It is enough for the people to know there was an election …

The most important political office is that of the private citizen.

-Louis Brandeis, Associate Justice, U.S. Supreme Court

So, what do a U.S. Supreme Court justice, and one of the great tyrants (Stalin, attributed with the title quote), have to do with the events, spin, speculation and general swirl and hurl of the last week in Australian politics? Hopefully, I’ll be able to demonstrate that the bow isn’t that long.

Wednesday, 30 January 2013: The Prime Minister addresses the National Press Club. The speech released to attendees didn’t contain one crucial piece of news: the announcement of the election date – Saturday, 14 September 2013. Generally well received, I found the speech discordant in parts. In ‘taking stock’, the Prime Minister outlines some ABS data, and emphasises our fears as a people We’re middle-aged. We live too far away from where we work. We parent and care for our parents. We’re saving instead of spending, a nation of consumers who yearn for the days when we could whip out the credit card with abandon. We don’t shoot each other very often (unless you live in ‘some communities’ [read Western Sydney], and then – you’re rightly concerned about crime and ‘cohesion’). We’ve lived through a few wars, where our Gallipoli obsession looms large in our veneration of heroes and the rarely-explored existence of the ghosts among the returned. We’re early and loving adopters of technology. We have mobiles, Facebook pages and iThings in abundance. Then, in the next stanza, we’re ‘strong, fair by instinct, smart’. Which Australia are we, the people? From the rest of the PM’s speech, it’s enough that we know there’s an election. The governing will continue and we can all plan our year. Weddings can be planned, observant Jews can declare they won’t campaign on the day and the religion of footy finals may be attended sans the onerous duty of lining up to tick a box or two.

Firstly, the great reveal. The jaws in the room, and without, dropped at the omission from the pre-disseminated speech; most memorably that of the Minister for Workplace Relations, the Hon. Bill Shorten MP, who was caught out live blogging at the Herald Sun. Here strikes the discordance: a PM offering certainty to a fearful people while catching many in her own Cabinet unaware.  For the trumpeting of getting on with governing, spin shot its load. The people who knew the election date announcement work in the PM’s office, Swanny DPM, The Greens leader Senator Christine Milne, and Independent MPs, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor. Actions speak louder than words? What a splendidly cohesive team the Gillard Government is, that not even a mass text message was sent 30 seconds before the drop. People wonder why there is an abundance of nameless ‘government sources’ with a cracking dose of the shits. That covers the fearful Australia.

The strong Australia? The announcement itself. We’ve been stuck in a fairly rubbish election mode since Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor backed the ALP. Remember when the Member for Lindsay (suddenly via the Arafura Sea) set sail with the PM on the SS Nervous Nelly, looking for the People of the Boats? Now we can at least say it’s only going to last for another 220-odd days. Please don’t attribute the early call to anyone other than the PM and her advisers. They knew it would rob everyone from speculating on the date for the rest of the year. Is it crazy/brave? Not so much. John Key, New Zealand PM, did the same thing – again, in the name of the worship of sport – and he is one of the last people you’d call crazy/brave. It’s a little interesting if you look at NSW. We, the people of the Scum Corp state, are used to fixed election dates. What the early announcement allows is a gradual build-up of appearances in a State considered so toxic in 2010, I think the PM visited once (maybe twice, if you count Rooty Hill RSL as the People’s Debate). NSW must hold; not only for the government to be reelected, but for the next generation of talent to stick around. Losing the Likes of Chris Bowen, Jason Clare, Ed Husic, Michelle Rowland, Anthony Albanese and Tony Burke would be disastrous. David Bradbury, if his seat wasn’t so bloody indispensable, could pack up and go home. NSW is very much at the heart of the ALP’s problems, but it is also at the heart of its success and longevity. The state of McKell, Wran, Chifley, Whitlam, Carr and Keating, reeling at state level, must offer some pathway at the federal level for the real ‘next generation’. Already, Team JG showed the smarts to pencil the Tet Festival celebrations at Fairfield into her diary last weekend. Smart thinking by some former colleagues of mine now working in the PM’s office.

Thursday, 31 January 2013: I think it’s a crock that anyone’s hand was caught in some nefarious plot to ameliorate the shamefully public arrest of Craig Thomson MP. The NSW wallopers are not averse to dropping a high profile bit of work to the media. While the act was cretinous, it’s hardly surprising. UPDATE: NSW Police have been forced today into an embarrassing back down today. Thomson’s arrest, they said, was triggered by his failure to surrender himself to Victoria Police for arrest. Fer shame. The strip search and the damage done, it turns out their southern cousins wanted to have a chat with Mr Thomson, not arrest him. Bravo, dickheads.

The Thomson matter is going to be an open sore for the government regardless of whether the election was held in six weeks or seven months. The same goes for the disgraceful allegations being heard at the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption. I am proud of many of the achievements of the Ministers and Premier I worked for; but the scale of the allegations, the hubris and disregard for everything that is good and right about governing puts the allegations against Craig Thomson, and the infernal Ashby/Brough/Slipper business in the shade. A sequoia-sized darkness. None of it is going away, so saddle up and deal with it – a big tick for a strong Australia.

Friday, 1 February 2013: It was a dark and stormy night. It was great subscription bait from the Australian Financial Review’s Phillip Coorey, who tweeted at 8.38pm: ‘Gillard govt cabinet minister has resigned. details online soon’. After I finally navigated my way through the AFR’s subscription maze, and learned that Senate Leader and Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills, Jobs, Science and Research, the Hon. Chris Evans, was quitting Cabinet immediately, and the Senate at the election, I was shocked. Evans is one of those reasonably unassuming, non-fuck ups of a Minister. My initial thought was, ‘Christ, I hope he’s not ill’. When I saw Channel 7′s Mark Riley retweet of Nicola Roxon’s resignation several hours’ later, I was stunned. What the actual eff? Two Ministers going within hours of each other. Every part of my former political self said, ‘bad juju’.

Saturday 2 & Sunday 3 February, 2013:

Over the past few days, I’ve had a few, shall we say, some teeth-grinding moments on the Twatters, chiefly because I refuse to fall in line with the pinheaded orthodoxy of ‘MSM fail’; ‘media fail’; ‘stupid gallery speculation’. This is where Brandeis comes in – ‘the most important political office is that of private citizen’. It’s a two-pronged thought: firstly, if you’re reporting the straight Five Ws, why is still one of them. Given that Evans’, Roxon’s and the PM’s offices were refusing to answer questions (yep, no message control going on here), what are we, the people, supposed to think? Nothing to see here, move along? Two senior Ministers had just pulled the pin – yet the Press Gallery is supposed to just write, ‘who, what, when and where’, and ignore the damning why? If the why is not forthcoming, if information is withheld so the message can be massaged to within an inch of its life, the Australia of fearful people is going to, and is entitled to speculate. We are the most important political office bearers. Forget the 24-hour news cycle. What about the blink-and-you-miss-it Twitter free-for-all? If people think the ‘abysmal MSM’ were the only ones speculating, have a long, hard look at your Twitter feeds and DMs. I had some information and theories. So did others. We exchanged views, a bit of healthy scepticism, and a fair bit of plain old, ‘what the actual eff is going on?’ When you cannot accumulate fact, you speculate. If you’re whiter than white and didn’t muse on why both of these Ministers were resigning, then you forfeit the Brandeis test.

Secondly, both Ministers Roxon and Evans are leaving for personal reasons. I don’t doubt that Ms Roxon misses her husband and daughter, and that after 20 years, Chris Evans has had a gutful of flying from Perth to Canberra. Having seen Ministers’ workloads in State politics, I understand the demands of the job. Here’s the thing I didn’t get: the Prime Minister’s claim that both indicated up to a year ago that they wanted out. Evans’ senate spot, not up for election this time, could have been filled by a casual vacancy, He could have sailed off into the sunset. Instead, he’s hanging around and collecting his pay until this September. A small part of me wants to say, ‘fuck off, Chris, bad call PM’. Nicola Roxon’s resignation stumped me. I know the time commitments. I know the demands of serving an electorate. OK, I don’t know what it’s like to have a husband or young daughter. Again, it’s the, ‘I’ve wanted to go for ages’ line. Maybe. Or is it just that having got the plain-packaging tobacco laws through, the drive and pride you had in being the first female Australian Attorney-General faltered? The difficulty is not Roxon’s resignation from Cabinet. Mark Dreyfus QC is a central-casting Attorney. The potential issue is the pre-selection for the plum seat of Gellibrand. No sooner had the name David Feeney, he of the faceless face and an unwinnable number three Senate ticket spot, done the rounds, a far more palatable name appeared: former Victorian Premier, Steve Bracks. He’s still young, lives in the electorate, and as someone I’ve met fleetingly, a smart operator with name and reputation recognition to die for. Mark Dreyfus practically went the Captain’s Pick himself, so effusive was his praise of Bracks. The sticking point is whether Bracks wants back in. After all, the most political office one can hold is that of private citizen. The real stick in the mud is the resignation of the Member for Barton and former Attorney-General, the Hon. Robert McClelland. It’s not clear whether McClelland will serve out his term; another former Premier, Morris Iemma, is one of the names being discussed to replace him. If McClelland quits Parliament in the next two-three months, it’s going to be very difficult (although not without precedent) for a by-election to be held off until September 14. Would any of us like to go six months (or longer) unrepresented in the Federal Parliament? Not so much. If he goes early, the Speaker should be encouraged, not laughingly discouraged from issuing the writs. Be strong, not fearful, lest the baseball bats come out in the months to come.

