Miranda Devine, and a short guide to arse kissing ...

(Above: found here).

Over the last few days, I've learned many things.

Like how it was progressives who were responsible for the rise of Pauline Hanson. Yes the inner urban elites bear many crosses, but their support of Pauline Hanson was surely the last straw for any right-thinking conservative. Their complicity in the ugly affair will be talked about for generations to come, or at least by Janet Albrechtsen for the next year.

And how it was John Howard who defused the ugly side of Hansonism, with sensible policies, while stifling political correctness attempted to prevent any debate. The bastards somehow shut Janet Albrechtsen right up. What's that you say, the day someone shuts Albrechtsen up, we'll be able to hear ourselves think? Too unkind, and it makes me immediately suspect you're a coffee sipper ...

But still in the grand world of revisionism and retrograde re-fitting - as if the Howard government had never been defeated at an actual general election - Miranda the Devine delivers a corker in How fortress Australia lost face:

The former Howard attorney-general and immigration minister Philip Ruddock, 67, is too much of a gentleman to say he feels vindicated now that Gillard is trying to copy his policies, but he does have useful insights from his experience.

Too much of a gentleman? Why that's a wonderful way to characterise a dour grey ghost of a man, who somewhere along the way in his servile servicing of John Howard's political chicanery, lost his soul but still wouldn't give up his membership of Amnesty (and thereby cost Amnesty much good will and more than a few memberships).

Not that they didn't try to reign him in:

COMPERE: A Federal Government minister is being stripped of his lapel badge. The Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock has fallen foul of Amnesty International, an organisation which he proudly supports. The human rights group has asked him to remove his Amnesty badge while performing his ministerial duties and to not to refer to his membership when promoting policies that Amnesty opposes.

Alexandra Kirk spoke to Amnesty's national president Kathy Kingston.

KATHY KINGSTON: We do have a policy that no member of Amnesty International can, when identifying themselves as a member of Amnesty or when it's a public figures being recognised in that way, can publicly challenge our mandate, officially approve policies or recommend a position in conflict with that.

As the minister and some of the government's policies, they clearly do contravene our mandate and our policies.

Not that it did much good, the trouble with Amnesty being that they're inclined to be gentle persons, in the original sense of the word, which devolved into the now much abused word "gentleman".

Not in the sense of being of noble birth, or of superior social position, with a right to bear arms, and ranking above a yeoman, or being independent and with no need of a wage-paying job, but in the sense of being cultured, courteous, polite, refined and genteel.

KATHY KINGSTON: Well, we've dealt with it publicly now because the response that I received from the minister was that he would continue to wear his badge. And because of the references again in parliament yesterday, one of the options open to us on our policy on membership is to issue a press release. And given that the minister hasn't responded to the private requests made, we've decided - the board has decided to take that action. I have decided that on behalf of the board.

ALEXANDRA KIRK: If the minister continues to flout your request not to wear the badge in his capacity as minister, would you consider stripping him of his membership of Amnesty International?

KATHY KINGSTON: Well, under the procedure that we have in place, there are options for membership to be suspended and there are options for an individual to be expelled. But those options will be discussed as with other options that we have at the next board meeting.

ALEXANDRA KIRK: Is that the next step?

KATHY KINGSTON: It will be - well, it will be a decision of the board. We'll wait and see what the response to this is ... (Ruddock stripped of Amnesty International badge).

Yep of all the lickspittle lackeys kowtowing to John Howard's worldview and policies and dog whistling, Ruddock was the finest (though perhaps edged out by the hapless, wretched Kevin Andrews if it came to a serious competition mano a mano). Even his daughter found it tough going ... How Ruddock's policy helped drive daughter overseas.

Ah, all the memories, and now the gentleman is being rehabilitated by the likes of the Devine, and him and his policies dragged out of the cabinet storing conservative memorabilia, dusted off and mounted like a parrot, to squawk again.

Now the angle isn't about the suffering of boat people and the extremities that might drive them to seek another life on a leaky boat on the high seas. It's all about the suffering of Philip Ruddock:

... who knows whether it is even possible to put the genie back in the bottle? There was trial and error to find the right combination of measures to stop people smuggling, and Ruddock paid heavily.

He was vilified to an extent rarely seen in Australian politics, branded child molester, cadaver, monster. His family was involved and even supporters distanced themselves.

