Table Talk: Bob Ellis on Film and Theatre

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

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

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

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

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

What a disgusting bunch they are.

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

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

Please tell me why.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another is to sell the Budget well.

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

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

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

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

So we have to win.

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

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

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

Or perhaps you disagree.

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

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

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

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

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

Or perhaps you disagree.

Budget Day May 8

6.05 pm

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

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

6.44 pm

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

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

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

The day looked good on SBS.

Wednesday May 9

5.1O am

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

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

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

7.25 am

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

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

8.58 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay?

Who do I send this offer to?

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

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

That’s a big figure, worth bewailing.

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

With Michael Kirby in the wig and the chair.

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

Okay?

Fran asked a minute or two ago if it was ‘any longer appropriate for the government to rely on Craig Thomson’s vote’. She repeated the phrase about five times while talking to Michelle Grattan, who seems to think it wrong as well for the Prime Minister to ‘rely’ on an accused, and therefore tainted man.

But the question then arises of how the Prime Minister can prevent Craig Thomson from voting on any bill, any bill at all, that comes before the House. He has been elected by his constituents, and he can vote as he wants. What is the process, what is the proposed process, by which she should now, must now, disfranchise him? What is it?

She could move, I suppose, to ask the Deputy Speaker to bar him from the House for a year. But the Deputy Speaker would not do that. He is not on any criminal charge. And Tony Abbott, for instance, who colluded in a war that was based on a forgery and killed a hundred thousand children, has not been deprived of his vote yet, nor is it thought by the Deputy Speaker, or by anybody else, that he should be.

So it is impossible to disfranchise him. So what is she to do? What is she to do? Beseech him to vote against his conscience on, say, a No Confidence motion, bring down a Government he believes in, truncate his own career and impoverish his family? Order him to? Why would he obey her? He is not a member, for the moment, of her party. Why would he thus hasten his own destruction, and hers? Who would do that? Would you, old friend, would you?

So the word ‘rely’ has been used in an Orwellian or Murdochian way to add a new rule to our democracy: that some elected members have a vote in the House, legitimately; and some do not. This is another Murdoch fabrication, another Murdoch New Law of the Land, the idea that the rules of a democracy can be varied to suit the tactical convenience of Rupert, a man not fit to run an international corporation. Though she cannot prevent it, the Prime Minister cannot ‘rely’ on it. Must not ‘rely’ on it. Must not.

In a democracy a bill is passed or rejected on the numbers. In this one, Andrew Wilkie, say, can vote this way or that. The Prime Minister cannot ‘rely’ on him. He votes as he chooses, and he has flagged that he is not to be relied on. Just as Craig Thomson votes as he chooses. He has that right. And this idea that he should not vote as he wants to is a new one in world history. Not in a thousand years of democratic practise since the current idea of democracy first erupted in Iceland has this idea has been heard of, until last week.

And here is Fran Kelly, touting it. Why has she bought, and why is she promoting, this Murdochist Big Lie that a vote can be ‘accepted’ or ‘refused’ by the Prime Minister of the day when it has never been done before and there is no constitutional way to do it?

Has Rupert offered her a job? Has she said yes to this job, to be taken up when the Government falls, and Prime Minister Abbott heeds the advice of his fellow Catholic Gerard Henderson and privatises the ABC? Is this the explanation? Or is there some other cause why she has embarked on this weird, science-fiction idea that this Prime Minister has constitutional powers unpossessed by any before her?

Can she tell us what it is?

Gerard this morning said I was part of the ‘ugly’ campaign against Julia Gillard: a lie, I think. I have criticised the Prime Minister’s voice and her speed of utterance and her tendency to cliche, not the same thing; not the same thing at all.

I defended her, in fact, in Unleashed against the ‘big bum’ strategy of At Home With Julia. Not the same thing at all. The opposite thing in fact, in a show co-written by a close friend whom I sternly criticised in print as unfair and low grade, endangering thus my relationship with the most talented actress of her generation. In other articles I described JG as beautiful, attractive, an exciting, stimulating, buoyant physical presence, an ideal deputy leader.

Gerard gets it so wrong. But of course, he does so deliberately. ‘Out Of Context’ are his three middle names.

He also said I described Gillian Skinner as resembling ‘a long-detested nagging landlady with four dead husbands and hairy shoulders’, which I did, and he said it was lacking in taste and ‘misogynistic’, and Jonathan Green and Mark Scott should not have printed it.

An extraordinary criticism, this. He would I guess by this new Cromwellian limitation outlaw and censor the right of cartoonists for three centuries, thus far, to so jeer at their leaders and mock with brash images their personal foibles, and of clowns and revue performers since the sixth century BCE to portray the great and powerful in demeaning, shrunken, household crises.

Against this, is he? Against the twenty-six hundred year old tradition of democratic response with humour to what our oppressors and our heroes and our enemies do and say?

What a haughty flapping half-arsed buffoon he is.

I challenge him again on this, the week of my seventieth birthday, to do what he has refused to do for twenty years, debate me in a public place on any subject of his choice (but not the Nicene Conference of 325 on which I am rusty), before any audience he likes at any time of the day or night.

But he won’t do that. He is afraid of me.

He is so, so afraid.

It is a pity that the best Budget since Chifley’s last in 1949 will be, as they say, ‘overshadowed’ by Thomson’s hookers and Ashby’s grimy machinations, but there you go. It’s what Murdochism does: if Labor is doing well, you drum up a scandal. You squeeze out of the headlines whatever the good news is, and slosh in the always available fecal matter.

In 1999 at the Hobart Labor Conference Labor’s health policy was ‘overshadowed’ by Howard saying he would stop lesbians having babies if he could, since he thought it better that their babies never be born than that they grow up without a father. In 2010 Gordon Brown’s achievement in saving the European economy and surviving the death of two children was ‘overshadowed’ by his having, in a private bugged conversation, used the word ‘bigoted’ accurately in the back of a car. And it cost him the election.

And now a Budget worth perhaps half a million votes will be ‘overshadowed’ by the impression that one of two people, neither in the Labor Party, is going to gaol and the government will fall in the next few hours and we shouldn’t worry about the Budget, it will never happen; like Hayden’s Budget in 1975.

This isn’t true, of course. Oakeshott and Windsor used to belong to the National Party and left it in distress and disgust and stood against it and won their seats despite its lurid, frantic opposition. Wilkie stood as a Green against Howard after being called ‘mentally unstable’ by the Liberals for having revealed the ‘Children Overboard’ Big Lie was a big lie. Katter will not risk losing his seat in the very weeks when his new party is breaking through into public consciousness and doing well. Slipper is in no danger of losing his to a legal enquiry and has, in fact, the constitutional power to throw the conspirator Pyne out of the House for six months before he vacates the chair today. None of them trust Abbott and where, then, will he get the four stray votes he needs to get to win a No Confidence motion today?

It is a Clayton’s Crisis if ever I saw one. But the foolish Michelle and Fran are swallowing it, hook, line and sinker. All that will happen is a good Budget involving the dispersal of a trillion dollars to people more deserving than Gina and Clive and Twiggy and Alan will be ‘overshadowed’ by a saucy text message or two and the misspending on hookers of a few thousand dollars by someone other than Thomson long, long ago.

These are the politics that Murdochism has imposed on the modern world. Never, never mention policy. Never do the figures and say who is better off. Never look at the improvements in the society. Talk about sex, sex, sex and ‘overshadow’ the figures, the new happiness in the world. Talk about sex. Give the impression that billions have been squandered on blow-jobs and buggery against the nation’s wishes and marriage itself imperilled by these greasy, nasty people. Just do it.

Murdochism has only four messages. These are that politicians of the Centre-Left are perverted, ill, emotionally unstable or misusing our money. And so it is the Centre Left ‘lash out’ and have ‘outbursts’ and ‘spit the dummy’ when Liberals never do. They have ‘bosses’ and Liberals have CEOs. Clive Palmer is not a ‘boss’, no way, Paul Howes is. James Ashby is not a ‘faceless man’, Bill Shorten is.

It is so unfair, and so well described in Lindsay Tanner’s book. In order to be noticed you have to be a clown (i.e. mentally unstable): forget about policy, policy is boring. You’re saving a quarter of a million jobs with policy, are you? Boring. Give us a nudge and a wink and an open bathroom door. That’s what we want. That’s what we want. Just do it.

And so, today, the best Budget since 1949 comes down and if Murdochism has its way it will not be noticed. A man unfit to run an international corporation is telling us still what to notice. Look, look, she’s just spoken sharply to a waiter. Look, look, the Prime Minister just showed signs of anger. When will Julia marry Tim, or is the relationship in trouble? How big her bum is. Vote her out.

What a disgusting bunch they are. When Rupert is gaoled in September and he will be, in Delaware, The Australian should be nationalised and given to the ABC and Salusinski and Akerman and Lewis and Bolt gaoled for treason, for formenting mistrust in the nation’s leadership in wartime, and we are at war. And for being part of the cover-up of the donation by a Deputy Prime Minister of two hundred and ninety-seven million dollars to Saddam Hussein. And Tony Abbott’s lifelong protection of pederastic priests, if that’s what it was, as discussed on page 68 of Duffy’s biography.

My famous fondness or Tony is going, I think. These are loathesome tactics that smirch and stain and foul the democracy.

And Swanny is, as discussed, the world’s best Treasurer, bringing down the only surplus Budget on the planet, unnoticed, unpraised, unsung.

Overshadowed,

And it’s a pity.

What is strange, or passing strange, as Kim might say, about the Labor ministry is they believe they will be sent up to see Matron if they offend in the smallest way the globalist edicts of their exploded masters in Wall Street.

They believe, for instance, that they cannot, must not, must never, unfloat the dollar, though this would cure everything. They believe that they must not put up the GST by two percent, though this would buy free dental care for everyone and guarantee them thirty years in power. They believe that all Budgets must be balanced or in surplus in perpetuity though the storms, cyclones, bushfires, tsunamis, shipwrecks and plane crashes Global Warming is bringing us will ensure they can’t be. They believe they cannot set up, say, a Government Flood And Bushfire Insurance entity with no premiums though it would ensure them thirty years in power because … well … Matron wouldn’t like it.

Francois Hollande, who proudly wears the name Socialist and has already said he doesn’t mind staying in debt for a while to ensure people have jobs and keep them (a totally revolutionary idea, my masters, worthy, some would say, of Danton; or Roosevelt; or, gulp, Kevin Rudd) may encourage these fussy wimps and their clenched and shuddering teenage advisers to ask what is needed, really neededc, to fix things and how best to get it,  and not be afraid of censorious, snuffling noises from some authority figure upstairs in Standard & Poor’s, who got it so wrong in 2007 and 2008 that he upended and bankrupted the known world and killed, oh, fifty million children, thus far.

Watch what Hollande does, and pay attention.

It is possible ‘Kabuki Jim’ Ashby is the first thirty-four-year-old male to have complained of sexual harrassment in the workplace and asked for money in recompense for it, in world history.

Can anyone supply a precedent for this?

An astounding thing to do.

One is almost tempted to think, because his claim is against the third most high official in the land, that politics may have something to with it.

Perish the thought.

Like our great national song, Wake in Fright finds climax in a suicide. Like most Aussie films of that era, it ends where it started. John Grant is back teaching school at Tiboonda and Charlie (John Meillon), his landlord, is pensively drinking on the verandah, a lonely man, like John, with the best of his life behind him and beer ahead.

What precedes this defeated return to a life he hates is a classic story of an outback journey worthy of Lawson, another drunk overwhelmed by heat, self-loathing and what John calls ‘aggressive hospitality’, a sun-seared circle of Hell unlike any in cinema.

It may not be the best Australian film, but it stands with Snowtown, Samson and Delilah and Beneath Hill 60 as an essay in trauma-without-redemption that suits an unpurged nation of men and women not yet settled who will, in Les Murray’s phrase, ‘take centuries to be truly at home in this country’.

John Grant wants out of everything, pretty much. He wants to be, like Davy in My Brother Jack, a journalist in England. The fly-blown urchins he teaches are unworthy of his great, simmering soul. He has a girl in Bondi, her rippling breasts emerging Aphrodite-like in his brimming dreams from the foaming surf. He will take her to England with him. In the meantime he will fly to Sydney and spend six weeks with her.
He is not a drinker to start with, refusing a beer and a singsong on the grubby train from Tiboonda to Bundanyabba, a big vulgar town like Broken Hill. But a chance meeting with a tall old cop, Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty), who buys him a schooner and demands a return one very quickly and offers another, tempts him into a spiral of yarning and booze and passivity and risk that within a few days nearly does for him. Every man and woman he meets becomes a tempter, and he loses himself in the interchange, becoming a primal, hunting, chundering, impotent, perverted beast.

The man he might become is there for him to see plainly. Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence), an alcoholic, humpy-dwelling, brilliantly qualified doctor, fond of opera and philosophy, who takes beer as his payment for his medical services and tries not to revert to whisky, which he gulps from the bottle, is a man who has ‘melted into the landscape’, become at one with the bellowing, rifle-waving barbarians he goes shooting kangaroos with, eating the iconic animals’ testicles as a delicacy afterwards. John tries to kill the Doc at the end, and then can’t find him, and in a sort of angry boredom turns the rifle on himself and, like another tormented exile Uncle Vanya, narrowly misses.

The colours throughout are bronze and red and brown, in searing images by cinematographer Brian West, who set the tone and palette of the subsequent era. Brown dust blows, the desert advances, the heat burns up the alcohol, a hotel receptionist (Maggie Dence) bathes her brow in water, sexually aroused. Jeanette Hynes (Sylvia Kaye), a mostly wordless strumpet, leads John firmly by the hand away from a drunken party to a gully where she lies down before him. Attempting entrance, he chunders over her.

Ted Kotcheff’s direction is remarkable. It has the clarity and force of Wyler or Lumet. In one arresting sequence Doc talks of Socrates on a verandah while Jack Thompson and Peter Whittle fight and shout and smash things up and John, whisky-drunk, sleeps peacefully in a shot that, ever-moving, lasts perhaps three minutes.

But his great achievement is in montage, to which Tony Buckley’s contribution as editor is Oscar-worthy. The two-up sequence, crowded, yelling, ugly, Homeric, a cumulative horror as huge as anything in Bonnie and Clyde or A Face in the Crowd, shows the touch of a master. But in the kangaroo-shooting sequence (and animals were harmed in the course of it) a new level of cinema is achieved. The delicate vulnerability of the animals, paralysed in the spotlight, and the raucous jollity of their assassins – John, a crack shot, among them – turns us into animal-rights-environmentalist activists in about ten minutes.

In this the young Jack Thompson, raw, rude, grinning and irresistible, makes his first appearance, receiving the torch, as it were, from Chips, in this, as it turned out, his last film. Al Thomas as Tim Hynes, a baleful, hospitable drunken Scotsman, and Peter Whittle, risking his life unscripted in a fight with Big Red, a giant kangaroo, are equally impressive.

Gary Bond, a kind of dark-eyed Peter O’Toole, is perhaps a little snobby and artistic as John Grant, but Donald Pleasence, accent-perfect, persuasive, priapic and satanic, gives one of the best performances in our cinema.

It is good that Tony Buckley searched the world and reassembled from discarded reels and decaying negatives this unquestionable masterpiece. It is, among other things, a hymn of praise to his own work as an editor, a new astonishment every time I see it, and I see it often. The first of the films of the present Australian era – now, amazingly, in its forty-fourth year – it somehow stands apart from the others. It is an anthropological study of a post-colonial species, punishing itself, perhaps, for unuttered crimes in its genocidal recent past with more and more violence and killing, drunkenness and self-laceration, in expiation of sins unnamed.

Evan Jones has adapted well a brilliant novel, based on experience, by Ken Cook, and Ted Kotcheff, a Canadian, has achieved a work of calm hypnotic horror comparable with Hitchcock or Polanski. Worth re-seeing many times.

Take another look at it, and be amazed.

The Socialist win in France and the chaotic result in Greece and the Labour resurgence in England (with Cameron unlikely to see out his term and Clegg bound soon, or within a year, to join a coalition with Labour) will mean renewed uncertainty in the money markets of Europe, widespread recession, more poverty on that continent and an end, perhaps, to the euro and will show how wise Swanny’s Budget is, and how stumblebum and creepy were Hockey, Robb and Abbott in their snide, innumerate and graceless responses to what will soon prove to be an unended world economic crisis with social misery and soup queues and racial altercation back in most places in the West but not, no not, Australia.

Labor will be on 49 by June 30 not least because the dental care initiatives will be very popular in the bush and the school-help funds welcome everywhere, and Brough and Pyne facing gaol for criminal conspiracy against the third highest official in the land, and most of the gallery journos found to be wrong in their predictions of doom for Labor whose merciful cause, world wide, will by then be enlightening and renourishing Britain, France, Greece, America, Scandinavia, Canada and South America.

And it’s because … well … it’s because punishing the poor for the greed of the rich is not a good look, frankly, my masters, and the jig is now up for a global system that gives Clive Palmer two thousand dollars an hour and an Afghan policeman five hundred dollars a year and kills two thousand children a day with uncleansed water and forty Australians a day with the toxic addictant tobacco.

It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair, it just isn’t fair, and this is now widely known. Campbell Newman will be on the nose a year from now and Baillieu could go in a single byelection and worms all over Australia are turning.

It only takes a bit of good news, and this Budget is that, and the Socialist win in France is that, to smash the Abbott-Hockey hubris and change the game.

Prove that I lie.

A cursory reading of pages 67 and 68 of Latham and Abbott by Michael Duffy suggests that this may not be the first time Abbott has involved himself, if the Pyne-Ashby-Brough-Preselection stories are true, in the cover-up of a homosexual conspiracy.

