At Rebecca’s place, deep in the Cro-Magnon rock formations which so neatly match her ideology, Weisser and her colleagues have been burning the midnight flint in pursuit of the latest Bruce allegations against the Prime Minister. I spoke to the cavewoman about this in August and, not surprisingly, her thinking was primitive — a case of monkey-see-monkey-do.

‘Craig Thomson and Michael Williamson want their matters to go away,’ she grunted, ‘so Gillard doesn’t want us to investigate her time at Slater & Gordon — it’s all part of the same problem.’ This is the warped logic the Australian applies to its coverage of the Prime Minister: Thomson and Williamson are guilty, therefore Gillard, as the leader of the Labor movement, must also be guilty. It has nothing to with facts, just political prejudice.

As part of the moral decline of Australian conservatism, the paper’s star witness is former AWU official Ralph Blewitt, a shady character who fled Indonesia in 2009 to avoid arrest after allegedly selling Australian expatriates land he did not own. He is willing to co-operate with the authorities, provided he is granted immunity from criminal prosecution.

The Australian’s reporting of the Slater & Gordon allegations has been error-prone. To give one example: on 3 September, legal affairs editor Chris Merritt argued that if Gillard had tried to register the AWU Workplace Reform Association as a fundraising body for union elections, it would not have passed muster under the Western Australian Associations Incorporation Act 1987. This is despite the fact that the entity was successfully registered in 1992 for a range of workplace functions, and that the act allows associations to be established for ‘political purposes’.

When I asked the Associations and Charities Branch of the WA Department of Commerce about fundraising for union elections, I was told ‘there should not be a prohibition on that’. I also asked if this was a valid opinion going back to 1992, thereby allowing for subsequent legislative amendments. The officials answered, ‘Yes’. In short, the Australian’s legal affairs editor knows nothing about this law.

Strangely, the advocates of freedom of speech on the conservative side of politics have been silent on the axing of David Penberthy from the Steve Price/Andrew Bolt program at Radio 2GB. As Penberthy noted on 10 October:

Just over an hour ago I got a call from 2GB saying that I am no longer welcome on the network. The reason: [my] column from last Tuesday which was critical of Alan Jones.

For the Tories, this is a case of inverted justice: anything Jones says about the Prime Minister is defensible, while those who criticise Jones are dispensable. As a matter of principle, Bolt should boycott 2GB until such time as Penberthy is reinstated. Or did the suppression of free speech only matter when it applied to him in last year’s Federal Court case?

The next time The Spectator Australia updates its list of Australian political insults, a bullet entry must be set aside for the Liberal party’s founder. We now know that in January 1976, Bob Menzies sent material to John Kerr calling Gough Whitlam ‘a kind of Hitler’. He also described Whitlam’s 1975 campaign launch as ‘like a Nuremberg rally’. Hitler pursued genocide against the Jews. Whitlam was a lifetime supporter of human rights and racial tolerance. The notion that Menzian Liberals are a bunch of polite petals swaying harmlessly at the bottom of the rose garden has been exposed, yet again, as nonsense.

One of the great transformations in Western society in recent decades has been the rise of celebrity culture. Airheads like Paris Hilton and Kevin Rudd delight in tweeting their every move and innermost thoughts, sacrificing their privacy on the altar of notoriety. Regrettably, people who refuse to participate in the cult of celebrity are labelled ‘recluses’ by the media.

Even though he led an active and community-minded life after leaving the Apollo space program, Neil Armstrong suffered from this vilification. On the morning of the Washington memorial service honouring Armstrong’s life on 13 September, Michael Collins wrote passionately in defence of his Apollo 11 commander:

By holding to his lifelong yardsticks of honesty, humility and grace, Neil did more than any salesman or huckster [to promote the space program] … If he was a recluse, our nation needs more of them – people who don’t seek the limelight but who can live competently in its glare, people who are the antithesis of some of today’s empty-headed celebrities.

Four days earlier, in its obituary of the British entertainer-cum-Gold Coast retiree Max Bygraves, the New York Times told a story which perfectly captures the ephemeral nature of fame. By the late 1990s, Bygraves’ stage legend had faded. However, when he saw an advertisement for a Max Bygraves impersonation contest, he cheekily entered. He performed his old comedy routine, reviving his best gags and ditties in front of the judges. He finished fifth.

The post 27 October 2012 appeared first on The Spectator.

Readers will remember the strange case of Nick Minchin, the tough-as-teak right-wing Liberal powerbroker, known for condemning climate scientists and supporting Cory Bernardi. Yet in private, Minchin practices the wacko habits of vegetarianism, having convinced himself that red meat causes cancer.

In the Senate, Minchin’s South Australian colleague Mary Jo Fisher was fond of lecturing the chamber on the rule of law. But behind-the-scenes she was a kleptomaniac, the Liberals’ answer to Winona Ryder.

Adding to this trend is the serious matter of Alan Jones. As Tony Abbott prepares for more radio interviews at 2GB, many voters are asking: how can he believe in the sanctity of family values if he is happy to appear on air with someone who thinks Julia Gillard killed her father with her lies? What has happened to Australian conservatism since John Howard’s retirement?

The Liberal claquers who have tried to defend Jones have simply demonstrated their isolation from public sentiment. The Australian people are incredibly irate about the Jones slur, not because of politics, but because they can relate to the grief being experienced by the Gillard family. Inadvertently, the Jones attack has humanised the PM in the eyes of the electorate — a political bonus she deserves given the personal trauma of recent times.