Monday, 4 February 2013: A new Ministry was sworn in. A new Senate Leader was elected. If the PM and Swanny DPM are both out of the country or unable to fulfil their duties, your Acting Prime Minister will be one Senator Stephen Conroy. Caucus met, and as sure as the sun sets in the west, Caucus leaked. Caucus leaked that the PM had cracked it with them for leaking against the Government, a fact relayed to her by a journalist. Meta or what? Caucus took place sans the former PM. Kevin, he of Queensland and here to help (and help all over the place – he’s said he’ll campaign wherever he’s asked), cited ill-health for missing the 2pm meeting. Maybe he was leaking. The fearful people of the marginals win this round, none of them warming to Brandeis’ treatise.

The Possum Comitatus with the Polling Mostest has produced this, the PollyTrend Two-Party Preferred graph, which looks like a few wobbly beer snakes. This morning it’s, ‘oh, fuck Newspoll, bunch of know nothings. Polls come and go. Outliers’. Not so fast. Yes, individual polls go up and down – but the trend isn’t a happy snap. If anything, it shows how long it’s taking for the numbers to move. Almost a year between the bulges, either side. I’m no pollster, but this doesn’t look like a volatile electorate to me. The polls taken over the weekend (with Essential to come tomorrow) reflect the thinking of the electorate at this point in time, and at this point in time, the ALP has freaked the people out. Going from a four-point gap to trailing by 10-12 percentage points is an indicator that the fear, fanned from within, translated to the people who hold the most important political office. And all for knowing that an election was being held.

Choking on your cornflakes

Warren Mundine must have been choking on his cornflakes.

The former President of the Australian Labor Party quit the party last year after his Senate hopes were dashed as Bob Carr strode into Federal Parliament, Senator-elect for NSW and Foreign Minister-in-waiting, following the resignation of Mark Arbib and the failure of Kevin Rudd’s challenge for the parliamentary party leadership.

Today, Mundine came out in support of the Prime Minister’s decision to endorse indigenous Australian, Nova Peris OAM for the party’s number one Senate ticket spot in the Northern Territory.

“Righting a wrong,” Mundine said.

While Peris waited for her party membership to be approved by the party’s National Executive (which does not include a member from the NT), a few others let fly.

Let’s start with the closest thing to a Scottish rocket launcher known to man, Senator Doug Cameron.

After he’d recovered sufficiently from choking on his porridge, Cameron kept it classy by invoking the ‘night of the long knives’ to describe the dumping of the incumbent, Senator Trish Crossin.

A “brutal exercise of political power,” Doug called it.

Despite receiving calls from the Prime Minister to prevent them choking on their Weeties, Senator Crossin, and her would-be preselection challenger, Marion Scrymgour, both had a vent.

Crossin, who has sat on the red benches for 15 years, issued a statement yesterday, pointing out the bleeding obvious – that she was facing a long walk off a short plank – but would not comment further until she had spoken with and consulted NT branch members and her colleagues.

Consultation, negotiation, input, trust, respect. All carefully inserted into five paragraphs. Very deft. I feel the hand of Rudd guiding the keyboard.

Former Deputy Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, Marion Scrymgour, was less guarded, shall we say:

“At the end of the day, yes the Prime Minister has her way,” she said.

“But she had her way with Warren Mundine, she had her way with Kevin Rudd.”

The Territory’s former deputy leader, Syd Sterling, labelled the move, ‘an appalling overreach of power by the Prime Minister’.

Ouch.

Being late to the party, I asked the Twitters what was going on. One of the replies (since deleted) attributed the move as a way of circumventing some nutcase (or words to that effect) from winning preselection. I don’t know any of the players, but assumed the unwanted would-be candidate was Scrymgour. Having once held the highest office of any indigenous MP in the country, Scrymgour was variously promoted, demoted, quit the party then returned. She wanted a crack at Crossin, now dismissed as yet another timeserver on the backbench. True enough; then again, most MPs spend the bulk of their time on the backbench. If you’re a Senate backbencher, that’s pretty much what you do for your term, especially if you’re in Opposition. As I said, I don’t know any of the players. I really have no idea whether Trish Crossin does a good job or not. I sometimes watch Senate question time and think, ‘who the fuck is that’? That made the subsequent spouting of, ‘nothing to see here, move along’ quite interesting:

“Doubt 1 in a thousand cares who the NT ALP Senator is. Classic beltway obsession overcoming news values.” tweeted Channel 10′s (and former ALP staffer), Stephen Spencer (@sspencer_63).

‘Beltway’? Canberra’s roundabouts do not a Dupont Circle make; and while one in a thousand people might not care who the NT Senator is, holding a Prime Ministerial press conference to announce a candidate is newsworthy. See ‘Carr strode into Federal Parliament’. That was a bit of news, AMIRITE? It’s the delivery and interpretation of news which bothers people – left, right, and as more than one in one thousand people feel, left right out.

There are many people of merit, or lacking it, who have been ‘parachuted’ into Parliament by all sides. In NSW, the ‘N 40′ rule was regularly exercised over the ALP’s rank-and-file membership by the Administrative Committee to exorcise deadwood, sometimes for more deadwood. There are some cracking people who have entered politics with a little help from the backroom. Nova Peris may prove to be one of them. I hope that if she is elected, she serves the Northern Territory with distinction; but the way this has been handled plays into the tired narrative of the Prime Minister’s prime ministership from critics within and without. Perception matters. The narrative could have played out differently had Peris been a member of the party before the presser was held, for a start. That’s just dumb.