It may of course be my misreading, and Duffy might like to join this column and say in what measure my assessment has erred.

More on this, perhaps, anon.

James Ashby has less experience than me in the writing of plausible dialogue and he should have have come to me, or to somebody like me, before he put up as evidence the following exchange:

SLIPPER: Have you ever come in a guy’s arse before?

ASHBY: That is not a question you ask, Peter.

As dialogue the question is fine, but the answer is all over the place. No Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Celt or Aussie Bloke in an intimate situation addresses the person before him, an inch or two away, or even three feet away, by their Christian name. To do that is to show aggression — as in ‘Thank you for that question, Kerry. Let me first say, and I want to make this perfectly clear, that I have NEVER, EVER’ … and so on.

You call a person by his name if you are having a fight with him, or if he’s two rooms away, and he can’t hear you and you’re trying to achieve his attention. But no-one, no-one does it when the two of you are one-to-one and up close; except for Jewish mothers, who are always angry with their progeny anyway, and shout at them most of the time.

To show how implausible it is, let us rewrite the dialogue just a little, adding only one more word.

SLIPPER: Have you ever come in a man’s arse before, James?

ASHBY: That is not a question you ask, Peter.

The superfluity of the two Christian names is hereby demonstrated. They are vividly unnecessary, both times.

So it’s likely — though of course, m’lud, not certain — that the Ashby line was made up, or misremembered. What he probably said was either ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘don’t ask’ or ‘Are you asking me were you my first? No, you weren’t, Sweetness, you most certainly weren’t.’ His line as written would have made Terence Rattigan aghast, and, if kept in the script, would have caused him to leave the production.

Another line he is SAID to have said is ‘I am openly gay, Peter’. Even with the ‘Peter’ left out (if that’s the phrase I want), this phrase as a self-description has no precedent in human speech or animal grunting since neolithic times.

It is possible, of course, it was Ashby who said it first. He is a bit of a trend-setter. He is, for instance, the first thirty-four year old homosexual male to file a civil suit for sexual harassment in world history, I would think. I may be wrong about this. But he is a trail-blazer.

And how sinister and silly and sneaky this is getting. It has what we know in the trade as the Salusinski Stain all over it, and the puppet-strings of a man unfit to run an international corporation.

You’d think Rupert could afford a better dialogue writer than this. Or would understand the need.

But perhaps he was inattentive that week, learning and rewriting and re-rehearsing his own lines, which he did rather well.

Thursday, 25th December, 2003

Mist all round our hill and I look out on grey tumbling vacancy. So it must have been before mankind’s beginning on this hill, in primordial fog and jungle fruitfulness.

Christmas Day and a bull terrier called Dotty owned by Princess Anne has a killed a corgi called Shara owned and loved by the Queen. Her Christmas Message seems superfluous after that: to the strong, the victory.

In Baghdad Operation Iron Justice (it used to be Iron Hammer but George Bush, I guess, renamed it) is shooting up ‘suspects’ in some southern suburbs and bulldozing houses. La Guardia Airport was evacuated after a woman set off the metal detector and walked off, dwindling into the murmurous crowd. Three Air France flights were cancelled on CIA advice that al-Qaeda may have ‘infiltrated the passenger list’.

I took the dogs to Hitchcock Park and there was hailed by Glenn, a man unknown to me. He used to be in the oil business and said America was buying up oil and putting it down old holes in Texas to have it in reserve when the Oil Wars began. The world was run, he said, by a small number of people who told American Presidents what to do and will order (and President Dean as readily as President Bush will obey them when they order) the subjugation of the entire oil-rich Middle East. Having got that, they will turn America into an isolationist fortress hogging all the petrol and sending every other nation broke.

I tried to tell him things weren’t as orderly as that; from what I knew of politics there were no enduring groups or alliances and no Big Plan survives more than six months, but he knew better. I asked him what religion he was. ‘None,’ he said, ‘I’m a Mason.’

1.10 p.m.

The seaplane slowly moves to its take-off point on flat blue Pittwater. The dogs lie under tables in stone-dead poses, mortified by the heat.

And the God of Christmas looks sillier and sillier. He created humankind, it seems, and finding some of it were adulterers, murderers and sodomites, determined to drown it. One family, however, built a boat and survived and from them descended all the present races of the earth. They then offended God by sodomy, idolatry, murder, theft and adultery again and God proposed to slaughter the lot of them. And his Son said ‘slaughter me instead.’ ‘Right,’ said God, and did, and if we acknowledge he did this we’ll be okay, and we can commit sodomy…idolatry…adultery…no, that’s not it. We can commit them as long as, before we die, we admit we were wrong to commit them, and if we don’t, or if we die suddenly, we burn eternally shrieking for ointment, water, oblivion for billions and billions of years.

Over one hundred and fifty million Americans believe this nonsense and so does their President, and he’s running the world. He thinks the End Time is so near it doesn’t matter if we wreck the environment, mine the ice and pollute the sea and whack up the temperature everywhere and speed the day when the earth becomes unfit for human life. There’s only twenty years to the Rapture anyhow.

Vote George Bush. He knows the score.

9.10 p.m.

Manger Square in Bethlehem is almost empty and only one church choir from overseas – Korea – made it there to sing ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ on this glum Christmas Eve. Tourism has lately zilched (and so has the Arab equivalent of McDonald’s) and many many young Palestinians lost their jobs. What are they living on, one was asked on television. Charitable donations, came the answer, from overseas, but these are dwindling.

A rocket lands on Mars today. They hope to find if there’s life there — and if, presumably, Christ had to die for it, or if the Angry Red Planet stayed too ignorant and unredeemable for that.

Friday, 26th December, 2003

Another assassination attempt – the second in two weeks – on Musharaff has killed a goodly number, thirteen or so, of his motorcade. A helicopter gunship has killed a member of Islamic Jihad and some civilians in Gaza and a suicide bomber killed two women and a baby in Tel Aviv. ‘A lot of intense activity’ around the American compound ‘in the last hours of Christmas night’ has followed rocket attacks on the Sheraton and killed no-one and a roadside detonation and a suicide bomber that killed three Americans. It is Mad Cow Disease, the English labs assure us. The rocket did land on Mars but has fallen silent and the boffins are ‘disappointed’.

Hot, grimy and gloomy. A pelican glides by my window very close: he looks like Mr Percival in Storm Boy back from the dead or the final smug soaring dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Annie is flying to Perth and I fear she will die in the first Qantas crash to cap a terrible year.

I walk the dogs and go through scenario after scenario. A single spent nuclear fuel rod in a reservoir in Los Angeles killing, slowly, millions. A hundred Mad Cows already eaten destroying McDonald’s and much American tourism. Jeb Bush kidnapped on Christmas night and exchanged, in Syria, for Saddam.

Or a rocket-grenade attack on Three Mile Island radiating Eastern America. A suicide bombing in Florida’s Disneyland, the bomber disguised as Mickey Mouse. Or in L.A.’s Warner World, the bomber disguised as Elmer Fudd. This is what terrorism is for, to make us think of these things.

And the media now is so infused with Hollywood hype that all it wants as headlines is that kind of story. The rescue, as in Private Ryan, of Private Lynch. The long grim search, as in Day of the Jackal, for Saddam Hussein. The quest for the lethal weapon as in Lord of the Rings. The tyrant’s regime on trial as in Judgment at Nuremberg. War up close with the ‘embeds’ as in Black Hawk Down. The black villains O.J. Simpson and Kobe Bryant and Michael Jackson, guilty as charged. This is what Murdoch and his jabbering marionettes have turned news into, each scenario disposable as kleenex, replaceable by another. The co-heroes of Rambo, the Taliban, are villains now. The master criminal Gaddafi a born-again friend of peace. The heroic foe of Khoumeini a Stalin-like tyrant, spitting on his captors. The thousand Israelis dead are ‘innocent victims of terrorists’, the three thousand Palestinians dead a luckless, expendable ingredient of a ‘government crackdown’ on ‘militants’. I’ve no time for losers, Bush (apparently) says of the Palestinians, and a nation goes to the wall. Their scenario is untidy so they end on the cutting room floor, like the coffins coming home and Michael Moore’s press conference after the Oscars.

The scenarios, however, can turn round and bite you sometimes. Saddam has been ‘run to ground’ but the death of young Americans continues and the ‘Saddamist diehards who hate our freedom’ scenario won’t last very long. Osama survived the lethal poundings of mortars all around him and instead of dying like Hitler in a Wagnerian holocaust of blood he crossed ancient mythic mountains safely like Julie Andrews and the Trapp family in The Sound of Music and seems more and more like Robin Hood or Che Guevara or even (hush my mouth) Davy Crockett as the years go on. Or Arthur, the once and future king. And even if they get him (Musharaff, it is said, has arranged to deliver him alive in August in time for the Republican convention in New York near Ground Zero) the terrorism will not cease, of course it won’t.

It’s as illogical as saying that JFK’s murder ended forever America’s desire to make useful wars worldwide and make money rebuilding the ruins. Or Ho Chin Minh’s death meant the Viet Cong would now surrender, or FDR’s death meant Hitler had won. The myth of Lost Leadership is a Hollywood fiction like so many others.

Saturday, 3rd January, 2004

A great earthquake has killed forty thousand in the ancient mudbrick city of Bam and left a hundred thousand, maybe, freezing in flimsy tents with nowhere to defecate, earn money or deal with their grief. Though ‘the worst natural disaster in the Middle East in centuries’ with a body count thirteen times as large as that of 9/11 no-one has yet said ‘the world changed on Saturday, December 27, 2003′.

It probably did, however. For after twenty-four years of diplomatic nastiness, trade embargoes and Islamophobic jihad America sent aid to Iran. But we shouldn’t mistake it for ‘the beginning of normalisation,’ Bush said on his farm, waving his arms and crossing his eyes till he got the words right. Not till they give up to ‘justice’ their protectively incarcerated al-Qaeda buddies, cease building and marketing weapons of mass destruction both nookular and chemical, establish democratic institutions and liberalise their economy. They were evil after all, and members of an Axis known to be Evil and if they thought a monumental national disaster worse than the crumbling towers of New York changed things they’ve got another think coming.

Three flights to Los Angeles from Paris meanwhile have been cancelled; a six-year-old on one of them had the same name as an al-Qaeda operative, and so did a Welsh insurance broker. Jet fighters escorted a flight from London into Washington. Another was diverted to Canada, where a search of an unaccompanied suitcase found ‘no explosive materials’. Two more London flights were cancelled, wrecking the holidays of many tourists. ‘Chatter on the line’ suggested a hijacked plane, a New Year’s Eve attack, a metropolitan slaughter larger than 9/11, we are told, in Los Angeles perhaps, or San Francisco or Las Vegas. International passengers are being held up for hours, interrogated, harassed, accused and strip-searched in freedom’s name and suspect planes may be shot down, tourists are now warned, first class passengers and all, to show the ‘terrorists aren’t winning’.

Sounds like they’re winning to me. Making particular people terrified is what terrorists do and wow, it’s working. ‘Chatter on the line’, it proves, is the cheapest, most effective terror there is.

What an idiot Bush is, and how clear it’s becoming, to even Americans.

On New Year’s Eve I fearlessly went to the city and ate with Bodisco and his rat pack and Walt Secord, the huge, fast-thinking Native American who does much of Bob Carr’s daily spin. We drank a bit, and talked of Carr for Canberra and the December Surprise.

‘I think he didn’t mind yielding up his place in history to Kim,’ I said, ‘but Latham’s elevation really shocked him.’

‘Well, he’s better than Latham, and he knows it.’

‘This is true.’

‘One winning strategy,’ Walt said, thinking it through, ‘might have been to keep Simon as Leader till the Sydney Labor Party Conference and there have Bob elected by acclamation, against his will, by a spontaneous outburst of irresistible affection from the assembled party.’

‘A pity.’

‘Yeah, it is. I wonder what we’re going to do with our lives after this when he goes?’

‘Hard to say.’

‘I’ll have to go to the corporate sector, and work for Coca Cola.’

‘Oh God.’

We drank some more.

Tuesday, 13th January, 2004

‘I know I shouldn’t do this,’ I said to Sir Tom Stoppard. ‘I’m aware it’s against the rules of engagement. But I want to tell you what the ingredients of your next play should be.’

‘Please don’t,’ the theatrical titan said. He had a big handsome face that in spite of time and his rediscovered Jewishness was reminiscent still of Mick Jagger’s.

‘Its characters should be,’ I persisted, ‘Bush, Bin Laden, Blair, Beckham, Botham, Bob Hope, Saddam, Condoleezza and Madonna.’

‘…Not bad.’

‘They could be all fogbound in an airport lounge.’

‘I don’t like realistic premises. I’m sorry to hear you do.’

We were on a boat on the Harbour having lunch. Bob Carr had interviewed him in the Town Hall the day before. He had spoken of Shakespeare’s ‘simultaneous compression of language and expansion of ideas.’ When asked what he thought Shakespeare was like he said it was always hard to say with writers. ‘I mean if you saw Dylan Thomas vomiting over a bar in New York, you wouldn’t automatically think, “Ah, he must have written ‘Fern Hill’.”‘

I asked him why he’d refused to write one of Stephen Sondheim’s librettos. ‘I’m not sure I like his kind of musical theatre,’ he said. ‘I like Guys and Dolls.’

‘I love Guys and Dolls. Why do you like it?’

‘Well, I don’t have to tell you that.’

On the boat as well was Sir Ian McKellen, who was Gandalf in Lord of the Rings. I belatedly congratulated him on his 1968 Hamlet, which I had seen, and asked him if it was true that he had been giving Tony Blair voice lessons, and thus prolonged a tyranny. He said it wasn’t. ‘The last such person I coached in that way was Neil Kinnock. And he was such a total disaster I stopped.’

The sun shone on the Harbour and the conversation was very fine. A week later Bob ran into Stoppard in a London bookshop, and both were amazed.

How lucky is Carr. How blissfully, brazenly, bafflingly lucky.

Frank May 5, 2012

What did Mal Brough do that was so odious Bob? Please expand for the benefit of your readers.

Also if you intend to blog on Bob Carr why not include his latest tweet:

“This Ashby seems more rehearsed than a Kabuki actor.”

Bob can you see anything worrisome of a Minister of the crown commenting on a victim of sexual harassment? Bob Carr is providing a lot of ammunition to the Liberals.

Now you can ban me.

Reader1 May 5, 2012

From Wikipedia -

Kabuki is a classical Japanese dance-drama. Kabuki theatre is known for the stylization of its drama and for the elaborate make-up worn by some of its performers. The individual kanji characters mean sing, dance, and skill. Kabuki is therefore sometimes translated as “the art of singing and dancing.” These are, however, ateji characters which do not reflect actual etymology. The kanji of ‘skill’ generally refers to a performer in kabuki theatre. Since the word kabuki is believed to derive from the verb kabuku, meaning “to lean” or “to be out of the ordinary”, kabuki can be interpreted as “avant-garde” or “bizarre” theatre. The expression kabukimono referred originally to those who were bizarrely dressed and swaggered on a street.

Bob Ellis May 5, 2012

To Frank:

It may not be so. But it is possible Mal Brough advised a devious homosexual on how to entrap, embarrass, blackmail, denounce and politically destroy the third highest official in the Commonwealth of Australia, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, or do I mean the second highest.

Conspiracy to entrap and blackmail a high official is against the law and punishable, as I understand it, by imprisonment. I may be wrong about this.

And it may not have happened. But the ashen Tony Abbott, his current parliamentary strategy of smear, move No Confidence and govern suddenly in ruins, clearly thinks it did, or it might have.

Why did Brough speak with him three times? How long was that in toto? Six hours? Three? One?

How long does it take to say, ‘You should see my lawyer. Here’s his number.’? Four hours? Two? One?Really?

What else, then, did he say? What did they talk about?

I’ve decided not to ban you at all. Keep writing. You’re such a goose. You help me out. You cheer me up. You make my day.

Please answer this.

Marilyn May 5

The real point is that Ashby was working to have a candidate elected when he worked for a member.

that is an illegal use of parliamentary offices.

True Believer May 5, 2012

If you don’t mind me asking, Bob, can we expect any more updates on Sydney Mayoral Election and Damian Spruce in the near future? I’ve become very supportive of Spruce’s bid since you first bought his campaign to my attention, and the election of a left-wing social democratic mayor in a populous city in the West is now sorely needed in light of Ken Livingstone’s unfortunate defeat in London. Commiserations Ken, but good on you for showing them what real Labour politicians stand up for.

Bob Ellis May 6, 2012

He plans I think to enact gay marriages on the Town Hall steps and the Opera House steps by skyped or flown-in marriage celebrants from, say, Vermont, the marriages valid in that jurisdiction, if the couples undertake, in the next three years, to honeymoon there. If Vermont is not the appropriate state, or they refuse to do it, Spain might agree to it, or a South American country.

It is as good enough a policy I think as to win him the gay vote holus bolus, if that’s the adverb I want, and perhaps, just perhaps, unseat Clover Moore in September.

Cuchulain May 5, 2012

Brough has witnesses at each meeting, who will no doubt confirm his version of events, not a silly man.

Cabcharges are the main game, up to police forensics and accountants, no matter what Albo or Abbott would prefer happen. Easy to lean on cabby with priors, so police should have good chance of finding out one way or the other.

Sexual harassment unless witnesses is difficult to prove, though SMS shows straying beyond employee/employer relationship, as does Ashby’s massage, though who strayed first? Could be a long complex court case, unless potentially they (Govt and Slipper) settle quickly with No Admission!

A Grech (a failed gotcha induced leadership change) may be worst possible outcome for ALP Abbott is now Coalition liability, anyone else may see LNP vote elevate dramatically.

