. But you, you turn back. Tell me why.
Why not press on to the delightful peak?
The root cause of all joy is in the sky.”
Almost to shocked and overawed to speak –
For now the one who fought for words was I –
I asked him, just as if I didn’t know:
“Are you Virgil? Are you the spring, the well,
The fountain and the river in full flow
Of eloquence that sings like a seashell
Remembering the sea and the rainbow?
Of all who fashion verse the leading light?
The man of honour? What am I to say?
Through learning you by heart I learned to write.
My love for your book turned my night to day.
You are my master author. Only you
Could teach me that Sweet Style that they call mine.
I could go on. But what am I to do
About this animal that shows no sign
Of letting me proceed? It scares me so,
My veins are empty, all the blood sucked back
Into the heart. There’s nothing you don’t know,
My sage, so tell me how this mad attack
Can be called off.” Then he: “You need to choose
Another route.”

It is Clive as he always was — clear, colloquial, cumulative, concise and perfectly rhymed — trying, again, the heights of world literature and, as, always, prevailing; winning inch by inch and line by line a war whose end, on Panassus’ too, is a new Paradise Lost in his native tongue, a new golden treasure that will last as long as English, or nearly.

What a task to complete while dying. What a last high vault for Olympus. What a buzz.

I will write more when I have re-read it.

Peter Slipper was forced out of the Speakership, it now seems, not for sexually harassing a thirty-four year old male ( the first such charge in world history), nor for using word ‘cunts’ in a private communication (who has not done that), but for misusing cabcharges, if he did, cabcharges worth a thousand dollars, a sum he could pay back in an instant, misusing them to cross a border and visit a winery.

This is a measure of the wickedness of Abbott, Ashby, Pyne and Brough. They were willing to drive a longtime friend to suicide to seize his parliamentary seat, and his vote; willing to drive him mad and agonise his children and his wife.

He was the man whose vote elected Abbott leader. Abbott is as vile as that.

He has pleaded innocent, of course, and must wait until Christmas to find out what his punishment is. It will be, at most, a fine that is equal to, or double, the thousand dollars he has or has not misspent.

This is the slimy, jeering, ungrateful wickedness of Tony Abbott, our next Prime Minister, and a measure of his moral stature.

Discuss.

Telstra is sacking a lot of people because nobody uses landlines any more.

This means I was right, and only older people use landlines, and these are the people whom Newspoll, disproportionately, rings; and deliberately rings, to get a particular result.

Which means Labor is, probably, on 49.

Discuss.

I invite O’Shannessy to sue me any time.

Pyne has clearly been pondering the fate of Sodom. In Genesis 18, you will recall, Abraham asks God if, in immolating Sodom, he doesn’t mind destroying the righteous with the wicked. God says, What righteous? What are you talking about? Abraham says, Well, if there are fifty righteous men in Sodom will you spare it? God says yes. Too right. Abraham gulps, and asks if there are twenty, will you spare it? Absolutely, God says. Too right. Abraham haggles him down to one, and there still isn’t any. And Sodom burns, in what seems now a rehearsal of 9/11.

And so it went last night on Skynews with Richo pleading with Pyne to spare Gonski. And Christopher, Godlike, said he would not spare it, nay, not even for O’Farrell, nor yet for O’Farrell plus the Labor states, nor by Yahweh would he spare it even for seven out of the eight states and territories. He would spare Gonski only if every state signed on. And if they did not, the disabled and Aboriginal and language-challenged hobbled and crippled children could burn in Hell for all he cared. He would not spare them. Not a one of them.

In thus impersonating the God of Israel, Christopher may have exceeded his mandate. Richo was baffled when told in arch and fearsome tones no contract would be honoured, and O’Farrell must take his punishment like a man.

It may be that Christopher has become insane.

O’Farrell, thus thwarted, may feel like the visiting angel in Sodom whom the Sodomites wished to anally penetrate, and Lot, a good host, protected by offering the roistering crowd at his gate his virgin daughters in place of that heavenly arse, and he may not like the sensation. And he may soon seek his revenge.

And we will see what we shall see

There were 7,591 hits on Table Talk yesterday; whatever that means. It is the highest number anyway that I have scored in the eighteen months it’s been going.

More and more Liberal moles are besieging this bastion of reason, and being sussed and rejected. Most commit the basic error of breaking the one house rule. This is that you can argue any premise you like, and attack any opinion I have, but you cannot attack my character or my motives if you do not know me personally. You cannot say I am like Goebbels in the bunker, as one affrighted fool I am currently suing said, wrongly implying that I would collude in the killing of my children. You have to be a little careful in this regard.

Otherwise, welcome. As it grows more and more likely that Abbott will lose, it will be an interesting read.

Those who wish to read afresh the arguments about Craig Thomson, and the uniqueness of what is being done to him, and in the injustice, should look up episode 61, below, completed overnight.

I am quivering with fury.

Today is a measure of how small an arsenal the Liberals have. Once again they spoke of Thomson’s criminality; once again, they claimed Rudd was coming back.

Everything else they tried on lately zilched. Hockey said he would cleave the tax office; that he might reduce the child rebate; that Howard’s giveaways, though they caused the current deficit, were okay with him; that he hated homosexuals marrying; that the most-praised economy in the world is in ‘emergency’; ‘emergency’ being redefined as ‘not being in suplus yet’; that the head of Treasury was lying with his every breath but his job was not in danger.