We should strive to have better people represent us in Canberra. If that means people get the arse when they don’t want to, or the ambitions of those who think they deserve a shot at the title are thwarted, so be it. I’m tired of political ‘dynasties’, personal fiefdoms and people who think they are owed something because it’s their ‘turn’. No, not so much. So, go for it Nova. Get stuck in and make a difference. Christ knows, we need it.

~~~

Meanwhile, on Sydney’s northern beaches, Tony Abbott’s Nutri-Grain may have been momentarily lodged in his oesophagus, but it quickly turned to a shit-eating grin for an unpopular leader under considerable pressure and scrutiny. After all, the Liberals and Australian Democrats have, or had, indigenous Australian representatives in Federal Parliament. The ALP was playing catch-up.

“It’s terrific that Labor might finally be getting its first Aboriginal representative in the Federal Parliament, so I’m all in favour of that,” he told Fairfax Radio.

If he has any sense, he’ll shut up and let the ALP’s latest fizzing and spluttering Catherine Wheel spin like topsy. Give it oxygen, Tony. Don’t suck it in with your blowhard ‘try’. That’s where you turn small victories into the dull thud of loss.

The Australian Labor Party’s Flying Circus

The last two weeks I’ve been struck by the depths of absurdity the Australian Labor Party has been hell-bent on plumbing. Blame Nicola Roxon. Her statement this week that Kevin Rudd was not the Messiah (and, ipso facto, a very naughty boy) sparked this idea – that the omnishambles the Federal ALP has created deserves to be viewed through the prism of the brilliant, flawed and greatest proponents of absurdist comedy since Spike Milligan.

Scene One: Mr Creosote, Monty Python and The Meaning of Life

[Rudd, the morbidly obese Mr Creosote, gorges on everything in a restaurant, vomiting until he literally explodes]

If Kevin Rudd’s government was so paralysed, dysfunctional and unbearable for Ministers and caucus – now given as the reason why Australia went to bed with one Prime Minister on 23 June 2010 and had a new one the next day – why was that not explained, clearly, compassionately by then-Deputy Prime Minister Gillard in a press conference that night? Indulge me with a draft form of words:

“Kevin Rudd led the ALP team to an historic victory in 2007. As a team, led by Kevin, we made bold calls that kept Australia largely immune to the ravages of the Global Financial Crisis. Sadly, it has become increasingly clear to our parliamentary colleagues that under Kevin’s leadership, the government is no longer advancing the policy agenda we set out in the 2007 campaign. As Deputy Prime Minister, I have worked hard to bridge the gap between the decisiveness Kevin showed during the GFC and the way Kevin has led the government during the past few months. Our Cabinet colleagues have sought to implement the reforms they were appointed by Kevin to carry out. They have not flinched in the face of external challenges; rather, internal processes are frustrating their efforts, and inevitably, letting you down. As Deputy Prime Minister, I have not resiled from my duty to act as Kevin’s closest adviser. That includes sharing some hard truths about his leadership style. Time and again, senior colleagues have exhorted Kevin to allow them to do the jobs he personally entrusted them with and which we were, as a team, elected to do. Tonight, I made the most difficult decision of my political life. I spoke with Kevin and told him that I intended to challenge him for the leadership of the Federal Parliamentary Australian Labor Party because I could no longer bridge that gap as his Deputy. A ballot for the leadership has been called for tomorrow morning. I am confident that I have the support of my caucus colleagues and if elected tomorrow, I will ensure that this good government performs as we have demonstrated we can; and that your local MPs, Ministers and Prime Minister not only speak of a shared vision for Australia, but use our complementary talents to their fullest extent. This is a good team. We have Australia’s interests as our overriding motivation. As leader, I will once again harness our talents, our motivation, with trust and goodwill. That is the marked difference between the Government I intend to lead and the Opposition so soundly rejected by you in 2007.”

Instead, we were told, ‘a good government had lost its way’ in a press conference after the ballot. I found it difficult to reconcile the long list of achievements Rudd set out in his emotional appearance at The Lodge with the actions taken the night before. I am not ashamed to say that I sat in a Ministerial office in Macquarie Street and cried when the leadership spill was called. I didn’t cry for Kevin Rudd; I had been too close to the repercussions of the Federal Government’s failures; enraged at times by the way it operated (or didn’t) and the way our already deeply unpopular State Government was handed shit sandwich after shit sandwich to swallow in public. I cried because in that moment, I knew who the principle architects were; I knew how they worked, and I knew the lazy epithet: the dreaded ‘NSW disease’. Yes, go on; tear down someone who had led the party to victory – because that was working out so well for us. Labor had been in power for 15 years in NSW that June night, and under its fourth Premier. We had lost almost all of our best Ministers – and yet this nightmare was being inflicted upon itself by a first-term Government. I cried because I knew we faced an impossible task; we were serving up Government to another rabble and pouring the wine for them to enjoy with our carcass. Why, why was Federal Labor so determined to follow our path?

Scene Two: The Black Knight, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

[Rudd, the limbless Black Knight goading Gillard’s King Arthur, ‘It’s just a flesh wound!’ As an exasperated King Arthur exits, the Black Knight screeches, ‘Running away, eh? You yellow bastards!’]

If you are going to take the axe to a leader, you make damned sure they are dead. You have to be prepared to wreck what you have helped build if you want to take the top job; and the wreckage must include the deposed leader. Instead of letting KRuddMP stay KRuddMP until he was so debilitated he resigned from Parliament, Prime Minister Gillard gifted him a purpose: ‘go forth, Kevin, as Australia’s chief diplomat’. It sent out a dual signal: here was a new Prime Minister so frightened by the prospect of a by-election loss that she came to the conclusion that it was better to have him piss inside her Cabinet than in the Siberia of the backbench; worse still, she said on her first overseas trip as Prime Minister, that she had no passion for international affairs, that she felt more comfortable in a classroom. Yes, she went on to say that she would be a, ‘feisty advocate’ for Australia’s interests, and recognised that sitting in meetings in Brussels was part of the package, but it didn’t ring true. Different things drive people to enter politics – the Prime Minister made it clear that education is her passion; Rudd got out of bed each day determined to make Australia a respected middle power – an effort rewarded with a place at the G20 table. While it’s not rare for Prime Ministers to make former party leaders Foreign Minister – Howard did it with Downer; Hawke with Hayden – why allow a former Prime Minister who loved nothing more than to strut on the world stage to do it full-time? It gave Rudd a perfect platform to play statesman; ‘hey folks, I might have had my arms and legs lopped off, but I’ve still got the head to mix it with foreign leaders while Gillard has photo ops in kindergartens’. The negative perception of the amount of time he spent travelling (‘Kevin 747’, anyone?), is, in my view, counter-balanced by the odd way the Prime Minister chopped up her former portfolio of Education and Training in her post-election Ministry and subsequent reshuffle into ‘Tertiary Education, Skills (Chris Evans)’; ‘School Education and Early Childhood (Peter Garrett)’; ‘Early Childhood and Childcare (Kate Ellis) and Jacinta Collins as Parliamentary Secretary. I found it ironic that Gillard released the Gonski Review (which she commissioned as Education Minister), but is nowhere to be found when it comes to the Murray-Darling Basin. Am I reading too much into this – a clear distinction between the ability of the two Ministers must play a part – or is she as much a micro-manager as Rudd, but only when it comes to her passion? Is the Prime Minister on the phone to foreign leaders searching for ways to stop the carnage in Syria? The only engagement in foreign policy I remember – and I am an international relations obsessive – are from her visit to the White House, punting a Sherrin in the Oval Office and President Obama’s whistle-stop last year (both involving photo-ops in … yes, schools). I was reminded yesterday of her visit to Afghanistan and that it may have been a relief for everyone involved that she didn’t feel the need to prove she was ‘the smartest guy in the room’; but I want the smartest guy in the room to lead this country. That may not be Rudd or Gillard.

Scene Three: The French Taunter, Monty Python and The Holy Grail

I don’t want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.

I could just cut and paste transcripts of any number of interviews given in the last two weeks, from Simon Crean’s first radio blast at Rudd, to the retiring (and hence, nothing to lose) Member for Bendigo, Steve Gibbons’ charm school cry that the Foreign Minister was a ‘psychopath’, through to the abject disgrace to his office that was Wayne Swan’s spray. It must be noted that other Gillard supporters have acted with class; Tanya Plibersek’s remarks spring to mind. Initially, Rudd sought, smartly, to claim the moral high ground and urged his supporters to do the same. By and large, they have: even Doug Cameron, (who I am sure would prefer to have played out a pub fight, Motherwell rules) sounded like the voice of reason compared to the bile being poured on Rudd. Bob Brown was right to say that Rudd should not have resigned from Washington; but Rudd was running out of time to mount any sort of defence, let alone challenge for the leadership. It’s been reported that the Prime Minister quickly voiced her displeasure at the Unhappy Member for Corangamite, Darren ‘Blessed is the’ Cheeseman for going on record and firing a shot against her leadership in a Sunday paper. Similarly, she should have put a muzzle on Crean. Asked, repeatedly, whether she had done, she responded, ‘I’m focused on doing my job’. It was the phoniest call of all. Whatever was going on, Crean deserved a clip around the earlobes just as Cheeseman did. Rudd seized on her failure to do so and pulled the trigger from DC.

Scene Four: Brian on the Cross Monty Python’s The Life of Brian

[Rudd, martyred. The chorus of the crucified breaks out in song ]

Life’s a piece of shit,
When you look at it.
Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke, it’s true.
You’ll see it’s all a show,
Keep ‘em laughing as you go.
Just remember that the last laugh is on you.