PS tas leg council Hobart election today ALP vote halved! Scary for Giddings and Gilllard

Frank May 5, 2012

It may be that Ashby was entrapped as you say but it is most unlikely given that Peter Slipper pursued Ashby for quite some time and offered him the job alegedly once he realized Ashby was homosexual. Yes it is true that Mal Brough covets Slipper’s seat and will in probability win the seat for the Liberals. But Bob you must realize and acknowledge in your heart that most people are of good will whether Labor or Liberal. Pure villainy is rare in most hearts irrespective of political persuasion.

Brough has a sterling reputation. As he said to Ashby:

“I said to him that my strong view was that you need to make sure you are on extremely strong ground because the media, the government and Mr Slipper will tear you apart,” Mr Brough said that he told Mr Ashby during a second meeting in late March.

“I said that you had better know that what you are saying is true and beyond any doubt.

“And, if it is, my strong advice to you is to go to the AFP (Australian Federal Police) with your claims of criminality and you had better get yourself legal advice regarding the civil matter.”

Mal Brough offered good and sensible advice. Advice no one could refute.

He should not be vilified. Wait untl more details emerge before condemning him.

Doug Quixote May 5, 2012

“It may be that Ashby was entrapped” (!)

I hope that is a misprint!

Bob Ellis May 6, 2012

It would be easy to ascertain how long those meetings were. Meetings between a man keen to damage the third highest official in the nation and a man keen to win his seat.

If over an hour, they add up, surely, to a conspiracy.

What Abbott, Ashby, Pyne and Brough seem not to understand is the ‘not a fit person’ judgment of the Commons ends for a while, and makes unfashionable, the Rupert Murdoch way of doing things, which is change of government through sexual scandal, or destruction of social democrat leaders through sexual smear.

Jim Cairns, Gary Hart, John Brogden, Lord Puttnam, Don Dunstan, Cheryl Kernot, Andrew Bartlett, Jackie Smith, John Edwards, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Matt Brown, Tony Stewart, John Della Bosca, Paul McLeay and Elliot Spitzer were brought down in this way, nearly all by Murdoch; and Bill Clinton, Troy Buswell, Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson, Jeremy Thorpe, Mike Rann, Prince Charles, Prince Andrew, Princess Diana, Ted Kennedy, Cecil Parkinson, John Prescott, John Major, Edwina Currie gravely damaged; and John Kennedy, Hugh Gaitskell, Nye Bevan, Bob Boothby, Hugh Dalton, Stalin, Bertold Brecht and Mao Zedong posthumously besmirched.

But the fashion has changed and after the Hacking Scandal it is no longer acceptable that Press Lords — Hearst, Northcliffe, Black, Goldsmith, Packer, Murdoch — tweak politics in this way, or even amusing any more when they try it on. It is wrong, not shrewd, or good fun, to ruin careers with minor incidents in private lives that have no bearing on policy or ability to make good speeches or initiate worthwhile public change.

So the present attack on the Speaker, the third most important official in the country, for sending suggestive texts, if that’s what they were, to an employee, and the curious thesis that he must resign because of them, is out of date now; as out of date now as a parallel thesis that Rupert Murdoch should resign because he wooed and married two of his employees, no doubt touching them unwelcomely in office hours for a minute or two, and he must lose his career and his legacy and his posterity and his legend for this loathesome use of his power.

That age is gone; and Abbott, Pyne and Brough do not understand this. They do not see that the Murdoch name is now as unseemly and stained and fouled as the name of Joe McCarthy in 1954, and, for a while at least, if I may use the adjective of the month, ‘toxic’. And anyone who stoops to his methods — peeping, snooping, hacking, bugging, forging private conversations, and the unspoken blackmail in the Hoover manner of public elected officials — will not prevail in the long run even if they win a Newspoll or two for a month or two by espousing this vile, pantie-sniffing way of doing things.

It is appropriate now for Abbott and Pyne and Brough to reveal what conversations they had in the last few months with Murdoch and the men who work for Murdoch about their upcoming political strategies and co-operative endeavours, and what reward they would give Murdoch if he helped them.

They should appear at a joint press conference and answer these questions live on television.

It is in the public interest and we have a right to know.

Discuss.

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the Party and, more importantly, join the dots; and, as we did in the old days, follow the thread.

This is the story so far.

A man unfit to run an international corporation has paid Newspoll, which concealed the rising vote of the Katter Australian Party throughout the entirety of the March Queensland election, to print on Tuesday last a poll showing Labor on 41 two party preferred and destabilise its leadership. This poll rang no mobile phones and admits a margin of error of 3 percent.

And we are to believe these figures, and panic about them.

The man unfit to run an international corporation who may, if Jay Rockefeller has his way — as Rockefellers tend to do — be arrested and tried in America soon, has tweeted that Australia must go to an election soon, just as when in 1975 he asked John Kerr to consider the process by which he might sack Whitlam eighteen months after his re-election, which Kerr duly, humbly, drunkenly did.

And we are to believe these figures, and panic about them.

They were figures that came in on the back of a civil case of sexual harassment against the third highest official in the land, a homosexual in a leather jacket with a Dicjens look to his nose and eyebrows. This case now seems to be a conspiracy of three Liberal voters, one of them at least occasionally heterosexual, who talked a long time, as Murdoch did with Kerr in 1975, about what to do about things.

And we are to believe these figures, and panic about them.

How long does it take to realise that Newspoll serves Murdoch, supplying and suppressing figures according to his whim, his edict, his prejudice, his passing fury? Figures on some people, like Rudd, whom he likes to sometimes befriend, but not on others like Swan, Shorten, Crean, Combet, Clare or Carr who might poll equally well, or better? How long does it take? A lifetime? How long, oh Lord, how long does it take to do whatever it takes to get a fair Newspoll done between elections, or to read one with acuity?

I’ll say it again. Newspoll is not to be trusted, as its long Queensland silence proved, and O’Shannessy’s refusal, in these columns, to say if he suppressed pro-Katter polls though he wrote in on other things, suppressed pro-Katter polls. I ask him if he did, again.

Newspoll is not to be trusted. And the Labor vote was probably 45 on the worst weekend of the Slipper distraction. And it is probably 46 now as the Slipper distraction falls apart. And it will be 48 by Friday after Abbott stuffs up, as he will, his Budget reply.

And we can win from there.

What Brough did with Ashby and what Pyne did with Ashby has a Murdoch honey-trap smell about it, much like what Murdoch’s man Salusinski did with John Della Bosca: somehow become aware of an affair with a comedienne who hoped to increase her visibility — and the laughter in the front row — by revealing an affair with a politician.

Pay her money, perhaps, for her story. Or even pay her money (perhaps) for initiating the affair. And thus deprive New South Wales of Bob Carr’s first preference in the years after 1995, the great Labor strategist John Della Bosca as eventual Premier, after him.

It is what Murdoch does. It was Murdoch people who got the NYPD onto the plane and Strauss-Kahn off it, Murdoch people at the New York Post, who knew curiously early that the hefty Diallo had been raped in the mouth — a physical impossibility without a gun involved, or a third person — by a man half her size. It was Murdoch people who tried to remove Prince Charles from the succession to the office of King of England by bugging what he said to his mistress, now his wife, about her tampon. It was Murdoch who alleged that Hitler kept diaries, and signed every page of them, with no more wartime secrets in them than in The Manchester Guardian.

It is what Murdoch does. He cheats, and hopes to make money from cheating. Getting, for instance, television licences Abbott would give him and Gillard would refuse him.

It’s a Murdoch operation, in my view.

In my view.

And what a pity Mal Brough, a politician of the first rank, and a man of conscience, is in the thick of it.

None of my family would see Snowtown for fear of its truth and no woman I know wants to see it, but it’s a great work that like King Lear transcends its violence and like our coming forth and our going hence must be endured.

In a dusty fibro suburb offering few choices – the world is five backyards wide, with a rusty bike or two, a wobbly TV, mum’s latest fancyman, ghastly spag-and-snag dinners, glutinous breakfasts, quarrels, noise and sleeplessness, a happy-clappy church that no-one much enjoys – a tempter, John Bunting, arrives with a plan to kill perverts, and proselytising among the damaged, the idle, the womanless and the daft, secures enough disciples to carry out his plan. Kiddy-fiddlers are tortured and killed, one agreeing in a bloodied bathtub that he deserves it, kill me, I deserve it, and a kind of puritan blood-cult grows up around this practice. Bunting has the charisma of a good shoe salesman, no more, yet he finds among these idle hands great quantities of devil’s work to do. If you doubted before this the existence of evil – and I certainly did – you will come away from this film a true believer in it, almost a fellow-traveller.

With a method like Mike Leigh’s of group rehearsal Justin Kurzel has winkled out of his inexperienced cast (Daniel Henshall who played Bunting was the lone professional in it) work of such lacerating intuitive credibility that you think it has really happened, and you were in the room when it did.

Should it have been made? Well, the arguments against Titus Andronicus are better (‘Why, there they both are, baked in that pie’), and No Country For Old Men, and The Road. The comparison is with Lord of the Flies, I think, a work on many school courses, about, like this, the unleashing of humankind’s inner savagery by what Iago called ‘a permission of the will’. Wars are connived in just this way by false allegations of adversaries’ diabolic deeds – the Belgian babies on German bayonets, the WMD, the beheading of young women for wearing lipstick in Afghanistan – and cities bombed and young men tortured because our side is morally superior to those we widow and kill. In Snowtown the same thing happens close up and face to face.

If ever there was an argument for tax-funded useless jobs it is this one. Idleness, idleness, idleness and grubby demeaning poverty are what stir these glum inconsummate also-rans to slaughter and cover-up and awkward obedience to a Leader, a petty Hitler with a vision of Decency restored. With jobs and the price of a night at the flicks and some popcorn with a girl they knew from school it would not have happened. If the job was painting rocks white, then painting them brown, then painting them white again (as in the Workfair schemes of the 1930s) the result would have been the same: a life, rather than a Godot-wait for mysterious, instructions with knives and twine and corkscrews.

Kurzel found his cast by hanging around a shopping mall in an adjacent suburb and looking for faces that resembled the faces of the originals, and going up to those who did, and asking them to audition. Louise Harris, who eventually won an AFI for Best Supporting Female, told him repeatedly to fuck off or she’d call the police, and Lucas Pittaway, as the moody near-wordless fifteen-year-old victim/antihero Jamie, who is torpidly hypnotised into abetting the serial slaughters against his anguished but paralysed better judgment, is as good as the young Heath Ledger.

The script by Luke Buckmaster is excellent and the music, especially the music, by Jed Kurzel, the director’s brother, as good as Morricone; and the result is a film that rivals the best of Polanski, and a lesson for us all in economy, persistence, passion and vision.

It stands with Samson and Delilah and Beneath Hill 60 among the best three Australian films and should, really should, be seen.

Friday, midnight

An interesting day. A man from Icon says he will make Mel read the Fred Hollows script and he would make a wonderful Fred if he wants the role, and Icon are now doing miniseries and he will read our Murdoch script Paper Tigers too.

Later for five hours I drink with a Labor backroomer and a journalist in Surry Hills. The Labor backroomer says Gillard is finished and Rudd likely, very likely, to be back as Prime Minister in a month in a desperate attempt to ‘save the furniture’ when Labor is inevitably defeated in an election that might be as close as October this year. We argue about this.

If Rudd were back, I shout — unanimously affirmed, let us say, by Caucus in June after the Budget fails to give Gillard a bump, which is possible — the following things will happen.

Swan, the world’s best Treasurer, will go to the back bench. Roxon, conqueror of Big Tobacco, will go to the back bench. Shorten will either lose all credibility and become Rudd’s Treasurer swearing ceaseless loyalty or, more likely, go to the back bench. Crean will announce he’s quitting politics and stay on for a year as Minister for everything. Gillard will announce that she wants to spend more time with her hairdresser and quit politics, staying on perhaps in her now marginal seat, the one where the car workers are losing their jobs, Altona, till the election this or next year.

Rudd will be sworn in as Prime Minister, replace Carr with Bowen as Foreign Minister, and make the abashed and baffled Carr Arts Minister. Carr will announce he’s leaving at the end of his term and recommend Wedderburn get his seat. Wedderburn will refuse it wanting the Representatives. Arbib will put his hand up. Carr will stay on, and attend opera a lot. Paul Howes will disaffiliate the AWU from Labor, or try to; or, at 30, leave politics; or be driven out of it. John McTernan, missing his family, will go home to England, thus halving the Labor backroom’s IQ overnight.

The Telegraph will then, within a week, run a story, What Really Happened At Scores, which will allege Rudd rubbed his nose in the cleavage of a stripper. It will be as false as the alleged Strauss-Kahn rape in the mouth of a woman twice his size in two minutes flat but it will do him harm and Labor’s figures will revert to where they are now, on 27, and then go lower.

By then it will be July 31. Rudd will continue to promise he will be less chaotic and self-regarding this time, he just needs another chance and his wife and family are praying for him. The Queensland polls will show in that state a surge to 25 percent of the Katter Party with Labor on 15. Labor will be looking at 17 seats at best in Federal Parliament. By July 15 Oakeshott will be sick of it, wanting to get home to his young family and announce he will support a No Confidence motion.

The figures, even money now, will depend on Slipper and Thomson. One more sexual allegation, false but Murdoch-driven, will cause Slipper to leave Parliament with his pension, forcing a by-election. That by-election, in September, will be lost and Brough be the new member and immediately embraced by Abbott as his new Shadow Foreign Minister. Abbott will bring on a No Confidence motion and Brough will vote for it. Rudd will advise an election on, say, December 1, 2012. That is, seven months from now.

Many, many Labor members will lose their seats or not stand, and Rudd will lose his and Smith his and Swan, if he runs, his. Among the seventeen left standing will be Shorten, Garrett, Combet, Albo, Clare and Plibersek and, in the Senate, Carr. Carr will be asked to swap with Garrett and be Opposition Leader and refuse. ‘I hate,’ he will say, ‘being Opposition Leader and I will never do it again.’ Clare will succeed Shorten as Leader after the 2014 Double Dissolution defeat and six years after that quit politics at 48. Howes, at 37, come in from the cold, will replace him. By then the Katter Party will outnumber Labor by 18 seats to 15.

Tony Abbott will enjoy twenty years in power after abolishing compulsory voting and retire in 2033 at 75. The Labor Party will be by 2025 in irreversible decline, like the Democrats five years ago. John Faulkner will write a book declaring the trouble all started when he, Faulkner, with his crucial casting vote put in Latham not Beazley; Beazley who would have won comfortably 2004 and yielded up the Prime Ministership to Shorten or Wedderburn in 2015; and then, at the book launch, have his first alcoholic drink at age 77 and quite like it.

It was a pretty depressing talk after a while, and the Labor backroomer, after many Carlton Draughts, allowed it might be a good idea not to bring back Rudd after all and another candidate, or even Gillard, was a better look.

While we were talking it became known that Brough had set up Ashby to gull, shame and scupper Slipper, and Labour won all over England, and the politics of everything altered, the way it does, into ever more different, more opalescent scenarios.

And so it went.

And the Rudd Redux Option began to slip away.

If Bin Laden has come out against Fox News, can the world be far behind?

CBS, al-Qaeda said, is ‘close to neutral’.

Discuss.

2.39 pm Friday

The results coming in from England suggest the Murdoch Effect is killing the Tories and my role model Ken Livingstone, the newt-fancying pro-lesbian bigamist, may just take London back, in his sixty-seventh year.

Watch this space.

9.95 am Saturday

Boris has beaten Ken by eight thousand votes, reversing in London a trend all over England that puts Labour on 39 percent and the Tories on 31. Labour has gained 823 seats and the Tories lost 405 and the Lib-Dems 336. Labor’s vote is up 16 points, the Tories’ down 9 and the Lib-Dems 8.. The Socialists will win in France tomorrow and the semi-Katterite super-socialists, who will abandon the euro and reaffirm the drachma as I lately advised, in Greece the same day.

This means I guess that Boris will be Tory leader soon, after his fellow Bullingdon buffoon David Cameron is booed by the Party Conference in September, and Clegg, mayhap, with Labour’s support and Miliband as deputy, Lib-Dem Prime Minister by Christmas and putting up new laws that will bring in preferential voting and so extinguish the Tory Party by 2020.

And so it goes.

It has been pointed out to me by some aghast and fair-minded respondents that Terrance, who says I am moved only by spite, bile, professional jealousy and septuagenarian uselessness and that Mel should be buggered and hanged in Iran; and Bob, who says all my scripts are about young women going down on middle-aged men (eighty aren’t, one is) are two different people, and for the sins of both of them I have cast out both for life.

There is reason in this plea for mercy, and my uncertain, grudging, abashed and remorseful commutations are these.

Terrance is banned for three years; and Bob is banned for eighteen months. If at the end of their periods of exile, they apologize unreservedly, they will be let back in.

The ban on Frank and the others is till June 25. Jim is forgiven but urged to continue writing grammatically, with correct punctuation, spacing and spelling

GK Cole is allowed back, but only if he/she uses that name. If I find that ‘Greenblatt’ is him/her, or any other pseudonym, I will expunge him/her from world history for a year and a week; that is, until my seventy-first birthday on May 10, 2013 or my death, whichever comes first.

No more correspondence will be entered into after 2 p.m. today, Frday , May 4, 2012. These edicts should not have been necessary but lies, lies, lies, lies have given me no choice but to act for a while with brutality in the cause of truth.

