Latham's law

19 May 2012
Mark Latham

For those who study the succession to the throne, last Friday was a red-letter day. Britain’s Prince Charles gave a wonderful cameo appearance reporting on Scotland’s weather, his most socially-useful function since he declared himself to be a reincarnated tampon. Down under, Australia’s Prince Charles also burst back into the news, with reports that he wanted to be reincarnated into the House of Representatives. Just when we thought it had gone the way of Number 96 and Prisoner, Australia’s longest-running soap opera, the Peter Costello will-he-or-won’t-he saga, took another surprising turn. PC-PC is on the comeback trail.

Michael Kroger’s devastatingly...

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Australian Books: The breath of life

19 May 2012
Matthew Lamb

The Hanging Garden
By Patrick White
Random House Australia,
$29.95, pp 240
ISBN 9781742752655

It is tempting to consider The Hanging Garden alongside other posthumous novels, most recently David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011). But in many respects, the latter’s publication is only cashing in on Wallace’s contemporary success: a reissue of the novel, with supplementary scenes, is already in the works. Contrary to this, Patrick White has so fallen out of favour with the reading public that The Hanging Garden is possibly better considered as the product of a gift...

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Vocal support

19 May 2012
Angela Shanahan

It is a rare thing for an opera to be the subject of a newspaper editorial. The success of Handa Opera’s La Traviata on Sydney Harbour turned the Australian into a publicity machine for Opera Australia’s musical director Lyndon Terracini and his vision for the company. The opera is the paper’s new cultural cause: up with opera for the masses, down with the clubbish obscurantists, and, more to the point, hooray for value for money from a company which receives almost 20 per cent of its funding from the public purse.

Terracini firmly believes that opera should not regard itself...

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Labor knows best

19 May 2012
Rowan Dean

The most revealing part of Craig Thomson’s surreal mea non culpa was missed by most commentators, who understandably chose to focus on Craig’s wacko conspiracy theory. (The obvious questions that Laurie Oakes didn’t ask were: ‘If you knew they were going to set you up, and how they were going to set you up, why did you keep signing off large and mysterious expenses on your credit card, hotel and mobile phone bills? And, er, how come you didn’t go to the police when you did finally twig you were being set up?’)

Leaving aside the prostitutes, the ugly...

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Lament of a progressive

19 May 2012
Michael Koziol

So it has come to this: we are so disillusioned with the characters and plot of Australian politics that we’ve started fantasising about a Peter Costello comeback. The famous ‘low-altitude flyer’, whose contribution to the nation’s history amounts to not kicking over the paint bucket for 11 years, seemed to sense a bar so low that even he could pass it and re-enter the Australian political landscape. As much fun as a decade of watching Costello not challenge Tony Abbott for the Prime Ministership might be, we’ve been there, done that, and Costello should just go away and embrace irrelevance.

...

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Australian Notes

19 May 2012
Peter Coleman

Parliament begins each sitting day with the Lord’s Prayer. This is not good enough for the Prime Minister or the independents, who think Parliamentarians need a code of conduct. The New South Wales Parliament has long had a splendid code of conduct. It did nothing to prevent the series of scandals of recent years. They only stopped when the voters hurled the government out of office. The voters are a better defence than an Integrity Commissioner against Parliamentary corruption. We may have to wait a while before we can vote on the Gillard government. Meanwhile, we still have the Lord’s...

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