•••

The cave-dwellers of the Tea Party are a major drag on the Republican campaign in the US. Cocooned in a world of fanatical Obama hatred, they have no rational understanding of the best way to beat the President. The US is an instinctively conservative electorate but the Tea Party has pushed the Republicans so far to the Right that the Democrats have been able to annexthe middle ground.

Something similar has happened in Australia with the rise of the Abbott/Minchin Liberals. By comparison, a natural conservative like Malcolm Turnbull has been made to look like a born-again Leftie. He has developed a niche market politically, for Liberals who have no desire to be part of a Weisser-style Cro-Magnon community.

It was not by coincidence that Turnbull was the first Liberal to strongly condemn the recent outbursts by Bernardi and Jones. Abbott’s predecessor knows too well the madness gripping his side of politics. Its driving forces are fanaticism and authoritarianism.

To give one example: on Sydney Radio 2GB on 24 September, the high-profile commentator Andrew Bolt harangued Helen McCabe, editor of the Australian Women’s Weekly, as a pro-Labor stooge. Her sin? To place material dealing with Gillard’s relationship with Craig Emerson ten years ago at the rear of a profile of Gillard. When did this occur? More than two years ago — an irrational focus on all things Gillard.

Bolt owes McCabe an apology. She is not a Labor person. She is a conservatively-inclined professional woman who does a fine job at the Weekly. She does not need Bolt to stand over her editorial judgements (from 2010) and pressure her into sharing his anti-Gillard fanaticism.

Part of the moral decline of Australian conservatism is its willingness to defend the indefensible, provided it involves a cutting attack on Gillard. Morality is only important to today’s Tories as long as it excludes the Prime Minister from its reach. As a Spectator Australia contributor, I am ashamed of the magazine’s editorial last Friday which failed to unreservedly condemn Alan Jones. It gave succour to the sick puppies, the Jones followers, who see nothing wrong in his comments.

Even worse, our associate editor, Rowan Dean, appeared in the Australian Financial Review on Saturday making light of the Jones atrocity. He positioned it as a joke, justifying the comments as an unlucky exercise in public speaking. This follows Dean’s recent defence of Bernardi’s comments linking gay marriage to the legalisation of bestiality. While likeable in person, Rowan remains naive about politics, hoping to receive brownie points for unerringly running the party line. He writes about freedom of speech but does not practice freedom of thought.

The Speccie editorial was also intellectually dishonest, self-selecting a list of political insults and then declaring Labor to be the main offender. For the record: where was Wilson Tuckey’s parliamentary slur regarding Paul Keating’s ‘illegitimate child’? Where was Peter Costello’s parliamentary ridicule of Nick Sherry’s mother, after which Sherry tried to kill himself? Where was Costello’s description of Simon Crean as ‘BS Crean’, by which he meant Bullshit Crean? Where were Alexander Downer’s repeated interjections against Duncan Kerr as ‘evil’? Where were the Liberal party’s attempts to fit up Keating as having affair with a Canberra pianist? Where was Bill Heffernan’s homophobic attack on Michael Kirby? Where were the Liberal party leaflets from Lindsay in 2007 inciting racial hatred? Where was Tony Abbott’s feeding of smut to the Press Gallery about Cheryl Kernot and Pauline Hanson? Please explain.

The post 13 October 2012 appeared first on The Spectator.

Perhaps I have taken my honoured place in the magazine too seriously, as the last page of Antipodean culture.  I rather fancy myself as having a border protection role, permanently on guard against the illegal incursions of queue-jumping columnists. This is this last stop for reading about Kevin Rugg and the Catman, beyond which lie the perils of a literary Nauru. No wonder the flamboyant Old Etonians who lurk at the rear of the magazine are always trying to creep forward. To paraphrase Tony Abbott, my role is to stop the boaters.

Perhaps it was the first sniff of spring, or more likely, the transfixing sight of Rowan Dean dancing with Princess Diana on the front cover, but 1 September was different. I read the whole edition.

Thank goodness I did. On page 49, Rory Sutherland explained how Americans ‘still believe all French people stink’. On the page opposite, Toby ‘Happy’ Young updated us on his latest maudlin adventure: a family holiday in France. After complaining, as only Happy can, about the ‘ghastly’ French people, poor transport connections, uncooperative waiters and ‘petty’ French bureaucracy, he arrived at his pièce de résistance, as they say.

‘Each family member now ranks the various Frenchies we meet on a scale of one to ten,’ Young explained, doing his bit for international youth education, ‘by appealing to such criteria as lack of eye contact, depth of contempt and poor personal hygiene.’ Of course, the Froggy stink bomb. It is not just Americans who believe the French smell. They also get up Happy’s nose. On his train trip from Paris to Avignon, our luckless traveller found ‘the journey was tainted by the smell of body odour’.

With my trip to the US scheduled for the next day, the Young/Sutherland thesis was gold. Why judge a country by its sights, cityscapes and hospitality when one can simply sniff the breeze?

••• 

So I set off on QF11, bound for Los Angeles. While I have long thought American foreign policy stinks, what about its people? Notwithstanding the initials of their President, my vacation was a stroll in the rose garden. BO was as rare as references to the Bush legacy at Republican campaign rallies.