(From Night Thoughts In Time Of War)

Thursday, December 18th, 2003

Saddam was captured on Saturday night and on Sunday night, after hours of suspense, displayed by Bremer (‘We got ‘im!’) in Iraq on videotape. He had a full curly brown-and-grey beard, big brown canine eyes and an old creased face, both godlike and doglike, that seemed in turn heroic and bewildered. His emergence like a hobbit from a hole in the ground beside a tiny, filthy adjacent cottage a few yards from the unmarked graves of his sons and grandson, and the pink, vulval parting of his hairy mouth when it was probed with what looked like a shoehorn, drew sympathy for him which was quickly turned round by the spinmen. He had not fought his captives to the death, it was said, nor even reached for his gun but came out saying in English, ‘I am Saddam Hussein, the President of Iraq, can we negotiate?’ It was not the story first told, that his guards at gunpoint said, as the Americans told them to say, ‘Master! Quickly! The Americans are near! We must leave immediately!’, and he came scrambling out and was seized from behind.

And so it went. Worldwide approval. Uncrowded shots of — wait for it — rejoicing Communists on Baghdad streets. Demonstrations in favour of him in Samara (no, said Death, our appointment was in Samara) fired upon by panicky teenage grunts, not many deaths. Bush saying ‘Good riddance to you, Mr Saddam Hussein.’ Howard Dean up against it, thankful for the capture but saying it left the world no safer from terrorists. Gephardt, Kerry and Lieberman calling him ‘soft on Saddam’ in sound grabs Bush will use later. Pundits agreed it made Bush now more likely to win if the economic recovery (deficit-funded, illusory) continued.

In the gloomy days and nights that followed I became convinced the world had gone down a wrong fork of the road on 9/11 and it was not coming back, and the dark, lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key side of human response was on the upswing. Bush, Howard and Latham said, or implied, that Saddam should hang; I suppose the courtly Christian moderate Tariq Aziz will hang beside him. How, condemned worldwide like this, can he, or they, get a fair trial? It seems pretty petulant to ask. Should he suffer sleep deprivation, truth serum, other gruesome forms of physical torture? Should Tariq Aziz? Do they have rights? Don’t even bother to raise these matters, we got ‘im.

In his last months before his March war the old man was writing, in Hemingway style, or near it, a new novel. Be Gone, Demons! it was called and, or so The Spectator tells me. It was about a man called Ibrahim ‘and his three grandchildren, Ezekiel, Aissa and Youssef, who symbolised Moses, Jesus and Mohammed, the prophets of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Ezekiel was portrayed as evil, obsessed with money and sexually deficient. Ezekiel becomes a moneylender and arms dealer whose machinations pit tribes against each other. He falls in love with a woman who resists him. He tries to rape her but she escapes. In the novel’s climax, Ezekiel is killed by “just men” in a battle on the plains of Mesopotamia. The demon is gone and Iraq can flourish.’
He wrote out of boredom, his translator Saman Abdul Majid explained, and his love of the two Iraqi genres, warrior epic and romance. ‘He wanted a pulsating, moody narrative and believable characters. “Saddam wanted to write like this,” says Saman, pointing at a passage in his book. “At dawn, the unit commander woke very early. He had to get to the front lines. He was shaving when he heard the American bombs start to fall.”‘

Why do I find this so beguiling, and this battleworn thug so much more interesting as a man than the dumb lucky wellborn cheating lush George Bush? ‘He saw himself as a great defender of the arts,’ Saman asserted, ‘a poet warrior like the Abbasid caliphs.’

He was amazed, Saman went on, by his fastidiousness. ‘He was a huge man. Always extremely clean, as if he had just stepped out of the sauna. He was obsessed with his clothes. For me, all this reflects his double personality. One half of him was a simple Bedouin, a practising Muslim who wanted to be a good man. He had no need to be repressive or fierce. This was the side of him I saw…a kind, patient man, sometimes humorous, ready to be contradicted. When foreign journalists came in and asked him if he was like Hitler, he did not get angry, he just laughed. He was demonised by the United States.

‘We all heard the stories. But whenever I met him, I found it unbelievable that he could be so cruel and also so nice. Also, people consciously didn’t speak about the worst things…About the woman who wanted to divorce her husband, but he refused. So she recorded him ranting against Saddam and took the tape to the police. The husband was thrown into prison and she got her divorce. Or the little boy of eight or nine at primary school who tells his teacher his parents have criticised Saddam and they are put in prison. You hear these things, but you choose not to talk about them. You chose your friends carefully and information did not get spread easily.’ He had ‘delusions of grandeur,’ he said, ‘which led us to despair.’

I should be careful. In his seventies G.B.Shaw found admirable qualities in Hitler and Stalin; I suppose as your sperm count ebbs and your beard grows white you come to admire the brute decisiveness, the unremitting ardour of the mighty of the earth. And you come to think, like Americans, that killing Arabs is not as bad as killing people.

Did Saddam kill innocent people? Oh yes. Did he have ‘rape rooms’? I doubt it. We look at so many interwoven truths and lies it’s hard to know what happened or if it’s forgivable.

Is it forgivable, for instance, to ‘kill hundreds of thousands of your own people?’

No?

Well, let’s ask the question. What world figure killed seven hundred thousand of his own people and is now universally admired?

Abraham Lincoln.

Yes, yes, I know I’ve said it before but you can’t get around it. They were his own people, and he caused the war, and he continued it when he might have stopped it, and seven hundred thousand soldiers died, more than all the American soldiers that have died in battle since. And he’s up on Mount Rushmore now. ‘And my client, your honour,’ we can imagine Geoffrey Robertson proclaiming, bewigged, in Saddam’s defence, ‘killed no more than forty thousand of his own people in what he also regarded — rightly or wrongly, m’lud — as another civil war: against Kurds and religious dingbats and unlike honest Abe now faces the gallows. And, oh yes, my learned friend does well to remind me, four hundred thousand Iranians in a war with the Ayatollah Khoumeini, with massively destructive and profoundly chemical weapons supplied by the US who rightly judged this bearded cleric an evil barbarous fanatic and his followers demented. Should we have cheered Saddam, or Khoumeini, in this war, your honour? If Saddam, why curse him now?

Annie’s prophetic dream was right in every particular. For he was indeed in the north of his country, dirty and bearded and wild-haired, like Blake’s engraving of Nebuchadnezzar gone mad; on all fours, she saw him, under tree roots in a kind of earthern cave. Not in Uzbekistan with a big-breasted woman reading Ramond Chandler by hurricane lamplight at all. And so it proved to be.

How does she know these things? How does she see them so clearly so long before they happen? What is the process? How can I find it out?

I got a recorded message last night that HQ had been ‘closed down’. I would be paid for what I had written, but not printed. This, for what it’s worth, is what it all too hopefully said.

Is there free speech in Fox News? Is there due process in Guantanamo Bay? For what crimes, precisely, were Qusay and Uday, and the little boy Mustafa, violently killed? When will families shot dead at checkpoints be compensated? How will this occur? If Iraqi elections are held, can Tariq Aziz stand for office? On what grounds can he, a courtly Christian Anglophile admired by the Pope, be excluded from his country’s democracy? What crime, precisely, is he guilty of? At what trial, and by what jury, was he found to be so? What crimes are al-Duri’s wife and little daughter being held for? Have they been threatened, or tortured? Have they been offered ten million dollars to betray their breadwinner? When will they be tried, and on what charge?

Why can’t David Hicks ring his mother? Why can’t Ali Bakhtiyari sleep with his wife? Why can’t Montezar Bakhtiyari, a brilliant student, know what school, and what country, he will be in next year? Where is this ‘freedom’ that George Bush speaks of so fervently and apparently sincerely, the ‘freedom’ American soldiers daily die for? What is it made of? How can it be tested? What does it taste like? Where can it be found?

These are not silly, shallow, childish quibbles by the latte-bibbing Sunday socialist commentariat. They go to the heart of what we are and what we are defending and how hereafter civilised Europeans, and civilised Asians, and civilised Africans think of us and what we have become.

For if freedom means anything it means everybody has it. It means, as Rousseau said, we are all born equal and remain equal in rights. It means David Hicks must be charged with something within a few days of his capture or let go. It means he can ring his lawyer, and plan his defence, as surely as Michael Jackson or Rene Rivkin can.

It means David Hicks, too, cannot be imprisoned for having bad thoughts, for wishing America ill. He has to have killed someone, or hurt someone, in a peacetime situation. If he merely took up arms in defence of a legal government against a warlike, bunker-busting, illegal invader he must be let go. He cannot be tried for violent thoughts any more than Bill Leak can, or Craig Reucassel, or Phillip Ruddock, or Derryn Hinch. He has to have actually done some harm.

And the freedom everybody has also means you cannot bulldoze a block of flats because a bad person slept in it for a couple of nights, evicting into the street at an hour’s notice a twelve-year-old student with exams to study for. It means you cannot build an electric fence between a family and an olive grove they have owned for a thousand years. These measures are as wrong and as lawless and addled as bulldozing a motel Bob Brown slept in once, or bisecting the SCG with a stone wall to stop the leper-loving troublemaker Steve Waugh from playing cricket there.

Freedom has no exceptions. It means we all have a right to life, liberty, a lawyer, due process, a jury, a plea, a day in court. It means we cannot be ‘targeted’ for ‘assassination’ by any government. It means any government’s head can be charged with murder as Milosevic was, and Ceaucescu, and a court like the ICC can put him in the slammer for life. It means that Condoleezza Rice can be brought to trial for fraud, when she knowingly talked of uranium sales that did not happen, and used them as grounds for violent aerial bombardments in which three thousand children died. It means George Bush can be sued for libel by Saddam Hussein, who agreed to debate that libel when Dan Rather asked him to on NBC, and for groundless, baseless torture by David Hicks, and for grievous bodily harm by the child whose arms were blown off in a war that had no legal basis or factual cause. It means ‘collateral damage’ is a concept allowable only in wars the UN, or NATO, or ANZUS, or the ICC approves.

That’s if you’re serious about freedom of course, and human rights, and democratic process and justice and fair play. George Bush isn’t, however eloquently he speaks of it, and his family never was. His grandfather Prescott funded Hitler. His father George H.W. headed the CIA and approved assassinations. His brother Jeb threw tens of thousands of Blacks off the Florida rolls, and refused to let thousands of other Blacks vote. He himself arranged for twenty-three Bin Ladens to leave America and so evade close questioning within a week of 9/11. His father gets millions as a ‘political consultant’ from the undemocratic Saudi Royal Family. His Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld helped fund the tyrant Saddam Hussein. His lawyer James A. Baker (probably) bought Judge Scalia’s vote, and with it a handy presidency for George. His minders covered up his criminal record, his (probable) cocaine habit, his year AWOL from the Air Force Reserve, his alcoholism, his dyslexia, his crazed religious witterings. If he believes in freedom it’s the freedom to fudge the truth, and ‘privatise’ another nation’s oil, and drop-kick billions to his mates, and kill any fucker who gets in his way. I’m not sure he also believes in slaughtering the heathen, but he certainly holds that it’s only by Christ you can get to heaven, and heaven is full of rich Texans but closed to Hindus, Wahabis, Catholics, homosexuals and other dupes of Satan, unless they see Jesus’ light on their deathbed and become fundamentalist Christians in the nick of time. Otherwise they fry in hell.

Can you believe in freedom and hellfire simultaneously? I don’t think so. Freedom means choice and hellfire means strict obedience to a set of tough rules on lifestyle or eternal torture follows. Freedom means freedom to worship and hellfire means you worship my way, buster, or else.

So Operation Iraqi Freedom is a big lie too, probably, as big a lie as Operation Infinite Justice, whose name was rapidly, nervously changed because it was so absurd. Words like Freedom, Justice, Democracy wobble and blur and morph into other words, like Pre-emption and Security and Border Protection, and soon we are blind to all words and bay in darkness for a light no longer there.

(We protect our borders by changing where they are, discuss. And whoever won’t move them round like us are ‘soft on border protection’, discuss. In Duck Soup Groucho Marx, madcap ruler of Freedonia, had a similar sense of cartography.)

Words have to mean what they usually mean or our thinking goes into whiteout, like the brain under dementia, and you start to sound like John Howard who has always malnourished words, especially adjectives, or massaged them to death. He said for instance of Bush’s trip to London, ‘I find it bizarre, and even obscene, that you can have two hundred thousand people demonstrating against the democratically elected leader of the largest nation in the world.’ Well, no, it’s not the largest country, China is. And he wasn’t democratically elected, he got his lawyers to stop the counting when Gore was about to overtake him. And it isn’t bizarre, he started an unlawful war that killed about sixty thousand people (or so some plausibly say). That’s more than the number of American dead in Vietnam, and people often demonstrate against this level of slaughter, so it isn’t really bizarre. And it isn’t really obscene; but blowing sleeping children into chunks of meat by rocket fire, now that’s obscene. So look at him, he’s lost all control of his adjectives and this is our Prime Minister. And it wouldn’t have happened in any other era, when the language still meant something and journalists watched over it jealously and strictly.

They don’t do this much any more. If they did they would have picked up a few more big lies, like the one about the little boy whose eyes were gouged out while his parents watched appalled. What is this little boy’s name they would have asked, and when can we see his parents, or some witness, interviewed about the incident on television? Or like the ‘rape rooms’ George Bush refers to so lasciviously. Where are they? How big are they? How are they furnished? Can we see some photos? Can we talk to some girl who was raped in one of them? A hundred girls perhaps. Of course not. These, like the Belgian babies spitted on German bayonets in August 1914, are the usual foul falsehoods told by the dimwitted arseholes in charge of a war. And it’s a pity.

And propagandists as fatheaded as this still shriek of the cause of freedom. Well, it doesn’t seem much like freedom to the two hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers Paul Bremer sacked and now can’t feed their families. It doesn’t seem much like freedom to the hundred thousand mothers, fathers and siblings and the four hundred thousand cousins of the corpses killed in the firefights, the air raids and the checkpoint shootings. It doesn’t seem much like freedom to the eighty thousand mutilated or traumatised by the rocket bombing. It doesn’t seem much like freedom to the sixty thousand dead, or the twenty thousand dead, whatever the loathsome statistic is; it might be only eighteen thousand dead. Yet Bush still uses the word as though it still has meaning and reality, and he may even believe he can spell it, but hellfire has meaning and reality for George Bush too. And Christ’s resurrection, and our need to drink his blood. And the Devil that makes you gay, or a drunkard like George used to be. And that far green heaven full of Texans with not a turban in sight.

I know this is no way to wish you Happy New Year but we’ve had a lousy stinking, bitterly testing annus horribilis and we won’t get over it for quite a while. So much that was fought for over centuries — habeas corpus, the right to stay silent and ring a lawyer, the right to photograph a coffin coming home, to broadcast a funeral, to broadcast, if they’re of interest, some gruff defiant words from Saddam or Osama, the right to take sides in a foreign conflict without the threat of arrest, the right to speak up against a stupid leader, the right to flee the Taliban and not be punished for it, the right to spend your childhood unimprisoned, the right to be rescued from shipwreck at sea — have been softly, shruggingly, swiftly, glibly surrendered. And we won’t get over it for quite a while.

And it’s a pity.

The chess move made by Obama yesterday, on the anniversary of the killing of Bin Laden, which was the release of some of the Evil One’s plans to target America and leave other countries alone, would be enough to defeat Mitt Romney on its own were this a normal year.

Romney after all said it was not worth spending all that money in order to target ‘just one man’. And so he showed himself, in American terms, on the John Wayne meter, or the Clint Eastwood meter, or the Arnold Schwarzenegger shakedown, some fraction of a dithering wimp without ‘the right stuff’ to command a nation at war with eternal vigilant slithering evil and a skulking terrorist under every virgin daughter’s bed, not now anyway, not this year, my fellow Americans, not this year when the chips were down, and America itself at risk from nuclear-armed jihadist fanatics as never before.

But it’s not a usual political year, and neither was the last, I suspect; no, hell, I know. Obama, the Black Messiah, the Brother From Another Planet, has not solved everything and has proved to be as vulnerable to the Congress numbers as any other human President. He has lost the Magical Realism he and his vaulting rhetoric ran and won on, and the ‘uppity nigger’ factor has resurged, in the way it tends to do, in the guise of Leftism and Socialism and fiscal incompetence and social disorder, in a country built on black slavery. And he has, as they say in America, a ways to go.

Still, it’s a good chess move, and the Fox News attacks on him (how dare he exploit this tragic anniversary and ‘play politics’ with what should be, my fellow Americans, a sacred occasion like, oops, 9/11?)  will be mitigated soon, or soon enough, by the daily diminishment of Rupert Murdoch, that ‘unfit person’ to run anything, whose interference in politics is becoming a retrospective abomination and whose name is now, in some countries, if not the US as yet, as toxic as Richard Nixon’s in 1974.

Romney’s homosexual associate Richard Grenell, whom he begged to stay on, doesn’t help him too much either. He looks a little unmanly, a little indecisive, a little pale and patched-up with facial surgery and hair implants and fake tan over his freckles, a bit like an also-ran.

There are some states that are still too close to call, Florida in particular. And the Mormon Factor still to play out.

Let’s see how it goes.

I have banned Terrance for life, effective two pm Friday, about the time Labour wins back most of the councils of England, though not Scotland, and possibly, just possibly, London.

All other irritating respondents are banned until June 25. They know who they are.

Jim has improved and is for the moment forgiven, and may continue if he stays literate, spaced and grammatical.

Terrance is banned for life because he told eighty lies about me and would not retract them. These suggested my entire ouevre is about young women fucking middle aged men. In eighty instances this is not so. It occurs in A Very Good Year only. It is mooted in Goodbye Paradise, by the young girl, not the man, and refused by the man. He continued however to say this over many responses, providing no evidence and getting it always wrong despite my copious instances of certain proof it was not so.

He also said Mel Gibson, a prominent benefactor of many Jewish technicians, actors, writers and producers (he cast a Synagogue-attending woman from the Jewish State Theatre of Bucharest as the Virgin Mary) and a plain supporter, in his current Maccabees project, of Zionism, should be ‘fucked up the arse and parachuted into Iran’ and there, presumably, hanged, which is under Australian law an incitement to terrorism, and refused to apologise for this crime against the state or significantly retract it.