Rudd says he has changed, that he recognises his mistakes; that he wants to reform the party – statements almost universally scorned. I have few doubts he has concertedly campaigned to challenge for the leadership, leaked information and briefed against the Prime Minister – all sackable offenses; yet the Prime Minister chose not to sack him. That said, the Wikileaks cables allege that Senator Mark Arbib had briefed the US Embassy and speculated about Kevin Rudd’s job in 2009. People have selective memories. If anyone has changed, it is Julia Gillard, who has gone from one of the Government’s most effective communicators and skilled debaters to negotiator-in-chief. People make mistakes. Then there is just the stupid shit. Who didn’t cringe at the Prime Minister’s interview on 4Corners a mere two weeks ago? Where was the nous, the political intelligence, the intuition which says, ‘I don’t need to do this’? Without interviewing her, the programme literally had no legs. Rudd didn’t need to give an interview, would never have agreed to it with things as they stood. Yes, it would have featured vision from National Conference, where a stony-faced Rudd sat through a speech which praised each of his predecessors and wiped him from the collective memory as clumsily as Stalin erased Trotsky from photographs, but without Gillard, it was a laughing stock – who would line-up to watch the combined wit and wisdom of Con Sciacca, Alan Griffin and his noodles and Janelle Saffin? The Prime Minister’s rejigged office, by all reports, works well – yet the appointment of a new and well-respected Chief-of-Staff and a Director of Communications from the UK hasn’t stemmed the stupid. The frequent cry is ‘she’s over-managed’. As an adviser, you have to possess the internal fortitude to take it to a boss who sometimes doesn’t want to hear what you have to say. You also have a duty to be on top of your brief and offer sound advice and back your boss even if they are a bastard to you sometimes. As a Minister, it’s incumbent on you to hire good people who will die in a ditch for you even if you are a bastard to them sometimes and challenge them, constantly, to set out solid arguments which you must then make a decision on. Sometimes people find themselves managing upward. That happens in all kinds of workplaces. The difference in politics is that you can blame a staffer, sack them, even; but if there is a perception that your staff are running the show, then you will be judged weak as piss. I don’t believe the Prime Minister is over-managed by her staff. She wouldn’t command the level of respect she does from people of the calibre of Greg Combet and Penny Wong, Tony Windsor and Bob Brown if she was. At the same time, respect must be earned. Trust follows. Rightly or wrongly, many Australians neither respect nor trust the Prime Minister, just as the majority of his caucus colleagues don’t trust or respect Kevin Rudd.

Scene Five: The Parrot Sketch, Monty Python’s Flying Circus

[The ALP is no more. It has ceased to be. It is bereft of life. It rests in peace]

The party (indeed the public) deserved the full release of the Bracks / Carr / Faulkner review of the 2010 election campaign – not the strategic leaks made in the aftermath of the 2011 National Conference (which infuriated the trio). Real reform needs to happen. The ‘faceless men’ is a tiresome term but it is not ‘offensive to members of caucus’, as the Prime Minister has said. I know who Mark Arbib is; I recognise Bill Shorten and his undoubted talent; but I couldn’t pick David Feeney or Don Farrell out of a line up. What is offensive is the power of bottom feeders like Bill Ludwig and Joe de Bruyn, and yes, Paul Howse, although he’s more chinless than faceless. They are the elected heads of unions. They are not elected members of caucus. Even the good Senators are elected by virtue of a place on the party’s Senate ticket (bloody unrepresentative swill). Union bosses and ‘machine men’ can make a tremendous contribution to public life. Shorten and Combet are excellent examples; but it is well past time to make wholesale change to the voting system which gives union delegates many advantages over branch delegates at conferences, and the way preselections are conducted.

Yesterday, Anthony Albanese, choking back tears, set out his reasons for supporting Rudd, while paying the Prime Minister the respect her office is due. His emotion stems from the great damage he knows this spectacle has done to the party’s survival and the very real danger that the ALP will be consigned to the Opposition benches for a very long time, perhaps annihilated, electorally in a fashion similar to NSW in 2011. He reminded me that if this happens, a generation, maybe more, of Labor talent will be discarded. The party needs the Shortens, the Combets, the Clares, the Wongs, the Bowens, the Husics, yes, it needs Albo, to survive this internecine war not only for what they can contribute, now and in the decades to come, but to inspire others to actively engage. It saddens me to think of the reprisals and recriminations which will inevitably flow from this sorry mess. I thought I had seen it all in NSW, but this is the most publicly vitriolic political fight I’ve known. The things that have been said cannot be taken back. This is now the ‘Canberra disease’. The policy-free zone led by Tony Abbott can remain just that if the seething and spite continues within the ALP, for they will serve up Government to an undeserving bunch of no marks, and pour the wine for them to enjoy as they pick over the carcass.

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right

Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent, and debate.

Hubert Humphrey

This is a cropped image taken (stolen) from the Herald-Sun’s #occupymelbourne gallery. I was flicking through, & this poster caught my attention. I flicked back & forth & still ended up at the same image.

Why? Because it speaks to me so loudly of everything that I find disturbing about the occupy movement as it exists in Australia. No economics or factoids in this post. Purely visceral.

Firstly, an apology to #occupysydney participants for not fully understanding why the camp was established outside the Reserve Bank of Australia. I was hammering away, railing inside my head & on Twitter as to why camp hadn’t been set up in Bridge Street (drunken aside: #occupybs would be a cool hashtag) given it’s home to the ASX? I asked a question on Twitter tonight (depending on how quickly I write this, maybe last night) and, thanks to @hailants, I learned something. Securency. I thought polymer notes were just a cool invention. I asked politely, genuinely, & I got a polite, genuine, informative answer about something I knew nothing about. That’s pure gold to me.

OK, so back to the poster. This is so fucking far from pure gold to me it’s not funny. Starving African child juxtaposed with obese Western kids eating junk food. Seems like everything capitalism, everything wrong, everything #occupy represents. Not to me.

I am in no way accepting of how totally fucked it is that gross poverty, is delivered in white 4WDs to the Global South by, yes capitalism, but also inept, corrupt governments & non-state actors. The answer (according to me) to a fraction of that starving African child’s problems is not the carte-blanche, lazy finger-pointing at evil capitalism. It is pathetic infrastructure. It is more expensive to transport food to famine-declared areas from a food bowl IN Africa than it is to ship food aid from Europe. As this Massachusetts Institute of Technology project contends, it is only through global actors such as the World Bank that intra- and inter-country roads in Africa can be built and maintained (the example it uses is the Mombassa - Nairobi road project in Kenya). People in sub-Saharan Africa starve not because there is no food, but because transportation costs are so high, making them aid dependent, and if the greedy Global North cannot be arsed, they die. Dambisa Moyo’s seminal work, Dead Aid may not be popular, but her central thesis, that cutting aid will force these capitalist solutions to take hold, is worth study. I do not agree with cutting foreign aid; but I would play with the idea and put forward the following solution – that the member states which signed up to lift aid to 0.77 per cent of GDP under the UN Millennium Goals – make that abysmal fraction higher, and invest in an infrastructure fund that will assist in building transportation routes and enable, empower the most impoverished to trade with their neighbours. It’s a capitalist solution to a problem that exists, that is so obvious, that for the life of me, I cannot understand.

Next: is this problem assisted by a poster in Melbourne? No. Bring forth the person in, Melbourne, or my Sin City of Sydney, this city of 4.5 million, who is not aware, that somewhere in the world, people are starving. Seriously, I will travel to them, I will jam my foot in their front door  & show them this poster if I am wrong. People know famine exists; they may not understand why, beyond natural causes such as drought; but we know it happens. Forgive me, Occupiers, but where are your solutions, where are your ideas, to fixing this unnecessary, base evil, ill? Capitalism Isn’t Working? It’s not an idea; it’s a statement of questionable fact. There is no attempt to make a constructive argument; it’s not even a talking point memo. Where, in the general assemblies or working groups, are the solutions? I know what the problem is. I’m disgusted by it. I’ve been to Dharavi, one of the world’s largest slums. I’ve seen poverty in South London, where I worked in social housing; in Gaza; in Russia; in Redfern – none of which this poster represents – barring one teeny, tiny thing. The fat kids. The ultimate representation, the tool to demonstrate, about the greedy Global North. Shyeh, right on.

Yep, the fat kids eating junk food. What greater depiction of corporate greed could you imagine? Oh, I can. Teeny, tiny mind of mine suggests that the kiddies sat at the Golden Arches of the capitalist piggery of the Global North, are the the poorest percentile, those totally dependent on welfare; the kids who grow up in households where generational unemployment is a fact of life … these kiddies, the fat capitalist pigs gorging on the fries – they are the 99 per cent. Not you, not even me, with my multitude of fucktardness visited, uninvited, on my childhood. Fact: poor families sacrifice, or cannot afford, fresh fruit and vegetables. They eat fried food. They have less playing space. They are the children whose life expectancy is slashed; who will develop NCDs (non-communicable diseases) such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. They will die earlier, their lives straining public health systems in between. They will, on average, not go to university. They won’t make these posters & camp in Martin Place or City Square, because they have never fucking been to Martin Place. They are in our rural and regional centres. They are on the fringes of our cities & at there epicentres. They do not regularly attend school. They are supplied with breakfast & taught how to read by the best of the 99 per cent – our under-valued teachers. These are the children Occupiers need to speak to; not Twitter twats like me. These children are growing up poorer than any of us – not in terms of disposable income, the measurable, cold, economic indicators I have written about before but under-educated, not even disengaged. They are the scorn of our ‘current affairs’ programming. Fringe-dwellers, regardless of race. The underclass. The illiterate and innumerate. The kids who set London on fire while we, the lucky 99 per cent of the Land of Oz sat here and watched. Rail against quantitative easing, #occupysydney … give me a small break while I imagine an austerity package, two or three, visited upon us. The truly frightening thing is that these children are not the stereotypical fat, unruly progeny of Macquarie Fields, or Fitzroy Crossing, or Frankston: they are the middle classes of  the BRICs, especially China and India. There are 78 million Indians with Type 2 diabetes. To work these most basic health issues through, we – who are not the 99 per cent – must get off Martin Place and reach Mumbai. Indians don’t see themselves as victims of capitalism. Indians thrive on trade; not just now, but through the ages. They live in a post-colonialist, still caste-ridden and religiously-divided country. They are more powerful than this lazy portrait, the Indians, South Americans, South Africans, Russians than our piss-poor democracy can imagine.