The only person who knocked me over was a heavily-perfumed matron on Rodeo Drive, one of the real housewives of LA, perhaps. Brandishing her shopping bags in the manner of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, she skittled my eldest child and bumped me sideways. It was difficult to know which was more powerful: the two bottles of Chanel No. 5 seeping from her pores or her bulldozer walking style.

At least my son’s sense of fun was undiminished by the experience. For him, LA posed more questions than it answered. For instance, on Hollywood Boulevard’s walk of fame, why doesn’t Beau Ryan have a star? Or why doesn’t the US currency feature the nation’s greatest inventor, Colonel Sanders? Or why doesn’t Beverly Hills have any hills? Just as I suspected: America’s best-known suburb is no different to Chester Hill, Seven Hills and Currans Hill on the star-filled flatlands of Sydney’s west.

••• 

In the Latham neighbourhood, one of the treasured community events is Hallowe’en — a time for children to dress up and for households to experience the joy of giving, albeit in lolly form. Neighbours get to meet each other and talk face-to-face, using sentence structures long forgotten in the Twitterverse. It’s an old-fashioned idea called humanity.

This year we plan to celebrate with extra gusto. The inspiration for this burst of All Saintly enthusiasm? The words and wisdom of Happy Young. Last year he reported on his Hallowe’en experience as ‘an unwelcome American import’ in which he is ‘forced to buy all sorts of ridiculous costumes’ for his children and accompany ‘the motley crew on their rounds’. Then the mother of all indignations:

Long after mine have gone to bed, there’ll be a knock on the door and some tiny little girl, barely older than two, will be standing there, holding out her hand.

For those who believe, as per the rhetoric of talkback radio, that drug-addicted dole bludgers should not be allowed to have children, they should at least acknowledge how the problem extends beyond the underclass. In  this country, who could forget the Shallow Watergate scandal, when the well-heeled executive director of the Sydney Institute, Happy Henderson, admitted to ignoring his grandchildren on Christmas Day, focusing instead on an obscure Radio National program? Also in confessional mode, Young  has declared:

I’m afraid I sound like a grumpy old man — and I suppose I am. That’s the result  of having children.

This is the worst body odour of all: the stench of the self-indulgent elites who treat children as one of life’s nuisances.

The post 29 September 2012 appeared first on The Spectator.

In early January, Henderson wrote  a column in the Sydney Morning  Herald describing his Christmas Day. Instead of playing with his grandchildren, who had to fend for themselves ‘at the beach in shallow water’, Gerard ‘with earpiece attached, switched on the ABC Radio National Artworks program’ and began scribbling notes of condemnation. Critiquing the ABC on Christmas Day is like watching Q&A on your wedding night — it’s for those who prefer political bondage to the real thing.

Later that month, in the playful Speccie style, I highlighted Gerard’s neglect of his grandfatherly duties, noting that even the Russian dictator Vladimir Lenin had a life away from politics. Henderson has been banging on about it ever since, attacking me and our fine editor, Tom Switzer.

Some of the comments in Gerard’s Media Watch Dog blog are disturbing, in a Henderson kind of way. For instance, I have been described as an apologist for Lenin and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. The imputation is wrong, as is Henderson’s knowledge of history (given that Russia’s population in 1917 was 170 million).

It is said of the internet that every online argument ends with the protagonists calling each other Nazis. This is also true of Henderson’s blog. On 10 August he wrote:

Perhaps one day Mark Latham, after reading the work of a deceased fascist, will use his column in the ‘Aussie Speccie’ to proclaim that Adolf Hitler really knew how to relax and loved nothing better than to construct sandcastles on the edge of Berlin’s Lake Wannsee.

Gerard is madder than a box full  of frogs.

By now, I can feel a Henderson  letter coming on, so I might as well make  it a long one…

••• 

Henderson specialises in the politics of perpetual grievance. If he takes offence at a comment, no matter how trivial, no matter how dated, it locks him into a lifetime of revenge.

Three case studies prove this point. The first concerns Australia’s leading public intellectual, Professor Robert Manne. In the late 1960s, Manne was a student at Melbourne University, serving as one of three co-editors on the university magazine. When a young Santamaria acolyte named Gerard Henderson lodged an article, the other two editors rejected it. Manne was his only supporter. Yet, for more than 40 years, Henderson has blamed Manne for this slight, vowing retribution. This is the underlying flaw in Gerard’s character: he has no perspective on history; his whole life is present tense.

As Manne told the Australian Financial Review last week:

The fact that someone recalls being rejected 40 years earlier is psychologically revealing … If you don’t get any minor detail right [Henderson] enters into a 40-page fax war in which people get worn down in the end. No normal [person] can be bothered with the amount of stuff he generates.

Another victim of Henderson’s fanaticism is the former Liberal  leader, John Hewson. This obsession arose from a private dinner party in Sydney circa 1987. A number of Liberal party supporters were present, including Hewson, Henderson and Henderson’s  wife Anne. As is common at such gatherings, there was a spirited debate  on a question of political trivia: who was John Howard’s best-ever staffer?  Anne Henderson barracked loudly for Gerard but the dinner table consensus settled on Hewson. One can imagine how this was received in the House of Hendi. Hewson has been on the enemies list ever since.