It was mooted that the Liberals would sell the ABC — to Singo? Gina? Lachlan? — and would take away the schoolkids’ money, because they said Labor ‘was going to do it anyway.’

They haven’t got many places to go any more. Only Slipper, Thomson, Rudd and the boats will get them headlines, and their boats policy — piracy, plus grovelling to Indonesia — looks more and more like lunacy.

But they have 114 days to go, and no good news anywhere.

Discuss.

What is wrong with the following sentence:

‘Newspoll is owned by Murdoch and behaves honestly’.

?

Hockey’s Press Club address in the Great Hall of Parliament was unimpressive, genial, mannerly, good-humoured, and beset now and then with with shafts of lunacy.

He said Martin Parkinson would keep his job though his numbers were obedient fabrications. He said Labor would cancel the schoolkids’ money within a month of winning, if they won, and he was astonished it wasn’t cancelled in the Budget. He kept saying Swan’s figures were lies, though they weren’t Swan’s figures but Parkinson’s, and Parkinson was lying when he said they were his.

Brown and stomach-stapled in a suit ill-cut by his cousin the bankrupt Chatswood menswear business failure, he looked more like an Iranian rug merchant than is good for the Liberal Party which is mostly Anglo and North Shore and sniffy still. He said he could not betray his principles, and hell-bound sodomites must not marry before they fry for a billion years, though he ‘respected’ the opinions of those who said they could.

It is possible that Joe is not very bright. He has redefined the word ‘emergency’ to mean ‘not being in surplus yet’; but he won’t say when he will be in surplus if he is in charge of things. He says he can’t possibly predict that, no way, without getting the figures. The figures were supplied this morning.

The dismay of the journalists was plain on their faces, the silences palpable, the questions respectful, restrained and hostile. The stories will be mild, reflective and uncommitted, but, in Joseph Heller’s words, ‘Something Happened’.

The turning point has been reached, I think. Labor, on 48.5 now (once you reconfigure Katter’s preferences), will be ahead after the weekend.

On the weekend a lot of Young Liberals — the party’s future — will vote to sell off the ABC to Gina Rinehart or Singo or Lachlan Murdoch.

And it’s all downhill from there.

Hockey has no trust in Parkinson’s numbers and will not fire him? What will he do with him?

10.15 am

No doubt the extra charges laid against Craig will be more to do with ice creams than whores, and with local indications that he would retain his seat, and rejoin the Labor Party after his re-election.

The malleability of the Victorian Police in this matter is not unexpected, given their nasty criminal history, nor the desperation of the Victorian Liberals, in the day after it became known they wanted to privatise the ABC, and would put this to the State Conference on the weekend, to find a ‘sexy’ distraction from their own internal ructions, now approaching fratricide, farce, silent comedy, and schism.

When I know more, I will add to this.

10.37 am

Hmm.

The ‘total amount’ of money spent is now 42,00O dollars, down from an initial slanderous overestimate by Laurie Oakes of half a million. 7,000 of this is for the drab, slack hooker he didn’t turn up for twice, when he was in Perth and on the Central Coast, and was nonetheless paid for, probably, by a forged electronic signature, a slack, drab hooker who in due course claimed she hadn’t met him. That leaves 35,000 over seven years, for ice creams, taxi rides and cigarettes, and sumptuous Chinese meals, at a weekly, shocking rate of … 96 dollars.

Wow.

And this is before there were union rules — imposed by his crazed Liberal-voting successor Kathy Jackson, who increased her own wage by 200,000 dollars and gave herself a new Volvo and lots of baby-sitting — on what could be spent on what.

The horrific total here alleged is … 13 dollars a day.

To the stocks with him; pelt him with rotten fruit; carve ‘Thief’ in his forehead.

How dare he.

11.14 am

In the Fairfax report there is mention for the first time of ‘pornography’.

In the ABC report, no such item.

It is important the relevant Fairfax reporter, Kate McClymont, who started all this, and ruined my life too, be dealt with severely.

She is sitting on a report linking Abbott with Torbay and Obeid, and will not let it out.

I encourage her to do so lest I come down on her like a ton of bricks.

11.45 am

A call from Craig’s electoral assistant, David Gardiner, who is in Queensland on holiday suffering the flu. It is ndeed, he tells me, more ice creams, taxi rides and cigarettes, which they knew about and expected would be added by these scumbags at a moment convenient to the Liberals.

There was a part of the conversation I should not reveal, and Craig may — or may not — speak to the media soon.

David said that there was no mention of pornography as far as he knew. A typical hateful McClymont hyperbolical inexactitude.

Or, as we old-fashoned liberals like to call it, a Big Lie.

4.03 pm

At Bookoccino drinking cammomile and reading the news online. Craig may be the first man in world history on 169 charges no reporter clarifies. It would be good if ‘caffe latte — 2.50′ were on the list of heinous offences, or ‘taxi home — 9.50′; but this of course would humanise him. And that would never do.

