David Burchell, and quotidian pleasures of a Punch and Judy wombat kind ...

Poor old David Burchell.

These days he finds wisdom in the musings of janitors. Back in the day of course it was the honest yeoman who inspired the muse.

Think A. E. Housman in A Shropshire Lad:

Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

Of course I once worked as a cleaner, assisting my mother late at night in the office, after school, wiping out the ash trays (those were the days when smoking wasn't a social curse), emptying the rubbish bins, washing the tea towels, and trying to control a run amok floor polisher. Child labour! And so I feel qualified to discourse on world affairs ... with the wisdom of a janitor in training.

After imbibing janitor wisdom about the education revolution, Burchell is positively dripping - perhaps even suppurating - for Ken Henry and his suffering and his lost arcadia of tax proposals:

Pretty soon a proposal most economists would have taken as unexceptionable had become a truncheon for use in the PM's distinctive, pre-pubescent, Punch-and-Judy version of class-war politics. Surely by this stage Henry's mind had drifted away to another, happier world entirely, perhaps to his beloved koalas of Epping Forest.

Pre-pubescent? Is this a kind of paedophilia of words, child abuse carried a step too far?

Punch and Judy version of class-war politics? Which role does Tony Abbott play? The cross dressing Judy? Or the stern violence-laden Punch armed with stick? Or is it just a particularly silly meaningless metaphor?

Beloved koalas? WTF? Had I entirely missed the point of all those stories about Dr Henry being a passionate conservationist, dedicated to caretaking a colony of 115 northern hairy-nosed wombats nestling within the confines of Epping Forest National Park in central Queensland (Treasury boss Kenn Henry leaves post to look after wombats).

And then I realised that Burchell was right. Mere facts and figures aren't relevant when what you really want to do is just write a bit of off-hand slaggery, evocative of the decline and fall of the Chairman Rudd Empire.

'Twixt a wombat and a koala is but a fey passing fancy, and so A Punch-and-Judy show isn't reform can slide from the keyboard like a wayward ooze of oil in the gulf.

What's more, you can see Burchell's point. If one tax on the mining industry sets off this kind of squawking from the commentariat, and a rushing and a gushing to the side of the ailing industry by that knight in shining armour, T. Abbott Esquire, equerry to Her Majesty's opposition, then imagine if the whole grab bag of Henry ideas had been taken up by the Ruddster.

There'd have been such a squawking vast numbers of readers might have been driven deaf and on to the socialist medical system.

Still, there was a wonderful sense of time travel in Burchell's words. I don't think we've ever seen a finer evocation of PM Bob Hawke:

I doubt we have ever before experienced a prime minister possessed of such an exquisite sense of confusion between the cultivation of his personal self-image and the agenda and mission of his government.

Oh dear, I misread that. He's talking about Chairman Rudd, and not Bob, nor even John Howard and his love of cricket, that steel man of iron without irony.

But when short of grand sweeping non-sequiturs, of a banal, trivial, personality kind (while bemoaning the cult of personality and the undue focus on personalities in politic), snidery can still play a key role for the commentariat:

And yet, even if the PM were called to his higher vocation at the UN tomorrow, though the government would doubtless be more humanly likeable, it would not for that reason be any less clueless.

Thank the lord, the UN meme finally comes out from the wombat hole, wherein it's been buried for many a month. Next step? Why surely it must be to warn the good citizens of Maine, who rightly fear world government, by the UN or some other black helicopter organisation, that Chairman Rudd is coming to take over the world ...

When confronted by this kind of easy snidery, some people given a resigned shrug, a wry tilt of the cap, a world-weary chuckle:

Already there are thousands of people out there, servants of the public, high and low, who have adopted the same attitude of wry resignation, the same shrug of the shoulders, the same world-weary chuckle, as my janitor friend.

And yet there is a great deal of serious work to be done.

But sadly when it comes to a great deal of serious work, not a single whit or jot of it can come by or from reading David Burchell.

Of all the commentariat commentators, he's the one most likely to produce a deep abiding sleep, a somnolescent nodding off, a kind of drowsiness worthy of Tennyson's lotos eaters.

I do confess I only came alive when confronted by this sentence:

Such is the chaos of the present quotidian political environment that many of these more fine-grained reforms may have to be introduced by stealth.

Quotidian! For some reason Americans love this word, and use it on a quotidian basis. It seems to fulfil some usual, customary or everyday need, or perhaps some ordinary or commonplace need (though perhaps the idea of paroxysms that recur on a daily basis, from some quotidian fever or ague would best suit readers of Burchell).

Anyhoo, it reminded that the idea of reading Burchell and thinking about a great deal of serious work to be done - as opposed to slagging off Chairman Rudd and doing a mock turtle routine about Ken Henry and getting agitated about a mining tax and quoting janitors on the education revolution - is one of the more surreal and contradictory notions you might propose to a philosophers' convention.

It made me wonder why The Australian keeps him on, and what peculiar private personality he might have. In much the same way as he wonders about Chairman Rudd:

It has recently become the fashion to attribute the federal government's growing leadership problems to the Prime Minister's own peculiar private personality. Like many such received truths, this one has taken hold chiefly because it provides a neat and gratifying explanation of events.

Could it be that Burchell writes the way he does because of his own peculiar private personality?

I don't know, all I can say is that like many such received truths, this one has taken hold chiefly because it provides a neat and gratifying explanation of endless arcadian, or dystopian or perhaps elysian columns written to the rhythm of ancient saws, platitudes and inanities for The Australian, and worthy of a colony of koalas ...

Feel like precious seconds of your time on this earth have drifted away, never to be recovered?

Never mind, here's a picture of Ken Henry with a wombat: