Senator Stephen Conroy, and a whiff of a Christopher Pearson culture war to spice things up ...

There's nothing like a good bucketing of all and sundry to start off a pleasant Sunday.

Take Lenore Taylor's Half-baked pies going cheap as a good starting point:

Labor will build a refugee processing centre but it can't be sure where; Abbott will turn back the boats, but he doesn't know where to, or what he'll do if they are no longer fit to sail. Both parties say they agree on targets to reduce our greenhouse emissions, but neither has a policy to efficiently get us there.

Both want us to believe they care about the issues anyway.

Gosh darn it, as our American cousins living in a nineteen fifties thought bubble might say, then she goes and ruins it:

Maybe they've got some thought-through, fully formulated ideas in their election kit bags, all ready to go.

Quick, someone tell her she's dreaming.

In Gillard's rush to tip policies overboard - never mind children - there have been a few minor victories, such as Senator Stephen Conroy's belated and impure recantation regarding his internet filter. (Conroy backs down on net filters).

But for the moment, it's what Napoleon might have called a strategic retreat - it's a little colder on the intertubes and in Russia than Conroy imagined, or he couldn't stand the heat, and so stayed out of the kitchen, pick the mixed metaphor of your choice.

But all my watching of vampire movies has taught me one thing. You can deploy your garlic and your holy water or the cross, but the only thing that's certain is a wooden stake in the heart. And there's no sign that Conroy or his filter policy has been given a decent, solid, wooden staking.

Blather about a review by an independent expert, and other transparency and accountability measures, is just bureaucratese and humbug, designed to defuse the matter as an election issue, before the censors and Conroy return after the election (and if Abbott gets in, he will take to Conroy's policy thrust like a duck to water). Colin James, of the EFA, put it best:

"I don't interpret [the move] as killing it but I do interpret it as trying to neutralise the issue in the short term as far as the election is concerned," said Colin Jacobs, spokesman for the online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia.

"They're tinkering around the edges with the classification scheme without having a rethink around how you apply a system that was designed for books and movies to the internet."

What is remarkable is the way the libertarians and raving loony ratbags on the right have run silent, run deep on this, because deep down they believe the kind of inane censorship Conroy has proposed is the right thing to do.

Take Christopher Pearson, please someone take him. Not a bopeep about the internet filter in all his scribbling, yet this week he re-enters the fray of a South Australian cultural war from the nineteen nineties, a matter so arcane that all but croweaters must shrug and sigh to see it once more disinterred. It's called Water under the bridge, and indeed there should be lots of water under the bridge since the time that there was a royal commission and a court case in the matter of building a bridge to Hindmarsh island.

When Pearson holds a grudge, especially a cultural warrior grudge, he holds it deep and bitter in his heart, but of course the latest carry on is actually around a kind of reconciliation, whereby the bridge remains built, the Ngarrindjeri admit its not going away, and all and sundry gather to open a local park:

Members of the Ngarrindjeri people have taken a symbolic walk across the Hindmarsh Island bridge, south of Adelaide.

The walk was intended to symbolise their cultural need to connect with Hindmarsh Island even though they opposed construction of the bridge in the 1990s.

A ceremony was also held to formally open a local park which commemorates efforts by the Ngarrindjeri in the bridge saga, which prompted a royal commission and a Federal Court case. (Ngarrindjeri in symbolic walk across Hindmarsh Island bridge).

You can imagine the kind of speech Pearson would have delivered if he'd been at the park opening:

Sure the Federal court ruling, made in the wake of the royal commission, acknowledged the secret women's business wasn't made up to try to stop the bridge being built. But the royal commission said you were a bunch of liars and fibbers, so nyah nyah, sucks boo to you all, and instead of taking a symbolic walk across the bridge, why don't y'all take a symbolic jump off it. (sample only, full one thousand word speech available at a modest, knockdown, nyah nyah price).

By golly, they play their cultural wars hard in crow eater land, so much so that when Pearson talks of political correctness, you get the sense that his sphincter is constantly contracted in a state of rigidly righteous correctness.

Of course if you want an alternative view to what took place, you might consult Margaret Simons, and Hindmarsh: where lies the truth? (and her book on the topic).

Conservative commentators, notably Ron Brunton - who was last week appointed to the ABC Board - have mentioned Hindmarsh Island almost every time there has been debate in the present "culture wars" over how our history should be understood and regarded, and what claim it has on the present. Ron Brunton has stated that support for the royal commission's findings was "the only intellectually and morally tenable position to take"...

.... The evidence I found during my investigations makes it clear that Brunton, Sandall and the rest are badly wrong. There never was a good reason to think the Ngarrindjeri women were lying, and there were plenty of reasons to think they were telling the truth. The appearance otherwise was largely the product of manipulation by those with vested and political interests. Brunton was, as my book shows, a player in this affair as well as a commentator. So were the conservative commentators Christopher Pearson and Piers Akerman.

The royal commission put on a show of fair judicial process, yet was a sham. Evidence that tended to support some of the women's claims had been lying in archives for decades. The royal commission did not look for it, and therefore did not find it. Evidence the commission did have was overlooked, and in at least one case, buried. Other evidence was interpreted with a shocking spin.

The commission's supposedly independent expert witness, a South Australian Museum anthropologist, was at the same time helping counsel for those opposing the proponent Ngarrindjeri women. He has since been found by a Federal Court judge to have been the originator of the fabrication theory, and to have influenced the course of the royal commission in a way that lacked professional objectivity.

His colleague and fellow witness, Dr Philip Jones, has recently been appointed to the panel reviewing displays at the Australian Museum. Jones's appointment is not surprising. His close friend and co-collaborator on the Hindmarsh Island affair, Christopher Pearson, is on the Museum Council.

That's the same Pearson who sits on the board of SBS, and watched as that network has been driven in to the ground by its current management.

Well we don't know the ins and outs of the affair, though there's plenty of warriors and their scribbles still around on the net, but of course the chief point of Pearson's column is to show how Pearson is completely in tune with Galaxy Quest. "Never give up, never surrender."

Sure, that's a satirical show, but Pearson is adept at self-satire. He rounds out his column thus:

Backbenchers in Labor's dominant Right faction cringed with embarrassment at the news and assured me the matter was not discussed in caucus. Perhaps they too were disconcerted that in the week in which Julia Gillard urged free, open debate and an end to political correctness, the Rann government should be trumpeting the PC pieties of the mid-90s and endorsing the culture of forgetting.

Strange, still parroting the same politically correct line, eerily rebutted by Simons way back in 2003:

But the story of the Hindmarsh Island bridge shows that, in both Aboriginal culture and in our own, information follows the lines of power, and secrets are the inevitable accompaniment to power.

The white men who steered events behind the scenes in the Hindmarsh Island affair saw themselves as combating dangerous political correctness. I believe that in doing so they gave birth to a kind of anti-political correctness at least as silly, dangerous and ideologically blind to evidence as what it sought to replace.

Well never mind, it's all done and dusted, the bridge built, a few subsequent pieties observed, and any way from the limited cultural perspective of the pond - yes we share Pearson's love of self centred myopia - maintaining the rage about Conroy is now much more useful, and while Gillard thinks she might have put the issue of the internet filter to bed, here at the pond, we'll maintain the rage, and only be satisfied, Christopher Pearson "maintain the rage and the culture wars" style, when someone puts a stake through it, or Conroy, or preferably both ...

Yep, never give up, never surrender. And watch out for the core meltdown, by Grabthar's hammer, and especially the bunch of chompy, crushy things in the middle of the hallway ...

(Below: and speaking of culture wars, a few more for you to join as noble Pearson-style warrior).