My own experience is no different. When Anne Henderson published  her 1999 book Getting Even,  I reviewed it for Christopher Pearson’s Adelaide Review. Towards the end of my piece I pointed out that, despite the Hendersons’ reputation for thoroughness, the book was error-prone. This provoked a flood of faxes from Anne Henderson, protesting that as Gerard had been her proof-reader, the material must have been accurate.

This was my first experience with the Henderson affliction known as corresponditis. If someone writes  50 words about them, they respond  with 50,000. Instead of throwing  Anne Henderson’s hypersensitive ramblings in the bin, I responded by detailing the dozens of mistakes in the book. Thereafter, I joined Manne, Hewson and scores of others  on the list.

How does this habit affect the other areas of Gerard’s life? Pity the poor pizza boy who delivers ham and pineapple instead of the meat lover’s delight. Or the hapless paper boy who struggles each day with the weighty load of Henderson-ordered publications and drops them off 20 minutes late. Or the confused Indian call centre operator who refers to his irritable customer as Gerald Horrorson. Each has had their photos pinned to the Sydney Institute’s dartboard.

Last week, in a letter to the AFR, Gerard denied that Getting Even was biographical. He said ‘the title was suggested by [Anne’s] publisher HarperCollins’. If so, someone at the publishing house has a wonderful  sense of humour. As the saying goes, HarperCollins — Five Paws.

The post 8 September 2012 appeared first on The Spectator.

In some cases, special programs in our schools have gone a step further: enshrining a blame-the-victim mentality. This is evident in the work of KidsMatter, a $50 million Federal government initiative run by Jeff Kennett’s Beyondblue organisation. KidsMatter is spreading mental health alarmism in Australia’s primary schools and childcare centres, urging teachers and parents to identify children suffering from depression (even though these children are too young to experience the condition).

Part of the recommended methodology is to pick out students with ‘peer problems’. In the KidsMatter material distributed to parents and teachers, it is said ‘such problems are indicated when students were generally not liked, they preferred to be alone or were picked on or bullied’. This is a shockingly naive and misguided approach. If anyone has a peer problem in the schoolyard, surely it is the bullies. Yet KidsMatter is stigmatising the victims of bullying as having mental health issues.

The children who stand up to bullies tend to be confident and well-adjusted. Often the bullies have tried to break into their friendship group and these young leaders have told them to go away. As a result, they are targeted by the bullies and subject to violence and intimidation. In these circumstances, the young leaders are not displaying peer problems or mental difficulties. Rather, they are doing the things society wants and expects from its young people: standing up for what’s right and acting in the best interests of their friends.

Parents around the country would be outraged to know this is how their taxes are being spent: on social workers and Beyondblue facilitators propagating a belief in our schools that the dangerous nutcases are not the bullies but their victims. Incredibly, Kennett has endorsed this approach as ‘a fantastic initiative’ which ‘has worked wonderfully well’. In truth, the Gillard government should close down KidsMatter. It is not only a waste of money, it is morally wrong, shifting behavioural responsibility for bullying away from the thugs who practise it.

•••

Young children have distinct ways of expressing themselves. Often this involves solo play and bouts of anxiety when separated from their parents. It is wrong for organisations like Beyondblue to look for something sinister in this type of behaviour. This is a worrying aspect of the fast-expanding mental health industry: its tendency to medicalise normality. As Professor Allen Frances of Duke University has argued:

Kids have developmental changes that are dramatic in a very short period of time. There can be lots of unintended negative consequences to labelling children who essentially are normal and will grow out of whatever problem they have at that moment. There’s no evidence at all that we can predict accurately who will go on to have a mental disorder.

In the mental illness industry, no age group is safe from intrusion. With crèches and kindergartens already under control, what’s next in the expansion of Beyondblue’s empire? Barging into maternity wards with mental health checks for newborn babies? Look out for Jeff Kennett in a hospital near you.

••• 

It is not only social-welfare empire-builders who are spreading mental health alarmism. Journalists are also part of the misinformation, knowing that inflated claims on this issue generate bigger headlines and more readers. To give one example, this is how the slap-happy Financial Review writer Alan Stokes started his column on 26 November last year:

When you go into the office, boardroom or canteen on Monday, count your colleagues – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That fifth person has experienced mental illness, will at some stage or is dealing with it right now.

Stokes provided no evidence for this claim or any supporting documentation. It was just a cheapjack way of sensationalising his story. The first duty of any writer is to ensure his readers are provided with accurate, reliable information. In this case, Stokes should have spoken to Gordon Parker, professor of psychiatry at the University of NSW and founder of the Black Dog Institute. ‘It’s been to psychiatry’s advantage to talk up these higher numbers [of depression]. We know that governments are not going to be interested in doing something about a trivial or very rare condition,’ Parker has said. ‘The figure that one in five will have an episode of depression is very evocative … But is it valid? Almost certainly no.’

When you go into the newsroom of a media outlet, count the journalists in front of you — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That first, second, third, fourth and fifth person has experience in beating up stories beyond the facts of the matter.

The post 25 August 2012 appeared first on The Spectator.

Unable to resist the electoral advantage of a scare campaign, the hollow man ploughed on. Even after the tax came into effect, with a relatively benign impact on industry and consumer spending, he toured the country talking of a ‘slow burn’ towards economic devastation.