In this, he overstepped the mark, and is elsewhere so enmeshed in lies and what seems to me political sabotage ( he claims Christopher Pyne will suicide because I said he was ‘mincing and sinister’) and is therefore banned forever with no appeal.

Hundreds of thousands of you may disagree with this, and plead for his life, but this will avail him nothing.

I know a fucking fool when I see one, and he is it.

His ghost may be heard as you pass beside the billabong, but not by me.

The Murdoch story may not end soon but it does afford Labor here and Labour there a good chance of retaining, and regaining, power.

Cameron, there, is enmired and cannot, may not, survive past the Tory Conference in September when he will be trailing Labour by thirteen points (he was trailing by eleven yesterday).

It would be wise therefore if Ed Milliband (aka Mr Bean) invited Nick Clegg to be Prime Minister.

The arrangement could be, as it ofttimes is in Israel, that Clegg reign in Downing Street for a year, then Bean for a year, then Clegg for eight months and call the election on Thursday, May 6, 2015. The Lib Dem vote would go up from the 8 percent it is now, Labour would win outright, bring in Proportional Representation, and the Tories, under Boris Johnson (or Hugh Grant, or Dawn French) by then, go into the dustbin of history.

In Australia the government could announce a Senate Enquiry into the influence of Murdoch — an unfit, creepy fellow — on the Australian political parties and their policies. Hawke would be found culpable, Whitlam too a little, and Rudd quite a bit, but Howard whom Rupert urged into the Iraq as he did Blair on false evidence, and Abbott, now in league with him — and the sinister, mincing Christopher Pyne — may well be found to be in criminal territory and go to gaol.

Pyne may be shown, or may not, to have conspired with Murdoch persons to put an agent provocateur in Slipper’s way with a view to later blackmail or vote manipulation. You never know.

It may not be so. But you never know.

An Enquiry, anyway, would consume public interest as the Cabcharge Horror never has. Or the Melbourne Hooker Holocaust now discomfiting Craig.

It is curious that Labor does not see, here, that the situation has changed, and the adjective ‘toxic’, now, after Thursday last, applies to Murdoch as it did thirty years ago to Richard Nixon, and to nobody else now living on this Earth.

He should be asked to appear before the Senate and say who, in that building, his friends are.

And Abbott and Pyne can either speak up for him, or speak up against him.

Either way they lose.

Tom Watson MP, whom the Murdoch people sought to blackmail and harass, put it best I think when he with characteristic plainness in the House of Commons yesterday said:

‘Everybody in the world knows who is responsible for the wrongdoing at News Corporation: Rupert Murdoch. More than any other individual he is to blame. Morally, the deeds are his. He paid the piper, and called the tune. It is his company, his culture, his people, his business, his crimes, his profits, his power.’

Publish it not in Gath, he might have added, lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice.

And so it goes.

(From Night Thoughts In Time Of War)

Sunday, 14th September, 2003

Johnny Cash died on Friday and the dying Clayton grieved for him. In his wine-dark baritone lay a deep disgust at the way things were: the working class wage, the tenuousness of marriage, the Law that scooped up the fragile and in Folsom Prison buggered and beat them into a dim, scarred, broken-toothed memory of the boy they were and the man they might have been. His like Clayton’s was a male world, one whose wordless drunken bondings reaching back through convict brute loyalties past the plains of Troy to early Cro-Magnon campfires. The male he spoke and sang for was the man Tammy Wynette stood by: uncomprehending, two-fisted, fibro-bound and on occasions wife-beating, one who then sobbed in the morning and kissed the eye he had blacked. Raymond Carver man; Larry McMurtry man; Tom Waits man; the man Bob Mitchum and, of course, John Clayton played so well.

I spent four hours with Clayton yesterday and found he was able to talk, for a change, as well as he always did. His mum Flo watched and his sister Gab rushed about fixing pillows, getting tea and massaging his toes but his clear proletarian mind cut through all that and I heard a voice authentic as Paul Keating’s, or Paul Hogan’s or John Williamson’s, roaming through his life, the women he might have ended up with (and were now in his extremity flooding round him and saying sorry) and the mates he held high in his heart. I’d begun to write a song about him, and had a draft in an inside pocket, one that would sing him down, as it were, to a suitable sub-Irish twangling tune, but it wasn’t ready yet. I kept beginning to go but he kept demanding I stay. At one point I said,

‘What’s the time frame here, Clayton? What time do they usually wheel you away and put you down?’

‘Put me down? Give us a break.’

‘I meant, you know, like putting a baby down.’

‘Yeah, or a dog.’

He said it humorously but that of course was what, when the bone cancer pain increased beyond enduring and the Breakthrough liquids he drank were no longer enough, they would finally, sadly, do. In two or three weeks now. I kissed his forehead and left quickly. It was okay for me, I was having the talks with him, and the contact as I massaged his toes and held his hand, that got me through it but for him, as he faced the onrushing dark and coped with blathering friends, what was it like? I drove for an hour, had a Newport pizza and soon was home, and watching BBC.

Monday, 15th September, 2003, 12.35 a.m.

The Americans have shot and killed eight Iraqi cops who were chasing in commandeered pick-up trucks some fleeing thieves on a dark night of no electric streetlamps (there are rarely any street lamps in Fallujah) unaware of whom they were killing. They apologised, called it friendly fire, arrested no-one, forgave themselves, the way you do. At the rifle-firing funeral a day later someone shouted, ‘Save your bullets for the chests of your enemies!’

Under this augury the Security Council met and Colin Powell asked Villepin, Fischer and others to send in soldiers to help out in Iraq, stipulating, of course, that the US remain in charge of law and order, peacekeeping and the administration of justice, brazenly inferring they were good at it. They told him to go to buggery and posed beside him on a downward-moving escalator, sure as hell that Bush’s approval, now on 48, would hereafter sink so fast that he’d cop the most humiliating terms by November; that’s if he’s in any fit state by then to put one foot in front of another when walking, a task that visibly exercises his concentration lately. On 9/11 he showed slurring, flushed, vague-eyed signs of being back on the sauce.

How must it be for an alcoholic to face unbidden dreams of dismembered children and brave young Fallujah allies with their faces blown away in the watches of the night, howling to Laura for Xanax and fighting the pillow for dreamless sleep. Enough to make him want, I surmise, to drink more Old Crow Whiskey to forget.

The Carr-for-Canberra story slummocks along. Carr in front of a fire engine unwittily sought to ‘hose it down’. Costello smirking said of Crean’s troubles that it wouldn’t be a truck that ran him over but a Carr. Talk is beginning of a December election, Crean losing and Carr moving over thereafter. Bodisco hailed this scenario but I called him a fool, saying anyone but Crean could win for Labor.

‘No way,’ Bodisco said. ‘Our polling shows Melham, Latham and Murphy would lose their Sydney seats and in Queensland Swan and Rudd lose theirs whoever’s in charge.’

‘So Carr would gladly then take charge of a bleeding corpse?’ I asked.

‘No he wouldn’t,’ said Bodisco startled.

‘Of course he wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘You speak, Bodisco, of catastrophe.’

I slept pretty shallowly beside my little radio and All Things Considered, BBC World and Radio Netherlands noted that Anna Lindh was still dead, Sweden’s euro vote now fifty-fifty and in the Persian Gulf fifty-seven thousand unslaughtered sheep yearning for a port, any port, in which they could have their throats cut facing Mecca as the good Lord, aka Allah, intended.

In their plight I saw international jackal capitalism summed up. The crowded baa-ing shipload of doomed refugees. Their babies dying, not knowing why. The bureaucratic finding that if some sheep had Scabby Mouth all may have it. The captain’s protest that they weren’t our sheep, they belonged to the Saudi who bought them. The refusal to ‘euthanase’ them, putting them out of their misery because they were, hot damn it, worth money, eight million dollars if delivered alive to somebody. The spectre of fifty-seven thousand woolly floating corpses like an endless cloud reflected in the ocean.

I thought about the fate of the animals we eat and how bewildering it must be for them to be so crowded, like Jews on the train to Belsen, multitudinously side by side with no room to sit or lie down, separated from their relatives, looking for them, baa-ing to Allah like Christ on the cross Eloi! Eloi! Lama sabbachthani! My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? Eloi and Allah: the same word of course, in Aramaic and Arabic. I never noticed it before.

I bought the Koran today at the Avalon Bookoccino and am reading it absorbedly. A bedside sample.

Believers, eat of the wholesome things with which We have provided you and give thanks to God, if it is Him you worship.

He has forbidden you carrion, blood, and the flesh of swine; also any flesh that is consecrated other than in the name of God. But whosoever is driven by necessity, intending neither to sin nor to transgress, shall incur no guilt. God is forgiving and merciful.

Those that suppress any part of the Scriptures which God has revealed in order to gain some paltry end shall swallow nothing but fire into their bellies. On the Day of Resurrection God will neither speak to them nor purify them. Woeful punishment awaits them.

Such are those that barter guidance for error and forgiveness for punishment. God has revealed the Book with the truth; those that disagree about it are in extreme schism.

Righteousness does not consist in whether you face towards the East or the West. The righteous man is he who believes in God and the Last Day, in the angels and the Book and the prophets; who, though he loves it dearly, gives away his wealth to kinsfolk, to orphans, to the destitute, to the traveller in need and to beggars, and for the redemption of captives; who attends to his prayers and render the alms levy; who is true to his promises and steadfast in trial and adversity and in times of war. Such are the true believers; such are the God-fearing.

Strange to see my famous phrase The True Believers was actually coined by Mohammed fifteen hundred years ago; but we had, I guess, a fair bit in common. The mental world I was raised in was much like his, the aroma of an Afterlife more true, more involving, more engulfingly eternal than the world I so briefly lived in. When death is not even a detail, not even an interruption of the foredoomed journey you are on, a journey designed by God Himself ten thousand years before you were born who on earth can stop you? Who dare even try?

A reasonable thing for Albo to do in the next day or so would be to look up slowly and contemptuously and say to seventy percent of the reporters in his eyeline: ‘Do you have complete confidence in your leader Rupert Murdoch?’ And if they say yes, then say ‘Please leave the room. You will be let back in when he is cleared of all suspicion of wrongdoing.’

And if they say no, say ‘Then how credible are you? Get out of my sight. You have knowingly worked for years for a monster. What sort of craven grubs are you?’

He should also ask Abbott to summarise, now, for the House, what discussions he has had with Murdoch in the last year or so, and if he will cut all ties henceforth with this ‘unfit person’, lately beating off two thousand lawsuits from bruised, abashed and stricken people all swearing he, or his gauleiters, invaded their emails and their private lives and brought them each by different means to vast, heartbreaking, midnight anguish and some to ponder suicide.

Will he cut off all ties with him, or will he continue them? Take a minute or two to answer this.

And if he will not, will the Speaker (Mr Slipper) ban him from the chamber for, say, six months?

The Murdoch taint and smell is a far, far fouler one than those attending the Health Services Union, or any misuse of Cabcharges.

This is a seminal villain of the Western world in this last half century, second only to Saddam Hussein.

And Tony Abbott counts him as a friend.

He should think well at this fork in the road which way he should go.

Canguro May 1, 2012

Sounds like it ought to be watched.

Thirty or so years ago there were relatively few Asians working in the prostitution business, but more recently an explosion of women from Vietnam and China work on their backs to pay the bills… an unintended consequence of the difficulties of surviving in this expensive country. Open any suburban newspaper and the personals ads are dominated with offerings by Asians for a range of services. Chinese students used to living on 20 or 30 rmb a day get a rude awakening when they arrive in Australia for their uni studies and find they need twenty times that amount to survive.

It’s not a case of pleasure first, and thanks for the money, but a decision difficultly arrived at, and in particular in the case of Asian women the damage to their sense of cultural propriety is immense – the consequences of repeated casual sex with strangers posing a barrier to their chances of having a traditional relationship in the sense that they would have understood or expected prior to the transition into selling sex for survival.

The sex-for-sale phenonemon has a powerful grip on man’s imagination, whether Asian beauties or blonde Eastern Europeans or Latinas and dusky-skinned Africans – there’s a demand for it all and the pull for services will never cease.

Alistair May 1, 2012

They both sound like incredible films, I’ll try and find them this weekend.

Strangely enough I’m writing a law assignment on prostitution at the moment, I’m arguing that it should be legal but regulated to keep the corruption and health problems to a minimum. Especially corruption, I dug up the Fitzgerald inquiry report and the prostitution ring being run by the police/government was just staggering.

Also free will, people should be allowed to be sex workers if they want to. The journal article I’m supposed to respond to makes the argument that all prostitution is degrading and a breach of human rights regardless of the consent of the individual prostitute. Interesting, but the author has given herself the right to speak for all sex workers everywhere, but if there’s even one sex worker who disagrees (almost certain) then she has no more right to enforce that view on everyone than the willing sex worker has to enforce their view on the majority (to slightly misquote John Stuart Mill).

As Canguro says above, prostitution exists and has existed in almost every society in history, I doubt you could stamp it out even in the most extreme of police states.

Where it all falls down, of course, is that the stigma is still there. I think it’s slowly changing but it is hypocritical in the extreme to make this a legalised and regulated industry and then shame the women who participate in it.

As for Aussie films, I think I posted somewhere on here before that I’d like to see a few more conventional/mainstream films made here. I know great, meaningful cinema is vitally important but why can’t we have some action/romantic comedy/thriller/etc movies set here in australia, with australian characters but not necessarily delving into the “australian story/psyche/zeitgeist’.

For example, “The Raid” an Indonesian film, written and shot in indonesia (although the director may have been French), one of the best action movies I have ever seen.

Canguro May 1, 2012

re. ” …why can’t we have some action/romantic comedy/thriller/etc movies set here in australia” … I watched, last night, three movies on the computer, a late-night session that ended some time after five this morning.

Two of these three were the 2009 piece The Hangover and its 2011 sequel, The Hangover II. There’s nothing particularly deep in them, they’re funny at times, employing experienced comedians in key roles, and presenting scenarios that we can all relate to in terms of dumb things done when drunk.

What astounded me when reading the background was how much money the films had made, the first, a $35 million budget and a box office return of $467 million, and the sequel cost $80 million for a $580 million return. Parse that into Australian cinematic probabilities and it might be do-able? Just a thought. Australians relate to being drunk & stupid.

Bob Ellis May 2, 2012

Careless Love opens on Thursday, May 17 at the Hoyts, Chatswood; the Paris at Fox Studios, Moore Park; the Randwick Ritz; the Nova, Carlton; the Palace Nova, Adelaide; the Blue Room, Brisbane; the State, Hobart; and the Classic, Elsternwick. It goes to the Chauvel, Paddington, on Thursday, May 24; and the Belgrave Cameo, Melbourne and the Cinema Paradiso, Windsor, Western Australia on Thursday, May 31.

Any interesting response to it, especially from those who have seen it, I will put up in this space and then another, for the next month; till, say June 10.

I think it is a tremendously good and and troubling film which raises questions about our society that we should carefully and urgently and guiltily look into.

Or perhaps you disagree.

It is a good day, I think, to begin some joining of the dots.

Rupert Murdoch, a man said this morning by a House of Commons Committee of Enquiry to be morally unfit to run an international media corporation, has been commissioning and concealing Newspolls that show a new party, the Katter Australian Party, doing as well as the Nationals and not even acknowledging its numerical existence, to the best of my belief. He is also behind, or involved in a plan to bring down Peter Slipper, as he brought down Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who would else today be President of France (to the best of my belief) with what may soon prove to be fabricated evidence of sexual harassment of one adult practising homosexual by another.

In this plan there SEEMS to be one Christopher Pyne, long thought to be ‘mincing’ and effeminate by about eight million of his adversaries, who spent some time over drinks with Ashby before he lodged his civil, not criminal, claim against Slipper for a suggestive text message or two and an open bathroom door. He did not speak to this homosexual about this aspect of his homosexual flat-mate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, at any time in that conversation, he said, why would he? As Master of Opposition Business in that House, and one who was frequently thrown out of it by Slipper, why would he?

It is thought by Murdoch, and Murdoch’s people, that these text-messages and a reported conversation or two are reason enough for a government to resign; and to call an election, moreover, in which it would be annihilated; and he said so in a public statement a day ago. Call an election, he said. It’s what the Australian people want.

Keep joining the dots; and pray keep in mind that this is a man alleged by the Mother of Parliaments to be ‘unfit to run an international organisation’ and therefore liable, under Delaware law, for immediate imprisonment for at least a decade without appeal for being head of an entity that corrupts, or seeks to corrupt, foreign officials.

Like, say, Scotland Yard.

And we are to believe, he says, that the Prime Minister, not he, must resign from office because of the ‘stench of immorality’ and chaos hanging like a thundercloud over her government while he, with two thousand lawsuits pending against his international entity, should stay in place. Ten text messages outweigh two thousand lawsuits, every time.

What then should the Gillard Government do? Well, it might ask Tony Abbott when last he spoke to Rupert Murdoch, and what they spoke of, what undertakings, spoken or signalled or hinted, were colluded or nudged or winked between them; and what Abbott then said to Pyne.  And then ask Pyne what he said to Ashby. And then ask Ashby what he said to Pyne.

They are all reasonable questions when the dots are joined and the consequent line goes back inch by inch to a man unfit to head a media megacorporation because of his previous nod-and-wink arrangements with powerful governments –  Whitlam’s, Fraser’s, Thatcher’s, Nixon’s, Blair’s, Howard’s, Bush’s, Rudd’s — and his people’s hacking and bugging of thousands of celebrities and crime victims. They should find out if a corrupt arrangement now exists between Murdoch and the Liberal Party and, in Queensland, the LNP, and if the relevant parties should be brought go trial.