OK, I am drunk, and tired and I have ranted and railed more than enough for the early hours. Please leave a comment or tweet me about what this poster says to you. I am a cranky old woman, sure; but I genuinely want to know, in more than a cut and paste about how we are controlled by the banks, the media, the corporations and politicians, just what this poster represents. I want more of you,from you, as the individuals who claim to make up the 99 per cent. Agree, disagree; just don’t ignore. Oh, and don’t bash the people you have so long admired for kicking against the pricks of the right, and laughed at the idiocy of the Convoy of No Confidence. If you believe that Wayne Swan is going to chuck a Tony Abbott and stand in front of an ‘occupy buildings, abolish gaols’ banner, you are sorely mistaken. Barack Obama is endorsing #ows in his cool, pragmatic style. He wants to save his presidency by appealing to his base. End of Politics 101. Time for bed. Like this, loathe me, just think about it. Please.

Occupy This

To steal from Network, Americans are mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it anymore.

The #Occupy movement, which began as #OccupyWallStreet, a protest against bankers, bailouts and corporate greed.

In my tiny mind, Americans have every right to be angry. They might be angry enough to consign Barack Obama to a one-term presidency – unthinkable a few years ago. The left is angry, the right is angry and the Tea Party is the small government, small tax version of the pro-life, pro-gun, pro-Christian base for this decade

A few fast facts on why I think Americans are mad:

The economy: No wonder President Obama is playing golf with President Clinton. The baseline in American politics is the economy, stupid. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics‘ latest release (7 October), seasonally adjusted unemployment in September 2011 was 9.1 per cent. That’s a 0.5 per cent improvement on September 2010. Breaking that down:

• 14 million Americans are registered unemployed
• Of that number, the long-term unemployed (people out of work for more than 27 weeks) make up more than 44 per cent, or 6.2 million)
• 24 per cent of teenagers (16-19 year olds) are unemployed
• 16 per cent of blacks are unemployed (c.f. with 8 per cent unemployment among whites; 11.3 per cent for Hispanics and 7.8 per cent for Asians)
• The annual 2010 unemployment rate of ‘Gulf War II’ veterans (i.e. military personnel who have served post September 2001) is 11.5 per cent

Delving slightly deeper, while the labor force and employment figures lifted, the civilian labor force participation rate (64.2 per cent) and employment:population ratio (58.3 per cent) remain fairly static. Disturbingly, 9.3 million Americans are classed as involuntary part-time workers (i.e. their hours have been cut or they’re unable to find full-time work). In August 2011, the number was 8.8 million – an additional 444,000 people in one month. Those ‘marginally attached to the workforce’ – some 2.5 million Americans who have sought work in the last year, but not in the last four weeks, are not counted as unemployed. There are 1 million ‘discouraged’ American workers. These are the defeated and demoralised. They believe they cannot get a job, so they’ve given up. Average hourly earnings? $23.12. Average weekly earnings? $793.02.

‘Failed’ stimulus: President Obama signed The Recovery Act on 7 February 2009. The total package of $787 billion was increased to $840 billion in 2011. I bracketed ‘failed’ because it’s open to interpretation. There is certainly a perception that while some of the leading indicators have resulted in an improvement in certain sectors of the economy and regions, in my view, this is counterbalanced by one of the saddest statistics I think I’ve ever come across: $8 billion additional spend on food stamps to feed 38 million hungry Americans. (Reuters)

Dysfunctional government: the White House is caught in a pincer movement. President Obama has come out swinging at Congress recently, most notably on his jobs bill. He’s moving to Candidate Obama, criss-crossing the country selling a Bill which has no chance of passing. These people who were willing to play brinkmanship with the country’s credit card. It is pathetic.

The cost of foreign policy: President Obama got Osama bin Laden. Terrific. It doesn’t change the economic and human costs of the country’s operations in Pakistan and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the key findings of a recent report from the Eisenhower Research Project based at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies:

• The U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan will cost between $3.2 and $4 trillion, including medical care and disability for current and future war veterans. This figure does not include substantial probable future interest on war-related debt.
• More than 31,000 people in uniform and military contractors have died, including the Iraqi and Afghan security forces and other military forces allied with the United States.
• By a very conservative estimate, 137,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by all parties to these conflicts.
• The wars have created more than 7.8 million refugees among Iraqis, Afghans, and Pakistanis.
• Pentagon bills account for half of the budgetary costs incurred and are a fraction of the full economic cost of the wars.
• Because the war has been financed almost entirely by borrowing, $185 billion in interest has already been paid on war spending, and another $1 trillion could accrue in interest alone through 2020.
• Federal obligations to care for past and future veterans of these wars will likely total between $600-$950 billion. This number is not included in most analyses of the costs of war and will not peak until mid-century.

That’s just war. Don’t start me on the President’s broken promise to close Guantánamo Bay; conduct of extra-judicial killings and the disconnect between endorsement of the Arab Spring where it’s easy (Libya, for example) and wilful disregard for others (such as the Shi`a of  Bahrain).

The 99 per cent: Campaign finance reform; the disparity between tax breaks for the super-wealthy and the middle-class; corporate bailouts; out-of-control student debt it’s the beginning of a national conversation Americans haven’t engaged in for a long time.

So … it was with a general sense of irritation that I heard about the #OccupyPickAnAustralianCity protests that took place yesterday, for one reason: the great Australian propensity for whingeing. If whingeing was an Olympic sport, it would be, ‘GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!’ for Australia. I whinge, I hear others whinge and I read about people whingeing on a daily basis. It’s healthy to vent, to verbalise frustrations, irritations and feelings that systems, services and other people are failing us; but when you conflate whingeing into the #Occupy movement, you cheapen it. Yes, I am fully aware that Australia was only one of 78 countries to hold protests yesterday. I would also contend that people in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece have legitimate fears and grievances against prevailing economic conditions and systemic corruption. Australia? Not so much. While many on the ‘left’ view Tony Abbott as the Nabob of No, the Occupiers of Australia are playing his game of fear and loathing:

The economy: 5.2 per cent unemployment in September 2011. As the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Measures of Australia’s Progress 2011 report shows, pretty much everything (barring productivity) has improved since 2000. Including unemployment. The bad news? That increase applies to threatened animal species due to climate change. The average weekly income per full-time employed adult is $1,305. The average hourly income is between $29.70 and$33.10 (the disparity? Female wages c.f. men) (Source: ABS)

‘Failed’ stimulus: I’m leaving this one to George Megalogenis

Dysfunctional government: I am not a cheerleader for the current Government, but I am thankful that there are some quality people in our Parliament. Not naming names, but as close to the bone it has come on major issues – especially in the last few weeks – it is functional. I may not like the politics, the policies, the poor communication and quality of political discourse, but it continues to roll on.

The cost of foreign policy: Defence estimates an approximate $6 billion spend in Afghanistan to 2014. Iraq Mk II, approximately $2.3 billion. To me, the irreparable damage is in civilian deaths, leaving Australian citizens in Gitmo, irregular migration flows (UN-speak for refugees), international reputation and pathetic policy reactions to the problems we helped cause. That said, I don’t think we’ve been breaking arms embargoes, killing people willy-nilly or uneven in our condemnation for despots the world over.

The 99 per cent: according to a new release into household wealth from the ABS, the top 20 per cent of Australian households have seen their average net wealth increase by 15 per cent to $2.2 million since 2005/06, accounting for approximately 60 per cent of total household wealth. The bottom 20 per cent’s average net wealth grew by only 4 per cent. They account for approximately 1 per cent of total household wealth. That leaves almost 30 per cent of Australian households with an average net wealth of $720,000, up 14 per cent since 2005/06 – almost on par with the richest in the land and 10 per cent ahead of the poor. I contend that there is no ’99 per cent’ in Australia. Of course there is disparity in wealth; but the two major assets of Australian households (property – $520-540,000; superannuation – $60-154,000) put ‘average’ Australia within striking distance of the top 20 per cent. This is not the case in the US. It never has been and never will be.

I hope this stirs some pots & kettles. It stirred mine.

Nation seeks politicians without fault: apply within

For a bunch that proclaims to loathe cookie-cutter political hacks dominating pre-selection battles. Australians are doing a bloody good job of turning anyone else off entering politics.

In 2002, I started work as an adviser for a NSW Labor minister. After a few months, he sounded me out. The party needs strong female candidates. You haven’t come up through the ranks of the machine or a union. You’re the kind of person the party needs. Member for X is going to announce he won’t contest the 2003 election. Do you want to have a go? I admit I thought about it for a few moments. For a lot of advisers, a seat in Parliament is the prize. Then I said, ‘no … it’s not for me.’ There was one overriding reason for that decision: I was afraid that events and choices in my personal life would make public life unbearable. As every year passes, I know I made the right choice. You see, for all of the whining that goes on about the quality of candidates & MPs; the ‘lifetime politicians’, Australia is increasingly (& sadly, in my opinion) adopting an American-style moral character test for our elected representatives – and on a lot of counts, I fail.