No poll of his electorate has appeared either. Not too hard to do. He would have got a weekend ago, I think, 53 percent two-party preferred; but now there is to be a Labor candidate, he may be down to 35. It would be fair if a poll were done. And the hooker found, of course, and interviewed.And asked what she did on the two nights he did not turn up.

Perhaps I could organise a poll myself.

I need five young people with mobile phones and a day to spend on the Central Coast, who were willing not just to ring a hundred landlines each but to speak to, oh, a hundred people in supermarkets and parking lots and ask what they think.

I will seek volunteers.

8.30 pm

Pyne has just told Richo he would not accept Craig’s vote even if it was what elects them to government in a No Confidence motion. His vote was ‘tainted’, he said, and he must therefore, like a nigger, go to the back of the bus and not enjoy the democracy, and the parliamentary vote, the people of the Central Coast elected him to.

How seriously mad these people are.

And how doomed.

9.12 pm

An eloquent young friend rings who was involved in the HSU a few years ago. ‘At the outer limit,’ he says, or words to that effect, ‘Craig Thomson achieved for himself an increase of income of twelve thousand dollars a year. And Kathy Jackson, his successor, at a MINIMUM, achieved for herself an increase of income of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, plus a new Volvo, ski-ing holidays, and baby-sitting services, and said it was Craig who was greedy.’

Joe Hildebrand on Skynews just said Craig Thomson was insane. In a ‘parallel universe’, he said, aberrantly believing himself to be innocent.’

Craig should sue him, for sure.

I will so advise him on the morrow.

9.25 pm

McClymont is on; looking, as always, like Mrs Danvers over Rebecca’s beauteous corpse.

God I hate her.

She has said a few pro-Labor things though.

Very strange.

9.32 pm

Paul Murray is still absent. With ‘flu’.

He will never be back.

11.35 pm

It was a little surprising when Tony Jones unfairly, pre-empting the courts, reported Craig’s ‘one hundred and seventy-four charges’ without saying what they were, and emphasising that Craig ‘must make no contact with the personnel of several brothels’, as if he would.

It has become our Dreyfus case. The amount of money involved, fifty-two thousand dollars, could be raised by a single concert. And he is being treated like Bluebeard. For buying some ice creams and restaurant meals

How bad is that?

4.30 am

‘Smear’ doesn’t cover what is happening. This is full-on persecution.

With Slipper we knew who the alleged sexual ‘victim’ was, and we could see what he looked like, and we could read the ‘harassing’ text-messages. With Craig there is no sexual partner, no hooker, no witness, no evidence apart from some paperwork that could refer, as it turns out, in this electronic age, to anybody.

And the rest of it is … confectionery: choc-tops, lattes, a Chinese meal, and oh yes, ‘pornography’. The name of the movie is not mentioned. Was it ‘Lust/Caution’? ‘Was it ‘Pretty Woman”? Was it ‘Betty Blue’? This makes a difference; but no, to Tony Jones it is ‘adult movies’, nameless, obscene, reprehensible. Legal, of course, and unremarkable. But treated like a war crime.

The presumption of guilt by Jones, Liberal voter, is total. The number of the ‘offences’ has become the main thing, not the money they cost any more; that is down by ninety percent from the original McClymont-Oakes figure, half a million dollars. No apology has been issued for the exaggeration.

This is how persecution works. This is the Abbott filth-fund method. This is what happens to those who cross Kathy Jackson.

This is really, really bad.

And so it goes.

There are no engagements the Liberals have won since the launch of their gimcrack broadband, and the number is quite a few.

The very fast train; the need for a surplus; the need to keep the Baby Bonus; the need to keep Michelle Rowland away from her baby; the initial refusal of a levy for the NDIS; their refusal to turn up for the NDIS debate; the Battle of the Prime Minister’s False Tears; the battle over the worthlessness of Bracks; the need for a bigger GST and a smaller super; Abbott’s refusal of a conscience vote on gay marriage; the battle with O’Farrell over the ‘con’ of Gonski; the need to privatise the ABC: all these fairly significant skirmishes they have lost outright.

It is hard to see how they can survive any more such losses. They are seriously bleeding. And there are 115 days to go.

More and more it seems like Labor, by a landslide.

Of 10971 votes cast thus far, 1755 are in favour of privatising the ABC and SBS and 9217 against, in a poll in the Age and the smh.

The enormity of this proportion would argue the Liberals have lost at least some votes overnight, perhaps as many as 1 or 2 percent of the Australian electorate they won’t get back. Many of them would have been ethnic Australians afraid of losing their foreign language news services and foreign language movies.

You can vote in this survey for seven more hours, and I urge you to.

I presume it was McTernan who proposed the September 14 election date be announced in February. The results for Labor have been spectacular.

For we now have time to argue things. In a 35 day campaign the American tornadoes, for instance, could overwhelm four days you cannot afford to lose. But in a 218 day campaign you can survive it. You have time.