They might also ask the ABC to divest itself of its partnership, in ABC Books, with the Murdoch company Harper Collins;  or suspend it until it is known how corrupt that arrangement in the past it has been: whether, for instance, the rejection of the Alan Jones book Jonestown by Chris Masters had anything to do with a Murdoch intervention; it was, after all a puzzling thing to do, was it not, to commission a book and then, without stated reason, reject it?

There will be days and days and days like this.

Discuss.

All of the usual components of Wish You Were Here, a melancholy Cambodian-Balmain thriller with just a splash of Antonioni (one of our tourists is missing, how shall the future be faced?) by Keiren Darcy-Smith who directs and Felicity Price, who plays the lead, are very good indeed: the acting, directing, realistic dialogue, photography, editing and so on. Price, the actress, is remarkable as Alice the pregnant heroine, Joel Edgerton, as her buffeted guilty husband Dave, impelling as Brando.

But it is very hard to follow, not just because it has a secretive premise, but because of narrative incompetence in the script (Price, Darcy-Smith) that no producer should have green-lighted.

The story flashes back a lot, but we are rarely entirely sure, when a flashback begins, that we are in Cambodia. A beach that could be Byron Bay appears, or a sky that could be Manly. No temples are shown, no vividly costumed by-standers, no blank-eyed Asiatic statuary, and for half a minute we don’t know where we are.

And all the characters, not just Jeremy, the missing one (Anthony Starr), but the heroine Alice (Price), her sister Holly (Isabel Austin-Boyd) and Dave (Edgerton), that is, the principals, are equally mysterious and stubbornly unknowable. Dave has a high-paying job, but we don’t know what it is. An architect? A drug importer? Alice is a teacher of some sort, the subject unknown. They have two small children, and she is pregnant, but she binge-drinks, knowingly damaging the foetus. She doesn’t mind her sister Holly fucking Jeremy, a casual drug-taking acquaintance, but is so incensed when she finds out Holly — her sister, her own siste — fucked, once, while drugged, her husband, she breaks up the marriage, proposes to sell the two-million-dollar Birchgrove mansion and wreck the lives of two tiny children while pregnant with a third, and he, Dave, agrees to this and her mother (Tina Bursill) doesn’t intervene and plead with her, why would she, what does the wrecking of the lives of four of her descendanys have to do with her; or even turn up in the movie again.

What is wrong with this woman? Nothing, Price, the author and star avers, nothing at all, she is acting rationally. She is very, very mysterious, anyway, and no woman in any audience in any nation of the world would agree with, or even understand, what the fuck she is doing.

She drinks, and fights, and has a road accident, and loses (I think) the baby, which is prematurely delivered, at twenty-eight weeks, and breathes in a humidicrib for a while and then…vanishes. No doctor mentions she has died. No funeral occurs. For a while we think she is in hospital, being looked after, and will be home soon. At no point does Dave remonstrate with Alice for being drunk, and mad, and careless at the wheel, and killing their baby. She is above criticism, it seems. And he’d better mind his mouth, or she will criticise him.

This film is very, very puzzling, and, though perfectly acceptable were it a twenty minute student film, it is, oh Christ, a feature film, and it has to have a resolution. Jeremy is missing, and we eventually find out what happened to him in Cambodia, where he was killed. And we see who killed him. And Dave, a witness, doesn’t say who it was to the police. Why would he? It won’t stop Cambodia being a fucked, corrupt, child-prostituting, gangsterised slum hell-hole. Why bother? Dave must be the most piss-weak hero in fiction since Porky Pig.

Good narrative screenwriting requires, first, that we know the moral landscape in which its people move. Do Alice and Dave take drugs, domestically? We aren’t told. Were they virgins on their wedding night? Impossible to say. Why does she risk an international flight through tropic turbulence and storms while visibly pregnant? Is she crazy? Why smash up everything over a fuck with one sister on holiday when both the parties were stoned? Is this not, my masters, the Birchgrove way?

Birchgrove looks lovely, and so does Cambodia, and some contrast would be nice if only to establish where we are. Where did Dave get all this money? Why does his wife have to work while seven months pregnant?

This film, whose dialogue is excellent, and whose acting is universally superb, even that of the little children, and the Cambodian whoremongers, will lose a lot of money. It could have been sorted at the script stage. But the two scriptwriters were too powerful in the structure of the company. It is, in the end, I fear, a folie a deux, in the way that, say, Tass and Parker’s films never were, nor Watt’s and McGuinness’s, and this tendency, in this couple, should be closely watched, and stomped on, in the future.

For twenty odd years John Duigan’s The Year My Voice Broke was the best Australian film — till Beneath Hill 60, Snowtown and Samson and Delilah overtook it, in my view. And Careless Love, his latest, is in its league. Like most of his work it has confidence, clarity, wit, the range and force of a novel, superb individuated performances and a morally troubling narrative.

It is about a university student who works as a prostitute part-time; not, as is often the case, to pay her fees and rent, for she has a scholarship, but to send money back to her father, a laid-off worker still waiting for his coastal north Queensland factory to reopen, who is now behind in his mortgage and may lose the family house, and, as a Vietnamese boat-person grown old and pathetic, will get no mercy from the smarmy white bank manager if he defaults.

Linh, the student, finds in the course of the film a boyfriend, Jack, who does not know what she is doing at night — she claims she is in the library, studying late — nor suspect her of any romantic duplicity, though he himself is not quite finished, it seems, with a former love he has difficulty shedding. Linh tries to keep her two different lives ‘in different parts of my head’. She whores, she reads, she takes notes, she shares a bed with her mild-mannered bloke, she has sex with him, she has nightmares, he observes her nocturnal distress, she is always short of sleep, she comes late to classes, she is sometimes in physical danger, once with half a football team.

She has for a while a relationship, paid but affectionate, with a bearded American painter and art collector and winter surfer of indeterminate age who may be CIA; and she copes, narrowly, with her two lives, visiting her father and mother and brother in Queensland and lying, effectively, about her arrangements. She has the makings of a good university tutor, a moral philosopher, an actress, a novelist, an activist, a party leader. And her father, believing she is a ‘fashion model’, lavishly paid, continues to service the mortgage with her large mysterious earnings, not questioning her too much, not wanting to know.

Though rarely naked in the scenes we are shown, we sense that she is good at her job. She answers with wit but remains submissive, plays dumb and virginal, when this is required, with a clanking heavy accent in pidgin English. She plays smart when that is amusing to them, before she submits to their gross penetrations and impotent failures. She hears out the lofty theories of the obese, effusive dimwits whom she eventually goes down on. She plays, for an hour or so, the good wife, the mistress, the incestuous daughter, the naughty smackable schoolgirl; and then she goes back to her studies.

And this for a hundred years or so has been, I suppose, a common story of our modern age, a frequent unprinted memoir of tens of thousands of ‘liberated’ girls in other towns, more so since foreign students have studied here and needed, from time to time, to send money back to their families. The division of self it requires is easier of course in another country, a far-off city, a metropolitan drug-affected student coffee-house culture. Sometimes it goes no further than nude modelling. Sometimes it includes blue movies; sometimes urination; chains; whips; thongs; tattoos. But it is always, always, in whatever decade, an avid swift seizing of the brief and fleeting interim of youth and beauty and Fast Lane living to make money out of it while it lasts, money you then spend elsewhere — on drugs or on jewellery sometimes, no doubt, but sometimes, as here, on what might be called, without scorn, ‘family values’.

As befits the story, we sometimes do not know if she is lying, and we do not find out. As befits the story, we see an older, coarser Asian woman in the same trade, a version of what she may turn into, being buggered by two cops over a car boot and being unable to help her. Always a violent end is near and she, like the raucous older strumpet should get out fast. Next week, perhaps. Next Tuesday.

The many male customers are drawn in depth in varying degrees of repulsiveness, pathos, perversity and physical threat. We fear she may be killed, and know she shares that feeling. We are sometimes reassured by her pimp Dion, played by David Field, a brutish, wily, stoic, working-class, fair-go Aussie man who knows she will scarper eventually and looks out for her nonetheless, not himself having sex with her because that is not the deal; and by her CIA friend Luke, who brandishes a gruff Bogartish insouciance and will, we believe, look after her. But we always fear for her.

We realise with a shock towards the end that the shadowy, secretive sub-Kafka nightmare she is in is a legal business venture, responsibly administered by tax-paying citizens who put their girls through compulsory government health-checks; and the money she earns by, say, test-driving a new vibrator in a room full of beaming coked-up wanking students is not ill-gotten or unacceptable. It is a normal, accustomed, sanctioned, free market business pursuit in a global economy.

Which raises the question, of course, of what in fact is wrong with what she is doing? Anything? And why should she lose her future in academia or suburbia or true love if she is found out? And will she, in fact? Or is the world a little different now? A little more tolerant? Maybe. Maybe it is.

This is a wonderful film, raising as all fine drama does big questions of how a society is run, where justice truly lies and what are the lineaments of evil and good we see overlapping and intermingling in characters here before us. And who among us if used against his deserts would ‘scape whipping, as Hamlet of Elsinore asks of Ophelia, the pregnant girl he carelessly whanged and cast aside.

It is, one might venture to say, John Duigan’s companion-piece, thirty years on, of his earlier, grimier urban fable Winter Of Our Dreams, about a sadder, smack-smitten, lovelorn hooker played by Judy Davis and her nervy junkie roommate, played by Baz Luhrman. They should be seen soon in a double feature, as the measure of a calm and capable auteur whose work, now and then, touches the hem of greatness.

The lighting and composition of Katherine Millis is majestic, assured and revelatory. It is like seeing Sydney for the first time, with its tropical palms and unexpected night harbour vistas, its candlelit dinner parties, morning joggers and sudden thundering rainstorms. The set design by Colin Gibson is wonderful, though a fair bit of it seems to be Duigan’s unaltered Coogee flat, a work of art itself which he uses deftly and modestly.

Peter O’Brien, who plays Luke, has an impact like George C. Scott and may be a future superstar. Nammi Le, who plays Linh, is one I think already. All the parts are well played, Andrew Hazzard especially as Jack who is a ringer for the young Peter Weir and will appeal as Hugo Weaving did to the next generation of doctors’ wives, and Ivy Mak, as the older prostitute Mint, a coarse, unstaunchable, vulgar tower of strength.

Duigan’s script is as good as anything by Ruth Prawer Jubhvala, the adaptation, it seems, of a classic novel as yet unwritten, and his direction as quiet and measured and unostentatious and lucid as that of Louis Malle or James Ivory.

That Screen Australia would not fund it, not award even five dollars to it, is a national scandal. That it was nonetheless made is a miracle.

One must choose with care the words with which one speaks of Winter of our Dreams. It is a special movie, European in its mood and pacing, yet very true to a recognisable Australia at a particular point in its history, which is now. It’s a chronicle of certain conversations, largely at night, out of which comes a feeling of the age we are at present enduring, the Fraser age, a time of dwindling options, with true hope gone. It has the exactness of a good short poem and the impact of a great piece of music. A wonderful song, Graham Lowndes’s ‘Till Time Brings Change’, climaxes the movie and in context over Judy Davis’s subtly beautiful altering face, transmits to us more than I would have thought possible from those ingredients.

The story in summary is well known by now. Rob MacGregor (Bryan Brown), a bookshop-owner, who is married to Annie (Cathy Downes), an academic and living in Balmain in a slightly over­emphatic open relationship, hears of the death of a girl he grew up with in Wagga and was connected with in his days as a student radical, and went to bed with once, but only once, twelve years before. He seeks to find out what happened to her, so he can write an article on the aftermath of certain student protesters like himself, which includes her story. He does this in part because his days of protest are at an end. It is the winter of his dreams. He plays computer chess with himself now. It’s the only adversary he has left.

A girl called Lou (Judy Davis), working as a street hooker in Kings Cross and addicted to heroin, tells him some of the missing story of Josie and her slow spiralling slide to purgatory. But she conceals a lot, particularly that she has the diaries that Josie kept in the days when she was in love with Rob and a disciple of his burning moratorium zeal. The diaries make her want to know Rob better, and she seeks him out in his Paddington bookshop and accompanies him to his over-tasteful tenement in Balmain and is shocked to find there that his wife, Annie, doesn’t mind her being there. She didn’t even know he had a wife, and with a whore’s residual puritanism (other people should be decent, because she is not) she feels an utter fool.

To make it worse, Rob won’t even sleep with her, the way he wouldn’t sleep with Josie, except for the one almost token night of weary defloration, and his relentless good manners, reticence and unwillingness to commit himself in any direction — not yes, or no, or even maybe, — begin to get to her the way the same things did to Josie, whose diaries we now hear more of. She becomes obsessed with Rob, and after slowly absorbing the intricacies of his open marriage (Annie setting off with nervous gaiety for a dirty weekend with a dim but beautiful male pupil), she tries to make him commit himself to her in the only way she knows, by going cold turkey at his house. She is trying to reform, you see, to make herself worthy of him. Needless to say it doesn’t work. On her departure Annie wonders sourly if she has stolen anything from the house.

Lou in pursuit of her dream then breaks off the grim prick-teasing relationship she has with Tim, her pusher (a stunning performance by Baz Luhrmann), and invites Rob to lunch in her grubby little room. He arrives to tell her he is going to play soccer with the Balmain Trots instead, and leaves her to ponder the neatly set little table, its bottle of wine and flowers. As Josie did, then, she wanders down to the docks where a sorry, threadbare group of uranium protesters still carry the flag of the future in the bitter cold. We sense from their worn and bloodshot faces that there is no hope. One of them, Jeannie Lewis, sings ‘Till Time Brings Change’. We watch Lou’s face. She thinks of suicide, of heroin, of joining them, of surviving, of giving up. We do not know what will happen to her. The film ends.

A few things should be remarked on apart from the courage of John Duigan and its producer Dick Mason, and the miracle of their low budget, and the excellence of Judy Davis’s sadly gleaming characterisation, which is as good as anything yet attempted by a woman performer on the English-speaking screen. One is that the film, despite her magnetic performance, is not about her but about him, and the kind of moral paralysis that comes over a man who has no more wars to go to. He can’t even attack his avowed promiscuity with any relish. He would rather go to bed with a book. It is also about how this kind of man can wreck the lives of his women: they reach for him, and find there’s nothing there. And they reach for him again.

In this role Bryan Brown gives his best and subtlest and tenderest and least self-serving performance; many Balmainites and Fitzroyites, confronted by it, have mistaken it for his worst. They have found his situation unbelievable too: an obedient wife on his instructions smilingly committing the compulsory adultery he no longer has any taste for. ‘My open marriage wasn’t like that’ is the brunt of their argument, ‘so this one can’t be true’. I find it chillingly familiar. Many of my friends were just like that. But then they were all in the ABC.

Another is that Duigan is choosing as a film form what is more or less a nocturne — certain conversations that take place mainly late at night when the mind is at its tenderest and awful things can be revealed — has put himself up against Ingmar Bergman. How, then, does he rate? Very well, I think. It’s certainly better than Autumn Sonata, The Touch, Hour of the Wolf and The Passion of Anna and not as good as Scenes From A Marriage. Well below Wild Strawberries. Not as funny as Smiles of a Summer Night. But it rates.

He has something of Bergman’s other quality too, that of a seer. He shows you how a whole society, at what Richard Nixon cagily called ‘this point in time’, and two whole generations tick. For it’s not just about the Balmain revolutionaries after the revolution has faded, when there are no more big brave causes left and the universe is shrinking; it’s also about the generation that came after them, for whom there were never any big brave causes to start with, only the dream that faded through high school of an honest job and the lure in an empty universe of the one devastating hit of smack that blows the soul to kingdom come, and the not-so-easy money that could be made to buy it from the fortune they were sitting on, and what became of them as one by one they died young, as do in that terrible litany at the end of the book all the friends of the authors of Puberty Blues, both of them now aged twenty-two: going on a hundred and five.

Judy Davis communicates all this, in a performance well nigh radioactive in the level of its telepathy, better than any read words or any heard song have done in our time. This, I think, is adequate praise. On Duigan, our one true native auteur, I reserve my final judgement. He is very good, and getting better, but he must not get cocky.

I mean that. Look what happened to Peter Weir.

On advisement by my lawyers and after a few Pernods with friends I have decided to commute the sentences of Simon, Frank and the others and ban them till only June 25. Until then I will ruthlessly erase whatever they send in.

If they are clever, and they get up very early, they will be visible for three or four hours.

But then they will be gone.

So let it be written, so let it be done.

It’s the Murdoch technique to announce a new rule, and pretend it’s always been in force. Yesterday it was declared by their people that a vote for a piece of government legislation should be rejected (it was not said how) by that government if the member of parliament in question was suspected of something or other but not charged with it yet.

This is a really new rule. Because when Mark Vaile and Alexander Downer were suspected of giving two hundred and ninety-seven million dollars to Saddam Hussein their votes were accepted, and not questioned, by John Howard or Peter Costello.

Tony Abbott did not speak up against their tainted votes, nor Eric Abetz.

They should reflect on this, I think.

Or perhaps you disagree.

And, oh yes. How do you, constitutionally, reject a vote on the floor of the House of a duly elected Member of Parliament? How do you do that? He can vote as he likes, can he not? What business is it of yours? The Speaker, perhaps, can throw him out. But why would she?

What an immense breach of the Constitution is being suggested here.

And not one reporter has taken note of it.

Discuss.

In a week when Rupert Murdoch said he had never asked a favour from a British Prime Minister, ever, it seems unusually dotty for the apparently intelligent Annabel Crabb to be touting the Murdoch line that there are no conspiracies, ever.

There are, in fact, a lot of conspiracies. The following twenty seem to be true.