Oh spare me. Of all the many angles to take, this is the one that the Devine settles on?

As for the revisionism, she isn't finished until she hits the bottom at the end:

... history will show his approach was ultimately humane, sending the signal to people smugglers that business was closed, and that Australia would select its annual intake of 13,500 refugees in a fair, orderly way.

Those angry, difficult years were behind us when Kevin Rudd and Gillard, the architect of the new arrangements, started tinkering. They should have left well enough alone.

The difficult years were behind us? Say what? This sordid ugly mess instituted by the Howard government was all sorted?

I know that living on the pond means living a lot of the time in cloud cuckoo land, but this takes cloud and cuckoo to a whole new level.

Well there's a lot more of it, but frankly it's Saturday morning, and I need to keep a decent breakfast down, and all this retrospective re-launching of the dry as sawdust ship Ruddock is too much to bear.

Instead I took solace in re-reading John Birmingham, the man who scribbled the best book on Sydney going around (Leviathan), and who as a professional writer hands out words in fine style, as in Manipulating fears for a shot at power with Gillard's not-yet-final solution:

"How can something that was supposedly immoral when done by John Howard be a stroke of political genius when done by Julia Gillard?" asked Tony Abbott, which is fair enough, except for the fact that the Mad Monk would grind down every asylum seeker for Soylent Green to sprinkle over his Nutri-Grain, because, you know, he's an Iron Man, with Speedos and everything.

Birmingham reminds us that it was the Labor party who instituted the mandatory detention solution, before it was cranked up to eleven by John Howard and his acolytes, and before Gillard tried to clamber on board.

I know I am totally in the minority on this. That Gillard, and Abbott for that matter, are actually speaking to, and for, the majority on the boat peeps issue. But you know what? The majority can kiss my arse ...

...To acknowledge that doesn't mean throwing open the doors and inviting twenty-five million displaced people in for a house party. But it should mean that any policy we put in place to manage their arrivals should be more about meeting our responsibilities – yes, that's right, responsibilities – in a humane and considered fashion than it is about cranking up the Fear-O-Meter for the sake of a shot at power.

Well they can kiss my arse too, though the thought of Miranda the Devine kissing the arse of Philip Ruddock has suddenly played havoc with my breakfast.

What a relief to read Adele Horin's good news story Country cousins defy redneck label in treatment of refugees, featuring my old home town Tamworth, where in the ugly years racist resentments were stirred, and the pot sometimes boiled over:

Tamworth, in northern NSW, appeared to live up to the redneck stereotype when, a few years ago, the council voted against accepting Sudanese refugees that the Department of Immigration hoped to place there.

Yet last week, for Refugee Week, the Tamworth mayor, James Treloar, was pictured with a smiling group of Sudanese men at a special celebratory dinner. He later explained to me that many Sudanese have lived in the town, and that a core of eight currently works at the abattoir and has settled in well. The council had been against accepting refugees straight from refugee camps, he said. But Sudanese, as well as a few other refugees, and thousands of migrants, had freely moved to Tamworth, having first lived elsewhere in Australia.

Helen Ware, who heads a group called Sanctuary that supports refugees in Tamworth and Armidale, reports some locals have had cause to reflect on the refugee experience since they have had personal contact. At a recent funeral of a Sudanese man a prominent local commented he had never given a moment's thought to refugees but now he wondered what it would be like for a family to flee their country with all their worldly possessions in a single small suitcase.

I just thought I'd throw that in before I head off to my local newsagent, staffed by people of colour, as Southern gentlepersons like to put it, with dry cleaning to be processed by the Vietnamese running the local dry cleaners, and shopping to be done at the Asian run local grocery store ...

There are other ways to approach asylum seekers and the very minor - in the scheme of the world's refugee problems - issue of boat people, without resorting to the righteous sanctimonious revisionist claptrap of Miranda the Devine, and her mealy mouthed purported concern for them (oh the drownings, the drownings), when the issue was so shamefully exploited by the Howard government to raise fears, and to keep the bastards in power.

As John Birmingham would say, she can kiss my arse.

On second thoughts, scrub that, I've still got breakfast to eat, let her keep on kissing Philip Ruddock's arse ...

(Below: here in the Behind the Lines year's best cartoons collection, Cathy Wilcox, 18 December 2006).