That was Labor’s Kim Beazley in 2001, railing against the Howard government’s goods and services tax. When his scare campaign fell flat, Beazley was held to account by the nation’s media. In particular, his policy to ‘rollback’ key elements of the GST was heavily criticised. His most severe detractors were from the Murdoch press, which regularly lampooned the big man’s belly flop.

A wonder of Australian politics today is why Tony Abbott is not receiving similar treatment over his carbon tax hysteria. Six weeks after its introduction, the tax has had no noticeable impact on economic activity or our way of life. How could it? A limited number of big polluters are paying a minor amount on their carbon use, with the government designing its policy so as not to affect small businesses or consumer behaviour. Most families are better off financially, receiving more in government compensation than the expected price impact on their household budgets — modelled by Treasury at just 0.7 per cent of the CPI.

Economists call levies such as this a punitive tax, designed to punish people who consume a certain undesirable item. The ineffectiveness of the federal government’s carbon tax can be gauged by comparing it to other punitive measures, such as taxes on tobacco and alcohol. Imagine if the government paid back to smokers and drinkers all the money it collected from them. The impact on their consumption of cigarettes and alcohol would be minimal. The government’s decision would be attacked as a self-defeating policy prank — a joke on the nation’s intelligence.

Yet this is what Julia Gillard, Greg Combet and the Greens have done with the carbon tax. It was never going to have the ‘wrecking ball’ economic impact Abbott predicted during his daily schedule of workplace stunts, festooned in hard hats and hair nets. The Liberal leader has run the most fraudulent scare campaign in Australian political history, yet the media are remarkably mute. Far from holding Abbott to account, Murdoch’s tabloids have been trying to prove him right, fabricating stories about the impact of the carbon tax on funeral costs and tip fees.

When Gillard, Stephen Conroy and other Labor ministers point to media bias against their administration, on this issue at least, they are correct. Until such time as Abbott is given the same treatment Beazley received 11 years ago, the nation’s media houses should be judged as Liberal Party barrackers.

•••

The Mal Brough affair should also be a major problem for Abbott. In late April, the former Howard Government minister dismissed suggestions he had advance knowledge of James Ashby’s court action against Peter Slipper, but then had to admit he had met with Ashby three times and sought legal advice on his behalf.

Two Mondays ago, following his preselection as the Liberal candidate for Slipper’s seat of Fisher, Brough denied asking Ashby for copies of Slipper’s daily diary. Yet documents lodged by Slipper in the Federal Court suggest otherwise. Brough requested emailed material from Ashby. After this had been sent, Ashby texted back: ‘Will need to get daily printouts tomorrow with greater detail.’

Brough has been lying in a manner no different to the disgraced Labor MP Craig Thomson. He is unfit to return to Parliament, especially given Abbott’s promise of high ethical standards under a Coalition government. As Ashby’s position continues to unravel, I expect him to withdraw his court action against Slipper, at which point Slipper may launch a counter-claim for damages. Either way, Brough’s involvement in the matter will continue to be subject to legal scrutiny.

The full details of the Liberal Party’s espionage against Slipper will eventually become known. It is difficult to see how Brough can survive as an endorsed Liberal candidate for the next election. At some point, Abbott will need to cut him loose.

•••

The pre-eminent expert on Liberal economic policy, Peter Costello, has pointed out that Abbott’s chief inspiration in this field is B.A. Santamaria and the DLP. This is evident in the Opposition Leader’s policy to deter investment from China’s state-owned enterprises. Under Abbott’s strategy, privately-owned companies with links to organised crime in the Philippines will find it easier to invest in Australia that the Chinese — an insult to our most important trading partner.

As one of Santa’s little helpers, Abbott’s policy has abandoned the Keating/Costello legacy of economic openness. How can he successfully run Australia’s miracle economy if he doesn’t understand the policy fundamentals on which it is based?

Mark Latham is a columnist for the Fairfax-owned Australian Financial Review and a former Labor leader.

The post 11 August 2012 appeared first on The Spectator.

Joel was adamant that, as with his political style, Rudd’s hair was artificial. On several occasions he wanted to grab hold of Kevvie’s fringe and yank it skywards, proving he wore a toupée. For this and other reasons, the loquacious Queenslander was known as Kevin Rugg.

Joel’s other great joy was in discovering a newspaper photograph of Thérèse Rein, a woman with a keen sense of self-awareness. Earlier this month, Rein spoke of learning to forgive herself for ‘not being five-foot-ten inches, blonde and drop-dead gorgeous’. Fitzgibbon would not have it any other way. Such was his hatred of Rudd, he rejoiced in his rival being condemned to a lifetime of waking up next to Ms Rein.

Animus of this kind is not unusual in politics. What I find odd is Fitzgibbon’s current role as a numbers man in Labor’s continuous-play horror-thriller, The Rudd Resurrection.

My old buddy is furious he missed out on a ministry after the February leadership ballot. He was overlooked when Julia Gillard foolishly invited Bob Carr into cabinet. Adding to Fitzgibbon’s grievance, Kate Lundy was given the prized sports portfolio in this year of the London Olympics. As one of the enduring Good-Time Charlies of Australian politics, Joel would have set numerous PBs in mounting the five rings of Olympic fellowship.