(1) A CIA-Navy Seal conspiracy that took out Osama Bin Laden.

(2) A Blair-Bush-Rice-Rumsfeld-Murdoch-Howard conspiracy that bombed and shot up Iraq and killed or displaced four million people on fabricated evidence of atomic bombs that were not there.

(3) A conspiracy of Saudis that brought down the Twin Towers and gutted the Pentagon and caused a sort of World War that bombed, aberrantly, Kabul and killed or displaced a million Afghans.

(4) A conspiracy involving Linda Tripp, Kenneth Starr and Newt Gingrich that impeached Bill Clinton and sought to depose him over a legal act of sex with an adult, and instal as President Al Gore.

(5) A conspiracy of Kerr, Barwick, Murdoch, Withers and Fraser that destroyed Gough Whitlam.

(6)  A conspiracy involving Sirhan Sirhan — a Palestinian terrorist — and some unknown people, one of whom invited Bobby Kennedy into the kitchen where Sirhan shot him.

(7) A conspiracy involving J. Edgar Hoover, some FBI people and James Earl Ray that shot and killed Martin Luther King.

(8) A conspiracy involving Jack Ruby and some CIA and Mafia people (Jack was Mafia) that killed Lee Harvey Oswald.

(9) A conspiracy involving Oswald, some Cuban people, some CIA and some Mafia people that killed President Kennedy and washed the crime scene, a car, of its blood and bits of bullet and brain and destroyed the film of the autopsy.

(10) A conspiracy involving Robert Menzies and Lyndon Johnson that with a forged letter of invitation got Australia into the Vietnam War.

(11)  A conspiracy involving J. Edgar Hoover and some FBI people who hounded the ‘left-leaning’ Jean Seberg to suicide.

(12) A series of conspiracies involving Senator Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Darryl F. Zanuck, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan that destroyed the careers of hundreds of left-leaning directors, writers and actors in Hollywood.

(13) A conspiracy involving Harry S Truman and some State Department people that denied Charlie Chaplin his US passport, tore down his statues and ended, at 62, his Hollywood career.

(14) A conspiracy involving Rommel, Boenhoeffer, Von Stauffenberg and many, many army officers that failed to blow up Adolf Hitler.

(15) A conspiracy between Hitler and some army officers which began the unjustified assault on the Gdansk Post Office which began World War 2.

(16) A conspiracy of six young Serbian students who shot and killed Archduke Ferdinand and his bride and caused a war that killed fifty million people.

(17) A conspiracy of French army officers that framed, shamed and imprisoned Alfred Dreyfus.

(18) A conspiracy of disgruntled Southerners that killed President Abraham Lincoln and injured Secretary of State James Seward.

(19) A conspiracy involving Henry II and some knights that killed Thomas a’ Becket in his cathedral.

(20) A conspiracy of Senators that killed, with twenty-nine stab wounds, Julius Caesar.

A total of one hundred million people died as a result of these conspiracies and Annabel titters at the very idea that conspiracies exist. She has bought, it seems, the whole Murdoch mendacity hook, line and sinker.

It is very hard to think of a major negative event that was not the result of a conspiracy. The killing of John Lennon, two failed attempts on Gerald Ford and one on Ronald Reagan seem to have been by lone madmen, and, lately, Anders Breivik’s murder of eighty Young Labour people. Charles Bremer’s wounding of George Wallace…

But the list is at that point almost at an end.

One hundred million others died as a direct result of a conspiracy, or a number of conspiracies.

And Annabel, a nice girl, has been suckered in, as many have, by Rupert Murdoch.

And she should apologise for being so silly, and girly, and dim-witted, now.

Murdoch on Thursday said the world worked on scratched backs but he had never scratched one. David Cameron said today he had asked Murdoch for his support in the 2010 election but he, Murdoch, had asked for nothing in return. Murdoch, who made no protest when Gordon Brown was bugged in his car by Sky News, claims to have not known, and now to be shocked by, three thousand other acts of bugging and hacking by his people.

Lies as big as this are being told by Murdoch, his genial beam in place, and, though no-one in the world believes them, not one of the seven billion people on this planet, a form of ritual religious observance is taking place. His ten thousand reporters are behaving as though his testimony has credibility and his judgment, this last year, has been sound.

And they are simultaneously scoffing at Julia Gillard’s judgment and credibility, and are saying she should go because she has none, or very little.

The question they should be asked today by Swanny and Shorten and Albo is, ‘Do you have total confidence in Rupert Murdoch? Do you think he should go, or stay?’

The confusion on their twisted faces will be a rare joy to behold.

It is a fascinating moment in media history, much like the moment when Pius IX declared that he was infallible. The aghast genuflecting world-wide obeisance in his people made, at that point, his religion ridiculous. Evolution, he added, was wrong, just as Murdoch now says global warming is wrong; or the WMD may still be found; or James has more administrative ability than any other person available to do his job.

It is no accident Rupert is known as the Prince of Darkness. The Darkness is a biblical idea that means, at its heart, the Kingdom of Lying. He presides there, as has no other ruler since Octavian Caesar Augustus, the first man elected a god by a majority Senate vote.

Let us all bow down therefore and worship him, just a little while longer.

You too, Paul Kelly.

You too.

I have a twenty-year-old son and an eighteen-year-old daughter, and among their friends are some of the finest people I know. Their stoicism, their grace, their humour, the wily courage with which they have greeted the stacked deck that history has dealt them, undercuts any pride or smugness I might have, because they are better people.

I had a choice of careers, and they have none of that. I knew if I quit a job on Friday I could certainly have, if I wanted it, another job on Monday week – I did this twice – and to them this is inconceivable. I knew I could strive in my life to do the kind of work that suited me, and I had a fair chance of getting that kind of work, and to them that is a preposterous fantasy. I knew I would certainly make enough money to buy a house and raise a family and put them through university, and they dare not even think of that.

And yet they look forward, with a kind of joshing hope, to the one life they will have on this earth, in an era not of their choosing. They look forward to, at best, an uncertain series of part-time jobs in different parts of the world and an abiding hobby – in music, surfing, writing, ecological protest, iridology, fly-fishing, late night conversation, romantic love – that will give their existence meaning for a decade or two, and then who knows? Perhaps they will own a few acres then, and will be growing and sharing radishes when the Great Bust comes. Perhaps they will be busking. Perhaps, at last, the song they wrote this year will be a hit, or the computer game they are still perfecting, or the better beer they are hoping to brew by then. Or perhaps they will be starving, or dead of chemical misadventure, but…them’s the breaks.

If courage is grace under pressure, they have it. They have done their hundred and ten job interviews, and have been turned down. They have dressed up, and pretended, and come away rejected, and had a drink and got up the next morning. They have auditioned for NIDA, and narrowly missed. They have mixed martinis in a boutique bar that soon went broke. They have fossicked for gold beyond Kalgoorlie and found none.

And now we are lecturing them on Mutual Obligation: they must be thrilled with that. For they have put in the hard yards, in thirteen years of imprisonment in schools in crowded classrooms with overworked teachers, in obsolescent courses that led nowhere. They believed us when we told them this misery meant, at the end of it, fulfilment in life. A job. A career. A family. Continuity. Hope of personal triumph. And now they have done the hundred and ten job interviews, and found we were lying. At least one half of that Mutual Obligation is ours, and we have not delivered. And they do not trust us anymore, or believe anything that we are saying. And why should they? We have told them lies.

I love these young people and their courage and their grace, but I know now having watched them that we are losing more and more of them year by year – to drink, to heroin, to a kind of rootless euphoria that keeps them hitch-hiking with a surfboard, a guitar, a smoking habit, a dream of the Good Place they will not find. To the sullenness that follows thwarted love. To the crazier political movements. To sudden bursts of petty crime and AIDS in gaol. To suicide in the spare room of a friend.

And part of our Mutual Obligation is to understand that this is not their fault. Illiteracy is at least in part the fault of the bad schools we have given them, or of moving from school to school as their parents lose their jobs and move on. Lack of career ambition is at least in part the fault of us not giving them any real hope of career, as I once knew it, or of choice of work, as I once knew it. The accusing finger points, and it points at us.

Or it points at those economic fashions that are ripping all hope from the modern world – and restoring slavery under the usual euphemisms of work for the dole, or privatised prisons, or illegal immigrant labour, or unpaid overtime, or the free-market cargo cult that asks us to freely compete with slaves by becoming slaves ourselves, and to cop the sack from more and more places of work as the only hope for full employment at some time as yet unknown in the pig-flying future.

I love these young people – or I love the friends of my children that I know – and one by one I see that I am losing them. They might have done well in the end, had they survived. They might have had children themselves, that they would have loved. And they probably will not. I mourn them already. And I hate the society that is inch by inch eroding their self-esteem and wasting their talents and their stoicism and grace and is now persecuting them for merely being born with hypocritical word games – mutual obligation, tough love, compassion with a hard edge, downsizing, workplace efficiency – worthy of Georgian England, where nine-year-old children were hanged for stealing purses to feed their parents and siblings, and prayers uttered up from the gallows for their souls.

It is time the lying stopped, and the hypocrisy and the tyranny. It is time, and time already, for a Sorry Day for our young. They are better people than we will ever be, and we are wrecking most of them, and slowly killing some of them, day by day.

Gillard’s new chess move this morning will hold things for a while. But it does show, once again, how much better a politician I am than she. (I told her to have the election in October not August; to debate Abbott three times not once; to make Debus Attorney General and Kerr Minister for Justice and so keep their seats and a Labor majority and never, never have Andrew Wilkie to deal with because he wouldn’t be in parliament). I expressed the view last year when all this was cobbled up that Harry Jenkins was the most respected man in the building apart from Bob Brown and John Faulkner and losing him was a great stupidity. He radiated integrity, and Slipper (a sleeper, my wife suggested) radiated imminent trouble.

And so it has proved. The thing to do, I suggested, was to offer him a minor ministry, or create one like Jim Hacker’s, a Minister Without Portfolio who filled in for other ministers unable alas to make the sewage treatment facility opening or the ethnic dancing, and keep Harry, the parliament’s wellbeloved frowning Eeyore, in his chair, a chair for which he seemed predestined from the beginning of the world.

But no. Once again she, or her gang, would not listen. And once again they are tap-dancing blindfold on the edge of a precipice and trying to smile convincingly.

They got it wrong this morning also. What they had to do was bring Harry back, give Slipper the minor ministry, accept with regret not a resignation from Craig, but a ‘standing aside’, like Slipper’s, from the party till the verdict comes in sometime in 2015.

And announce, of course, a withdrawal by August from Afghanistan.

But they’ve got it wrong again, if course. They’re the Mouse Pack, and it’s what they do. They’re still accepting Rupert’s Rules of what’s a scandal when he himself is straddling two thousand scandals and beaming confidently.

Have they no ear or eye for these things? It seems not.

And it’s a pity.

It will be noted by those who can add that bikies have killed more Australians than ‘terrorists’. Dozens more. On the mainland, hundreds more.

Yet bikies are allowed to cross state borders unimpeded. They come in aggressive swarms into country towns unchallenged. They can take their bikes onto the Princess of Tasmania and menace that small island unreproved. They shoot up the homes of rival ‘families’ like mafiosi and all the resources of the State are unable, thus far, to stem the momentum of their random, bullet-flying, neighbourhood-terrorising, almost nightly violence.

If one could play with the figures as statisticians do one could say, with accuracy, that bikies kill hundreds of times, thousands of times, millions of times, more Australians in Australia than ‘terrorists’. Yet billions are spent on worthless weapons of detection and fruitless house-raids in search of one sort of ‘terrorist’ when another sort are blam-blamming away uncorrected.

For bikies are by any definition terrorists too. They terrorise, kidnap, threaten, sell drugs and smuggle weapons as did al-Qaeda and, in the past, the IRA.

Yet because they are home-grown they are treated, or have been thus far treated, as a minor irritant, and ‘terrorists’, that is, swarthy Muslim heathens who may not have been born here, as an international enemy we are at war with. We are in a ‘war on terrorism’ and spending scores of billions on it though it has cost us less lives in a hundred years than car accidents in a month, and relatively relaxed about bikies who continue to kill and scare a lot of us, treating them not as ‘terrorists’ but naughty boys.

Is there a racist component in all this? Of course there is. Is there a culturist component? You bet.

It is racism, and culturism, that is ‘securing our borders’ at a cost of annual billions against a threat that is not there. No Afghans thus far have gone to gaol for violent crimes against Australians; none, I think, in one hundred and seventy years. But lots of Anglo Australians on Harley Davidsons have.

It is only blind prejuduce therefore that is waging this War on Afghans, this War on Tamils, this War on Palestinians whise cost coukd feed and house a football stadium of them for decades.

It is because we are racist idiots like white Alabamans in the 1920s that we are making war on good people, and wrecking the education of their children by locking them up, and letting Anglo hoons blam-blam away unimpeded, terrorising, literally terrorising, hundreds of thousands of us.

We are as shameful a country as that.

Discuss.

Childhood is not what it was.

I lived in two towns in mine, and in each I had uncles, aunts and cousins in the same street. In one of the towns was a grandma and grandfa, and a mother always home.

We had set meals and family games of Scrabble, and games of neighbourhood cricket, and gatherings of the whole extended family at the beach. Church, too, we had, and the interlacing gossip and loyalties and feuds and picnics religion brings.

Childhood was more populous then. You might have three or four siblings, and five kids in the next yard, and six in the yard beyond. You might have twenty cousins, some your age, in the same district. Blood loyalties were strong, and there was always a favourite, forgiving auntie you could pour out your heart to, then sleep a night on her couch. Neighbours were like aunties, and were called Auntie. If your parents weren’t there, you could go next door and she’d feed you.

Some societies are still like that. Ireland. Calabria. Eritrea. Nepal. Poverty mattered less because there were blood ties and neighbours and an ethic of love. Between a child and hunger or danger there were a lot of adults, adults who really cared.

It’s not like that now, or not very often. Smaller families, working mothers and the commonness of divorce mean childhood is more solitary now. Television makes it less verbal. Computers make it less physical. Children who once would have spent all their daylight hours outdoors playing now spend them in front of a screen, murdering aliens with special weapons or pestering strangers in other hemispheres. They change address more too, as their dads lose jobs and move on, or their mums divorce and move on, and neighbourhood friendships that once lasted lifetimes are episodes now. There are fewer kids on the street, because fewer get born in the first place. Kids stay in more because they feel safer at home. They wait for mum there, behind a closed front door, for mum to come home from work, at the deli or the insurance office.

Because of television, kids know more now. The AIDS campaign revealed anal sex to them, the Lewinsky scandal revealed oral sex. The murder and starvation of Rwanda, the war in the Gulf, made real to them what to us were fuzzy, abstract concepts. War. Death. Famine. The death of children.

Childhood used to be a time of dreaming, of the imagining of infinite possibilities. Reading was a sensual delight in childhood then. You imagined your heroes’ faces, and their mighty deeds. Radio let you do that too. The mind was activated. Dreaming had an edge of amazement to it.

Now the dreams are all prefabricated, put in a blue chip, standardised. Disney dreams. Star Wars dreams. Japanese warrior dreams. Reading is a task, not a pleasure. Not now.

There is, too, a feeling that we never had, a feeling that the future has little hope in it. Because the jobs aren’t there, and the money is less and less, and love won’t last, and a nomad life, moving on and on from job to job and marriage, maybe, to marriage, is maybe all there is. And then there’s the crematorium, and that is that. No heavenly choir. No loved ones waiting beyond the Pearly Gates. Hope gone. April fool.

In the first biblical story Eve and Adam learnt too much, and are ashamed, cast out and know, in grief, of their mortality, because the Tree of Knowledge is full of bad news in the end. Knowledge likewise has polluted childhood, slimed it, in the same way as the apple of knowledge did for Eve. Knowledge is like champagne at first, but it comes with a hangover.

Many children now fourteen have already (amazingly) been through sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, and are wiser for it I suppose, but it’s too early. Many children of eight have already, through The Simpsons and South Park, learned too much disgust with the world. It improves their sense of humour, but it makes more desolate their little souls.

I hope I’m wrong. I don’t think I am. Sometimes, at Christmas, among the extended family I see them as children ought to be, opening presents, playing with the baby, curled up on the bed with grandma, lighting candles, singing carols and putting on puppet shows, squealing down the waterslide. There should be more years of this, not less.

But the information revolution and economic rationalism is ending all this, and much else too. Soon – it is pretty certain – as the laws of employment slacken and competition heats up, child labour will be back, overt and covert, as it was in the days of the cotton mills and the chimney sweeps, as it is now on the few small farms remaining and the seven-day-a-week small family stores, slavery in all but name.

Kids are tougher now, but scareder too. They see their role models daily get the sack, their overworked teachers haggard in the street. They hear of pederast priests and incest and youth suicide and Stolen Children and computer crime and a Global Economy where the rich, the lucky, the crooked survive. They have no belief now, as we did, in the power of prayer. They have no belief in the wisdom of their elders. They can operate a computer, their elders often cannot. They have no eternal scenario they can book into, in this world or the next. They can get the same rush of joy from a drug or a song or a movie, they know that. They live for the moment. The moment may be all there is.

I mourn all this, and I yearn for better times. I wish there were some place in my country, and maybe there is, in Burringbar perhaps, or Boonah, where things are roughly as they were. But I fear for our children, and the Great Bust that is coming that will overwhelm so many them, and convince a lot more not to have children themselves.

The ghost of that certainty is reaching its bony hand back into their childhood, even now. They know there is not much out there. The door is locked, and the computer busy, and the aliens hurling themselves before the zapping weapons that will provide a little victory, just this once.

hempanon April 25, 2012 at 11:27 am

I dodged the Vietnam bullet by being lucky enough to avoid conscription. The youth of my day were all too aware that war is the ultimate obscenity but today’s youth attend dawn Anzac services proudly wearing the medal of some dead relative while others go off like pilgrims to celebrate our defeat at Gallipoli.