If you want a career in Australian politics, you need to start thinking about it at 15, join the Young Libs, Young Nats, Young Labor, Young Un-Fun clubs. I don’t think the Greens have an insufferable youth wing, but if they do, I’m sure it’s a little more tolerable. This way, you’ll be inculcated with not just the party line, learn how to spit venom at your nasty little conferences & attend branch meetings; you’ll also learn about ‘shit sheets’. These grubby documents are the anti-Christ of the Parliamentary privilege debate I wrote about last week. They are the product of scuttlebutt, gossip & personal enmities. I’ve seen them circulated at party conferences & mailed to Ministerial offices. It’s the poison-pen equivalent to the needle and the damage done. What do they teach the kiddies? Whatever you do, don’t do anything ‘wrong’.

In the last month, we’ve seen the office of the Prime Minister denigrated in a tacky, ‘comedy’ commissioned by the ABC. I refuse to watch, ‘At Home With Julia’, not because politicians should be put on a pedestal, but because I saw a promo of the Prime Minister apologising for flashing a bit of thigh trying to get to a meeting dressed in a pink robe and thought, Mark Scott, ‘you wouldn’t do that to a man’. It’s the same principle I apply to Glenn Milne’s loathsome attack on the Prime Minister over a previous relationship, and today’s pitiful smear in The Age on Sophie Mirabella less than a fortnight after the death of a man, who, regardless of their relationship, had a profound effect on her life. Unless there are financial irregularities with campaign donations, who cares? What possible public interest is there in the insinuation that she hid the relationship because of her family? The only person who seems to rejoice in this is Catherine Deveny, who tweeted, “Sophie Mirabella. Self-hating wog. Discuss.” I don’t like Ms Mirabella’s politics, but I will address Ms Deveny’s talking point: “Catherine Deveny. Feminist & progressive when she feels like it. Discuss.”

The nadir of these personal attacks is when it comes to ‘outing’ homosexuals. A NSW Cabinet Minister is alleged to have been caught in a ‘lewd act’. Two witnesses allegedly reported to an off-duty police officer that they allegedly saw someone engaged in a sexual act in public, in an ‘inner city suburb’ (i.e. where all the gays in the village of Sydney live). I have never witnessed a lower act in politics than the outing of NSW Minister (and a former boss), David Campbell by Channel 7 reporter, Adam Walters. In what way, shape or parallel universe did his personal anguish improve public life in NSW? The government lost a hard-working Minister who had not broken any section of the Ministerial Code of Conduct. Funnily enough, the hardest-hitting question put to Walters when the public interest test was applied came from Channel 7 Sunrise host, David Koch, who point-blank asked Walters whether he’d ever been involved in such an activity, as Walters had justified the story on the grounds that Campbell had misused a Ministerial car. The answer was yes, when he & then-partner, Reba Meagher, left her driver asleep at the wheel of her Ministerial car at work after dropping her off at a nightclub. Your tax dollars, hard at work.

Politicians are paid by us. They are ambassadors for our community; but they are human. So, Australia, get used to a breed of politicians who have never been pissed; never had homosexual sex; never used drugs (unless in the company of journalists); never sent a text or called someone just for the purpose of having sex; never had a parking fine; never been unemployed or admitted to hospital for anything other than a sporting-related injury; never had an affair or fallen in love with someone ‘inappropriate’, like a hairdresser. Welcome to a future filled with drones, whose only exposure to life as many of us imperfect angels know it is vicarious because their eyes have been trained on the prize since they were teenagers. Think of an America without Lincoln or Kennedy; a Britain without Churchill; an Australia without a Hawke or Curtin, because that’s where we’re going. It’s not that hard; we’re already there.

None of the News

I was a ‘copykid’ at News Limited’s Holt Street, Surry Hills, headquarters in the early 1990s. I have written previously, & very briefly about my experience there, on a rare journalistic duty known as a ‘deathknock’. What I haven’t written – or ranted about – is the sum of that experience; how it opened my eyes to the guts of an industry from the way that I think has fallen by the wayside – interacting with everyone on staff, from the ‘Brothers’ in the printing room, to the drivers; the late night paper runs, where we swapped bundles of the Daily Telegraph-Mirror (as it was then) and The Australian in return for the Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Financial Review – a cute little deal that meant if one had a great splash, the other could write a few pars & get the Day Editor & Chief-of-Staff onto the yarn so they could report how it was progressing at the morning’s news conference. We rotated shifts: mid –dawns; 7am-3pm; 3pm-midnight, seven days a week; we rotated desks – from the radio room, an airless goldfish bowl where you listened to police scanners for breaking stories; to general news (generally shit, the editorial floor’s dogs body, with tasks ranging from getting then-DTM Editor, Col Allan’s cigarettes, to ploughing through the newspapers’ photo library and paper files for back stories and pix. Oh, and buying Ray Chesterton’s chips). I was lucky; my starting roster was on the Weekend Australian Magazine. They were a good crew, and the pace was, well, I started at nine and finished at five, bought coffees, did the file gathering and sometimes some proof-reading. It was great. It was also sheltered from the maelstrom of the editorial floors.

When you work shifts, your body and mind inevitably rebel. As soon as the rosters went up – unless we were on a regular assignment such as the magazine – 20 plus copykids, almost all with degrees and aching with ability – zoomed to the ‘head of the copykids’ office to check it out. Invariably, there would be a week of 7-3s followed by a mid-dawn week in the radio room, starting Sunday night. The worst weeks involved changing shifts daily. 7-3, 3-7, 9-5, 11-7 … a 40 hour week, without scheduled breaks, for $17,000 a year. Raised in a union household, I was shocked to learn that because we weren’t on a recognised award, the Australian Journalists’ Association (now the Media, Arts and Entertainment Alliance) would not accept us as members, or fight for even the most basic of rights. It turned me off unionism for life (despite working for Labor governments, I have never joined a union). Again, if you were working on a good desk, like the DTM features desk (my all-time favourite; bursting with talent and sound people to work alongside), it was a case of, ‘hey, do you need me for 15 minutes? I just want to go out and grab something to eat, I’ll be straight back’, and eating without interruption. If you were on a shithouse roster, like the newsdesk, there would be two copykids so you could at least take a piss, and cover for each other while you saw what delights the canteen held for you. Invariably, it was hot chips. Invariably, you inhaled them or ate them cold, with the shout, ‘COPY!’ snapping you to attention and ensuring you were beside the person who called before the shout came again.

After two cadet exams and two failures to escape the ‘copy’ grind for a prized cadetship, I bid Holt Street farewell. My desire to change the world with electronic typewriter (yes, I am that old) and SLR steadily eroded by seeing the way shit worked: the nepotism; the sensationalism; seeing good journos doing good things, knowing they were capable of much more (many of them have gone on to prove me right). It was also an exciting time – the merger of Sydney’s two tabloids into one; being part of the end of an era – the last of the copy runners, the last of the trucks leaving Holt Street as the presses moved to Chullora and the sub-editors got to grips with doing their normal jobs as fact checkers, word-slashers & general layout to becoming the new ‘band of brothers’.

OK, so this is a rambling way of getting to the biggest media story of the year: the implosion of News International. I’ve eaten this up, just because I left News Ltd almost 20 years ago doesn’t mean I don’t care about the company. Care is the wrong word. There were (and are) plenty of good people at News. I have never worked at Fairfax but I have had a decade’s worth of liaising with both Fairfax and News and they are both employers of writers capable of fine journalism and scum producing real bottom of the barrel tat and opinion dressed as news.

The only thing I can add to the debate about whether the British disease may have spread to Australia (much of it quite spiteful, ill-founded and agenda-focused from a variety of players – not all of them News Ltd employees) is another of the tasks performed by the 3-11pm or 4pm to midnight copykids: faxing the first couple of pages to each of Mr Murdoch’s offices, so that wherever he was, he knew exactly what was in every one of his papers. In those days, there was only one Mr Murdoch. AsI fed the fax machine a page at a time to Mr Murdoch on a regular basis, I often wondered how he had the time and energy to read every title owned by News Corporation and its subsidiaries – I think there are about 170 (from the suburbs of Sydney to the Wall Street Journal; excluding minority shareholdings in Fijian, PNG, and Russian titles). I wondered, but always went back to the adage that Mr Murdoch had ink in his veins. He loved newspapers the same way Kerry Packer loved Channel 9. He famously parlayed the legacy of his father, Sir Keith, (main asset? The now-defunct Adelaide News) into the world’s second-largest media and entertainment conglomerate. It takes balls of steel. As we have seen in the case of News International, it means that the ink in his veins appears to have dried.

Yet, I have this gnawing suspicion that he still gets the first five pages of his titles sent to an iPad somewhere in the world; dictators may look upon their chosen successors benignly, but they remain dictators to the very end. The Mr Murdoch that I worked for, all those years ago, knew what was going on in Holt Street. Why would Fleet Street (or Wapping) be any different? I am not buying the Sergeant Schultz defence that Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks are selling. I don’t care how much Mr Murdoch may care for Rebekah Brooks (some say she is viewed as another Murdoch child), the man we all knew as ruthless when it came to business (and he viewed editorial as business), would never have suffered an editor who said, ‘sorry about that guy busted for phone hacking, I didn’t know it was happening’. Their heels wouldn’t have touched the floor on the way out. James Murdoch’s tortuously crafted statements about standards don’t cut the ice with me, either; if he didn’t know what was happening on his watch, then he’s either incompetent, a fool or both. I don’t believe he is. His father’s refusal to address the issue publicly to any greater extent than a terse sentence (even on his own Fox News Network, with a business reporter who called him Mr Chairman, which made me snort water out of my nose as I imagined Mr Murdoch waving his mighty ‘red tops’, a version of Mao with Little Red Book in hand) is the ultimate con. He is a man with a compulsive desire to know things. He was bidding for the greatest prize, 100 per cent ownership of BSkyB, which would stamp his name in history as the greatest of the great media tycoons (they have always existed: people who believe The Australian is a poisonous vessel of the right under the Twitter #auspol hashtag probably don’t remember the UK Mirror Group pensions scandal under Robert Maxwell, poor Czech immigrant turned MP and media proprietor, let alone have any notion of the influence wielded by Max Aitken (the 1st Baron Beaverbrook – indeed, ‘the first Baron of Fleet Street’) who published every morsel of King Edward VIII’s affair with Mrs Wallis Simpson, while personally imploring him to give up her up. His friend, Churchill made him a Minister during World War II; he met with Roosevelt and Stalin; Evelyn Waugh thinly-disguised the media tycoon in his triumph, Scoop, Lord Cooper, on Beaverbrook. Murdoch is not the first, he won’t be the last. However, Mr Murdoch is looking a little fragile. As King of kings, more Ozymandias than Ramses the Great.

