David Burchell, and more cultural stereotypes per acre than bunnies and thistles ...

(Above: oh dear, how cruel is The Australian, with this see through the ears of Tony Abbott shot as a start to their election coverage. Can it get any lower or dirtier than this? Abbott said it would be a dirty campaign, and The Oz is off to an ear-ly start).

A nation in despair, rudderless, no great helmsman to hand. That's Australia in the first week of the election campaign, as we grimly, helplessly note that Paul Sheehan remains invisible at the Sydney Morning Herald.

I simply don't know how we're going to get through the next few weeks if this state of affairs continues.

Luckily, we still have David Burchell to hand to produce an abundance of meaningless rhetoric, tinged with the usual sort of nonsense about us and them, so all is not lost:

Here he is leading off with a heartfelt plea for who knows what, in Underwhelming war of words could get tedious:

This, no doubt, is why the asylum-seeker/border-protection debate works so well for us, and why it so rarely seems capable of pragmatic resolution. We know a great many people on the "other" side of the debate are not very different to ourselves - with the same parochial worries, the same dimly felt anxieties about the world's faceless poor, and the same root conviction that everybody who is truly deserving of help should be offered it. And yet it suits us to treat our opponents, variously, as bleeding-hearts or heartless ones, rednecks or cosmopolitans, because it delineates them as sharply as possible from our own worthy selves. In the process, though, we lose any persuasive sense of shared nationhood - and in our desire to parade our own moral values, taken as national virtues, we serve only to stymie the same political accommodations we claim to seek.

By the end of that blather, it's true I'd lost any persuasive sense of shared nationhood with David Burchell, though I also didn't have a clue as to his own moral values, or whether he was taking them as national virtues. Oh wait, hang on, he is:

In the outer-urban and provincial Australia in which I live, there are hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions, of people whose tenor of life has not altered to any remarkable degree since their parents' days. They treasure their ageing V8 utes and winter dinners of fibrous roast beef served with Yorkshire pudding. They know in their hearts that Australia is God's own country, even if they've never left its shores. They still fondly imagine a trade apprenticeship to be a passport to a solid 50 years of the good life, in a cosy life-niche. And they nurture the comfortable conviction that just about everybody else in the country - aside from a few mildly amusing egg-heads who drive through their towns in Audis, Saabs and Subarus - feels more or less the same.

It's funny, as last night I tucked in to my roast lamb and roast potatoes - good Cowra lamb from the butcher down the road who buys great lamb but hopeless steak, you have to head around the corner for a decent steak, dubbed unpatriotically a New York steak - I wondered exactly where the inner city suburbs fitted into this deep philosophical musing, in favour of Yorkshire pudding - never mind, that in many years in Tamworth did I ever manage to see a Yorkshire pudding served up by that reprehensible Wars of the Roses name, except to Poms, bludgers and recalcitrants, when a decent plum pudding with cream would do.

Meanwhile, I have Alex Mitchell explaining to me in Welcome to inner-city burbs, that I live in a 'burb where women rule the roost, wherein I discover that overtly patriarchal Sydney has been over-run by female politicians, and wherein a totally vacuous attempt to replace Paul Sheehan with an equally profound lack of insight, concludes with the line "Women of Darlo, your time has come." This comprehensibly stupid piece also offers the advice that "The issue is not gender but the beliefs, principles, ethics and moral convictions which guide public lives."

Put it another way. Alex Mitchell of the Herald, your time hasn't come, or is well past coming, but do try to grasp the inherent contradiction between the issue not being gender, and furi0us inconsequential scribbling about coincidental confluxes of women of Darlo, you sweet inconsequential darling you.

But hang on, I see we've dropped Burchell, and he also has a lot to tell us about the inner city:

Contrariwise, in the bustling, cosmopolitan and yet still strangely lonely and characterless neighbourhoods of our inner cities, there are tens of thousands of earnest, highly strung folks whose work-lives are their avocation; whose "politics" stem from the innermost sanctum of their souls; and for whom the private economy is not the engine of prosperity, but a moral abomination on the scale of the slave trade.

You know, confronted by that level of cultural stereotyping, by that persuasive lack of shared nationhood, by that willingness to demonise inner city folk as earnest and highly strung workaholics, and all the other blather words, like "strangely lonely and characterless", along with the political posturing, there's only one civilised response. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

But then Burchell is only interested in compounding the bullshit, seemingly incapable of telling the difference between a dunny, a chook house, and the ability to shove his arm up a cow's behind:

When the wrong party wins a federal election they threaten to emigrate - with the conviction that somebody other than themselves should care about this. And somewhere inside their hearts pulses the assurance that everyone - everyone worthy of being called a living, breathing human being - thinks pretty much as they do.

Yep, these folk are simply incapable of reading David Burchell, scribbling for that elitist rag The Australian, whose circulation in the outer suburbs and the bush in this wide brown land is three fifths of bugger all, and then only to snobs and ruling elites and posturing effete ponces, and then realising that there are deluded gits who think differently to the way that they do.

Well there's a handsome cultural insight for a Monday morning.

