Tony Abbott, Chairman Rudd, leading the way and a circus of galahs

The gnashing and wailing in the Murdoch camp in the coming weeks will be a joy to behold.

First the Ruddster published an attack on neo liberalism in that little wet socialistic pinko perverted commie rag mag The Monthly, and now he's dumped some six thousand eight hundred and twenty words into the Fairfax archives.

Fairfax!! Why if he'd delivered it directly to Satan's presses in hell it would have been better than handing it to Fairfax for a Saturday morning print run. The sheer unmitigated gall, the utter cheek of the man.

I know the exact words, because Shaun Carney in The Age, with Orthodox spin, tells me so. And if it's 6,280 words, it's longer than the sermon on the mount. Carney can't resist a little gloating at the ruckus ahead:

The article will, predictably, be dismissed and ridiculed by his opponents and other media outlets, not only for what it is but what it argues. Rudd has, as a small part of his argument, quite intentionally climbed right up the noses of free marketeers and neo-liberals over what he sees as their culpability for the global financial crisis.

Pain on the road to recovery, it's called, and it goes on for ever and ever.

Oh it'll be a tough week for the commentariat columnists as they ruminate and meditate and get shocked and outraged at the cheek of the man. For the rest of us, it'll be necessary to find a way to stop the man from taking a 'light duties' holiday and using the time to devise new ways to torture us with pedantry.

Meantime, what have they got in The Australian? Well there's poor young Peter Van Onselen moaning about how he couldn't get the Liberals to take seriously the business of writing about new policy directions for the Liberals when offered a free kick and a free book by the Melbourne University Press (It'll take more than sound bites and spin to win back government). Only Tony Abbott played the game properly by preparing a solid chapter. Uh oh.

We can't shut the Ruddster up, and the Liberals couldn't get their shit together, and now The Weekend Australian magazine is left to publish extracts from Tony Abbott's forthcoming book, and the Ruddster is cheekily trying to take the gloss off that publishing coup by slutting around in Fairfax.

Worse still, just to help stabilize the Liberal party leadership, Peter Van Onselen persists in calling Abbott's work an application for the top job:

Abbott's book is a manifesto for how he would lead the Liberal Party. In it he has deliberately tried to quash the notion that he has written a job application for the Liberal leadership. This is true in the short term. But in the longer term Abbott hopes to present a case for why he has what it takes to lead a party in need of philosophical direction.

Abbott is a conservative, unashamedly so. His book spends a good deal of time outlining the case for conservative positioning of the Liberal Party. But he has done so by outlining how he doesn't believe his views are as extreme as they have been painted to be by the media. To me this attempt -- and it is done convincingly, and I say that as a media commentator who was critical of his positioning on issues such as the introduction of the so-called abortion pill RU486 -- represents an understanding by Abbott that while he may think his views correlate with those of the average Australian, he has a long way to go if he is to prove as much.

Van Onselen sounds sceptical about Abbott's chances, but when The Australian does a little splash saying how Abbott leads the way, you have to think the hounds are barking. Especially when the Abbott splash on the intertubes edition leads into Paul Kelly, Editor at large, and ponderous pontificator, doing a piece entitled A blueprint for rule (which probably should have added to the header "as supplied by the ruler in waiting", lurking behind the arras, unless a rapier gets him first).

Kelly spends an inordinate amount of time explaining how Abbott will fix federation by following up on Rudd's plans to nationalize state hospitals, so we now have the bizarre spectacle of Abbott asserting that nationalizing state domains will deliver less government bureaucracy, more private entities, and smaller government overall.

A bigger federal government will mean smaller government? Sure and that porcine I saw flying past the window heralds a new era in stem cell research if only an Abbott government will allow it to be conducted.

So this is the week ahead. Two blabber mouths who can't help themselves going head to head, while poor old Malcolm stays stuck in the middle, forced like us to listen to their great solutions as to what ails the Australian nation.

As if to rub salt into the wounds, when you go to the Rudd tract in the Herald, you get an advertisement for the NSW government boasting about how it's doing everything right by spending taxpayers' money on intertubes advertising boasting about how it's doing everything right, followed by Annabel Crabb's video celebrating the week as Wilson "Ironbar galah" Tuckey's week.

And here's the real bummer. If The Australian mounts a campaign to conscript Tony Abbott into the Liberal party leadership, the conservative commentariat can look forward to a lengthening of their suffering under a federal Labor government. Thinking the mad monk is foreman material is going to be hard after a long and honorable career as caretaker for wayward souls at loon pond.

The upshot of all this? The squawking and the moaning on loon pond will require ear plugs as politicians write about the world and commentariat columnists denounce politicians writing about the world and the rest of us are left to marvel at a circus with only one ring and way too many clowns ...

Or should that be galahs?

(Below: Wilson Tuckey as an incipient galah. I couldn't resist doing a screen cap of the video's start image but if you're tempted to learn more of his galah ways, you'll need to go off to Annabel Crabb at the Herald to catch the embedded video, with the link working - at least for the immediate future - here).