Why have I written this? For almost 20 years, I have felt very guilty about something I did to further my career at News Limited. While working on the DTM features desk on Good Friday (can you imagine, the slowest of slow news days), I went out to grab some coffees for the skeleton crew. I happened to spot the notoriously private film director, Jane Campion. Ms Campion was hot property, having just returned from Cannes, with the Palme d’Or for The Piano. I loved the film. I came back, and with a studied insouciance, dropped the tidbit as I put down the coffees. The CoS loved it, a photographer was dispatched and boy was I feeling good about providing a lead that would fill a story-sized hole in the paper. The snapper came back, unhappy. Ms Campion’s partner had lost his temper, their quiet party of four was ruined and the photos were awful. The reason? Jane Campion’s first baby, 12-days-old, had recently died. The story was published, and must have been incredibly hurtful to her & her partner, and it was my fault. There was no public interest in pursuing a woman who had not pursued personal fame; let alone snapping her having what may have appeared as a nice little chat about her French triumph, but was possibly a first outing with friends as they struggled with their grief. To my shame and regret (knowingly, or unknowingly, it doesn’t matter), I caused someone else pain to advance my stocks at News Limited because as a ‘celebrity’ she was fair game. I believe it was that single event which made me reassess what I wanted to do with my life. Telling tittle-tattle wasn’t it.

For the record, I despise what News International has done. I also loathe that while it was ‘just’ affecting celebrities and politicians, the status quo prevailed; there was no groundswell of anger when the News of the World was literally, The News of the Screws - only when it became about real people. My experience with Jane Campion made me relate to the pain inflicted on former British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and his wife, Sarah, by Rebekah Brooks, who personally saw that News International’s Sun newspaper broke the news that their baby son had cystic fibrosis. I cried when I read it in The Guardian. I’ve worked for some monumentally self-serving people in politics and in business. I’ve seen first-hand some who I consider to be morally bankrupt; people who bully others in a manner bordering on sociopathic. I’ve known people who have been dragged before, or deserved to front, the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption. I’ve also had stand-up brawls with journalists who will stoop to innuendo and float base lies to fool people. I have seen people hurt, careers ended, by stories that served no public interest. I have had lazy hacks call for stories they can present at news conference, written a press release ‘exclusively’ for them and seen my words printed verbatim, with their name attached to it. In the same edition of the paper, they will roll out a bullshit yarn about the millions of dollars spent by governments on ‘spin’, which always included the salaries of secretaries, receptionists and policy advisers. I have personally had the staff of ‘shock jocks’ call me – a Ministerial press secretary – to resolve the problems of their callers – basically ‘queue jumpers’ – and then take the credit for it on air. The lives of ’spin doctors’ and journalists are symbiotic; we, accused of being all-powerful, deceitful obfuscants of the truth; they, facile hacks who struggle to write a decent lead and selectively use one quote or statistic to suit their agenda, even when third parties object in Letters to the Editor. I have heard off-the-record phone calls between a Minister and an Editor which haven’t even finished before their press gallery reporter is on the phone, demanding a statement from me about what my boss genuinely believed was a personal conversation. I have had the threat, ‘we’re running this anyway’. I’ve also developed relationships with journalists to the point that they will tell me what pages their stories are running on, so a Minister can piggy-back off tomorrow’s unpublished headline, pre-record radio news grabs and know that TV crews will turn up for the vision we lovingly put together for them to fill their bulletins; or alternately, craft an ‘appropriate’ response to a shit sandwich. Anyone who thinks for one moment that one or the other has the complete upper hand on a positive or negative story is deluding themselves. Their news, your news … a lot of it is not news.

Tell us something we don’t already know

Anyone who has ever read anything on here or follows me on Twitter knows I was an ALP apparatchik. I worked as a media adviser to five Ministers and a Premier of NSW. For the better part of the last decade, I had a peanut gallery view of what is now known as, ‘the NSW disease’.

Following the #NSWisconsin disgrace, I was considering becoming a financial member of the ALP again, despite the fact that I can’t abide what I see as policy missteps and the inability to articulate a message – any message – consistently, thoughtfully and while keeping our hands still.

I was very close to giving Sussex Street my money again because at last, here was an enemy without. Premier Barry O’Farrell had given me a reason to say, ‘this is wrong, and I am willing to swallow every bit of bile and help pay, through my membership dues, for a sustained campaign against this law.’ I was so close until I read this. It’s easy to demonise Joe Tripodi. I can’t stand him for two reasons: he’s really smart, but didn’t use his brains to make good public policy. Instead, he dragged behind former Minister and MLC, Eddie Obeid, preferring to cultivate patronage and influence, all for the title of ‘kingmaker’. Secondly, I’ve seen him smile and stab people in the back. Most of them, his close ‘mates’, some, ‘enemies’ he helped ascend to the dizzying heights of Governor Macquarie Tower. So when I read that he would stay on the rules committee, my heart sank and I left my money in the bank, because it reminded me how much I hate the generally unelected, largely unaccountable ‘factional’ players who make it their mission in life to build up and then tear down elected leaders; fill Caucus with people you would not ask to make a bed, let alone Cabinet; a recipe which reads, ‘hey voters, we’re the ALP and we are not fit to govern the state / country’. The list is long. It is filled with names that, unless they are from NSW, I’m largely familiar with. What I am familiar with, is their modus operandi. I’m sure I could swap Joe de Bruyn and Don Farrell for Russ Collison and Mark Arbib and come out with the same answer.

I read the entirety of Senator John Faulkner’s Wran Lecture last night with great interest. The patrician Faulkner looks like the anti-Tripodi. Furiously intelligent (never go to a Faulkner trivia night and challenge an answer); ‘prime ministerial confidante’; ‘respected elder’; statesman. Last night, I read the speech and called him ‘a giant’. I highly recommend his 2005 Henry Parkes Oration, which takes a much broader swipe at the malaise affecting Australian politics. The faintest whiff that the ALP is about to set its hair on fire is enough to make the news. When John Faulkner launches a stinging rebuke / critique / attack, it sets the news agenda for the day. Pretty much everyone loves it because it fits the narrative that the Prime Minister is the Socialist Left’s Lucrezia Borgia and the shoguns (tired of warlords) all look like Paul Howes. Actually, Paul Howes doesn’t look much like Paul Howes these days. I digress: I agree with a great deal of what Senator Faulkner says: the party desperately needs reform; there should be debate at state and national conferences; branch membership requires revitalisation and those who are joining – especially through Young Labor – are doing so because they want to duel with ideas, not numbers; to serve the Party, not some jumped up bag of wind parading as a false liege.

That said I am going to call Senator Faulkner on a few points. By your own admission, you, Senator, are a bloody hypocrite. You have been a NSW Senator for 23 years. What did you do before the Party – not the people – sent you down the Hume Highway for so long? You were Assistant General Secretary of the NSW Branch of the Australian Labor Party and worked for NSW Minister for Sport and Recreation, Ken Booth MP, following two years spent as a special education teacher. Your official bio is a little light on the detail provided in your Wikipedia entry, Senator, you define factional warlord and apparatchik as much as Joe Tripodi does. Tripodi worked as an economist at the Reserve Bank of Australia for as long as you taught. He then went to the Labor Council and into the Bear Pit. You both entered the party as teenagers; you both went through the party machine before entering Parliament. One difference: Joe was elected by the people of Fairfield. Your name was put on a ticket and sent to the printers. As I said, I can’t stand Joe, but don’t hover somewhere above the fray like a bespectacled Moses when you have supped from the same cup and exerted more influence over a longer time.

Lead, don’t follow, public opinion, you say? Yet the longevity of Australian political leaders such as Bob Hawke and John Howard is in large part due to their uncanny ability to read the mood of the electorate. It is a rare talent that radiates, ‘the leader knows what they are doing and it is what I want’, both within the party and outside it. It is not something they dialled-a-mate for. In my opinion, the perception that Howard had outstayed his welcome – that he had lost ‘touch’ – played a big role in his defeat. Hawke? Well, Keating simply had what Costello did not: the internal fortitude to want the leadership so badly he risked wrecking it to obtain it. Listen to members, supporters and MPs, you say? Yet when Kevin Rudd ran government through a kitchen cabinet of four; when he established innumerate committees, endlessly consulted and produced white papers and nothing happened; that was when the polls went to the wall and the faceless men got on the phones. There was plenty of listening, plenty of dithering and nothing happening. You were in that Caucus meeting, where the elected leader of the nation was replaced without a vote of MPs, you miserable, gormless bunch. @KRuddPM knew he didn’t have the numbers, addressed the Caucus one final time as leader, and emerged @KRuddMP.