Thus it was we have had time to bring up and thrash out the persecuted baby; the worth of Gonski; the evil of the ill-gotten choc-tops of Craig Thomson;; the wastefulness of the Baby Bonus; the acceptability of the NDIS levy; the acceptability to New Zealand, Britain and Barry O’Farrell of gay marriage; the folly of Abbott forbidding a free vote on it; the stupidity of Paul Murray saying the Prime Minister’s tears were false, she was ‘bunging it on’ when she cried for disabled children; the cruelty of Julie Bishop, who wanted to sack a Victorian hero, Steve Bracks, from a job he deserved; the moral oddity of Abbott, who opposed gay marriage, defending a pederast, John Nestor; the moral repulsiveness of Abbott, dressed as a priest, seducing women; the memoir by Kevin Lee of the ‘homosexual culture’ Abbott went to college in but did not snitch on; the foolishness, while tornadoes fulminated, of him continuing to oppose action on climate change; the unpopularity of his cut-and paste broadband; the resurgence of the republican debate, with him and Turnbull on opposite sides; the ugliness of the Howard cabinet which he, Abbott, proudly evoked in his Budget reply; the fraudulence of the Newspoll which asserted that Gillard had gained a quarter of a million votes but Labor not one; the Liberals’ opposition to the empowering of local government; the Liberals’ plan for a bigger GST, to be enacted next year after a Double Dissolution election in May 2015; the innocence of Slipper and Thomson, and the guilt of Ashby and Brough; the bizarre proposal of Abbott that boats with children on them be ‘towed back’ by illegal dangerous piratical means to a country that won’t accept them; and that Abbott will ‘apologise’ to the Indonesians for denying them the thrill of torturing our pregnant cows; and the Victorian Liberals’ plan to sell the ABC to Rinehart or Singo or Alan Jones.

There has been time thus far to discuss these things in some depth; and there are still 115 days to go, which is three times the length of a normal campaign.

We still have time to discover what crimes Tony Abbott is covering up from his seminary years; the crimes of others, that is; if any. We still have time to discover what majority he is praying his God to give him, and whether he is still confident his God is on his side, and that eating his living flesh on Sundays, and drinking his blood, is a good idea. We still have time to ask if he will ban, this time, the morning-after pill for raped teenage girls, or why he will not.

There is time, thanks to McTernan, there is time. Time equivalent to the interval between Dunkirk, a seeming disaster, and the winning of the Battle of Britain on September 15.

We can go at it now with a good heart. We are on about 48.5 and we need another 180,000 votes, or preferences from Palmer, Katter, the DLP or what might be called the ‘Windsorites’.

With 35 days the public might have been fooled.

With 218, we have an even chance.

So now they want to privatise the ABC.

McTernan, bless him, has given them time to show how mad they are.

If you want Gina and Singo running the ABC, vote Liberal.

Paul Murray has been off air for two days. It is hard to see why. He is said to be sick. Sick with what? One of Boris Yeltsin’s ‘heavy colds’?

It is likely, I think, that Murdoch has pulled him off air, fearing Gillard will sue him, now or later, for having said her tears were false on Thursday. That it was libel is not in doubt. That it was malicious libel is not in doubt; you only have to punch up seven hundred of his programmes, to check on the level of his prejudice and the venom with which he gives it voice.

It may be that we will never see him again.

Sad, sad, sad.

Is Tony Abbott a good man? The evidence is thus far not convincing.

He refused to marry, twice, his twice-pregnant girlfriend. He seduced young women while dressed as a priest.  He swore to the good character of a convicted pederast, and a Governor-General who defended pederasts. He sought to deny desperate women the morning-after pill. He went along with WorkChoices. He believes his sister will fry in hell for a billion years for sodomy.

In the past eight days he has gone back on a payment for motherhood; persecuted a baby; opposed a good education for the needy; boycotted a debate on the Disabled; called his ally O’Farrell a damn fool; and fucked, it would seem, a drunk driver. In a week of raging tornadoes, the worst in world history, he still believes climate change is ‘bullshit’. He has threatened to sack the esteemed Australian Steve Bracks if he goes to New York, though he would not do so if, say, it was Jeff Kennett who got the appointment. He has furthermore said he will not allow homosexuals to marry, or allow his colleagues to vote on this as they want to.

Is he a good man? The evidence is growing that he is not.

He has used the ‘character issue’ on Gillard. Others should use it on him.

Can anyone tell me what Morgan said today?

These two emails came in yesterday from Kevin Lee. They touch on Abbott’s three years in the seminary, before he was asked to leave, and clear up some things for those who have had, like me, some doubts concerning his moral character.

Hi Bob,

Thanks for an interesting read. As wouldabeenthesbeian says I do have an interesting story for you. I know Tony and met him in the seminary. And I know exactly why he left the seminary. Its not as clear cut as most would believe. It has less to do with celibacy and more to do with people in the church not wanting him to become a priest because he thinks for himself. The Church wants drones and self-seeking sycophants.

I know John Nestor too and i can fill in a lot of gaps for your blog’s readers about why he was dismissed from the priesthood. Again less to do with his sexual habits as his unyeilding individualism. My book is already published. You can get it at my website. It will open a lot of drawers and you will find the things under the top layer will explain why so much in religion and politics in Australia is Catholic coloured.

I can also tell you why I was courted by the Liberal party before and after I left (was kicked out of priesthood) and you will be amazed at the insights I have about who and why my path to politics was thwarted. It was the conservative Catholics (Opus Dei)who prevented me getting a start even after some high ranking Libs were backing me for a candidacy. There is another book in that story.