But that’s public life. In the memorable phrase of Sarah Hanson-Young, tragedies happen, accidents happen. Fitzgibbon has resigned as a founding member of the Anyone But Rugg Club, complaining to his colleagues that Gillard has betrayed him. The greatest betrayal, however, is to his own moral code: Joel’s willingness to jettison the values of a knock-around Aussie bloke and support a tosser like KRudd.

What about the toupée? That hasn’t changed — like the rest of Rugg. Even his brother is bagging him publicly, confirmation of my motto that those who know Kevin best like him least. If Greg Rudd doesn’t support his brother, why should the Labor party?

••• 

Gillard has little to fear from Fitzgibbon working the numbers against her. Among Labor’s machine men, he is best remembered for voting the wrong way. The Latham Diaries for 3 February 2003 records the details. Laurie Brereton was under attack from Leaping Leo McLeay as the parliamentary convenor for the NSW Right. When a ballot was held, the McLeay forces ‘came close, losing by one vote. Joel almost threw it away, initially voting for the no-confidence motion (against Brereton) — a brain explosion.’ Wrong-Way Fitzgibbon may end up voting for Gillard after all.

In the traditions of the Westminster system, a sacred point of honour is the role of party whips. Their primary function is to support the leader. If at any time their loyalty falters, they are duty-bound to resign their position (which in the Australian House of Representatives carries substantial additional remuneration).

It is a measure of Labor’s dysfunction that each of its three whips (Fitzgibbon, Eddie Husic and Jill Hall) are working against Gillard in favour of Rudd — an extraordinary circumstance. Last week, the Manager of Opposition Business, Chris Pyne, was right in calling for Fitzgibbon to resign. The same ethical standard should apply to Husic and Hall.

••• 

In the hysterical reaction to Channel Ten’s hit program The Shire, one of the harshest critics has been Jessica Yates, a Fox Sports reporter and former Miss Parramatta Raceway. On the night of the first episode, Yates tweeted, ‘The Shire has to be one of the most inane, embarrassing, highly offensive pieces of rubbish TV that has been produced … ever.’ I thought that title belonged to motor racing.

Humiliation of the hoi polloi is one of the standard techniques of commercial television. As a sports fan, Yates would be aware of the AFL and NRL Footy Show ‘street talk’ segments, in which the toothless, seemingly hopeless characters of working-class neighbourhoods are subject to public ridicule. On Paul Vautin’s NRL show, Parramatta Mall is a favourite target, yet Miss Parramatta Raceway has been tweetless in defence of her local community.

Similarly, Lisa Wilkinson, a Campbelltown girl-cum-Today presenter, has raised no objection to The Footy Show’s humiliation of the hapless battlers on Campbelltown’s main street. Yet in watching The Shire she wrote, ‘I have been sitting in front of the TV with my mouth wide open for 10 minutes — like, totally.’ This is the same look Wilkinson has each morning when sitting next to her co-presenter Karl Stefanovic, a try-hard bogan notorious for appearing drunk on-air.

At Richard Wilkins’ book launch last year, Stefanovic described his host as ‘the Don Bradman of rooting’, adding ‘three things about Richard Wilkins: great bloke, big hair, massive cock’. When the Australian television industry awarded its 2011 Gold Logie, recognising the work of its most successful ‘personality’, Stefanovic triumphed. Is The Shire really such a surprise?

The post 28 July 2012 appeared first on The Spectator.

When 200 boatpeople drowned off the coast of Java in December, Hanson-Young was asked if her party accepted responsibility for the loss of life. ‘Of course not,’ she replied. ‘Tragedies happen, accidents happen.’ In all my experience of Australian politics, I cannot recall a more callously inappropriate statement.

It is difficult to comprehend how Green Senators live with themselves, knowing their opposition to offshore processing is luring boatloads of people, many of them infant children, to death by drowning. The tragedy of Green asylum-seeker policy is compounded by the pretence that onshore processing is an act of humanitarianism. It is, in fact, a death-trap, encouraging people to risk their lives aboard unseaworthy vessels.

This is the problem with fanaticism in public life. Obsessively-held beliefs blind members of Parliament to the evidence before them. More than 800 boatpeople have drowned during the term of the Labor government, a horror for which the Labor For Refugees group and the Greens must accept responsibility. Hanson-Young is only 30 years of age but her eyes are from the Middle Ages, giving her the menacing look of Vandal Savage. For the families boarding leaky boats in Indonesian ports, the deadliest menace is in her policies.

Repeated tragedies of this kind do not just ‘happen’. Governments have responsibility for the protection of their borders. Refugee policies influence the movement of asylum-seekers between nations. Judged by their deeds, the Greens are a party of mistaken fanaticism, not compassion.

•••

I love a debate about Labor values. It puts me back on the ladder of opportunity looking for a third way to reach the light on the hill. My favourite Labor activist is the inner-Sydney councillor Darcy Byrne, the political equivalent of an ambulance chaser. Whenever a new trendy issue arises, Byrne establishes another front-group to attract publicity. His latest effort is ‘Labor Loves Live Music’, ostensibly to encourage more pub rock blaring through the gentrified backstreets of Balmain and Annandale.

Byrne’s timing could not be worse. The singing Catman, Craig Emerson, will interpret Labor Loves Live Music to be an endorsement of his gyrating renditions of ‘No Whyalla Wipe-Out’ and ‘I’m Still Standing’. Emerson’s strongest Labor value is stuntism, a never-ending quest for media attention by making a fool of himself. As Paul Keating once said, ‘In politics, where there are no brains, there can be no feelings.’ Thus Catman is impervious to the public humiliation caused by his stunts. Look out for an Emerson-Byrne duet of ‘You’re So Vain’ in a pub near you.

