He sent children to their deaths in Sri Lanka. He drove two young men to burn themselves to death, and another to attempt to. He caused a riot on Manus in which sixty young men were brutally injured, one with a cut throat, one with a bashed head who died of it. He covered up this murder, and let one of the four murderers escape. He continued to employ the other three, and did not ask any questions of any witnesses. He continued to employ, or to allow his agents to employ, the other twenty or twenty-five head-bashing thugs.

He kidnapped on the high seas one family in their own boat, burnt the boat, locked up the one hundred and fifty-seven people on it and scared the fifty children by taking their fathers away from them. He took away the medication of a three-year-old girl who then had fits. He sent back to their torturers a family fleeing Sri Lanka.

He said, wrongly, that he had ‘stopped the boats’, concealing those that still kept coming, which he boarded, burnt and sank, and those that came via East Niugini and Thursday Island, Green Island, Rottnest, on pearling luggers to Broome, successfully to Australia, disgorging their customers in secret. He tried to send back to execution a fifteen-year-old stowaway.

He called ‘wimps’ and ‘surrender monkeys’ those who wanted to treat children better. He called Gillian Triggs an incompetent judge of what drives children to try suicide. He denied he had caused some children to poison themselves, cut themselves, bang their heads against the furniture. He said he ‘prayed’ for refugees ‘every night’. He believed, however, that murdered Muslim children burned in Hell immediately. He believed Tony Abbott, and most of the Cabinet, would burn also, and thirty million Australians, already dead, were currently burning too.

He made no offer to Gazans, dying every day, to come here with their children, three of whom died while you were reading this. They may be refugees, but they were not welcome here. A hundred years on Nauru for them if he caught them heading here, he threatened, with no time off for good behaviour. This was in Australia’s national interest. They must pay, for the rest of their lives, for daring even to think of coming here. They are not our kind.

His hydrophobic loathing of ‘heathens’, or what the poet called ‘the lesser breeds without the Law’, was reflected in those missionary Christians and aggressive settlers who in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in North and South America killed, with extreme prejudice, one hundred and sixty million ‘Red Indians’, Incas, Cubans, Eskimos, and captured black African slaves. He is a bad, bad man, but he is not unprecedented.

He has been at it thus far only ten months, but he is keen to do as much damage to heathen humanity as his office, illegally and secretly empowered, lets him do.

He should be removed, arrested, arraigned, imprisoned and punished, very soon.

We will stop killing your children when you disarm. And you blow up your air-raid shelters. And abolish your Hamas leadership. And deliver them to us in chains.

And, oh yes, allow us to execute all our kidnapped prisoners.

Trust us. We will keep our word.

Your few surviving loved ones will be perfectly safe.

Perfectly safe.

No, I am not a terrorist.

You are.

And we do not negotiate with terrorists.

Go away.

Abbott said he did not want to ‘provoke’ any of the ‘players’ in the current Russo-Ukrainian War and his vow to ‘bring to justice’ the evil murderers of thirty-seven Australians was therefore on hold. So was his promise to ‘bring home the bodies’ for cremation, since landmines might blow up the searchers, providing more bodies to bring home for cremation, in hot summer weather that attracted flies.

Julie Bishop accused the Russians of being unhelpful. She was only asking them to stall a big war, provide a ‘corridor’ as big as Marrickville and stop people under bombardment in burning homes from defending themselves for, say, six weeks, so she could look for corpses, or bits of corpses, in those eight square miles, a much more important priority than Ukrainian liberty or Russian pan-Slavic hegemony over its historic subjects, blood cousins and serfs. Bringing bits of bodies home for cremation was much more important than this great movement of history. And, along prescribed pan-Abbottite lines of not provoking either player, she said the Russians were a pack of bastards.

Scott Morrison swore no children on Christmas Island were sick, or trying to kill themselves, and Gillian Triggs, who was ‘not a doctor’, could not possibly know if a child who said ‘I want to kill myself’ was in any way mentally unsettled or pessimistic. He refused to say if he had ordered the orange boats to take fifty weeping children back to India where they might be beggared, bride-burnt, prostituted or raped and hanged from trees, or if the Navy had mutinied, and told him to go fuck himself. These were ‘on-water matters’ which Angus Campbell had told him not to reveal. And he, an obedient Minister, would never, ever say what was going on, since ‘national security’ depended on it; and on not saying why it did.

He stopped Hanson-Young from seeing the children, and the children from seeing their lawyers or ringing them, and threatened them with a hundred years on Nauru as punishment for being born, quite recently, in Sri Lanka, and sailing on their fathers’ boat through international waters towards their promised land, New Zealand. Though they had committed no crime, he said, they would get a hundred years.

The bill for the day for not searching for bodies, and entombing one hundred and fifty-seven pesky Tamils, was three hundred and five thousand dollars. It would be that much tomorrow, and the day after; and, after six months, enough to upgrade, refurbish and build tennis courts in a hundred public schools.

(From Dali)

Ask yourself this.

If a squad of Hamas fighters, through a tunnel or some other stratagem, managed to infiltrate one of those israeli settlements in the West Bank that have been condemned by 158 out of 166 nations in one vote, and 160 nations out of 171 nations in a different vote, in the UN;

If that squad had brought with them a cache of rockets and began firing them from the houses of the settlers whom they had locked in the basements – some 380 israeli men women and children;

If those rockets were almost all intercepted, and the three or four that weren’t injured 4 or 5 israelis;

Would Netanyahu issue the order to IDF planes and tanks to rain down armament on the settlement in the name of self defence, and blame the deaths on Hamas for sheltering brhind them?

And would he have the same 83% of israelis supporting him in killing 380 men women and children to take out 28 fighters?

I wish someone would ask him.

Soon there will be five hundred children killed in Gaza, five thousand injured, five hundred thousand traumatised, and Kerry dare not even use the word ‘disproportionate’. The White House, daringly, has said they are ‘concerned’.

Bibi has us foxed. He says a man sleeping in his own bed among his own children is ‘hiding in the civilian population’ and though he is an elected MP deserves to die because of some opinions he holds. He is guilty of Thoughtcrime and must, like Winston Smith, die for it. He says this man is deluded if he says bombs that fell on kindergartens came from Israel. They might have been Hamas rockets, incompetently exploding.

Bibi has us foxed; and half-believing, I think, that when there is a truce all the dead children will come back alive again. Then they will be killed again in the next ‘incursion’ and come back alive again.

This is not true. They are dead forever, and will not grow up, marry, and have children of their own. He is killing children, little children, forever, and asserting that because he is doing this inadvertently, while aiming at other people, this is entirely acceptable, and it’s Hamas’s fault anyway for thinking the way they do, and defending their country with rockets, and refusing to disarm. And whoever does not agree with this, whoever does not agree with this, my friend, is an ‘anti-Semite’.

There has not been such propaganda since the show trials under Stalin. He is calling on duly elected MPs to admit their error, and embrace their execution.

He is a bad, bad man, and should be arrested and put on trial in an international court.

My father was a Jew, and I say this.

I don’t want to be a bore, but the killing has to stop.

It is now desirable that Scott Morrison be psychologically investigated. Nothing that he said to Sarah Ferguson suggests anything other than hectic self-delusion, fervid paranoia and life in a parallel universe.

He said Gillian Triggs’s assertions that children were sick, biting themselves, banging their heads and drinking poison were mistaken. He said Tamils fleeing torture in Sri Lanka and transiting through India were ‘economic refugees’. He said that though he had burnt their boat, and thus taken off them every penny they had, they might welcome the chance to go back to India and lifelong poverty. He said they would ‘never, ever’ live in Australia, unlike another Tamil, Kamahl, even though they were fleeing torture, and a regime the Canadian Prime Minister thinks capable of genocide.

He is guardian of the fifty children whom he has been, by the look of it, abusing. He locked them up in a windowless cabin, took their fathers away from them, denied them toys and an education, and phone calls to their grandmothers. He has threatened them with a hundred years on Nauru, and forbidden a Senator to see them. He has forbidden their lawyers to see them, or talk to them on a phone. He has no right to do this. He’s refused to say if he tried to send them on orange ‘lifeboats’ back to India and dump them on a beach there. He has not yet denied, but he will, that the Navy mutinied.

It is reasonable Palmer, Labor and the Greens informally ask that his sanity be investigated, and the GG consider this course of action.

It’s time.

SARAH FERGUSON: I’m joined by the Immigration Minister, Scott Morrison. You’ve said variously this week that these people are economic migrants. How did you determine that?

SCOTT MORRISON: People who are Tamils in India are not subject to persecution as a result of their Tamil ethnicity, and that is, I think, widely understood. It’s certainly my understanding of it and it’s certainly the assurances that have been provided by the Indian Government. I mean, the UNHCR themselves have recognised that India has provided a safe haven for Tamils for decades.

SARAH FERGUSON: Just a moment. I mean, there are plenty of people we accept as refugees who come through transit countries. You have called these people economic migrants.

SCOTT MORRISON: Well, I think they are, Sarah.

SARAH FERGUSON: Have you heard their cases for asylum? You’re aware that they’ve all made cases.

SCOTT MORRISON: Sarah, I think the suggestion that Tamils fleeing India allegedly because they’re being persecuted in India because they’re Tamils just, I think, doesn’t bear up to the international experience and the recognition of the Indian Government’s provision of safe haven to Tamils in India for a very, very long time. Frankly, I think it’s quite offensive to India, Sarah.

SARAH FERGUSON: I’m just - actually, I’m just a little bit confused there and I think - well, I think actually I’m a little confused and I suspect therefore the audience is confused. Why are their claims for persecution necessarily about their time in India? Those claims may just as well apply, or far more likely, in fact, apply to their lives in Sri Lanka. Now what do you know about them that enables you to assert so clearly that they have no claim for persecution from their time in Sri Lanka?