2

Sorry for the late reply but I only was alerted to your blog today when someone said I was mentioned then I saw the context. Just read my book Unholy Silence to discover the depth of homosexual depravity that had descended on Manly seminary by the time I arrived there, the year that Tony Abbott left. His leaving had less to do with the sexuality of the students and professors there than it had to do with his “inflexibility”.

I had a lengthy conversation with him last year about why he was forced to leave. He was a man who didn’t like being told what to believe and think. But to be a Catholic priest you have to assent to all that Holy Mother church believes and teaches. Some of us who are not frauds, refuse to do that. It is illogical.

Then second comes the realisation that we had been sacrificing our sexuality to an institution that has lost its right to call itself “God’s Church” especially after the daily revelations of the raping of children by clerics and the blatant indifference of the rest of the Church hierarchy and people.

A hint of Groucho, a touch of Tevye, a gathering aroma of Bruno Ganz’s Hitler and just a soupcon, maybe, of Jack Benny inform Kevin Spacey’s lurching and grimacing Crookback but do not bruise or diminish the sinuous rock-ribbed verse, which Sam Mendes, the director, has allowed to remain the star turn of his Richard III, by William Shakespeare, now touring.

The setting, a stained grey hallway of many doors and a grey brick wall on which newsreel projections dance (a frail, bearded king, arriving; Chamberlain-era throngs, cheering) might be Barcelona 1936 or Sarejevo 1998, and many headshaven men talking into their sleeves in the foreground give us, in our day, what Shakespeare’s hushed groundlings must have seen in theirs: a world very similar to their own, of half-remembered shabby suits and crumbly buildings, war medals and uniforms from their grandparents’ time; and, of course, in blood-smattered black-humorous blank verse, bitterly brandished memories of the slaughters of which most kingdoms are made.

Performed uncut, the text reveals more large, lavish women’s roles than any other tragedy: assassinations’ widows and mothers mourning butchered sons and spouses like those of Chile’s Disappeared; some weird rough Plantagenet chivalry having spared the women’s lives, it seems, and let them run like shrill Cassandras through palace halls unguarded.

Of these, the half-mad Queen Margaret, widow of the mutilated Henry VI and mother of his mutilated son and heir, and murderess herself of the dynasty’s much mourned kingmaker York, is the most unlikely palace guest, and poses for this director and all before him a near-insuperable problem of why she is not eftsoons beheaded or clapped in a padded cell — which Olivier testily dealt with by excising her, bag and baggage, from his movie altogether.

Mendes has made her part ghost, part mad plaintiff, heard out with bored amusement by snide shrugging courtiers as Margaret Thatcher in her present mumbling dementia might be heard today; and he has added her as well to further scenes as vigilant prophetic witch overseeing the carnage her curses have brought on Crookback’s kingdom supernaturally. In this role Gemma Jones, once the Duchess of Duke Street and lately Bridget Jones’s tempestuous randy mother, delights as she did in Brook’s Dream in and Bennett’s Getting On in 1970 and 71, a wellbeloved legacy, much missed already, of better times.

A cast of twenty, more than Shakespeare’s Globe afforded, beating ominous drums and interjecting from the audience, excel at every turn in Lancastrian, South London, Kentish and mid-Atlantic accents here mixed promiscuously and well. A black Buckingham is a bit of a surprise, more so when Richard calls him ‘cousin’ but, as a good and trusty servant betrayed by his colonising master, he fits the last African century quite well; but not, I would think, not Buckinghamshire…

No, no, no. No. I do not like it. In even an era of a Blanchett Bob Dylan and Richard II and a Nevin King Lear and Mark Antony (‘I look forward,’ I told the great lady, ‘to your Antony and Cleopatra, co-starring Gerry Connolly’), two cousins must bear some resemblance to each other. Shall a black Desdemona, or female Falstaff, or dwarf Coriolanus, follow? I hope not. Though Mr Chuk Iwuji is an excellent plausible torn hob-nobber with manifest evil he is, as we used to say, ill-born, on the wrong side of the Buckingham blanket.

Maureen Anderman, Stephen Lee Anderson, Jeremy Bobb, Nathan Darrow, Jack Ellis, Haydn Gwynne, Isaiah Johnson, Andrew Long, Howard W Overshown, Simon Lee Phillips, Gary Powell, Michael Ridko, Annabel Scholey, Gavin Stenhouse, Hannah Stokely and Chandler Williams excel in their many worrying roles, including two infant princes who speak in unison, and a Duke of Clarence who drowns in a butt of Malmsey in real time right there before our eyes, giving beef and marrow and poignancy to walk-on characters oft played heretofore as mere nodding muppets. Katherine Manners is particularly good as King Edward’s tall bony widow Elizabeth, out-hollering Spacey through a twelve-minute scene of repetitive unabashed hortation and shrieked blood libel that might, just might, have been cut down a bit; it’s already 11 pm, after all, and some of us have elderly bladders. And yet, and yet …

Spacey’s lumbering, smirking Richard is as fresh and pungent in its impact as Olivier’s must have been on that first night in 1945. But unlike Lord Larry he flaunts no vocal tricks nor pirhouettes. He plays the dialogue as dialogue, the monologue as human speech, with an unaugmented naturalism that startles with its directness and modern, everyday cadence. Occasionally he pulls a face, or raises a crippled languid hand satirically, or mugs a gasp or eye-roll at his own perverse duplicity, but this is what the role demands. This is Richard as written, the Sir Les Patterson of his day. There are no bolt-of-lightning moments till the very last, wherein he hangs feet up like a slaughtered hog, or Mussolini, as Larry did as Coriolanus in 1957, bleeding and twisting on a hook.