Meanwhile, let us now nod off and drift back to dreams of Robert Menzies, picket fences, FX Holdens (did I mention my first car was a Holden), and lamingtons, and pumpkin soup, or scones, your choice with a cup of tea, and lather up such a host of cultural stereotypes that the angels might sing about them for all eternity:

Yet in a rambling, diverse land of some 22 million, the great majority of Australians clearly do not fit either of these opposed pictures very closely. Rather, they're in that vast, uncharted space between these extremes, a space suffused with vaguely nostalgic images of a kinder, simpler nation from a lost era, as well as with the sundry appurtenances of our imagined future - obscure Asian condiments in the kitchen, snatches of modernist decor, a TV the size of a ping-pong table that transmits the world news 24/7. In many respects, indeed, they hanker most of all to be told that these two aspects of our imagination are compatible - that we can remain tied to kith and kin, and to many of the values of our parents and ancestors, all the while cleaving to the promise of a new world that feeds on personal re-invention, endless self-adaption, and only half-glimpsed opportunities.

Oh no, say it ain't so, obscure Asian condiments in the kitchen, and snatches of Ikea.

But hang on, that must be what happens in the 'burbs, because here in the inner west, we have a dozen Asian bakeries peddling pies and sausage rolls, while one entrepreneurial Asian cafe features a meat sizzle on a Saturday. Have the 'burbs lost their soul in their quest for Asian condiments and Ikea furniture, with a taste of Freedom, while we in the inner west remain the last bastion of dinkum-ness?

Who knows, because the remarkable reality is that it's only the swinging seats who determine the outcome of Federal elections, and these are very specifically located, and relate to constantly shifting demographics, and what might be unsafe for John Howard one year might be unsafe for Maxine McKew the next, and that particular electorate, for example, happens to be full of Asian-defying stereotypes. No doubt with a taste for obscure Asian condiments ... you know, like garlic ... or is that exotic vagrant chilli? Or ginger? No, more likely the kind of cardamon you can find in the Indian restaurants serving their curries in Tamworth ...

But then thankfully Burchell isn't intent on producing anything that might remotely be taken for an actual insight into actual politics or actual electorates, so swept up is he in his vision thing:

Hence parties that aspire to leadership are obliged to find a language and tone of voice capable of speaking to what is common in us as citizens, and which can also unite us in shared recognition and sympathy. The new PM's intervention in the border-protection debate briefly seemed to hit just such a conciliatory, ecumenical tone. Except that, trailing Julia Gillard's artful words was not so much a policy as a raw political intuition in search of a policy. And so the nascent moment melted away.

To which all you can add, in a hearty bush tone, is "Well bugger me dead, the nascent moment melted away huh, like a caricature in search of a cackle." Yes, that's the kind of raw syrupy shit I expect from inner west folk, you know, all that claptrap coming from the innermost sanctums of their souls, as they search for nascent moments and conciliatory, ecumenical tones. Well, fuck that for a joke, the effete ponces ...

But hang on, that ineffable Burchell ponce is still in search of the ecumenical, like some bleeding heart from the inner west:

What was remarkable about both leaders' campaign speeches on Saturday was that each tried earnestly, and failed utterly, to find this same ecumenical note. Gillard's expression of honour at becoming PM of "this country, the greatest country of them all", had a forced character. It was followed by the familiar autobiographical reverie about the merits of hard work and discipline - which we must all by now suspect is a partial rendering of her actual self-image, just as her twinset-and-pearls look is a deliberately partial rendition of her private personality.

Epic fail. He signally failed to mention her nasal accent, unlike all those who come from Unley, and her fey pose of actually living in Altona, which is clearly false, and posture laden, unlike David Burchell, who sounds like a refugee from a history department in a remote regional university in Armidale ... incapable of relating to the rural scientists in his midst. Who knows, he might be an academic somewhere else, and deeply happy in his lifestyle, as might Gillard living in Altona ...

But he did mention her poils, and so passes the Christopher Pearson test for the useless turning of politics into a personality and dress sense test. More please, Mr. Burchell. A reference to red hair and living in sin and atheism is surely in order, and perhaps while you're at it, why not good queen Bess ...

But no, now for a piece of cunning, a kind of pox on both their houses:

Tony Abbott's most patriotic offering - that "Australia will be at its best when all of our people are empowered to be at their best" - seemed equally hollow. Abbott's trouble on occasions such as this is that he never seems sure whether he is speaking to unite or divide, to cultivate hope or stimulate fear. He launches attacks then strikes statesman-like poses in succeeding sentences, as if to reinforce the boy-like awkwardness that has become his leitmotiv.

Surely these suspicions of insincerity must have something to do with the emptiness of each side's economic rhetoric. Gillard's efforts to articulate a forward-looking economic philosophy have been mechanical and rote. Abbott promised to stop the waste and rein in the imaginary debt, while refusing to offer any positive economic ideas at all.

Surely a party that aspired to national leadership would be painting a word-picture of where it wants our nation to be, economically and socially, 10 or 20 years down the track. Without this, it will indeed be a long, tedious five weeks.

Indeed. What we need in power is a party determined to strike down the moral posturing of strangely lonely and characterless types, highly strung workaholics skulking in the inner west, and what we need is a party in favour of aging V-8 utes and fibrous roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, and a party firmly in favour of a stick in the mud stay at home attitude of those who make a stand against mildly amusing eggheads who drive exotic vehicles ... damn those academics strutting through the outer west, pretending to be at one with the people ...

Hey, if I was David Burchell, I'd be feeling nervous ... as a poncy writer for that elitist rag The Australian, I couldn't imagine someone more clearly cut out for the role of inner west cultural warrior ...

(Below: oh dear, The Australia continues with its shocking images. No, not the obligatory mournful startled baby, or the hapless goose Swan beaming in the background, but the poils. Oh dear lord won't someone think of the implications of the poils for cultural stereotyping).