SCOTT MORRISON: Sarah, I have made no comment in relation to Sri Lanka. I have made a comment in relation to them leaving India and my comment’s in relation to them leaving India. And that’s why I’ve been working with the Indian Government to come to an arrangement where many of them who have been resident in India for a very long time could be considered for return. Now, they may well have wished to return to India rather than the other options that are on the table here, which is obviously offshore processing.

SARAH FERGUSON: Now do you think that anybody listening to you during this week would have heard anything other than the Immigration Minister asserting that these people are economic migrants?

SCOTT MORRISON: Well I can’t speak for what people hear and think based on the reporting this week, Sarah. I couldn’t possibly do that. My position, I think, has been crystal clear. People have left India and the suggestion was that people were being persecuted in India, and my simple statement was is that’s obviously a nonsense.

SARAH FERGUSON: But you’d be well aware now from the evidence in your own case in the High Court that they’re making asylum claims and that some of the claims refer to, as I understand it, their lives in Sri Lanka, not in India. So would you like to take the opportunity to amend that statement?

SCOTT MORRISON: No, I - there’s no need to amend the statement. I’m simply saying the people saying they’re being - fleeing persecution in India - remember - and those comments have been made by their own lawyers this week, asserting that it’s possible that this could be the case. Well I just don’t think that bears out with the international experience and it certainly doesn’t bear out with India’s track record of how they’ve treated Tamils in India. That’s why we’ve been working to provide the opportunity for people to go back to India. Now there’s an opportunity to do this under the arrangement we’ve come to with the Indian Government.

SARAH FERGUSON: Just while we’re on that, Indian Government, just briefly, will the Indians accept forcible returns?

SCOTT MORRISON: Well the first step is: will they agree to meet with consular officials? Now the normal process is that no consular official can be forced on an individual, and if they’re receiving advice, whether it’s from lawyers or advocates or others, to refuse that, then they will be passing up the opportunity to potentially return to India where they were safe. Now, if they choose not to do that, then that’s a matter for them, and it could be possible that all of them may choose not to speak to Indian consular officials, and in so doing, they will pass up an opportunity to - potentially to be reunited with their families in India.

SARAH FERGUSON: I think people would be very confused with Sri Lankans sent to see - or having Indian officials sent to see Sri Lankans. But let’s move on because there are some other topics to cover here.

SCOTT MORRISON: Well, no, no, no, Sarah, you’ve raised that point, so let me address it. They’ve been living in India, the vast majority of people on this vessel, for a very long time and they have family in India and so what I have done…

SARAH FERGUSON: Do you know that the majority of people on this boat - you are asserting that they have lived in India for a very long time, the majority?

SCOTT MORRISON: That is our understanding of who’s on this vessel. Now, we are providing an opportunity for them to go back to India and they could make that request to Indian consular officials over the course of the next week. Now, if advocates are telling them they shouldn’t talk to consular officials, then I question whether they’re acting in their best interests…

SARAH FERGUSON: All right, let’s move on.

SCOTT MORRISON: … because they will pass up that opportunity. It is rare for India to concede bringing back someone who was not a citizen. Now they’re prepared to do that, they told me, for humanitarian reasons, and if advocates are going to deny them that opportunity, then where they end up will be very much a consequence of that decision.

SARAH FERGUSON: They were at sea for a very long time. Why didn’t you just take them straight to India?

SCOTT MORRISON: Well, we were working towards that objective.

SARAH FERGUSON: And did India say no?

SCOTT MORRISON: We discussed three options with India.

SARAH FERGUSON: No, did India say no?

SCOTT MORRISON: Well, let me tell you what we discussed with India. We discussed three options. One was that they could be taken to India, where that process which I’ve talked about, their identity and so on, could be assessed. That was not accepted by India. It could also be done on the ship and that was logistically difficult to get Australian Indian consular officials to that ship, and so in those circumstances, we chose to do it this way. Now, we’ll see how it goes. But if the outcome of this is that no-one chooses to talk to Indian consular officials, then the Government’s policy is very clear and they will go to offshore processing and that’s where their claims will be assessed. They will never, ever be resettled in Australia and that will be the outcome and nor will they ever be able to probably ever go back to India again.

SARAH FERGUSON: Was there any attempt to take them to India on orange life boats?

SCOTT MORRISON: Well, I don’t discuss those sorts of operational matters, Sarah.

SARAH FERGUSON: Well, in this case, it’s not like a normal on-water matter.

SCOTT MORRISON: Well it was very on-water.

SARAH FERGUSON: We’re talking about potentially a much longer journey. Were the orange life boats a consideration in this case? It’s passed now.

SCOTT MORRISON: The Government always considers all of our operational options that are available to us. We work through a methodical process …

SARAH FERGUSON: But does that mean you did consider the orange life boats?

SCOTT MORRISON: Well, I always reserve those options to us, as does Lieutenant-General Campbell. But when and where and how we do those things, they’re operational matters.

SARAH FERGUSON: So how far were you prepared to send people on those orange life boats? This is a very different scenario to sending people back to Java.

SCOTT MORRISON: Well, Sarah, you’re now getting into operational details, which you know is not Government’s policy to discuss, based on that advice I have from Lieutenant-General Campbell.

SARAH FERGUSON: Just to go back to the principles at work here, the bottom line is that you made a decision, I think, on 1st July that you were going to send these people back without finding out whether they had an asylum claim. That breaches the basic principle of international law. Are you comfortable with that?

SCOTT MORRISON: Well, Sarah, I reject the assertion you’ve just made. You’ve just asserted that I was seeking to take them back to Sri Lanka based on your own argument before that they were fleeing Sri Lanka from persecution. The Government has made - the Government has made …

SARAH FERGUSON: I beg your pardon. I’m actually going on what the Prime Minister …

SCOTT MORRISON: Well, hang on, you asked the question. You might let me finish it.

SARAH FERGUSON: Well let me just tell you - you said on my own assertion; it’s actually not. I’m quoting Tony Abbott, the Prime Minister, who said, “I would expect most of the people on that boat to go back that their countries of origin,” plural, so presumably that included Sri Lanka. Did it?

SCOTT MORRISON: Well what he was referring to was the place from where they’ve come from and the origin of that voyage was India. Now …

SARAH FERGUSON: “Countries” - he said “countries of origin”. Did you - let me just make the question very clear, Mr Morrison: did you consider sending them back to Sri Lanka?

SCOTT MORRISON: There was no attempt during the course of that past month, there was no discussion with the Government of Sri Lanka about people on that voyage going back to Sri Lanka and I’ll tell you why: that voyage did not come from Sri Lanka. It came from India. People were living in India or had transited through India and there is an opportunity for them to return to India, if they choose to speak to Indian consular officials, and if they choose not to do that, I assume on the advice of lawyers and advocates and others, and why they would do that against what is possibly in their best interests, others would have to explain.

SARAH FERGUSON: Let me just move on. The Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs says that virtually all of the 174 children on Christmas Island are sick. Children are self-harming, biting themselves, banging into furniture, swallowing poisons. How can this possibly be justified?

SCOTT MORRISON: Well, I don’t believe that’s true, for a start. Under this government we’ve reduced the number of children in detention by almost 35 per cent. The number of children on Christmas Island has dramatically reduced by over 60 per cent. Under this government, we’ve funded children going to school in detention. On Nauru, we’ve funded the establishment of facilities, including schools …

SARAH FERGUSON: That - actually, as you are aware, that wasn’t my question. You’re saying that Gillian Triggs is making up the evidence about the sickness of children?

SCOTT MORRISON: I don’t think there is evidence of the claim that the high - the Human Rights Commissioner has made in the way that she has made it. These are difficult environments and appropriate care is provided by our people. I think they’re quite sensational claims that have been made. She herself is not a doctor and we have medical people who are there who provide that care on a daily basis.

SARAH FERGUSON: All right. Just very briefly, because we need to clear this up before we go. So there’s no confusion over the orange boats; you did consider the use of the orange boats to return those asylum seekers to India?

SCOTT MORRISON: Sarah, I’m not going to let you put words in my mouth. What I am saying is the Government reserves its right to exercise any and every option that we choose is in the Australian national interest. And that is always my position. I haven’t commented specifically on the matter you’ve referred to because that’s not my practice to do that.

SARAH FERGUSON: Scott Morrison, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

SCOTT MORRISON: Thanks, Sarah.

Abbott decided not to bring Putin in shackles to Darlinghurst Court on a charge of mass murder, because he needed his help. He wanted, in the middle of a shooting war,  an area the size of Marrickville where unarmed police could prod the shrubbery and find Australian corpses, as distinct from Ukrainian corpses — which looked a fair bit like Australian corpses — in the blasted rubble of five towns and bring them home for cremation in ten or eighteen towns Down Under, before the summer heat did further damage to those that had not been consumed by animals or robbed of trinkets and passports by frightened impoverished refugees from slaughter.

In order to do this he had to be nice to Putin, the mass murderer. He said he wouldn’t be joining any economic blockade. Putin, like most of the world, judged him a lunatic. Obama was puzzled, to say the least, that he had, in this new Cold War, defiantly, or mistakenly, joined the other side.

Angus Houston’s coppers, meanwhile, were unable, again, to visit the ‘crime scene’ owing to bombardment near the Raddison, where they were drinking beer and assuring their wives, on mobiles, that no, they were in no danger despite what Abbott was saying hourly on the radio, in his newly assumed capacity of Chicken Little-in-Chief, of how little chance they had of coming home alive.

And so another day passed of the worst democratic government in world history since the system’s foundation in Iceland in 930.

Before its end, Scott Morrison had found ‘shocking’ and ‘unacceptable’ a charge by several dozen churchmen that he was a child abuser. He saw no harm, he said, in locking up children, taking their toys, taking away their fathers in handcuffs and hinting they might be killed and promising, at best, a hundred years among birdshit on Nauru idly dreaming of a better life. This was not child abuse, he said, however mad the children were getting and however many had attempted suicide. And if it was child abuse, there would be less of it soon, when fifty of the abusees were safely back in India.

The clergymen suggested he would be better employed elsewhere, and, like Rolf Harris, out of the vicinity of children, and any power he might still have to determine or disorder their lives.

Joe Hockey rejected Standard&Poors’ triple-A rating saying it would be gone soon if his Budget was not passed in toto. It involved nearly everyone being thousands a year worse off, and young people seeking work as whores or toilet cleaners forty times a month, and forty million applications to small businesses being processed every six weeks, thus lessening ‘red tape’ and giving a ‘work ethic’ to cripples, drug takers and the mentally disturbed. If they make thirty-nine applications that month, not forty, he swore, they wouldn’t get the dole for seven months, not six. Drug-muling seemed an excellent alternative in comparison to this, and many embraced it.

Emma Alberici behaved very badly last night, and I suggest she be suspended for a fortnight without pay and asked to consider her position.

She told a man whose people were being slaughtered that if they built air raid shelters they should be killed. She said if they totally disarmed, and stopped digging tunnels, Israel would kill no more of them. She accused him, as Joe McCarthy might, of secretly working for Hamas. She seemed to assert that people who did not agree with Israel should be killed, and their children also.

While she was doing this, all the electricity was cut off in Gaza. Babies in humidicribs died, old people on the operating table died. People were fired on by battleships at sea, a sea in which they were forbidden to go fishing.

She seemed very angry that this man, his own family members being fired upon, disagreed with her. She seemed anti-Semitic. The Arabs are a Semitic people. It seemed to me she had drunk the Netanyahu kool-aid, and was sorry she had done so.

I ask her to debate me, anywhere.

My friend Akram al-Basri showed me his children’s photos, and explained how his mother had been killed by Hamas for ‘collaborating with the Israelis’. For a time he was allowed to stay in Australia with his uncle. Then he was sent back to Gaza, where he was killed, and so was his brother. His wife tried to come here with the children, and was refused. She was ‘not a genuine refugee’.  She is under bombardment tonight. It is still night in Gaza.

Will Amanda Vanstone, an ABC employee, apologise for sending him back?

Just asking.

Joe Hockey just said on PM that requiring young people to make forty applications per month would get the ‘most hungry’ into jobs, and Big Business’s view that the plan was ‘nuts’ was wrong.

Joe seems not to know what young people are like. They are in the throes of self-definition, like Hamlet, and would like to be rock stars or computer design billionaires or top models and to say that, FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE, they must clean toilets, wipe the bottoms of old men, or manage drooling lunatics through their shriekings after midnight, is to insult them at their heart, at the heart of their self-definition, their self-esteem. Hearing this, they are more likely to snort coke or sell it, beat their girlfriends, whore them, or end as drug mules hanged in Malaysia.

You do not do this to young people. To be on the dole is shame enough. To say they must now, if paid well, become whores and risk AIDS or suck off truck drvers parked at petrol stations — which is what Joe is saying — is to lose their vote, and their parents’ vote, forever.

Joe, a Palestinian, is acting more and more like a suicide bomber. He can’t get ANY of his Budget through, and, like Hitler blaming the Jews and seizing their property and locking them up, he is kicking in the crutch an entire generation who have some self-esteem, and like the Jews will not surrender their culture.

And he cannot survive many weeks in his job. He is dead as hal-al mutton and he knows it. And he is planning his revenge.

He is even saying Standard&Poors don’t know what they’re talking about when they say our economy is in good shape. It’s in bad shape, he whines, I said so.

What a fucking nong.

Or perhaps you disagree.

Mark Latham, a political staffer turned MP turned Leader, said people like himself must be denied preselections hereinafter. Unionists. Apparatchiks. Heredity party ‘princes’. People who led ‘normal lives’ must be let into parliament: shearers; farmers; teachers; lawyers.

Yeah, well. This would have ruled out, in past years, the unionists Curtin, Chifley, Hawke, Mick Young, Bacon, Combet, Shorten; and the Labor princes Ferguson, Crean and Beazley. It would have ruled out the ‘staffers’ Emerson, Albanese, Gillard, Plibersek, Rann, Swan, and Rudd.

What is he talking about? He is the Leader who didn’t think the tsunami worth talking about, or leaving his holiday for, and bizarrely believed that he not Beazley could win in 2004. He wrote a book called ‘Civilising Global Capital’ ten years before the GFC showed how dumb-ass an idea that was, which I urged him to rename ‘Housetraining The Crocodile’. He’s the one who cut Gough Whitlam, who gave him his education, his first job, his imprimatur, his enthusiastic encouragement, his lifelong love, out of his life. This is the hulking bully who harassed Gillard on the street in 2010 and cost her, maybe, three seats. The is the idiot who cost us three years of power by thrusting himself, at forty-two, into a leadership he was unprepared for, and too drugged-up, ebullient and self-pitying to do sensibly.

It’s moderately important that he go fuck himself.

Or debate me any time, anywhere, on any subject whatever.

Julie Bishop has given five million dollars to Gaza, that is, one hundred dollars per dead or injured person, or enough to rebuild fifteen dwellings, though fifteen thousand have been destroyed.

She meantime spends two hundred thousand a day in her stalled search for ‘clues’ and burnt bits of bodies round MH17, and has spent thus far half a billion looking in three oceans for MH 370, for what purpose it is not clear.

These expensive quests for purposeless ‘evidence’ of things past at a time of ‘economic emergency’ may make some of us ask why the dead are worth so much more to them than the living. Spare bits of corpses on a war-torn crash site, it seems, are now worth dying for, and spending billions finding among other corpses, but money for schoolkids an intolerable extravagance. Why is this?

Morrison called ‘surrender monkeys’ those like Sarah Hanson Young who did not want, like him, to put fifty children on Nauru for eighty or ninety years and never let them leave it — to get an education, or a job, or a spouse, or visit relatives in India. He put them in the meantime into a desert concentration camp, soon to close, and wouldn’t let them see their lawyers, and called a ‘stunt’ Hanson Young’s plan to visit them and ask how they were doing. He welcomed, however, visits from Indian bureaucrats who might now separate thirty Indian-born children from their parents and take them ‘home’ to Pondicherry to become child whores or street beggars or small businesspersons far from their grieving mothers, fathers, and elder siblings. He did not say why he had burnt their boat, and would not compensate the owners for this bizarre piratical assault on voyagers threatening no-one, anywhere.

Peter Van Onselen said India was not a signatory to the UN Convention that one does not persecute refugees and logically the High Court must now stop them going there. What we must do therefore, said PVO, is withdraw from the UN Convention. He did this on his show, and was not arrested for advocating terrorism, an oversight perhaps.

Peter Slipper, the man whose vote elected Tony Abbott, was told he might get five years for spending nine hundred dollars on cabcharges to wineries. This was nine thousand less than Abbott illegally spent on air fares to book launches of Battlelines, his manifesto, in 2009. But he paid it back in time, or rather his publisher Louise Adler did, and grew very snaky with him when he did not pay her back, so that she lost money on the book. Though Abbott, Brough, Brandis and Pyne had wrongly called Slipper a ‘workplace sexual harasser’ of a trembling thirty-four year old male, James Ashby, and could be sued by him for 350 thousand each, as could eighteen Murdoch journalists and five or six shock jocks, Slipper, grown mad and suicidal, had shown mercy on them. It was remarked that Abbott wrongly spent six hundred dollars flying to Slipper’s wedding, and paid this back too, and so avoided five years in gaol.

Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph published a morphed photo of Slipper as a ‘dirty rat’ and a Newspoll alleging Abbott was now as popular as Shorten, and his government on 46. The Morgan poll, an honest one — it rings mobiles, and redistributes Palmer as its respondents want, not as they used to — had them on 45.5.

Warfare round the MH 17 crash site caused Australian police, again, not to go there. Their presence, and Julie Bishop’s, in the area, cost a quarter of a million dollars that day. Abetz meanwhile announced that anyone under fifty who lost their jobs would not get the dole for six months, a saving of fifty thousand dollars a day. So a search for bits of the dead in an area as big as Marrickville full of bits of other dead people was more important than the misery of living breadwinners and the welfare of their children in towns that were dying, as always.

The amount spent searching for MH 370 in an area as big as Queensland hit half a billion.

Is Gaza a crime scene?

If one of the jobs going that day is a sex worker must she take it? If she’s a virgin must she take it? Will she lose the dole if she knocks it back? Why not?

What’s to fear in India? Bride burning? A mere bagatelle. Being raped and hung from a tree? A walk in the park. Two hundred million young men competing for your job? What a wuss you are. Life in misery? Join the club. Sleeping in the street? Boo hoo.

Get real. Toughen up. Take your medicine. Go home.

You’re lucky I didn’t send you home to Sri Lanka. I’ve sent hundreds. Not all of them are dead. Not all of them are dead.

But they learned their lesson.

We must send in unarmed police to bring to justice rocket-firing Russian swine, and if any are killed, send in other unarmed police to avenge them who, if they are killed…(contd p94)

The Gore Vidal film, The United States Of Amnesia, shown on ABC last night, was superb in every way. I have put up on Ellis Gold my 1997 piece on him, after spending bits of a week with him when he came to Sydney, and Bob Carr’s memorial of him in his book.

Abbott was surprised to find his plan to send armed soldiers into an an area beset by three disorderly armies unpopular. Told it could be dangerous, he ordered a hundred unarmed policemen currently drinking brown ale in Putney to go into mortal danger to seek bits of burnt cloth and body parts which Abbott thought sacred and worth dying for, carrying no weapons. The three disorderly armies then started shooting at each other on the ‘crime scene’ and even the policemen stayed in Putney. The soldiers asked if they could go home now please, and Abbott thought he might put them in police uniforms and send them unarmed into the war zone as well. Housed in London, the soldiers and policemen were costing a strapped Hockey Budget eighty thousand dollars a day

To distract the nation from this, Abbott announced he was reintroducing slavery. Called ‘work for the dole’, it required men with teenage children completing high school to leave their towns and work in other towns in demeaning jobs for little money, and teenage girls to apply for forty jobs a month for six months in return for no pay whatever, not even their bus fares to interviews. It is to be presumed that if there was a legal job in prostitution services available they would have to take it. It is not known, though, if she must accept work as a whore on a ‘trial run’ basis, or if she was a virgin she would be required to take it, working for nothing, the way you do, until she was ‘up to speed’. It is also not known if a forty-five year old woman applying repeatedly for work as a low-paid prostitute knowing she would not get it because she was fat and ugly would be thought to be ‘cheating the system’ and denied the dole thereafter. The deputy minister for slavery, Hartsuyker, did not say how this new plan would ‘reduce red tape’ along lines of Abbott’s ‘red tape bonfire’ celebration of a month ago.

Nor did Hartsuyker say if ‘work for the dole’ included army service in the new war, if it came, in East Ukraine.

On Insiders it was warmly asserted that Abbott had ‘retrieved his Prime Ministership’ by the strength and decisiveness of his plan to ‘go in, get the cadavers, and get out’. This had impressed all the world, they said. He also ordered our diplomats to get the fuck out of Libya, now beset by a ‘resurrect Ghadafi’ insurgency keen to kill everybody.

Morrison spoke in tongues, and his pirates brought 157 black people to a cage in the desert from which all cameras and phone calls were banned, though no-one could say what harm they would do. It was thought that Morrison, plainly guilty of child abuse, would be imprisoned more comfortably in Sydney or Goulburn, pending investigation of the four or five hundred children who had suffered psychological harm or death while under his protection.

Abbott said no more about ‘bringing to justice’ Putin or any of his accomplices who had deliberately shot down 37 Australian tourists because of the evil in their hearts.

If heaven exists it must resemble the Labor Conference in Sydney Town Hall. The high architecture; the pipe organ; the aged faces grudgingly applauding show ponies they hate; the pies and sauce and coffee; the Mars Bars; the sausage sandwiches; the raffle winners picked by Johnno, now in his thousandth year and moving papally through the throng with his threatening twinkle, his pork pie hat, his walking sticks and secret handshake.

And, once again, raw passionate speeches from the best and brightest of our time. If you seek intellectual heft, youthful talent, divine forgiveness and envious comradeship, seek it not at the High Tables of Oxford or Yale; nor on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange; nor on any opening night of any Olympics: go to Sydney Town Hall in July round Whitlam’s birthday in any year, and open your ears and your mind and exhult in what you hear.

Shorten’s Hockey line, ‘a conservative Treasurer, whose charmed life has robbed him of charity; and, I might say, judgment’, was a stand-out but eleven hundred others were in the league. Carr’s two speeches, on Gaza and himself, proved august and measured and stirring as any by Lincoln or Clarence Darrow. It’s good to hear the English language frogmarched into oratory, the slogans and anthems and war-cries of a century transformed into punchy, rugged, insatiate verbal glory. I wish this happened every month, and an ongoing miniseries of it were sold each year at the ABC Shop for twenty dollars. It is a high leap of the heart for a fair-go nation, every time it happens, and it should be acclaimed and empowered. More later.

The children of Israel have a right to defend themselves. The children of Ishmael do not. They are heathen filth, fit only for slavery, rape, and the ceaseless unsleeping service of our bodily needs. And it is meet, as the prophet Isaiah noted, that we dash the heads of their little ones against the stones. The blood of our ancestors cries out for us to do this frequently, every two years or so. And to those who say our ancestors were also their ancestors I say, ‘Watch it, sunshine. We know where you live, and possess sufficient helicopter-gunships to reduce to flaming rubble the house your great-great- grandfather took twenty years to build in five minutes; on a clear night, maybe three.

Some would say this is not an adequate basis for domestic and foreign policy in a proud free Middle Eastern democracy, role model for the fussy vigilant civilised world. And to them I say, as we used to say in the alleys of my home town, Philadelphia, to cowering and pleading and bleeding old ladies, ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.’

Next year in Gaza! And the year after.

Until there is no Gaza at all.

In a move reminiscent of nineteenth century slavery, Scott Morrison sold thirty-seven black children to the Indians; or, it was whispered, paid the Indians to take them away. But the Indians would take only some of them: those Indian-born, unlike their parents, who wept when hearing they would now be parted from them. These parents, S&M swore, would never live anywhere, not even in his desert concentration camp, which was closing; and that would teach them a lesson.

The High Court then, to his surprise, told him selling people was wrong, parting parents and children was wrong, and scaring the bejesus out of infants for five weeks on end on the high seas was child abuse. They considered what they would do with him, and what period in chokey, comparable with Rolf’s, they would sentence him to.

Abbott, meanwhile, said what he was doing would ‘send a message to the people smugglers’, though none were involved; the boat was their own, and they were sailing nowhere ‘illegal’, only New Zealand, when Morrison, a parrot on his shoulder and a loud-hailer to his mouth, had kidnapped them for no good cause at sea. Fearing forty years in prison for crimes against humanity on top of the child abuse, Morrison prepared himself to babble and pray in Shirelive Church, whose communicants had begun to put up two crossed fingers when he approached.

(The boat his captives came on was boarded, stolen, looted and burnt at sea, and some government advisers were worried that this act of purposeless war might be frowned upon by the UN.)

Abbott continued to spend hundreds of thousands on soldiers drinking brown ale in Putney and Cosgrove and Houston enjoying top accommodation in Amsterdam, stepping out occasionally to murmur prayerfully over a misassembled corpse, whose nationality was uncertain. Abbott was criticised in Europe for proposing to send armed troops into a foreign battlefield by agreement with a government that did not exist, after a bloody affray in their parliament in which four noses were broken and everybody moodily abolished themselves, to go there in order to look for corpses already in Amsterdam, or eaten by wild dogs, crows and bears, in an area as big as Armidale, sending soldiers there within two months who were currently drunk in Putney; and to get them there on, he said, Malaysian Airways, the only service that still flew there, adding this was a joke. The Europeans laughed briefly, then warmly called him ‘nuts’.

Chris Davis, a Liberal, or, as they call it up that way, an LNP, lost Stafford, or contributed to the loss of Stafford, by the biggest margin in Queensland history and immediately joined the Labor Party. He generously offered to stand against Campbell Newman, and thus presumably preserve him in Ashford, a seat he was otherwise bound to lose, by the assiduous application of his wondrous proven incompetence on Labor’s behalf. The Labor Party told him to go fuck himself.

Campbell Newman, now repenting his every policy and apologising on the street to everyone who went past him, became more and more like a homeless person or a Buddhist monk lately fallen on irreligious times. He knew he was set to become only the third PM or Premier in Australian history to lose his own seat, and against that day was making a grovelling fool of himself, the way one does. He considered seeking work in the High Command of the imminent invasion, Gallipoli-style, of East Ukraine, but Tony Abbott told him to go fuck himself.

Tony Abbott, meanwhile, noticed a thousand Gazans had been unjustly killed, and vaguely approved of this. ‘Israel has a right to defend itself,’ he said, or is said to have said, in Confession to Pell on Skype, ‘but Gaza does not. The people there are heathens and beyond redemption whereas the Jews, as my friend Mel Gibson, the eminent Catholic thinker, has informed me over a few jars, will join the True Church at the latter day and in a subsequent battle, Armageddon, fought against Putin the King of the North, will die in their millions as the whole Earth burns but be resurrected soon after that and join us Catholics in heaven singing Holy, Holy, Holy on the Sea of Glass; and that is the basis of my foreign policy for the foreseeable and prophesied future.

‘ The corpses I am retrieving from Ukraine will overfly the slaughter in Gaza, and not look down.’

(From Dali)

As of 16:42 GMT, Gaza health ministry confirms death toll of Palestinians in the Israeli offensive in Gaza has increased to 848. More than 5,694 have been injured since the operation began.

Here are the numbers announced by the ministry:

Out of the 848 dead, 40 were elderly (20 males, 20 females), 600 were adults (518 males, 82 females) and 208 were children (138 males, 70 females).

Out of the 5,694 injured 230 elderly (108 males, 122 females), 3685 adults (2573 males, 1112 females) and 1779 children (1126 males, 653 females).

So, 208 dead children and almost 2000 children injured. How is this not a war crime?

And Benjamin Netanyahu said that Hamas represented another type of “Islamist extremism, violent extremism that has no resolvable grievance” adding: “Hamas is like ISIL, Hamas is like al-Qaeda, Hamas is like Hezbollah, Hamas is like Boko Haram.”

OK then, Israel is like Hitler’s Germany, Israel is like Hussein’s Iraq, Israel is like Qaddafi’s Libya.

Where does that get us Bibi? You’re not looking after Israel, you’re stuck in the bog of a fucked concept. Lying helps I guess.

Mike Carlton in the smh today. Very, very fine.

How many children has Scott Morrison sent back to Sri Lanka? How many have been killed?

Abbott concluded a deal with the Kiev government, which immediately resigned. The deal provided a hundred policemen who would sit in London drinking brown ale until sent for. These would be joined, he swore, in a month or two by ten or fifteen young men in slouch hats with machine guns who would go with them to an area which the government that did not exist did not control and protect them from Russian rockets, delving bears and falling Boeings. Kiev swore in turn they would have a new government in a month or so, and it would then proclaim which side they were on, and shoot all dissenting traitors. Till then no uniformed Australian would be allowed on the ‘crime scene’ which Abbott insisted must be urgently searched lest ‘tampering on an industrial scale’ take place and fingerprints, for instance, on shattered wineglasses be erased in the four or five months before his gallant Anzacs, whistling and fondling their lethal weapons, got there.

He called this uncovering and reassembling of clues and corpses a ‘humanitarian mission’ which did not, any more, alas, involve ‘bringing to justice’ Vladimir Putin in shackles to Darlinghurst courthouse. ‘We just want to bring home our dead,’ he said, near tears. In months, he swore. In days, Julie Bishop swore, contrarily. ‘The adults are in charge,’ PVO exulted; he was held down by Ross Cameron and sedated.

Bishop revealed she had not yet cut a deal with the rebels, whom she had lately called mass murderers. She was astounded these evil men had not returned her calls.

Though the ‘crime scene’ was called ‘unguarded’, ‘chaotic’ and ‘subject to daily looting’ by most reporters, who had no great problem sauntering around it, Abbott and Bishop swore they were in control of it, or soon would be in control of it, or rather in a queue of many firm, determined, vengeful nations who were also in control of it. They were worried insufficient body parts would be found to approximate thirty-eight Australians after dogs and bears had delved for them in the warm long summer months when the Anzacs and policemen were drinking brown ale in Putney and awaiting orders. ‘The adults are in charge,’ exulted Andrew Bolt. Tony Abbott looked around, through authoritative rimless glasses, for a helpful headline or a friend.

This proved to be not Scott Morrison, who was in big trouble in many latitudes and jurisdictions. Having kidnapped thirty-seven children and one hundred and twenty adults on the high seas, stolen their boat, their walllets and their mobile phones, forbidden them lawyers, translators and primary educations and having, for the period it would take to sail to England, sailed instead in circles round the Arafura, telling the High Court meanwhile ‘these people’ had no right to live anywhere, the baffled and maddened S&M felt suddenly obliged to take them, not to where they were going, New Zealand, but to a desert concentration camp in Western Australia where, with any luck, no reporter could photograph them. ‘They will never live in Australia,’ he foamed helpfully, knowing this was not his decision, and making the whole world wonder what he had against them.

This turn of events made nonsense of his frequent boast that he had ‘stopped the boats’ and made us wonder how many boats, indeed, had set out lately and how many Tamil children he had sent to torture, death or inconvenience in Sri Lanka (known by Canada as the seventh circle of Hell) in breach of our UN obligations and, not that it matters, the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount. It also meant the Court could find him guilty of child abuse and put him in the slammer (to judge by the number of children involved) for twenty or a hundred years.

Facing down these difficulties with his usual hydrophobic resolution, S&M swore that his persecution of these photogenic infants would continue, they could not have their phones or teddy bears back, or the company of their fathers, and the best they could hope for was imprisonment for eighty or a hundred years among birdshit on Nauru. He was immediately applauded by PVO as ‘Abbott’s most successful Minister’.

Malcolm Turnbull amiably accused Joe Hockey of dementia or lying. Sure, he had ruined Joe’s life, he affably admitted, by recontesting the leadership he had just resigned and beating him by one vote, Joe’s own, on the first ballot unexpectedly. But, hell, he wanted to be Prime Minister too, and both of them, both of them agreed it was important they kept the maniac Abbott from attaining the crown. And both since then had sworn, the way you do, that he was now to their surprise a very fine fellow indeed, archangelic in his commanding radiance and their love for him exceeded the love of woman, and they would never, never now think for even a moment of overthrowing him, whatever their common wet dream Credlin has lately advised, and however close he came, in poll after poll, to rendering the Party leprous, odiferous, moribund and laughable.

Tanya Plibersek said the twenty million spent on sailing one hundred and fifty-eight refugees in circles round the Arafura had been ‘all about Scott Morrison’s ego’. Mark Kenny, gasping, said this was the most spiteful thing he had ever heard.

The ‘strong and admirable leadership’ Abbott and Bishop have shown, according to the smh editorial, begs the question, ‘against what opposition?’ Shorten has assonantly echoed their every press release. Obama has marched in lockstep with their paranoid bellicosity. Not even Jacqui Lambie has come out in favour of killing tourists in mid-air. They each have hinted Putin should be denied the joys of Brisbane if it proves he killed thirty-seven Australians with malice aforethought and then attempted an alibi. They have threatened with Commonwealth Police a war-zone raining bodies from the air. Joint funerals of promiscuously mingled body-parts have been attended by two of our foremost generals. There have been daily Prime Ministerial statements on how the body parts are doing and how soon, in calendar months, the bereaved might see and cremate them.

But they might be overdoing it, rather. Bishop, sensing the drift of the wind, last night asserted it might be ‘days, not years’ before the corpses are reassembled and flown home and ‘reunited’, whatever that means, with sad siblings and fiancees. And Abbott has backed away from his ‘persecuting Putin’ initiative of last Friday. He knows full well he will come willy-nilly to Brisbane, and shake Tony Abbott’s hand.

And this will show, as this last week has, that nothing like ‘the adults’ are in charge; a coven of squawking Chicken Littles seems nearer the mark. Tony Abbott, the Chicken Little-in-Chief, seems unable to get a corpse in a coffin, properly labelled, within three months of its murder. In this way, the Murdochists proclaim, he has shown himself a true world statesman.

It is to be wondered, however, how long this numbering and naming of corpses, their embalming, refabricating and searching for clues, and their scores of separate onerous funerals will stay interesting. The thirty-seven children whom Scott Morrison has lately driven mad may more intrigue the television audience hereafter. The living have a future, the dead, it has proved, a more limited one. Abbott’s obsession with the latter, after spending half a billion dollars on a passionate search through several oceans for MH 370, may with his morbid picking over of the broken bits of this latest ill-lost Boeing win fewer friends than he is counting on.

I may be wrong about this. The western suburbs mày hail him as a Churchill, come to judgment.

And we will see what we shall see.

Waleed Ali’s piece in the smh today is worthy of George Orwell, and should be read.

Hamlet, Brutus, Willie Loman, Hedda Gabler, Gig Young, Van Gogh, Socrates, George Sanders, Antony, Cleopatra, Stephen Fry, Mohamed Atta, Michael Hutchence, Petronius and the swaggie from ‘Waltzing Matilda’ contemplated or committed suicide and none of their doctors was delicensed. Hemingway, Hart Crane, Mishima, Sylvia Plath, Brian Epstein, William Inge and Hunter S Thompson topped themselves while possessed of no fatal illness and none of their GPs was punished in any way.

I myself have failed to prevent seven friends from killing themselves and no inspector of police has come after me.

No suicide these days, moreover, is illegal. No failed suicide goes to gaol. It is the subject of the two best known texts in our literature, ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘Waltzing Matilda’, and it is well known in many cultures. In ancient Rome and medieval Japan it was thought a noble thing. Among some Buddhists, burning oneself to death for a cause is still applauded. To be a suicide bomber is an ambition of a hundred million young Arabs and five million Tamil Tigers, who invented it. In England, suicide missions like the Dam Busters and the Cockleshell Heroes and the Great Escape were acclaimed by royalty, nobility and commons alike. Racing car drivers still are. The serially suicidal Jack Brabham was knighted for it.

So what is all this shit about Nitschke? He is no more guilty than Brutus’s friend Strato, who held the sword he ran on, or the solemn visiting disciples who did not seize Socrates’ hemlock, and dash it to the floor.

Give me a break.

‘I advised Prince Hamlet that it was his choice,’ Phillip Nitschke said. ‘If it be not now, yet it will come, I said. I told him he was a thirty-year-old adult, and if he had good reason not to have a sword-fight with the brother of a dead girl he had impregnated and caused to drown herself after stabbing his old father through an arras, he should not accept the challenge. “The readiness is all,” he said. And I said, well, it was his decision. He was over twenty-one. And the rest is history.’

In what may become known as his ‘Archduke Ferdinand moment’, the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, swore to protect the remains of thirty eight Australians by putting fifty Australians in mortal danger. ‘The silliest strategic move since the bulletless charge on the Nek,’ said the esteemed historian, Trevor Wilson. Antony Beevor, author of The Second World War, compared it, unfavourably, to Anzio. ‘We did not send in eight thousand policemen to retrieve six thousand dead soldiers from Anzac Cove,’ said Rob McLachlan, the overweight Bathurst-based Gallipoli scholar. ‘We Scots-Canadians call that throwing good money after bad.’

‘The forty-eight million dollars this purposeless search will cost before Christmas,’ Sir Peter Cosgrove, a former soldier, is said to have said in a secret memo, ‘would be better spent on counselling the bereaved, or building a cenotaph at Mascot.’

‘Eet eez not as zo zere weel be any usefool eveedonz on ze crash site,’ said the Dutch forensic expert, M. Hercule Poirot. ‘From ze Black Berx we weel know if anuzzer plane shot eet down, or attracted fire from ze ground. From retrieved hand-towels, nuzzing.’

When asked how many missing dead fingers were worth risking World War 3 for, the clearly abashed Prime Minister would not be drawn. ‘Vladimir Putin asked if he could send in troops too,’ he said, moistening his lips and changing the subject, ‘and I told him where to get off. What do you think this is, I said to him, Russia? “Yes,” he said. Bloody cheek.’

It was noted that another plane might fall on his ‘diggers’. If that occurred, he said, ‘we would send in another army to retrieve their smashed and sacred bodies. And if they, in turn, died in their scores on duty, we would send…we would send in…’

Mr Abbott was led from the room, babbling and weeping, by a Ms Credlin, a very tall woman, who then, some said, winked at one Joe Hockey, who smiled broadly.

…Peta Credlin, quoted as having said Joe Hockey was ‘head and shoulders’ above any other leadership aspirant including her former employer Malcolm Turnbull and her husband Brian Loughnane, provoked a swarm of backbenchers to extol Tony Abbott as little short of the Archangel Gabriel in his wisdom, valour, physical beauty and probity. His leadership in getting bits of humans to Amsterdam had amazed and inspired the world, they cried, with a strategic brilliance comparable with George Patton’s dash to the Elbe. They predicted forty more years of his leadership, subsequent elevation to the House of Lords and early canonisation, then went out and drank heavily.

Scott Morrison failed to sue Sarah Hanson-Young for having called him a ‘child abuser’. This followed Gillian Triggs’s account of twelve new mothers on suicide watch being unable to put their babies down in ten-foot-by-ten-foot aluminium boxes immuring eight other people in summer heat and children with no ball to play with. If true, it meant any Sydney policeman could arrest him and put him on eighty times as many charges as Rolf Harris, which might then get him logically three hundred years in prison. It was clear the High Court thought he had assisted in the killing of other Tamil children dragged off other boats into the arms of their families’ torturers and found his lack of remorse contemptible. His failure to sue Hanson-Young, or admonish her, was an admission (‘Silence gives consent’), some thought, of his guilt.

Abbott’s repeated emphasis of how long it would take to reassemble mutilated humans and reunite them with their anguished relatives at various crematoria began, after five days, to show signs of incipient insanity. Among those aware that he also thought that most of them would burn, as Protestants, in Hell, he seemed insincere and bizarre; they thought Joe Hockey, perhaps, a preferable alternative Prime Minister. This was until they learned they could have had, a year ago, the excellent Greg Combet, and they went out and drank heavily.

A plane went down in the Algerian desert, and Abbott offered to assist with eighteen Australian parking policemen the French Foreign Legion in ‘securing the site’ from ‘contamination’ by ‘marauding Tuaregs with something to hide’. The commanding general of the French Foreign Legion, Georges Clouzeau, told him to go ferk himself.

Hemingway13

It might turn out that the real meaning of ‘Called to account’ will constitute a similar consequence to the compensation paid by the Ukraine government to the families of 78 victims in the 2004 accidental downing of the Siberian Airlines flight by a Ukraine military missile over the Black Sea a fair distance from Ukrainian territory (airplane was closer to Turkey during peacetime.)

Also this meaning of “called to account” eventuated, after an indecently long delay, when America paid “ex gratia” funds to victims’ families for the USS Vincennes’ 1988 accidental downing of an Iranian Airbus. Despite attempts by Pres. Reagan to claim it was an act of self-defence, the 290 deaths were finally compensated for during Clinton’s presidency. Reading the Wikipedia summary, one is struck by how closely the current Machiavellian American and the current Murdochian Australian responses to the Malaysian Airlines tragedy is a grim echo of the USA’s over a quarter century ago:

“The Vincennes had entered Iranian territorial waters after one of its helicopters drew warning fire from Iranian speedboats operating within Iranian territorial limits, after the helicopter violated the Rules of Engagement by getting too close to the speedboats. The United States officially claimed that the Vincennes was acting in self-defense in international waters at the time of the incident; subsequent disclosures would show that the Vincennes had entered Iranian waters and then initiated a skirmish with the Iranian coastal patrol vessels which had posed no threat to it.”

“…….the airliner was making IFF squawks in Mode III (not Mode II used by Iranian military planes), a signal that identified it as a civilian craft, and operators of Vincennes mistook for Mode II. According to the United States Government, the crew incorrectly identified the Iranian Airbus A300 as an attacking F-14A Tomcat fighter, a plane made in the United States and operated at that time by only two forces worldwide, the United States Navy and the Islamic Republic of Iran Air Force. The Iranian F-14s had been supplied by manufacturer Grumman in an air-to-air configuration only and had no known anti-ship capabilities.”

To quote Mark Twain yet again, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

Hugh Weiss

The day after the USS Vincennes’ downed the Iranian Airbus, Hem I was scrambling on to the then once weekly flight from BKK to Hanoi. The plane was an aged Tupolev TU34b still sporting the glass nose from its previous life as a Soviet maritime reconnaissance / bomber. In those days Hang Kong Vietnam didn’t allocate seats, so it was the quick & the dead. If you didn’t get one, wait until next week & run faster.

In the scrambled I ended up grabbing a seat beside a round faced bloke with an afro & a little pencil moustache. As I sat down, two big blokes in the seats behind jumped up to grab me but my new mate signalled them to sit back. My seat companion was apparently a VIP who’d been been boarded earlier. We started chatting about the news & story on the front page of the BKK Nation. Seemed a pretty decent, well educated, rational bloke. No political rhetoric or dogma.

As it happened John Button was leading the first trade mission to Vietnam & we all ended up in the Foreign Ministry guesthouse. Down in the foyer just before dinner, I was talking to a couple of Aussie when my flight mate & his entourage came down the steps & he came over for a chat. After a few minutes A convoy of bloody great Russian stretched limos turned up, one with a Libyan flag on its pole.

My little mate turned out to be the Libyan Defence Minister, in Vietnam to acquire a couple more plane loads of air defence weapons one of my Vietnamese contacts reported later. If you’ve worked out the timing, Hem, that’s about 18 months after Reagan sent the F-111s in to bombed Gaddafi’s palace after deciding he was behind that nightclub bombing in West Berlin.

These recurrent ‘incidents’ which end up being the basis for political hairy chestedness, accusation & counter accusation, followed by acts of knee-jerk retribution have a long history. The Yanks & Poms always claim to have definitive evidence. History usually ends up telling another story.

At least on this occasion, the US seems to be agreeing MH17 was an accidental shoot down & they’re indicating there was a basis for the error. That tells you a lot about how much the global power balance has changed since Iraq & the GFC. I get the feeling the last remaining war mongers are TAbbott & McCain.

Frank

I keep thinking about what a little old Ukrainian woman said to a sniffing reporter, after a corpse fell through her roof and landed in her lounge room.

“It was the day it began raining humans.” she was reported to have said.

Flat endless fields of sunflowers waving in the summer sky and above, quite suddenly, it began raining humans.

Richelieu II

A brilliant summation of Abbott’s and Liberals use of this event for their own propaganda and polling means. The ABC has run this propaganda line for the government for the past 7 days, yet the Liberals will still accuse of it left wing bias and call for its privatization. Good luck ABC it doesn’t matter what you do the Liberals will try to destroy you.

Helvi

Sick making…

Dali

And now the Governor General Sir Peter is flying halfway around the world to greet a plane (hasnt it already arrived?) transporting the body remains to the morgue in Amsterdam.

At what stage does Abbott’s hunger for personal kudos and political shamanism become ghoulish abuse of his own people?

Will there be a funeral parade in each capital city, 21 gun salutes and Mayoral speeches, with special appearances of the weeping Abbettes wearing white with “It might have been me” in red across their not bad looking breasts.

Do these innocent people and their families deserve the added injury of being dragooned into the political service of a sinking politician’s final moments on stage? The line between dignity and respect on the one side, and pomp and pastiche on the other is not so fine that Abbott can get away with this sham.

Shame on him, and shame on his pitiless breed.

A12 yr old vision impaired girl wrote to him to plead that the $175k grant to paralymic sports be reinstated after Hockey cut it, got this response:

“”I congratulate you on taking an interest in your system of government,

“We are a great country and a great people. One day it will be the responsibility of you and your generation to lead our country.”

I guess he was busy rehearsing his grief, while the inner politician was whispering ‘i love the smell of napalm in the morning’

Abbott was shown to have colluded with Murdoch, but hidden from his party, his catastrophic Millionairesses’ Pregnancy Bonus before he announced it without consulting them. ‘Sometimes it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission,’ he chuckled pleasantly at the time. Its consequence, the likely destruction of his party and the axe murder of Joe’s Budget and career, he judged a small price to pay for his whimsy. It was approved after all by Credlin, who was keeping her eggs in his fridge, and that was enough for him. It would cost his party eighty seats, but hey ho, shit happens.

A report said all the children on Christmas Island were now mentally ill, and many mothers on suicide watch, in part because their babies had no floor space to crawl on. The children had been made mad by having no schooling whatever, and nothing to do. Widely called ‘child abuse’, these conditions were commanded by Morrison, our nation’s Child Abuser-in-Chief.

He was in India, where government officials responded with shock and loathing to his proposition that they take back from him the Tamils he had kidnapped on the high seas, and pay for their upbringing, care and old age. Morrison, amazed that he no longer has anyone to sell slaves to, may have to commit some sort of hari-kiri before the victims of his piracy arrive, acclaimed, in the High Court to testify against him.

Abbott meantime swore that he would leave no stone unturned until every sacred fingerbone of the Australian dead had been brought home for cremation. Two further planes were shot down over the crime scene, adding further dead to it, while his people dug up a field as big as Bathurst for vital clues, and Angus Houston earned five thousand dollars awaiting for two hours with sombre dignity whatever Australians had been thus far exhumed, though thirty were still missing.

It is not yet known what Abbott will do if any of his ‘diggers’ are killed by neighbouring gunfire. Declare war perhaps, on some country that is hopefully smaller than Russia.

I’ve completed my review of McDonagh’s Calvary, one of the best films ever made, on Ellis Gold. Those who do not wish to know what happens in it, should not read it.

In what film did James Garner glory in his cowardice before D-Day? Who was his co-star? Who wrote it?

‘Brought to justice’, a meaningless phrase much used in the comic books of the 1940s, was picked up last week by Julie Bishop, then quickly replaced this week by ‘called to account’.

This was because it had proved that ‘brought to justice’ was nowhere near as meaningless as she had first thought it was. It turned out to imply, in this case, that we hang Vladimir Putin, or bring him before a firing squad, or lock him up in The Hague for a minimum of twenty-five years. Or that we treat in this way some drunk teenage gunner for his part in what proves to have been an accident.

Now it is clear it was an accident, and airline officials and EU officials were equally responsible for it, she has reduced the ferocity of her language, wisely. ‘Called to account’, her new phrase, means no more than ‘interrogated, found wanting and spoken to severely’, not judicially killed. Not kidnapped by an SAS crack squad parachuting into the Kremlin and dragged in manacles to a show trial in Darlinghurst, which is what the rabid hyperbolist Abbott foolishly promised last Friday.

This leaves me to wonder what Angus Houston-we-have-a-problem is doing there, and what above two thousand dollars a day he is being paid for. Bringing someone to justice? No. Delving the cornfield for spare bodies? No. Loading corpses onto Qantas, two by two, and bringing them home? No. Praying over them? No.

I think what he’s doing is providing his name, that’s all, and its happy echo of Apollo 13, to an exercise in Abbottist propaganda, operation homebound feelgood, Biggles brings them home, Tony and Julie sort the Russkies, as he did when he was looking for MH 370, an unended soggy search which has cost us Australians half a billion dollars thus far and bids fair to cost us a billion more.