But his triumph, and it is an enormous one, and the standing ovation true earned as few in our time, is built up line by line within the meaning of what is said, and hinted, and thought; and when, after three hours lurching and smiling and wooing and roaring his lungs to shreds, he goes into a punishing sword-fight, steel against steel, with fingers and foreheads at risk, he climaxes at infarct’s throbbing frontier a physical marathon that would have pole-axed most Olympians (or, more aptly in this case, Paralympians), and does it sometimes twice a day.

I give him best, and wish him well, good health and survival. Bell, McKellen, Olivier, Pacino have not come near him. This is a Richard Crookback for the ages, and should be preserved.

I first saw Laurence Olivier in Richard III in 1953 and thought he looked like that. His capering, mocking, domineering, evil, attractive hook-nosed tyrant drew me to him, and I watched him closely thereafter, four times in the flesh at the Old Vic, and my much-praised co-written play about him, Intimate Strangers, soon to be performed as a reading again at the Bondi Pavilion, was lauded in London when Greta Schacci, the last actress to be in bed with him on screen, directed it at the Comedy in 2007.

Olivier was a gangster-entrepreneur-showoff-bully and the ‘vile toad’, the ‘bottled spider’ Gloucester suited him, and seeing it again after thirty-five years on ABC on Sunday night (I sought to go to bed, but he held me, as always) was a retrieved memory, a resident ghost, unlike any other. His opening soliloquy, which I and Bob Carr would sometimes recite in duet, is not as I remember it, quacking and yelping, at all. It is much more … still, and mild, and chilling: the Devil tells you of his plans, confidentially. More to come.

O’Shannessy’s contortions continue. Though Gillard picked up a quarter of a million votes, Labor picked up not one, he says. Though Abbott attacked super, ended the Baby Bonus, threatened the Disabled, abused Steve Bracks and persecuted a baby, he lost not one. Though Hockey got his shadow Budget wrong by half a billion dollars he was thought the better Treasurer. Though 35 percent favoured the Budget, and 21 percent were undecided, it failed. Though as ‘better economic managers’ Labor got 41, the Coalition 41 and 18 percent were uncommitted, the headline was ‘ALP Base Rejects Budget’. Though a quarter of a million more people approved Gillard, ‘no-one was listening to her’.

We used to call this ‘brainwashing’. The next stage is not to report political news at all for a while because anything to do with O’Farrell being ‘conned’, or Gonski dropped, or Peta drunk, or Abbott fucking her, or Slipper innocent, or Thomson picking up votes, or Palmer winning his seat, or Brough going to gaol, or Abbott’s connection to Obeid and Torbay, would hurt the Opposition.

There will be silence for a while. And decorous avoidance in any headline of any evidence that Labor has momentum.

That should do the trick.

Essential Polling shows Labor on 35. It was on 38 at the last election, which it won; or pretty much won. Other/Independent is on 9, up from 6.6 in 2010. It is clear, pretty much, or clear to me, that the extra 2.4 are Katter Party people; and a recent Queensland poll (of 36,000 people) shows 80 percent of their preferences going to Labor.

That brings Labor up to 36.9. They will get 55 percent of the Other/Independents (they are mostly Oakeshott, Windsor, Wilkie and Katter) which brings them up to 41. They will get 90 percent of the Greens, which puts them on 48.2.

It is not too hard to win from there.

Especially now a GST is mooted, and a loss of Gonski, and a broadband that fifteen million Australians don’t want.

And you should add 1.5 too for the mobile phones that aren’t rung.

We’re on 49.7, and very close.

If O’Farrell has been conned, should he be replaced as Premier?

Lies continue to be told. SBS has just said Gillard’s ratings had gone up, but Labor’s position had ‘not improved’.

Wrong. Nielsen showed Labor’s vote improved by 380,000 people; Morgan by 440,000 people; Essential by 450,000 people; in a fortnight; and the nation divided 44-44 on the Budget. This puts Labor at best, once Katter’s preferences are reconfigured, 120,000 votes away from victory; at worst, 480,000 votes away.

Gillard picked up a million votes in five days. And there are one hundred and sixteen days to go.

In that time, half a million is easy. There are a million ‘undecided’, and 130,000 ‘refused’.

It is wrong to lie. It is wrong to lie. It is wrong to lie.

I wanted to fly Hackers down to Adelaide to read, in her lovely nut-brown voice, some pre-Shakespearian verse in a show we were doing in Holden Street last August. But I couldn’t find her in the couple of hours I tried to. None of those I thought were her old friends knew where she was. She had ‘gone to ground’, as the fox-hunting simile says. She was playing hookey. She was unavailable for interview. It is clear now why she was, and I wish I had searched longer.

For I loved her very much for about thirty years, and so did hundreds of us. She was one of the five or six women I would have married had I met her earlier and had she liked me enough. There were probably fifty other worthy enough young men who felt the same way, and were similarly stirred.

