Gerard Henderson, the socialist media, the battling Liberals, a history lesson, and a word from Mr Pooter

(Above: et tu Gerard Henderson?)

It takes a special skill to chastise a political player for a speech devoid of empirical data, and then lead with a statement devoid of empirical data, and to chastise the Liberal party for airing their dirty linen in public, and then proceeding to wash their linen, dry it, and give it a thorough ironing, with bonus lashings of arch starch.

But Gerard Henderson puts that special skill on display with In this climate, it's stupid to air your dirty linen in public.

First to the score this week, and it will be a boondoggle for those loving long odds:

First mention of John Howard in the column: 9th paragraph

Number of mentions of John Howard in the column: six

Not until the ninth par does the immortal John Howard enter the picture, then in a flurry scores six mentions! The canny, wily Henderson is playing with the punters, and surely someone somewhere today pulled off a betting coup of the quality of the Fine Cotton affair.

Meantime, back to the empirical issue:

Some Liberals seem to forget that a substantial majority of journalists vote for the Labor Party or the Greens and there are few soft interviews available to them on the electronic media or in newspapers.

Source please, instead of a repetition of a long held, often stated, but never sourced prejudice. Henderson has been known to mock the one attempt at statistical study of bias in the media, but in a singular demonstration of magical powers, always prefers to channel his own prejudices when it comes to the dominant Murdoch and Fairfax media, not to mention the commercial television and radio mobs. (If you lost money on Henderson today, why not irritate him by taking a look at the Gans and Leigh study in pdf form, available here).

Perhaps his source was the always reliable musings of Australian News Commentary, which way back in 1999 called things the Henderson way when musing on the failure of Pauline Hanson's One Nation:

Maybe it was because the extremely powerful men who control Australia's media are quite comfortable with the Labor/Liberal duopoly in politics. The media barons know they can get their way with either when they are in power. One Nation would appear to them as a renegade outfit. It might not be so compliant - better to destroy it at birth. There is strong evidence that the Packer and Murdoch media have led the anti-Hanson campaign.

Maybe the journalists themselves didn't like the proposition of Labor being consigned to opposition for a long time. There is a philosophical alliance between Labor and journalists. Most journalists are unionists, and hence have a sympathy with the party set up and supported by unionists. And by the time journalists leave university most of them have a natural lean to the Left. The pseudo-sciences of sociology and psychology indoctrinate many of them into becoming politically correct, do-gooders with a socialist outlook on life.

I will leave it to you to speculate as to the reasons for the media's anti-Hanson campaign.

But one fact remains - the media in Australia have far too much power and influence.

Lordy, and they didn't even blame Henderson's albatross and bête noire , the ABC.

Never mind, let's get on with the airing and the washing and the ironing of the dirty linen in the Liberal party. First of all it's Malcolm Turnbull's fault:

Yet last month the Opposition Leader, Malcolm Turnbull, chose the Radio National Breakfast program to send a message to his parliamentary colleagues that he was not prepared to lead a party which has nothing to say on climate change.

There would have been no problem if Turnbull had delivered such a message in the Liberal party room in Canberra. However, by issuing this missive on radio, in the presence of a television camera, he made public what should have been private.

There wouldn't have been a problem with Barnaby Joyce and Nick Minchin rolling around in the corners of power? Dearie me that sort of optimistic pious platitude from our prattling Polonius shows exactly why poor old Malcolm in the middle is having such a hard time. As usual, it's all the fault of the victim, who helped introduce the very kind of bill while in power that the fundies are now seeking to frustrate:

If the Opposition Leader receives a reasonable compromise from Labor on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme this week, and cannot get this deal through his party room, the Breakfast clip will be used widely to demonstrate he was rolled.

Because he will have been rolled, and that would have been understood whether he turned up to debate the issue on air, or not.

Henderson finally gets to the real cause of the trouble, the sundry clowns and climate deniers who made such transparent Judas's of themselves on Four Corners:

Earlier this month, a number of Liberals decided to go on Four Corners to express their doubts about the Coalition allowing Kevin Rudd's scheme to pass through the Senate. The group included two frontbenchers - Opposition Senate leader Nick Minchin and Tony Abbott - and backbenchers Cory Bernardi, Julian McGauran, Dennis Jensen and Mathias Cormann.

Barnaby Joyce, who leads the National Party in the Senate, indicated his opposition to the scheme. However, the Liberal frontbenchers Ian Macfarlane and Christopher Pyne defended Turnbull's position. It was as if the Coalition had decided to film their internal arguments and place the product on the Liberal Party's website.

Well if Minchin, Abbott and the rest had shut up there wouldn't have been a problem!

Oh you believe that do you? Put yourself down for a place in the prattling Polonius school of deluded optimism.

The real problem is of course that the Liberals had and supposedly have had, and still have a policy on climate change. Poor old Malcolm in the middle told us so, as you can find on the Liberal Party site (here):

Now the Coalition will offer bipartisan support to the Government for the carbon abatement targets Australia takes to the Copenhagen climate change conference in December. Those targets are, as you know, an unconditional five per cent reduction from 2000 levels by 2020 and a reduction of up to 25 per cent from 2000 levels by 2020 subject to a global agreement being reached to achieve a substantial reduction in global emissions. Now this enables Mr Rudd to go to Copenhagen in the knowledge that the entire Parliament or at least the Government and the Opposition support the targets he is taking there. It’s a rare degree of bipartisan support and I imagine few national leaders will go to Copenhagen with that degree of support.

Well yes I imagine few national leaders will go to Copenhagen with that rare degree of bipartisan support. Because rounding up the cowboys proved harder than Malcolm thought, as they acted like enraged steers on a stampede.