A touch too Orwellian for me where death is glorious, defeat is victory and peace can only be attained through war. My immediate reaction to yet another death in Afghanistan is to shout at the TV….. STUPID IDIOT !

Meanwhile, those poor young fools who survive return home only to be eke out their days in their own private hell.

Canguro April 25, 2012 at 12:14 pm

Hempanon, what would you have done, had your marbled number had been pulled from the barrel?

The option of conscientious objector existed, and I’m wondering how many young men went down the rabbit hole when they learnt they were to be conscripted to fight in this war that posed no clear and present threat to the Australian community.

It’s striking how obedient we are, that we would so easily obey a diktat to abandon our circumstances, don the uniform, have our heads shorn and then after a period of preparation be sent to act as targets for hostile strangers who naturally resented our presence in their country.

If one puts oneself in the shoes of the invaded, it’s an easy stretch to see that the act of defense of one’s homeland under those circumstances is natural and desirable, and why not? You’d be mad not to, as it’s said. But to be packed off to fight in another country that has no interest in ours, no interest in expansion or invasion, simply to be fodder for the foe because of a clash of political ideology and cultural integrity, no, no, and a thousand times no. Jesus wept, that we might one day collectively develop the spine and fortitude to stand up to the decision-makers and force them to confront alternatives to the ongoing military madness that so debases us as supposed intelligent and sensitive creatures.

hempanon April 25, 2012 at 3:49 pm]

I suspect that at age 20 I might have copped it sweet and joined the ranks of the other brand new cannon fodder. I was a late developer, particularly politically, and still hadn’t worked out that my Menzies obsessed parents were barking up the wrong tree. A year or so later things were very different and I maintained the rage for many years.

Yes, the kiddies are compliant and mostly put the uniform on without much complaint which is surely an indication that the education system is ‘working’. Thank God Gough turned up in 1972 to put a stop to the insanity.

Doug Quixote April 25, 2012 at 6:05 pm

Hear Hear Hempanon. Gough got in and ended the ridiculous conscription system that even the Army did not want, in excellent time to save me from the machine; not only that, he enabled me to go to university at a time when my parents would have really struggled to enable it, and that is not mentioning all the wonderful reforms to health, family law and trade practices which were 20 years overdue.

David Black April 25, 2012 at 11:54 am

Once when I found myself in the middle of the dreary city of Newcastle, I discovered a WW1 memorial to the men of Newcastle who had “Died For The Honour of The British Empire.”

Why would anyone risk one’s life for that?

Australians in those days, thinking themselves as basically British, were probably different then.

Doug Quixote April 25, 2012 at 9:34 pm ]

Exactly that David. We were the South British. Our troops were the Australian Imperial Forces and ‘imperial’ meant just that : the forces of the empire, Australian contingent.

James April 25, 2012 at 12:54 pm

ABC TV began its Anzac Day program this morning with a portentous declaration that Anzac Day was a “uniquely Australian” day. What’s your analysis of this, Bob?

Bob Ellis April 25, 2012 at 4:10 pm

It’s the only national holiday that celebrates a defeat. There is in England no Titanic Day, in France no Surrender To Hitler Day.

We have no Granville Train Disaster Holiday, nor even one for the Newcastle earthquake.

But we have this one. Because it was the first big defeat that killed or crippled, probably, one quarter of our fit young men.

And since this is an impossible for us to live with, we have to pretend it was a victory of some kind, a test passed.

James April 25, 2012 at 5:31 pm

You’ve missed the point. The letters NZ in Anzac stand for another country that observes Anzac Day as a national holiday. I had hoped you would have something to say about the mindset that allowed the ABC to put its lie to air.

Your own points are well made, though. France could well observe its own counterpart to Anzac Day. The number of Frenchmen killed at Gallipoli was nearly as great as Australians and New Zealanders combined.

My respondents have heated up as they do from time to time and are now yelling and fighting and calling each other cunts and saying boo sucks Labor is on the way out everywhere.

It’s an old right wing technique. You distract and busy the enemy with matters other than policy, with personal attack and fabricated scandals (Slipper, Strauss-Kahn, Edwards, Lewinski) and remove him/her from contention with a tsunami of graffiti, nudges and blithering.

In the Gillard Government’s case it is an attempt — and it may succeed — to ‘overshadow’ with a charge of sexual harassment a hundred and sixty good laws and the best economy in the world and the first significant hobbling of the tobacco industry and its murderous daily worldwide poisoning of children, and give an impression that a good and busily achieving government is incompetent and tottering from crisis to crisis and bring it down. The cry used to be ‘There will never be a Budget surplus from this government.’ Now it’s ‘Peter Slipper’s Cabcharges have brought it to its terminal crisis, resign, resign.’

The hysteria has been well managed and has fooled even Fran Kelly.

But in fact it has no numerical basis. Peter Slipper’s vote will stay with Labor, and the figures are 77-73 on significant legislation with or without him in the chair. If Andrew Wilkie changes his vote, they will be 76-74. If Peter Slipper is no longer Speaker, someone else will be.

And that Speaker has the power to remove, say, Bronwyn Bishop from the House for a week at a time repeatedly and frequently and thus improve Labor’s numbers if Abbott refuses a pair, as he is likely to do, to Bob Carr or Stephen Smith or a sick, miscarrying member.

Because this is what the Liberals are like. They do not build anything (except, in Baillieu’s case, prisons), they do not make anything (name a Liberal-funded Opera House or Snowy River scheme) and prefer to tear things down as a rule (O’Farrell the monorail, Newman Queensland’s literature and its Barrier Reef); they can only work on crisis, and will feverishly forge a crisis wherever they can. War refugees escaping tyranny and seeking a better life for their children is a crisis. Stephen Conroy saying ‘fucking fantastic’ is a crisis. Kevin Rudd saying ‘mate’ to Kerry O’Brien is a crisis, nay, a ‘meltdown’. Belinda Neal speaking sternly to a waiter is a crisis. David Campbell visiting a bath-house is a crisis. But a war for ten years on the wrong country in which a hundred thousand children die is not a crisis, it’s good policy.

Like Murdoch, the Liberals cheat. It’s what they do. And it’s all they do. In the end all they want is CEOs on two thousand dollars an hour to be earning instead three thousand dollars an hour for doing very little work, and this is their guiding theology. And everything else they rail against — the arts, the friends of the forests, Slipper’s Cabcharges, Broadband– are a smokescreen over that mindless greed for more and more money for fewer and fewer people and everybody else replaced by machines or in the servant class as they were in Edwardian times.

Let my smirching, harassing respondents know therefore from this time forward that I am on to them, and whenever they advert overweeningly to personality not policy I will delete their contributions. They will not scare away my intelligent readers with an impression of carnage, obscenity, rapine, panty-sniffing and mindless riot. It may work with Peter Slipper and ruin him. It will not work with me.

They have been warned.

A day later I rang Chris Noonan and he, like me, had been thinking of little else. It was a film, he agreed, that got up with you when you left the cinema and followed you home; it sat by the bed while you struggled for sleep and looked at you searchingly with one hand on its knee; it was one of the best films, we both averred, we had seen in the past ten years.

It was Rats in the Ranks of course, the stupendously patient Connollys’ ill-titled chronicle of the contest for Mayor of Leichhardt in 1994, already a ferocious talking point on its opening night when we saw it, alongside its alert, unsettled lead actors – diminished and humanized and smaller, it seemed, in the foyer – and we went to a bash with them afterwards, a few blocks down the street in Glebe; a talking point among people uncertain of why they were impressed.

Some thought it amazing such folk would so nakedly expose their own Machiavellian duplicity, as they repeatedly regrouped and went back on solemn oaths and slagged each other’s character so poisonously on film. Others thought it amazing that the stars defamed would not have attempted legally to abort its opening night or censor its more rancorous contents. How could working politicians, they wondered in sympathetic anguish, be so careless of their political future? (This latter group were then flabbergasted to hear that the Labor Party proposed to screen the film at fundraisers.)

Others, like Sydney’s Lord Mayor Frank Sartor (completely recovered, unlike me, from our eight-hour night on the family grappa a year ago), were handsomely unfazed. It had been exactly like that with him, he said, not knowing till the last minute whose votes had actually changed, and whether the weeks of schmoozing had worked. It was for this very reason, he said, he had importuned Bob Carr to change the system to one of direct election by the mere ignorant populace. Working with fratricidal shifting caucuses of three was just too fucking hard.

Some, like Trevor Snape, one of the unveiled participants, found it a little shallow. Those weeks were not entirely consumed, he said, with jostling for personal aggrandisement and catharsis. They were also putting in long hours of benevolent committees, assessing and allaying the woes of our constituents, writing reports and tending their families. There were a million other stories in the naked municipality. This was just one of them.

All, however, had in their ruminations missed the cause, I think, of the film’s popularity, which is race memory, Australian race memory at the least. These were people we already knew – Auntie Min and Flash Harry, Mervyn the gawky swot and Edna the phlegmatic washwoman, Frank the sly old lag, and the enflamed, moustachioed, hubristic stevedore Jim – from the Anglo-Celtic village all we pre-1915 immigrants sailed from and now in remembrance yearn for. They need no introduction because we know them so well already – Kate Butler, all tough durable wrinkles and conscienceful dignity, who believes it’s her turn to be Mayor; Evan Jones, the sardonic, spade-faced Labor stalwart nearing ninety who has seen it all; Neil McIndoe, a driven, red-mustachioed equivalent of Yosemite Sam, who is feeling lucky and wins the draw from the hat; Trevor Snape, the conscience-wrung young Labor schnook, all spectacles, elbows and indecision; Kate Harding, well over a hundred, who still pines dreamily for chains of office; and Larry Hand.

Larry I’d call a remarkable creation if he were merely a work of art. As a real person he pulls off the hard double of being both quite astonishing and very familiar – and much more troublingly likeable than the ‘low-rent version of Francis Urquhart from House of Cards’ that Phillip Adams so warmly hailed him to as, to Larry’s visible pleasure, on opening night.

He looks like a dark-eyed Gene Hackman and acts like, well, a handsomer Richard III, grinning with radiant ruefulness every time it seems (once more) certain he can’t arm-twist the needed numbers to his faltering cause. At once dauntless and stoic, unflappable, mock heroic and matey, quietly contemptuous too of his own dull, tugging powerlust, he behaves throughout with such admirable, gallant shiftiness (assuring telephoned reporters this is off the record mate, with the cameras ceaselessly roll) that I yearned by film’s end to run him for Mayor of the Universe, were that position vacant, and write his mighty inauguration speech. He’d win in a walk, of course, so thoroughly, archetypally, unrepentently, intergalactically is he the thing itself, Political Man, deftly offering you a crumbly cigar. He was there beside the campfires of the Euphrates Basin in the earliest times, massaging the numbers; he is here, in Leichhardt, now.

The Connollys get all this with a breathtaking minimality, at one time holding an unchanged four-shot for six or eight minutes, knowing the observed human tussle was enough, and subtly underplaying the marvellous time-worn cityscape of white municipal clock tower, mouldy council chambers and gloomy tenement rooms, while using a dramatic structure based, if I’m not mistaken, on High Noon.

This is great anthropology, great political history, and, with its ballad-like singleness of purpose (do not forsake me, oh my numbers), with its ticking-clock chapter headings and occasional shafts of unsettling music, something very close to great cinema. It speaks well of the Australian character that we accept these flawed and clawing, woundable and vengeful human souls as our fellow creatures without self-righteousness or undue mockery, much as we once in times agone copped the womanising of Bob Hawke and the fallen trousers of his majestic predecessor – with amusement, but no moral squint.

This is a decent humanistic forgiving society, unafraid (as in Joh’s Jury, and Blue Murder, and Labor in Power) to advertise its stumbling gaucheries and low cunning, and to laugh at them with unjudgmental fondness, and it makes you sometimes, as in this film, glad to be alive.

It is a pity Fran Kelly and Michele Grattan have adopted the Murdoch Method of political analysis, however unwittingly. They regard a few saucy text-messages as ‘overshadowing’ a surplus Budget, an end to a war, a potent attack on a cancer-causing drug’s world-wide marketing, an interest rate fall, a salvage of car jobs, a tax on greedy earth-ripping billionaires, a rolling-back of global warming, and so on.

No, the saucy texts overshadow all that. They are a dark day. If Bob Brown had sent them they would have ended his career. Of course they would.

What are they talking about?

They do not change the numbers in the House. The government will not fall. At worse Harry Jenkins, the best Speaker since Federation, will be back for a while. What is the problem?

The problem is, and it always was, the Murdoch Method. Its rules are these. If it is a Labor, or Labor-supporting politician he is either:

(1) A sexual beast;

(2) A corrupt, finagling double-dealer;

(3) Emotionally unstable; or

(4) Senile.

His/her policies must never be mentioned. His/her talent as a speaker, or Speaker. His/her competence as a minister. Those policies of his or hers which, enacted, have improved the world.

The Murdoch Method is to keep political achievement out of politics, and concentrate on private life, dread rumour, hair style and alleged madness.

And, oh yes, mention accurately something he/she has done, and express horror at it.

Thus, David Campbell visited a legal homosexual bath-house, driving a car he was entitled to. Belinda Neal said ‘Do you know who I am?’ to a waiter. John Della Bosca tupped for a while a comedienne. Cheryl Kernot had an affair, at twenty-four, with a nineteen-year-old  man  she had once had taught at school. Bob Carr said ’2001′ instead of ’2000′. Kim Beazley said ‘Karl Rove’ not ‘Rove McManus’. And so on. Shock horror. How dare the taxpayer sustain these vile, mendacious, arse-prodding dodderers any longer? They saved the nation from world recession? That doesn’t count. Shock horror, shock horror, he just said ‘arse’.

No horror was expressed, however, when the married Murdoch tupped, at sixty, a twenty-six-year-old employee. Or when he countenanced the bugging of a sitting Prime Minister’s private conversation in a car and professed shock and horror at the word ‘bigoted’, used accurately, and with its repeated, pummelling headlines brought him down. Or promoted his fool sons to high positions in which they wrecked their several companies and forgave them and thereafter gave them two thousand dollars an hour, or was it only fifteen hundred? Dollars? An hour? For what exactly, their surname?

Or no no. Those things were mere bagatelles. But a saucy text-message, that is a nation-smasher.

Fran and Michele should come to their senses.

Or join the Liberal Party, which is making, thus far, good use of them.

‘That’s the way world works, though, isn’t it. You scratch my back, I scratch yours.’ ‘And never in sixty years did you scratch a Prime Minister’s back?’ ‘Never. Not once.’

Strange to see a man whose dialogue I’ve been writing for fourteen months, this Renaissance rogue, this Jacobean shuffler, this Talleyrand-like shrewd survivor, so perfectly in character. The evasive charm. The beautiful voice. The succinctness.

I know him well by now. The selective, horse-wise racetrack gambler. The compulsive poker-player. The crash-through-or-crash man who destroyed Gough Whitlam, created Thatcher, helped cheat Bush into power, bullied Blair into war in Iraq.

And scratched the back of Nixon, who taught him a trick or two. ‘I cut off my right arm. I cut off my left arm.’ ‘The buck stops with me. I failed. I’m sorry.’

He learned well too from Rudd, who showed an Apology is enough, and Compensation doesn’t matter a damn if you look royal enough when saying sorry. If you look like you’re running the Universe, and you believe you are, there’ll always be enough craven forelock tuggers to take you at your word.

Scratch my back. But Thatcher, Bush, Blair, never scratched mine. Never. No way. Impossible. That’s not my way. Look into my eyes. Never.

One commentator said, well, no, he never asked a favour of anyone, but it’s curious how many favours were done for him. The avoidance of due process that gave him The Times. The police provided to protect him at Wapping. The license to broadcast and print after the Sacking, which he discussed face to face with Kerr four months before. The right, as a foreigner, to publish newspapers that Nixon gave him.

Like Richard III and the Jew of Malta, he beguiles us, his sworn foes too. What, hath he crucified a child? Ho ho ho.

He professes shock at the bugging and hacking of some ‘rogue reporters’ as he did not at the ‘tampon’ conversation of Charles and Camilla or the ‘Bigotgate’ bugging that cost Brown five seats and Number Ten, or the false ‘scoop’ that Margaret and Gough were divorcing a week before Labor’s landslide loss in ’75. That dirty trick, and the bare-breasted Page Three girls thirty-eight years ago did not faze him as the Dowler hacking did a year ago. Deeply shocking, deeply shocking, who’d a thunk it? Ever thus, no doubt, did Chairman Mao gasp at the Cultural Revolution. What could my dear wife have been thinking?

Will he get away with it? He might. Leveson seems to like him. It’s hard for even me and Ramsey, his well-informed assassins, to hate him; and the disgusted authors of the forty-five books about him; Willie Shawcross even, the son of the Nuremberg inquisitor who sought to destroy him and then was beguiled into ia sort of hagiography.

At the heart of it, though, are three questions. If he was a profit-seeking businessman only, why did he publish, for decades, papers that lost money? Why did those papers plug violently this politician or that? Why did those politicians give him favours? How did this happen?

It is worth asking, too, if he is simply a profit-seeking businessman, why he repeatedly employs his incompetent sons in high positions when talented people are available? Is this not the essence of corruption? And if he is corrupt in this fundamental way, why not in other places? If he will fix the 2000 election call, which he did, why not lesser elections too?

But the charm is there, the beautiful voice, the impression that he and we are in on this, colleagues, comradoes together. We get the joke, and it’s a good one, he is telling.

How many of us have come to the slaughterhouse believing we shared that joke before we found the joke was on us?

And our guts were all over the floor.