Abbott’s desire to wrap himself in the flag and the needs of the dead gets creepier every day. Why spend a billion dollars on a watery convocation of corpses that might be spent on living schoolchildren, two thousand dollars, say, on each of a million of them? Yet he is fighting like a scorched muskrat to take their money away; and spend it sauntering around the bottom of the Indian Ocean looking for scattered hunks of Boeing.

It is a good bit like the medieval reverence for the relics of the saints, and the selling of their pickled fingers and ears for a purse of gold in the fond belief that they will reduce one’s time in Hell. Abbott, who may be described as a Gibsonite fundamentalist papist fool, is unconsciously continuing this habit of his forefathers, and should be asked to stop.

Let the dead bury their dead, our Saviour shrewdly advised.

We have seriously better uses for our money.

What is Angus Houston being paid?

What is he doing?

Tony Abbott said, ‘After the crime, the cover-up,’ not stating what the crime was. He committed Australian troops to armed participation in a civil war in Europe, then changed his mind. He seemed uncertain whether Putin had ordered a mass murder or merely supplied lethal weapons, like Martin Bryant’s gunsmith, to irresponsible people. He seemed surprised when the refrigerated corpses went to Holland, not Angus Houston, who therefore had little to do but potter about a cornfield looking for burnt bits of cloth and fingerprints. He promised a long agonising wait before the dead would all come back, then found a hundred of them were missing. He beseeched Angus Houston to dig up an area the size of Armidale and find them quickly, hiring extra shovels if he had to, lest wild dogs pre-emptively devour them, and so deprive him, the GG, and these glorious dead of a photo opportunity in the Federation Chamber.

Morrison told the Court that if refugees were captured in a particular part of the sea, they couldn’t live anywhere. Though himself the legal guardian of thirty-seven kidnapped children, he separated them from their fathers, terrifying them, denied them an education, and allowed them only three hours a day in sunshine, presumably without their fathers, who the sobbing toddlers probably fear by now have walked the plank. The High Court said it was worried about these children being so long at sea and Morrison was amazed and affrighted. He let go a fifteen-year-old stowaway, whom he had previously called ‘not in the national interest’ and ordered back into torture in Somalia, hoping thereby to show he was a good fellow and avoid, if he could, imprisonment in The Hague.

Joe Hockey’s book revealed he wanted the Budget to be crueller, and called Abbott a wimp for keeping the old age pension and allowing disabled bludgers any money at all. The book revealed he was mocked as a kid for being a fat wog, and ‘gave as good as he got’.

Which he still does, by the look of it.

The moment may be soon approaching when John Kerry says it’s wrong for Israel to be bombing hospitals and killing hundreds of children.

So far he’s blamed only Hamas. They won’t agree to a truce, he says. They want their imprisoned soldiers released, their houses rebuilt, their borders opened and food and bandages let in. They want their democratically elected MPs not murdered in their beds. And, oh yes, freedom, liberty, self-government, a nation once again, unharried by helicopter-gunships at midnight depopulating kindergartens. And…you know…the pursuit of happiness.

These are unreasonable demands, John Kerry roars, and Hamas should know their place.

But…now the planes are not flying in, and the UN is frowning on a slaughter per day more numerous than the London Blitz, it is possible, just possible, America may, at last, unfetter the language and called mass murder by its proper name.

Has Israel any friends left? Don’t think so.

And we will see what we shall see.

The evidence considered in the next few days will spell the end, politically, of Scott Morrison and may see him put in gaol for piracy, kidnapping or child abuse, of all of which he is guilty, and also, possibly, complicity in murder, the latter if he has already sent back to Sri Lanka children who have been killed or ‘disappeared’.

It is my opinion, and I may be wrong, that the Court has no option but to let the imprisoned Tamils come to Australia, at least in order to testify, and almost certainly to live here.

My evidence for this is Morrison’s crazy behaviour in the last four weeks and his letting in, yesterday, of a fifteen-year-old stowaway he had previously described as ‘not in the national interest’ and ordered back to his probable death in Somalia. He must have been pretty scared to do that, after hearing advice from his lawyers, I would guess, that he should now quickly curry favour with the Court.

Of this bizarre brief semifascist chapter in our federal history, now approaching its end, Scott Morrison is surely the most eccentric, lawless and fat-headed footsoldier and propagandist. He has threatened three-year-old refugee children with a hundred years of imprisonment, without appeal, on Nauru. He has covered up a murder and let the murderer get away. He has covered up the throat-cutting, shooting and head-clubbing of sixty people. He has separated Muslim women from their husbands, for long years their only protectors, and terrified their children by not letting them know, in a language they understand, how long they will be imprisoned and where they are going and if they will be killed there. He speaks in tongues and prays for his captives and jeers at his opponents for not being tough enough, deeming child abuse an honourable way of being tough and a valiant thing to be engaged in.

It may well be that he will survive the week unimprisoned. But he will not, I believe, in this era of slaughtered, raped and molested children, survive as a responsible Minister and the guardian of hundreds of them beyond Saturday.

Or I could be wrong.

So Jacqui Lambie talks like a character out of Girls and therefore shouldn’t be a Senator?

Wow.

So, I guess, should everyone who won’t say grace and sing God Save The Queen.

Are you, Prime Minister, as good as your word?

I know Abbott quite well and it occurs to me what a conversational coward he is. He hasn’t yet rung even one of the bereaved, and there are about a thousand of them. He hasn’t been, and he’ll never go, to the crash site. He hasn’t been to the United Nations. He didn’t ring Putin for three days, it didn’t occur to him that he ought to. And when he got through to him, he had I suspect a grovelling conversation with him, as he used to with me, ‘Australia’s finest writer,’ he told me often enough. ‘After the crime, the cover-up,’ he said a few minutes ago. He said, I will bet a thousand dollar lunch at Macchiavelli’s, no such thing to Putin.

It’s a fair question what reality he’s in. He doesn’t imagine that Putin could sue him, which he can. He doesn’t remember that you don’t prejudge a case not yet before a jury. He’s a lawyer and he doesn’t remember this. He said what has happened was a ‘crime’, but not a ‘war crime’, not wanting to upset Putin too much. He’ll have to shake his hand in September after all, whatever comes of this.

He’s trying to cast as an ongoing uncertain emergency what is hereafter mere procedure. The Black Box will show if another plane was nearby. The names of the suspect gunners will soon be known. The ‘contamination’ of the ‘crime scene’ is bullshit. Nothing on the ground will alter the Black Box evidence or the certain verdict of misadventure in wartime. The theft of wallets and passports is routine on any battlefield in any neighbourhood of impoverished peasantry in Europe.

Yet he behaves like JFK in Thirteen Days: sexy, decisive, wise, world-altering. A narcissistic magnification of his role in millennial history, some would say. A prematurely ejaculated wet dream, no more, of the kind that he had as a trainee priest, as he meekly reveals in his book.

It was a luckless accident, that’s all, which happened to people put in harm’s way by corporate arseholes wanting to save, oh, thirty dollars’ worth of kerosene and reduce, it turns out, the distance flown between Amsterdam and KL by three kilometers.

And yet he witters on, convincingly perhaps, about the enormity of an event that rivals, probably, the Marysville fires or the Granville train crash but is not a signicant world calamity.

Asked if it was a war crime, he dodged around it, knowing he would have to finger Putin, who buys a lot of our meat, if he said yes at a subsequent press conference. Asked if it was a terrorist act, he fudged it, knowing that if he thus called Russia a terrorist state he would have to call Israel one too by the end of the week when their toll of dead children topped a hundred. And that would never do.

What a shifty, sneaky, unlikeable, cowardly, cuckolded moral midget he seems entirely.

I’m so sorry now that I thought for so long I liked him.

If a rocket is fired from the grounds of a hospital, we kill everybody in the hospital.

It is only fair.

It is only fair we do this.

We are not a terrorist state.

We are the bringers of infinite justice.

Klondike Rob

I am sure others* have picked up on some curious inconsistencies over the past few days in how the MH17 crash site story is being reported when one considers, without bias, what one can observe from afar.(*Some of the very observant folk who comment on this blog.)

Consider:

1. Within a day or so of the crash, an operation is underway to locate and mark human remains with white flags on sticks. Commentary says much of this being done by volunteer off duty coal miners. It may be a crudely executed operation, but it looks to be both systematic and organised. And humanitarian. Few resources at hand. But something is happening. Who planned and ordered this? Who called out the miners?

2. The body hunt is followed, logically, a day or two later with a systematic, if clumsy, collection of human remains in plastic bags. Who organised this? Who provided the body bags? It looks – visually on TV – to be a combination of uniformed emergency workers, miners and civilian volunteers. Who recruited them? Did the local CWA provide lunch? No, that’s not a daft question – this is a large scale drafting of people in a war zone for a very unpleasant task. It doesn’t just happen. Willing people – caring people – need to be brought together.

3. The body bags seemingly immediately find their way to a waiting train of refrigerated vans. The bags are counted – presumably an inventory prepared – and loaded into the vans. Who provided this train and ensured its safe arrival and standing at the station? Can you imagine doing something like this in Australia – the bureaucracy, finding the rolling stock, etc etc? It doesn’t just happen.

Do you see what I am suggesting – a three tiered organised search, recovery and safe repository of the remains of several hundred people put together in a war zone by …. whom?

Don’t look to our media for an immediate answer. All of this happened while they were bleating on about … what?

Politicians, journalists, bureaucrats, et al. Blind as bloody bats, the lot of you.

There is another level to the events of the past few days we are not being told about. No conspiracy here, just mass incompetence of journalists and the usual self serving of politicians.

Helvi

KR, we also forget that they are pretty poor over there…

Helping ,not accusing works better always.

Klondike Rob

Helvi

Would it not be a very nice, and a try Australian, gesture if our Prime Minister, or our foreign Minister, said, “We don’t know who organised the search, recovery and safe care of the remains of our fellow Australians, but we would like to say, “Thank you”. We know it would have been done with few resources, perhaps with little prior experience, and it was undertaken in an unsafe war zone in the face of an angry world, but that makes what was done all that much more appreciated. Thank you to all those who did this and arranged for it to be done. We don’t fully understand how it happened, but it happened. Thank you.”