Let MPs speak their minds in the name of diversity. Fine. I don’t think there are many people in the party who would be terribly pleased with the clusterfuck that is the Government’s … what … it’s not even a policy … the clusterfuck that is the Government’s latest idea about how asylum seekers should be processed, and yet, with the exception of Fremantle MP Melissa Parke, none has stated their dissent. But here’s the thing: brave, dissenting Melissa had not even spoken to the Minister for Immigration when she went public. It beggars belief. Let MPs say what they want? Amen. Get them five minutes with the Minister at the same time so they can have a chat first. On second thought, if you can’t be bothered having the discussion internally, if you have not grabbed Chris Bowen after a division and said, ‘look, I’m not happy about this, I need to speak to you’; if you have not had the gumption to even attempt to piss inside the tent, why should I listen to you piss on it from outside?

Senator Faulkner wants vigorous debate at party conferences and in the branches. He also advocates a say for ‘progressive-minded’ people, who are falling into the arms of third party organisations. Who are they? The ALP is not Get Up. It’s a political party. You can’t just put your name to one online petition, or even draft one, and ignore the other 30 issues of the day because you don’t care about them as much. Well, you can – you’re a citizen and you can do that if you like. But have to give a damn about stuff you’re not interested in when you’re a member of a party. Did I care when I door-knocked suburbs during the 2007 NSW election that the issues raised by voters were almost always council-related? No. Because the candidate needed to know about the cracked pavement, so that when they were elected they could pressure council to get it fixed, and if they didn’t, you could talk to concerned residents, go to the local paper – do something! I am sure people would flock to ALP branches, line-up to get the best seats at conference and participate in full-throated, exciting debates. About the things they’re interested in. Then when it’s time to talk about the not so interesting to them stuff – see you later? Supporters of the ALP? We exist. We’re called voters. Here’s what I want. I want a Caucus where backbenchers get as much time with Ministers and the PM as independents do. If they can’t get a hearing, or are fobbed off by the apparatchiks, then have an almighty spray. After all, the government is only one heart attack away from an election – now is the best time to speak your mind. Senator Faulkner just has – again,

Senator, you are there. You are a powerful figure – so powerful your speech has dominated the news agenda today. You’ve been talking about reforming the party for years. We have review, after review, after review. You co-authored the last one, so act! Stop telling us something we don’t already know.

So … I’m not a climate scientist

Writing this with a fair amount of trepidation, but in the firm belief that real stupidity arises from not asking questions.

On Saturday morning, I thought about the Say Yes Australia rallies in support of the so-called ‘carbon tax’. (Aside: why is it beyond the ALP to give anything a simple name? Half the battle of political will is lost when the Opposition’s label sticks).

I thought about the pros & cons of the policy formerly known as the Emissions Trading Scheme. I don’t there are many cons; NSW has had a carbon credit scheme in place for years, but few people probably realise it, and while it was a Labor policy, the Gillard Government is not pointing to it as a handy example that its idea is hardly a first. I think polluters should ‘pay’ for carbon emissions, but recognise that it will come at an economic cost, firstly to industry & secondly to consumers. Fears of unaffordable power bills are something I recuse myself from commenting on as I don’t struggle. Then again, I believe that compensating people for existing behaviours is a self-defeating proposition. There are many ways people can save on their power bills; simple old rules that my Mum drilled into us: switching off appliances at the plug so you don’t pay for stand-by power; washing in cold water & knowing peak & off-peak periods. Maybe it’s time for a savings-based approach, which would recognise cuts in household consumption on an account basis, so that larger families are not disadvantaged or treated in the same way as single people like me.

What troubled me on Saturday is not the economic argument for pricing carbon emissions. I get that. This is where the trepidation comes in. I cannot, for the life of me, explain climate change. I cannot articulate to a skeptic why action is required. I resort to a string of words; polar ice caps melting, rising sea levels, Tuvalu sinking, longer and more frequent droughts … and even then, I don’t know why.

My whole being is wired toward being able to answer questions. I am a curious person by nature – and if I don’t understand something, I ask questions, read from a variety of sources and listen to various points of view until I am able to draw my own conclusion. I like to know things. I like to be ready to be able to discuss things, not as an expert, but at least as an interested party. Here, sadly, is where climate change and I part ways. Climate science bores me rigid. I skip articles, ignore interviews – I define apathetic. I’m supposedly bright and engaged with the world – and I am ignorant. I didn’t even watch “An Inconvenient Truth”.

I accept that while some of it is me, not you, as someone who has spent a working life trying to communicate the why, I have to give climate science communication a fail. As a political adviser, I worked in many land use portfolios – I have seen, understand and can clearly articulate the problems caused by deforestation, salinity, beach erosion, even weeds. Maybe the climate change window passed me by, but now I feel like the dope at the back of the class, almost afraid of asking the question for fear of being laughed at by the other kids. Increasingly, I am disquieted when someone expresses anything less than full-throated support in public. I feel a sharp intake of collective breath and slogans, not reason, spewed forth. I don’t want a 140 character answer – but I want to be enticed by the subject. I don’t disbelieve the science, I just don’t understand it – and I’m not prepared to rely on, ‘well, 1,400 scientists and Tim Flannery can’t be wrong’ as an answer if I’m asked about it.

So … I’m not a climate scientist. Would one of you put your hand up and point me to some readable information from a range of credible sources that will help me. Otherwise I will continue to take Abraham Lincoln’s advice:

It is better to say nothing and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

NSWisconsin

In previous posts on the state on NSW politics, I largely focused on what I knew best – the decade I had spent as a Labor staffer.

Today, I turn my attention to the O’Farrell government, because today, my worst fears about the crushing victory Premier Barry O’Farrell secured in March 2011 have been realised.

For the first time since the early 1900s, a NSW Government has used a guillotine motion to effectively gag debate in the Legislative Council (Upper House) on its reforms to public sector wage increases.

The Premier claims, in a facile, lazy way that he is being allowed to get away with by all in the press gallery, bar the ABC’s Quentin Dempster, that he is simply following Labor’s public sector wages policy. This is not true.

While my former boss, then-Premier Morris Iemma, signed a memorandum in 2007 to set wage increases at 2.5 per cent, at no time did Labor seek the extraordinary powers now at Premier O’Farrell’s disposal.

Firstly, the new laws remove judicial discretion. The NSW Industrial Relations Commission, led by Boland J. was not consulted on the intent of the legislation, which effectively strips the IRC of interpretation of the law when disputes come before it. Rather than weighing up the totality of the case, the IRC will now simply dispatch the law. It is no longer judging a wages case on its merits but rubber stamping the O’Farrell Government’s policy. The question must be asked: whither the IRC? Why bother preserving an institution which has been gutted.

Secondly, the Premier’s assertion that he is just following on from what his Labor predecessors intended is a furphy. As the NSW Public Sector Wages Policy 2007 makes plain, while the Government intended to maintain real wage increases at 2.5 per cent per annum, at no stage were challenges to the policy, through the independent umpire (the IRC), or even the Executive Branch of Government, banned. If Ministers could demonstrate, via the Public Sector Workforce Office and NSW Treasury, that departments and State Owned Corporations within their purview, had a case for an increase above the 2.5 per cent, they could take that to Budget Committee for consideration. The only caveat on this was that no offer was to be made until this process had been adhered to.

Thirdly, nothing prevented a public sector union from going to the IRC and seeking an increase above the 2.5 per cent. The IRC had the power to say no, but it reserved the right to say yes. The IRC, not the Government of the day, was entitled to consider a case on its merits. Now, the IRC doesn’t even have the powers of FairWork Australia to settle a dispute. It is no longer an umpire. It is merely the scoreboard.

Perhaps the great triumph for the O’Farrell Government has been to divide & conquer public sector workers. In a message delivered at 4.01pm via Twitter yesterday, the Police Association of NSW stated:

Sending good vibes to those members of the Upper House who believe in a fair and just IR system for police and all others

By the 5pm news, it became clear that the O’Farrell Government was not going to take on the police. They would be exempt from the 2.5 per cent rule. This was a move straight out of the Wisconsin, USA playbook, where Governor Scott Walker took on the unions, effectively delivering an 8 per cent pay cut through attacks on benefits. Police were exempted from the legislation. This is plain divide and conquer by Premier O’Farrell. The Police Association hurriedly tweeted:

Rest assured police will continue to stand beside all other public sector workers to fight this unfair IR legislation.

I personally pleaded with the Police Association not to be swayed by the clear political machinations being dealt their way. I do not wish our police ill; far from it. I do believe in solidarity, particularly when it comes to our frontline workers such as the fire brigades, ambulance staff, nurses and teachers. The message I sent was clear:

Premier O’Farrell plays ‘divide & conquer’, excluding police from #nswisconsin. @PoliceAssocNSW, pls stand w/ nurses, teachers, say no!

Obviously, the Police Association is charged with doing the best thing by its members, & that would not entail knocking back the Government’s offer. Sadly, they are the expedient pawns in a political stunt. Public servants working in offices go on strike – what a bunch of whingers. Teachers go on strike, they are a bloody nuisance. Nurses have a stop work meeting – inconvenient but manageable. Fire fighters do the same – they’re hardly going to let a house burn down; but if the police went out, the population of NSW (excuse the pun) wouldn’t cop it. The Government would be blamed, & punished.

As the Fire Brigade Employees Union (FBEU)’s Jim Casey tweeted the Police Association:

Police stand by the rest of public sector. I’ve had my share of bad days with the coppers, but this isn’t one of them. #nswisconsin #solidarity

There is a march against the new laws at 12,30pm, outside NSW Parliament on Macquarie Street, Sydney. I am going to my former place of employment to say no to political chicanery, to say I do not accept an unwarranted attack on the Industrial Relations Commission as an arbiter of the law, to say ‘damn you’, Premier O’Farrell.

Welcome to your world, NSW.