The reasons for this were many, in all of us. She was a fine actress. She had lovely contralto voice, exactly the same voice as her friend Jennifer Hagan, and Judy Davis. She was a brilliant writer, with a perfect English mandarin style, like Evelyn Waugh’s, as her book on her ancestor Barbara Baynton shows. She was beautiful in a way that reminded you sometimes of Lauren Bacall and sometimes of Judi Dench. She had a quality I called ‘aristocratic vulnerabilty’, much like that of Dench, or Deborah Kerr, or Glenda Jackson.

But there was another quality that made you love her. It was a decent straightforwardness, an inexhaustible sympathy, a buoyant directness mixed with good-mannered Englishness, upper-middle -class mannerly Englishness (her father was a career soldier) that could have walked in a big white hat into Downton Abbey and been perfectly at home.

I can’t think of anyone who disliked Hackers. It is horrible she never married and had children. She must have had offers. There was a careless adventurousness about her, though, an indecision, a flightiness and a capacity for sudden, brief emotional collapse (I witnessed one) that may have thwarted this, or delayed it, or whatever.

I have been thinking about her all day, remembering things, and the tears have not come yet. I think of her dancing sassily with big breasts in the second act of King O’Malley in Burnie, Tasmania, in 1970. And how smitten I became, and how I pursued her.

I think about Yeats’s ‘Vague Memories’ poem, and wish I had written one, as I could have, when there was time.

I should do one, and put it up here.

Nielsen showed Gillard picking up a million votes, Newspoll only a quarter of a million, and my friend James Carleton called the situation ‘much the same’, a gap too big to be closed in the hundred and seven days remaining before September 14.

(Well, the gap is half a million. Labor picked up 370,000 votes in the last five days. There are 107 days to go — the equivalent of the time between Dunkirk and the winning of the Battle of Britain — and poor hag-ridden Jim says it is too long a time for Labor to creep back in. At the present rate of change, it would take a week.)

There remains the Newspoll two-party preferred, 56-44, the best poor enshackled O’Shannessy could do for Murdoch, who demanded 58-42, I imagine, on Friday last and was dangerously defied. He moved the Newspoll a day forward though, so as to quash or quench or mitigate Nielsen’s Labor Doing Better headline. He gave Gillard the quarter of a million vote gain as preferred Prime Minister because he had to. Anything less would have seemed like lunacy.

Murdoch’s headline, Labor Base Rejects Swan Budget, from a finding of 35 ‘good’, 37 ‘bad’, and 21 percent ‘uncommitted’, shows a ‘bad news’ budget doing really well though, and Labor, overall, doing fine.

Because, you see, there are still a million ‘undecided’, or this is what Newspoll thinks. And eight hundred thousand voted Labor last time. And Labor needs only a quarter of a million of these ‘undecideds’ to win.

This is because Bob Katter’s KAP Party (aka ‘other’) is currently scoring 600,000 votes, according to Nielsen, and 70 or 80 percent of its preferences, misallocated by both Nielsen and Newspoll, are going to Labor; which puts our oldest party not on 46 but 48.5. And a quarter of a million ‘undecided’ out of a million, fairly easy to imagine, gets us there.

The most peculiar poll of all is the one by O’Shannessy this morning . It’s on whether Hockey or Swan is a better Treasurer. In this Newspoll’ Swan scores 29, ‘uncommitted’ 30, ‘neither’ 6, and Hockey … well … none; he’s not there. And Turnbull, for some reason, is on 35. (Clearly there was some shouting down the phone; I do feel sorry for O’Shannessy, future gaolbird, sometimes, I really do.) Somewhere in these numbers we see Swan beating Hockey, narrowly, 38-37, in February, 2013; beating Julie Bishop, hugely, 45-21, in December 2008 (!); and … um …

Yes, it’s a Hockey-Swan Better Treasurer contest in which Hockey, amazingly,does not appear; lest Hockey lose,I guess, I guess. He lost in February, and has not been heard of since. The Turnbull figure is from April ’08. Why is it up there? Why is any of it up there? What is going on here?

O’Shannessy was scared, haemorroidal, sleepless and frantic, I guess, I might be wrong, and taking midnight phone calls from Rupert.. Can there be another explanation? Can’t see what it is.

So: under ‘better economic manager’ it is 41-41, an even Labor-Coalition split, with 18 percent ‘uncommitted’; taken, I guess, before the Budget, or we would have been given a date more precise than merely ‘May’.

(Taken before the Budget and published after? Oh boy.Oy vay.)

If Murdoch thinks he can get away with this ragtag, criminal botch he may be mistaken. Gaol is imminent for fraud, in my view, for somebody; somebody soon; as it is for Rebekah Brooks.

There is, for instance, the 2.5 million people supposedly ‘uncommitted’ on who would be the better Prime Minister. Do you know any of these people? There are 2.5 million of them, the adult population of Queensland, who don’t know who they want as Prime Minister. Really? Really? What is he playing at?

It’s pretty clear, if you give it a moment’s thought, and why shouldn’t you, what in fact is going on. It goes like this. 39 percent want Gillard. 40 percent want Abbott. 14 want Katter. 3 want Palmer. 4 want someone unavailable, like Bracks, Beattie, Gallop, Carr, or Brown.