Another Labor figure to encourage Catman is Michelle Rowland, from the Western Sydney seat of Greenway. In the Australian Financial Review last week she said, ‘I remember going to university in my check-out uniform so I could go to work afterward, so I don’t need a lecture on values from the Greens.’ With his habit of plagiarising Skyhooks tunes, Emerson cannot resist a check-out chick, as per:

Women in uniform, sometimes they look so cold
Women in uniform but ooh they feel so warm
Women in uniform, khaki white and blue
Women in uniform coming after you

Ten years ago Catman won Julia Gillard’s heart by strumming soulful renditions of ‘Lady in Red’. At the next meeting of Labor’s Caucus, the Member for Greenway can expect his full melodious repertoire. If Rowland was serious about her commitment to Labor values, she would wear her check-out uniform in Parliament House. Fortunately, the Liberal Senator Mary Jo Fisher has resigned, meaning it is safe for Michelle to also bring groceries onto Capital Hill.

When Catman loses his Queensland seat of Rankin at the next election, a glorious career awaits

in North Korean politics. Recently the international media have been intrigued by a woman accompanying Kim Jong-un in public. She is Hyon Song-wol, the lead singer in the patriotic Bochonbo Music Band. Inspired by Emerson’s use of song to attack the capitalist backslider Tony Abbott, she has produced the toe-tapping classics ‘Footsteps of Soldiers’, ‘I Love Pyongyang’, ‘She is a Discharged Soldier’ and my personal favourite, ‘Excellent Horse-Like Lady’.

Meanwhile, the close links between left-wing parties and showbusiness have been confirmed. Following a concert staged for Kim Jong-un, the Walt Disney Company complained it had not authorised the use of its cartoon characters in the Hermit Kingdom, among them Winnie the Pooh, Tigger and Minnie Mouse. Likewise, Emerson did not seek Elton John’s permission to use ‘I’m Still Standing’. Nor did Anthony Albanese contact Universal Pictures when he mimicked Michael Douglas’s speech from The American President. For the bards and minstrels of Australian Labor, all the world’s a stage. 

The post 21 July 2012 appeared first on The Spectator.

In a shameless display of opportunism, Tony Abbott has predicted a rerun of Biblical plague and pestilence. Yet in practice, the carbon tax is an innocuous money-churning exercise. The funds raised from the tax are being paid back to businesses and consumers in compensation. Prices will rise by just 0.7 per cent, and most Australian households will be better off financially. The tax’s net result is to move money from the rich to the poor, a backdoor way of securing greater income equality. Robin Hood is riding one last time, his green tights masquerading as a green policy.

Carbon Sunday and its aftermath was a chance for Labor to portray Abbott as the Chicken Little of Australian politics — a modern version of Liberal stalwart Bruce Goodluck, who famously entered the House of Representatives chamber in a chicken suit. Unfortunately for the government, its best efforts were foiled by stuntism from its own side. In the animal farm of federal politics, Catman was back. 

As Minister for Trade, Craig Emerson has no executive responsibility for the carbon tax. But this did not stop him from travelling (at taxpayers’ expense) to the South Australian backwater of Whyalla for a series of childish pranks. He was seen squatting, in the middle of the day, with the Special Minister of State, Gary Gray, feigning a countdown to the tax which might destroy the town. This was meant to be a body blow to Abbott’s credibility, given the Opposition Leader’s prediction of Whyalla being ‘wiped off the map’. 

Catman’s stunt had the creative genius of a dead cat bounce. The carbon tax actually started at midnight, rendering the ministerial countdown redundant. They looked like two middle-aged guys who couldn’t find a toilet. Emerson then achieved the destiny for which he has long yearned: international media recognition. His rendition of ‘No Whyalla Wipe Out’ went viral. There was just a small hiccup — the virus was feline distemper. 

As one of the few Australians to have ever visited Whyalla, I am not without sympathy for Abbott’s prediction. The carbon tax may not have wiped this God-forsaken place off the map, but could someone please wipe it from my memory bank? Gray urged me to go there when I was one of Kim Beazley’s shadow ministers, another dismal journey in the cause of Labor. Latham’s Law Number 83: never trust a Bob Collins protégé. 

In last Friday’s Australian Financial Review, Geoff Kitney quoted an unnamed ‘senior Labor figure’ as saying, ‘It’s a bit surreal’ — and no, he wasn’t talking about Emerson and Gray. He was commenting on Carbon Sunday: ‘Such a big moment with such a lot of change and yet so little feeling of anything having changed.’ 

Of course nothing has significantly changed. The government has levied a relatively mild tax and then paid the money back to taxpayers and pensioners. Why, in substance, would the ordinary work of the nation be any different? First Emerson and Gray, and now another Labor figure. Gillard’s ministers are inhaling carbon, not just taxing it. 

In the nothing-has-changed department, it has been a stellar week for the Rudd family. The irrepressible Thérèse Rein, fresh from meddling in February’s Labor leadership ballot and costing her husband votes, burst back into print on Saturday. Perhaps she was inspired by Catman, the only media junkie who can match the Rudds for vainglorious publicity-seeking. 

Asked by the Fairfax press about Kevin’s comeback, Rein replied: ‘It would be on the proviso that it was completely about the country, the national good, Australia’s place in the world.’ How one forgets. It has never been about Kevin. The vindictive leaks during the last campaign, the destabilisation of every leader under whom he has served, the non-stop networking of Australia’s business and trade union elites, the thousands of Press Gallery briefings, the six bids for the Labor leadership — it was all about the country, the national good, Australia’s place in the world. 

And the expert view of Rudd’s colleagues that he is a ‘psychopath’ and a ‘complete and utter fraud’? According to Rein, ‘That’s actually not about Kevin. It’s about the people who are calling him names.’ Nothing, it seems, is about Kevin, the selfless one.

As Talleyrand said of another pretentious family, forever conniving to fulfil its born-to-rule self-image, the Rudds have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

The post 14 July 2012 appeared first on The Spectator.

Now the Australian Turf Club has gone further, announcing in its members’ newsletter sponsorship of  ‘the inaugural Kenny Awards for excellence in (racing) journalism, in memory of the late Sydney journalist and crime writer, Les Kennedy.’ There is, of course, a longstanding link between racing and crime. Fine Cotton, Big Philou, George Freeman and Murray Farquhar come to mind.

Mention of the Kenny Awards, however, had me bamboozled. They must have been thinking of the doyen of Australian racing journalists, Kenny Callander. Either that or the ATC was harking back to the glorious 1980s, when the highlight of Western Sydney nightlife was the Kenny Hiscoe. Maybe they meant Chris Kenny, with the award going to the Press Gallery journalist who predicted the greatest number of (unfulfilled) Kevin Rudd comebacks. 

•••

If Julian Assange had a dog named after him, it would be an Ecuadorian Splitz. Assange has spent his adult life dedicated to freedom of information, building the illusion that governments act in conspiratorial ways against the best interests of their people. Now, with his bizarre bid for political asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy, he is denying the Swedish legal system vital information regarding the sexual assault allegations against him. Surely, in the interests of full public disclosure, Assange should travel to Sweden and face his accusers. Cowering in an embassy in London gives the impression he has something to hide.

Assange is a reminder of the iron rule of foreign affairs: beware the work of fanatics. For all its fanfare, WikiLeaks has had little lasting impact. Its big ‘revelation’ in Australia was that Kevin Rudd engaged in sabre-rattling against China. For those who knew Heavie Kevvie well, this was hardly news. Only dills like Channel Nine’s Peter Harvey thought that Rudd’s language skills and interest in China made him pro-Chinese.

In one of the great acts of political equilibrium, for every fruit-loop leftie in public life there is a right-wing equivalent. Assange’s mirror image is the Australian’s foreign affairs editor, Greg Sheridan, an American poodle. On Sky News’ Australian Agenda last November, Sheridan claimed that China today is in the same position as Japan in the 1920s. Thus Australia and the US need to prepare for war in the Pacific. 

It is a measure of Sheridan’s extremism that his views are to the right of John Howard’s. Last month at Britain’s Oxford Union (the only union he has ever supported), the former PM said he did not ‘see the Chinese as a threat. I think the Chinese are too preoccupied with internal issues’. Howard is correct. Sheridan’s Cold War-style attacks on Australia’s leading economic ally are the work of (another) dangerous fanatic.

•••

For those of us who assumed Australia’s cultural cringe had ended, the media’s coverage of the G20 Summit in Mexico was surprising. By any objective test, it was unexceptional for the Prime Minister of the world’s most successful economy to offer advice to Europe. After all, the sick man of the global economy needs all the help he can get. There are three crucial lessons the Europeans need to absorb from the Australian experience:

•  Means-testing of the welfare system is essential to restraining government spending
•  Ongoing microeconomic reform is the best way of lifting productivity and sustaining real wage increases
•  Economic integration with Asia is vital to export growth and higher national incomes

While Australia has more to do, especially in labour market flexibility and budget cost-cutting, we have a compelling story to tell. The cringeing backlash at Julia Gillard’s presentation to the G20 was proof, yet again, that for large parts of the Australian media, the poor woman can do no right.

When the London Sun took on the President of the European Commission in 1990, it screeched ‘Up Yours Delors’. Yet when our Prime Minister was ‘slapped down’ by the current President, José Manuel Barroso, Murdoch’s Australian tabloids refused to say ‘Go To Hell Manuel’ or even the milder ‘No Way José’. Instead, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph tried to explain ‘Why Gillard Looks Like A European Bloc-Head’. 

•••

The real blockheads are those who refuse to acknowledge the strength of the Australian economy. Two Fridays ago, for instance, the Telegraph’s Simon Benson opined that ‘Sydney families now have a new phrase to add to their cost of living lexicon: To heat or to eat.’ He attributed this to a $300 average annual increase in electricity bills in NSW, lamenting how ‘not even the Cuban revolution could achieve such an extravagant gouging of its citizenry’. 

Now for the facts: since 1984, real disposable income in Australia has increased by 20 per cent, leaving the average family $11,600 a year better off. Even with Fidel Gillard’s carbon tax and bigger power bills, they are still $11,300 ahead. Benson has been smoking too many Cuban cigars, of the exploding kind.

The post 30 June 2012 appeared first on The Spectator.