You may have been wondering what I have been doing over the past few months when I should have been writing in The Spectator Australia. Well, at long last I can tell the true story and you will now be the first to know. Until a few months ago, I lived in St Kilda, and in fact was so close to the beach that I could see the bay from my bedroom window. It was natural, therefore, when Professor Flannery started to warn us that global warming would melt the polar icecap, wash away our properties and wipe the beaming smile off the face of the man at the entrance to Luna Park, that I should sit up and take notice.

••• 

And, of course, it was not only Professor Flannery who put the wind up me; lots of other really top people like celebrity refugee lawyers, movie stars dropping by from Hollywood and intellectuals on Q&A also alarmed me as they all seemed to be singing the same song: après moi le deluge. So I decided I had to do something about it, sell up in St Kilda and find a place further inland, and certainly higher up, where I could at least be high and dry as Doomsday ebbed inevitably closer.

••• 

It took months, but at long last I found it. And here I am, perched on the crest of the hill in Kensington Road, South Yarra, with a balcony from where I look down from my mountain eyrie on the huddled masses of Toorak, yearning to be free but condemned to a watery grave. It is true that I was a bit put out when the good professor bought a new house by the water’s edge in NSW, as if the great flood would stop at the border and that his warnings apparently did not apply to himself. And, so far, the news of global warming has not reached South Yarra. In fact, Melbourne is locked in an epic deep freeze of such unrelenting, painful cold that you could film Game of Thrones here, and I expect we will soon hear the bailiffs crying out: ‘Bring out your frozen.’ But you never know; Professor Flannery might be right and, in any event, for the first time in my life I can safely say I have seized the moral high ground.

••• 

So now it is back to business and the state of the nation. I had plenty of time to reflect on current affairs as I watched and waited for the seas to rise. One thing that has not changed over the past few months is that journalists still think everything that happens today is new, when in reality it has all happened before, although apparently none of them can learn anything from it. Take the current imbroglio concerning the ghastly Julian Assange and his antics in seeking refuge inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and occasionally wandering out onto the balcony and dispensing wisdom to his adoring followers. No one in the media apparently knows that the world went through exactly the same issue in 1956, when the Catholic Cardinal Mindszenty took refuge in the US Embassy in Budapest, one jump ahead of the Communist goons who would have strung him up. He was granted asylum by the US, but the same issue then arose of how he could safely leave the embassy and get to the airport. The answer was clear; he could not. Although Assange’s luvvies and progressives cannot grasp the point and perversely make up new rules of international law to suit their convenience, it has long been established that diplomatic protection begins and ends at the embassy’s front door. Unless you adopt one of the more florid schemes that have been floated for getting Assange out of the embassy, like posting him in the diplomatic bag or smuggling him out to the laundry with the ambassador’s underpants, that is where he will stay. Cardinal Mindszenty, a very brave man indeed, camped out in the US mission for 15 years in very trying conditions. Therein lies the solution; after 15 months of Assange, let alone 15 years, the Ecuadorians will be crawling up the wall to get away from this pathetic narcissist. All they have to do is keep him away from the typing pool.

••• 

But I have noticed something new while I have been hibernating (if I were on the public payroll I could say I was on a sabbatical). Two new political defences or arguments have emerged and are already being put to good use. I call the first one the Malcolm Fraser Thrust. With this ploy, you wait until you are really in a corner with no answers and then play your best card; you just say to your opponent or the world at large, ‘You’re a racist!’ You have to make it a real dénouement and say it with a tone that implies it is some new truth just revealed, uniquely, to you, and to which there is no answer. It also has the advantage that if anyone dare reply and deny the accusation, it becomes even more effective by being given a second run during the denial. People such as its eponymous inventor have become emboldened in the use of this debating point by the result of the Andrew Bolt case, and we will hear more of it, especially when the new refugee plan starts to fall apart at the seams and demands are made by the public for a tougher solution. The second handy defence I have detected is called a Julia Gillard Confession and Avoidance. Her excuse, about any of her sillier public positions of years gone by, is that ‘But I was very young and naive at the time.’ You can use this defence even if you were over 30 at the time of your allegedly immature transgression and even if, as a qualified lawyer and trusted with being a partner in a major law firm, you must be presumed to have known what was going on around you. So it is also a very handy instrument to have in your toolbox, and a defence that keeps on giving.