And if you distribute the ‘uncommitted’ second preferences, which O’Shannessy never does, Gillard would be on 52, and Abbott 48.

But that is mo what we see in The Australian. Murdoch prefers to print the Big Lie that there are three million people who have no preference at all.

This is how criminal Rupert Murdoch is; in my view. But we already know that. He resisted expert advice and printed the Hitler Diaries, and made a wad of money. He constantly had Romney ahead in his US polling last year. He called it for Bush when 500,000 Florida votes were still to come in. He is, old friend, as fraudulent as that. As big a forger of numbers,

It would be reasonable, on the botched Hockey figures alone, for the Attorney-General — or a Senate committee — to investigate poor sad O’Shannessy and put him in prison for ten years. In my view.

And to ask him if he makes his pollsters ring certain prefixes. And ring Friday nights when nobody young is home. And ring only landlines when no-one young has one.

And whether he did this to create headlines that give a sense of Labor being in big trouble; and Abbott, though disliked, inevitable as Prime Minister.

I ask the relevant officers to look into this.

10.10 pm

Watching Paul Murray gobsmacked by a six-figure swing Labor’s way in the Nielsen Poll was a quiet, unastonishing joy for me and I had another muscat.

This figure plus the two percent Labor gets from the misallocated preferences of the KAP and Windsor and Palmer and the 1.5 they get from mobile phones not rung by Nielsen it is on 49.5 and the GST and Gonski have not yet sunk in.

There will be a similar swing on Morgan on Tuesday, to 46 or 47 and the game will be afoot.

10.40 pm

He’s now aghast that Gillard is level-pegging with Abbott on 46, a swing her way of a million people, and saying ‘Crying works’.

What an enjoyable evening this is turning into.

10.50 pm

They are saying moreover that her tears were bunged on, or that she was ‘crying for herself’ and her lost career. Gillard, a lawyer, could go them for this, and get a lot of money from their proven malice and big lies. I saw Shorten in tears after meeting disabled people (‘I met three heroes this morning, mate’) and she had met some too a short time before she rose to speak.

It is to be doubted Murdoch would stand Murray the 250,000 dollars plus costs if she wins, or even if she loses, the election and come after her Skynews harassers.

10.15 pm

Nothing on ABC yet.

As in America, where the whole game depended on the Obama youth vote not coming out a second time, and it did come out a second time, there is no Plan B. Here the Murdochist bullies had only one plan, to gloat over the bad polls, to mock and chitter and whoop and jump about and jeer and pull faces,, and keep this up till the people obediently capitulated to this form of reasoning and voted along.

It depended on the poll numbers staying low and not moving. And now they are moving, Labor’s way. And Abbott’s policies look shonky, secretive and cruel.

And what, my masters, now this is known, and 46 percent of the people want Gillard and only 46 Abbott, is Plan B?

They have none, and they’re in trouble.

Discuss.

11.30 pm

Watched Fry on Wagner, and am settling into Olivier’s Richard III.

1.40 am

Olivier’s Crouchback is remarkable, unlike any character — demonic, macchiavellian, psychopathic, scarred by natal wrenching and mockery thereafter — ever on the stage.

Among recent public figures he resembles only Rudd: testing his power always, scorning all who have helped him, seeing what each new cunt-act he can get away with. I kept proposing to go to bed but I couldn’t.

What an interesting day.

It is good to see Mathias Cormann in his obergruppenfuhrer accent and prognathous, Buzz Lightyear jawline bucketing Labor’s ‘relentless negativity’ and the Prime Minister’s changeability after Abbott in a week went back on the baby bonus, Gonski, super and a GST O’Farrell and Barnett sorely wanted, and didn’t turn up for the NDIS debate while Gillard wept for the halt and the lame and the blind sincerely, and Pyne persecuted a baby.

No headline saying ‘Liberals In Chaos’ will occur tomorrow I guess but it is hard to see how they have won the week, or, after offending retirees and the parents of schoolchildren (this is eight million people) picked up votes.

It will be a big lie O’Shannessy tells tomorrow or Tuesday, but tell it he will; he will; he has to. In my view.

And the police, in due course, will come for him.

In my view.

So … the economy is in emergency, and a GST may solve it, and you won’t bring it in for five years? Emergency, you say? Five years, you say? Longer than World War 1? Can you run that by me again?

So: you want a mandate for the GST? And you think, like Barry O’Farrell, it’s a good idea? And all the Liberal Premiers think it’s a good idea? Why not seek one now? Why not seek an electoral mandate now?

If Barry O’Farrell wants it, and it needs to be tested at an election, why not do it now?

Barry O’Farrell can hold the enquiry, Joe Hockey can say who should be on it, and it can reprt by August 1.

And the people can decide.

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 worse 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 everyone liked the broadband, 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 Steve Bracks and a sick baby and found himself in a big public fight with O’Farrell over the GST; but there were no upside stories about him, none at all, none at all; except, perhaps, the one about how he delivered his Budget speech without a stammer 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. He’ll have to have a good one.

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 somehow achieves a higher goodness which we used to call Christlike, unevenly intermixed with a despairing, mad-dog vengefulness which, at the end, or near 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.