But, you and I know Tony and Julie won’t say anything like this.” Nor will Bill Shorten or any of our so-called leaders. No, this is an opportunity for political advantage taking and world stage strutting.

Hemingway13

KB,
Thanks for your post that has exceptional cogency and common sense.

The pathetic excuse for analysis we are getting from the so-called professional journalists is life imitating art – specifically, the brilliant Australian TV satire of current affairs programs, “Frontline” (1994-1997), with Rob Stitch playing the presenter and character, Mike Moore. An episode in which he reports from PNG for a week is the most apposite of all, but one of the sharpest was titled “Heroes and Villains”. That’s what the MSM wants and is going to create come Hades or high water. Our PM is the Aussie Winston Churchill and and Putin is another Stalin.

Alas, after copping a half-dozen variations of Mike on commercial channels and ABC, I just can’t stand to watch anymore and now sticking to Table Talk and a couple USA progressive blogs.

The Murdoch/Rinehart, ABC Copycatters have already set in concrete the Hero/Villain paradigm for this tragedy, and within a month we’ll see the polling (bogus or not, doesn’t matter) which saves Tony’s bacon and in two years sweeps him through a triumphant re-election campaign.

Poor fellow, our country.

Florence nee Fedup

I wonder with all this talk of tainted evidence, are some trying to discredit the evidence that might emerge.

We know the bodies where falling from that plane long before it hit the ground. One came through the roof of a near house.

No one has said what Putin has to gain, from this plane falling from the sky.

Florence nee Fedup

I always like a cool head, in any time of crisis. The cool head is more likely to get it right.

I have the feeling, that while Abbott is ranting and raving, Malaysia have been talking to the people that count, the so called Separatists.

Heather

Yes, the Malaysians seem to have their heads together this time around. They are keeping clear of Abbott and Bishop, I see.

You’re right! cool heads are far preferable. Am not seeing Abbott nor Bishop as being cool headed. They’re a worry.

Bodies falling from the sky, with debris spread over 12 km, is horrific.

It’s getting to the truth of it all, which is going to be the problem.

IMC..:)

As can be seen by the Unanimous UNSC Resolution, just this once it appears Tony Abbott is on the side of the angels & so you need to pull your head in Mr Ellis, pronto. Nobody knows how to do bloodless internal coups (& counter-coups)like The Australian Labor Party. With any luck Dimtri Medvedev will follow Julia Gillard’s lead & swiftly destroy Vladimir Putin. Or that’s what I’m hoping, praying, twittering & wishing for anyway. But as you say ‘we shall see what we shall see’ won’t we? Regards, ~IMC..:)

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/mh17/un-vote-and-malaysia-deal-with-rebels-offer-hope-for-mh17-investigation/story-fno88it0-1226996857752

Reply

Heather

Of course they should stop all domestic and cargo flights over war zones, or places of unrest where lots of war equipment is being used.

However with the antics of Abbott and Bishop, it is pretty obvious the neocons are baying for WW3. With these, more fear = more control.

Peter X

You are right Heather about the neocons, “We must have that war with Oceania (or is it Eurasia?) soon”.

Peter X

Abbott’s obsession with dead bodies and little respect for the living suggests he has missed his calling and should have been an undertaker. He actually looks like one. My apologies to any undertakers reading this for reinforcing a stereotype.

Julie Bishop demanded that Russia be named in a UN resolution condemning the ‘shooting down’ of MH 17 and was told that she couldn’t, and it wasn’t a ‘shooting down’, it was a ‘downing’ and it was possible the bombarded rebels were shooting at a Ukrainian fighter plane simultaneously overhead. She then baffled the world body by asserting ‘they still call Australia home’ in a speech that neared but did not excel the standard set by Pauline Hanson in the House in 1996. The BBC simulcast her speech for a minute and a quarter, then cut it off in embarrassment.

Scott Morrison failed to explain to the High Court why he had kidnapped thirty-seven children, separated them from their fathers, denied them an education, toys, or a translator who might tell them what the fuck was going on, or whether their fathers were still alive, and immured them in a smelly windowless hull of a boat whose location he refused to reveal. This was while his leader was excoriating the Russian rebels for their secrecy; and for stealing, as Morrison’s brave sea-dogs had, mobiles, wallets, passports and personal trinkets from insensible corpses thus desecrating their privacy.

Morrison was further revealed to have ordered the threatening of witnesses to Reza Barati’s murder, two roommates who had under duress agreed to go home to persecution in Iran. They could not go home, it was now decreed, until they had exculpated Morrison in the inquiry into why the fuck sixty people were brutally assaulted, one by a cut throat, several by gunfire and one, Barati, head-bashed to death by a rock. If they did not tell lies as directed about all this they would not be let go.

Morrison also meekly agreed to let a sixteen year old refugee stay in Australia, after fighting like a wild dog in a court case to send him home to certain murder in Ethiopia.

Will Abbott get away with this? Well, it’s possible.

Let’s first be clear about what he’s up to. He’s hoping to make us forget the least liked Budget in eighty years and the fifty billion deficit that it’s heading to, plus the Stafford byelection and the whiff of destruction it brings to Liberals everywhere, plus the thirty-seven children his wellbeloved mad Minister Morrison is tormenting on the high seas, and make us applaud and hail him as some kind of national saviour by ‘talking tough’ to Putin because, well, because…there are these corpses…shot down by Russian guns…which…well, which… in refrigerators on a train…should be…um…ah…

Here it gets difficult as propaganda. We are to believe it is urgent these dead bodies come home, now, now. And it is urgent the ‘crime scene’ not be ‘contaminated’ by…um…moving the bodies and their effects away from it. And it is necessary that Putin fail to co-operate, or that he can be smeared with hundreds of deaths he has nothing to do with. It is necessary that Russia veto the investigation which Abbott is toughly, heroically, patriotically, fearlessly demanding. Or, if he capitulates, it be seen that Abbott and Bishop made him do so.

But it’s probable, I think, not certain, that he’s done in this case what he always does, shoot off his mouth too hyperbolically, too soon. He’s more or less said Putin is the co-author of a mass murder, and he must be ‘brought to justice’. Which raises the question, what justice is that?

Netanyahu will by Friday have killed more innocent people in two weeks than Malaysian Airways killed in five months, will have done so deliberately, three hundred of them women and children, and some old people in intensive care in a hospital and two ambulance drivers and people on the operating table and babies in humidicribs and will not be ‘brought to justice’. He will be barely criticised, by anyone. And Putin will not be ‘brought to justice’ either. What will happen is he will come to Brisbane, and Tony will shake his hand.

This is because what works so well for Tony domestically, the smear, doesn’t work for him internationally. Slipper, smeared with homosexual impropriety, and ruined and made half mad by the whiff of it, will by Friday prove to have done no more than misuse nine hundred dollars worth of cabcharges on a daytrip to some wineries. Craig Thomson, smeared with the odour of having spent half a million dollars on hookers, proves to have spent one hundredth of that, but was ruined anyway because of the initial hyperbolic whisper by Abbott and Pyne, who ran from the chamber whinnying of the ‘contamination’ of him voting on their side.

But…smearing Putin with co-authoring a mass murder, a murder with no sense to it, is harder. The idiocy of the plane being in that air space obtrudes, now and then, into the consciousness of the viewing public. Other planes were shot down there recently. Why be there? Why?

And the lack of motive, as with Lindy Chamberlain, is troubling also. Why did Putin want to kill Dutch, Malaysians, Australians, AIDs experts, on the way home from a holiday, or on the way to a conference? What, for him, was the upside of this? Why would he do it?

At this point, it comes down to it not being about Putin, the murderer, at all. Nor is it even about Putin supplying bad guys weapons, because the US supplied Saddam, Assad, Sharon, Marcos, Suharto, Pinochet, with weapons also.

It comes down to getting some dead people home, and the difficulty of extracting them from a wartime situation. A bureaucratic difficulty, which is also somehow a war crime, and also a national calamity.

Is this, Bill Clinton might ask, a dog that’s gonna hunt?

…Well, it might be. Abbott hopes it will be his 9/11. He’s already imagined the search for MH 370 would fulfil this fantasy too. In each case, curiously, it was dead people, not live ones, he was bent on rescuing. The dead don’t heckle, and he’s spent half a billion thus far trawling the entire Indian Ocean for some of the quieter ones. But ‘dignity for the dead’ for five thousand years, maybe twenty thousand years, has had a primal, tribal, semi-magical resonance to it. Fallujah was flattened and its population blown to bejesus because a few American corpses were mutilated, hung up on a bridge and bashed with boots. You don’t mess with our corpses, motherfucker, was the motto from W which Abbott is creepily echoing here. Killing our men is fine. But you don’t fuck round with their dignity after that. You don’t embarrass them posthumously. This also works for Abbott as propaganda, as it did in the Bronze Age when Achilles dragged Hector’s corpse behind his chariot in a blasphemous, unmannerly way that damaged his public profile, his legend.

But…it’s probable, not certain, that events have moved too fast for him. As I write this, the corpses are heading to the Netherlands, the Black Box has been handed over, not to us, but to the Malaysians, and there seems to be, oops, evidence now that a Ukrainian fighter-plane might have been in the sky simultaneously, providing a nearby target that was missed when MH 17 was hit, by a rocket perhaps intended to go elsewhere.

And after that, well, Death, where is thy sting? Where, grave, thy victory?

Maybe these fifteen minutes are over, and our necrophilic revels ended now. And maybe we’ll have to go back to talking about an unfair Budget, and Morrison, child abuser, and Abbott, the punch-drunk woman-hater, after all.

And so it goes.

Can there be any doubt that Morrison is abusing children? Thirty-seven of them? Any doubt any more? And that he should go on trial for it?

Can there be any doubt?

Can the Prime Minister inform us on what charge Vladimir Putin will be ‘brought to justice’? And in what court? And who will be his legal representative? And in what prison, if he is found guilty, he will be encarcerated?