Poor Henderson is troubled by the concept that the Liberal party might have a policy on this issue:

Life in opposition was always going to be difficult for the Coalition. The problem has been exacerbated by Turnbull's insistence that the Liberals have a firm stance on carbon reduction.

Better that they don't have a firm stance, that they wobble around like jelly, with the strength of a marshmallow and the philosophical depth of a doughnut?

Never mind, as usual with Henderson, when confronted by a real issue in the here and now, he always retreats to the safety and comfort of a history lesson about Liberal traditions. This time it's Abbott, Turnbull and Brandis who must cop the lecture on their lecturing:

All three identified themselves with the Menzies tradition. But the sharpest contrast was between Abbott and Minchin. Abbott supports the stand adopted by Howard. He sees the Liberal Party as embodying both liberal and conservative traditions. Not so Brandis, who maintains that "one of the keys to grasping the Menzian conception of liberalism is that he did not view the Liberal Party as a conservative party". According to Brandis, Menzies "stood for freedom". It's as simple as that.

Well surely it has to be as simple as that. Who on earth, right at this moment, in these troubled times, would dump on the immortal founder of the Liberal party?

But is it? Those contemporary Liberals who see Menzies as embodying the principles of liberalism and freedom - and nothing else - overlook the fact this is not how he was viewed when prime minister. The Menzies government sought to ban the Communist Party, committed Australian forces to Korea and Vietnam, introduced conscription for military service overseas and upgraded the national security provisions in the Crimes Act. None of this is mentioned in Brandis's speech, largely devoid of empirical data.

Gerard Henderson would dump on him, that's who! By golly he stopped short of mentioning the pig iron Bob phase of Menzies' career (press release here) or his embarrassing "I did but see her passing by , and yet I love her till I die" devotion to the British monarchy (here), but his portrait of Menzies as an anti-freedom tyrant comes pretty close to heresy. Pass the smelling salts please, reading this kind of Nick Minchin posturing, Tony Abbott hectoring heretic is heady stuff. Next thing someone will be telling me Barnaby Joyce is an agrarian socialist ...

Lordy I feel faint. Quick, pass me someone else to bash, preferably outside the Liberal tent, so we can get back on an even keel. Yes, Waleed Aly, you'll do, you need a history lesson too:

A similar absence of evidence can be found in current assessments of the Liberal Party. On the ABC's News Breakfast program yesterday, the Monash University academic Waleed Aly depicted Minchin as "very close to John Howard" and maintained "he was one of the few people in the Liberal Party who actually was prepared to approach John Howard and suggest that he step aside for the good of the party". In fact, the relationship between Howard and Minchin in the years leading to the 2007 election was less than cordial and Minchin never spoke directly to Howard about the leadership issue.

Ah well, history's done and dusted, now to sort out the squabbling Liberals:

The problem for the Liberals is not that Turnbull and Minchin disagree on carbon reduction but that their debate is being conducted in public as part of a discussion about what the Liberal Party really stands for. It's possible this debate will continue into next year. But it's also possible the absence of a consensus at Copenhagen will put the focus back on the Rudd Government. The challenge for the Liberals is to remember they are in opposition and to understand downloading to the media is usually ill-advised.

It isn't a problem they disagree, and that there's a profound philosophical split in the party, if they'd only stay out of the debate and stay out of the media and keep everything behind closed doors like the 36 faceless men who ran the Labor party?

By golly, that's advice Mr Pooter himself could live with as he searched after middle class respectability and the quiet life. And while you might think that kind of posture spineless or craven, what a bold policy stroke it is, as strong and as sensible as an ostrich sticking its head in the sand.

Such are the days of our lives, and so pass the columns of Gerard Henderson through the hourglass of time ...

And now, because we never like to be gloomy, in memory of Bob Menzies and the picket fence hook on tie view of the world, a reading from Mr Pooter and his Diary of a Nobody:

I shall never forget the effect the words, “happy medium,” had upon him. He was brilliant and most daring in his interpretation of the words. He positively alarmed me. He said something like the following: “Happy medium, indeed. Do you know ‘happy medium’ are two words which mean ‘miserable mediocrity’? I say, go first class or third; marry a duchess or her kitchenmaid. The happy medium means respectability, and respectability means insipidness. Does it not, Mr. Pooter?”

I was so taken aback by being personally appealed to, that I could only bow apologetically, and say I feared I was not competent to offer an opinion. Carrie was about to say something; but she was interrupted, for which I was rather pleased, for she is not clever at argument, and one has to be extra clever to discuss a subject with a man like Mr. Huttle.

He continued, with an amazing eloquence that made his unwelcome opinions positively convincing: “The happy medium is nothing more or less than a vulgar half-measure. A man who loves champagne and, finding a pint too little, fears to face a whole bottle and has recourse to an imperial pint, will never build a Brooklyn Bridge or an Eiffel Tower. No, he is half-hearted, he is a half-measure—respectable—in fact, a happy medium, and will spend the rest of his days in a suburban villa with a stucco-column portico, resembling a four-post bedstead.”

We all laughed.

“That sort of thing,” continued Mr. Huttle, “belongs to a soft man, with a soft beard with a soft head, with a made tie that hooks on.”

This seemed rather personal and twice I caught myself looking in the glass of the cheffonière; for I had on a tie that hooked on—and why not? If these remarks were not personal they were rather careless, and so were some of his subsequent observations, which must have made both Mr. Franching and his guests rather uncomfortable. I don’t think Mr. Huttle meant to be personal, for he added; “We don’t know that class here in this country: but we do in America, and I’ve no use for them.”

(Below: happier times for the Queen, and then a cartoon about sadder times).