Paul Sheehan, the usual cheerleading blather, and somewhere there's a better place ...

(Above: now there's a logo-enhanced plaque).

While some choose to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a survival technique, a way of getting through the current election campaign, here we naturally dream of ponds.

Loon ponds.

There are more loon ponds in the world than you might think, and today we feature Loon Pound, Newfoundland, Canada. Greetings Canuckian loons, situated near the pleasant town of Placentia, aka Pleasure or Plaisance. This handy guide will give you ways of finding out more than you ever dreamed of about the pond and its environs and plucky Placentians, unless of course as a Canadian you already know.

It is of course much better to dream of foreign climes and times than contemplate the squawkings on the local loon pond, and it's with bitter regret that we think of the circumstances that prevented us from heading off shore for the entire election campaign.

We wanted to avoid writing about the election, but of course the commentariat are furiously scribbling and taking sides, and who better to show how it's done than Paul Sheehan, in An unhealthy blend of evasion, half-truths and spin, featuring as usual an unhealthy blend of evasion, half-truths, spin and rampant cheer-leading.

Whenever it comes down to cheerleading, a column would be so much shorter and to the point if the columnist simply said "I can't stand Labor/Gillard/Rudd, or the whole damn thing, and/or I love Tony Abbott/jolly Joe/Truss and the whole damn thing, and I'm going to vote accordingly and urge you to do the same".

There, done and dusted, they go about their lives, we go about ours, and the raucous shouting on the pond dies away on milliseconds, and there's not even a distant echo swallowed up by the morning's gentle mist.

It's when a one sided analysis is attempted that it comes unstuck.

Sheehan leads off his show of disdain for Gillard by quoting Gillard being evasive on the 7.30 Report. If he'd been in the other camp, he would have any number of notorious exchanges featuring Tony Abbott being similarly evasive or lead footed.

Quote examples of both? What are you, a communist?

The Gillard exchange is of high moment, crucial importance and of breath-taking concern, full of deep and dire implications for the national economy and national security.

Why didn't she call former Chairman Rudd after his gall bladder operation?

Yep, that's what you get as policy analysis on loon pond. How much simpler and more honest to simply scribble "I don't like the cut of Gillard's jib", or her accent, or her red hair. Since trivia is the go for Sheehan, let him be the earnest, open, trivia hunting twat that he is.

But of course leading with trivia about Gillard might lead a humbug tweaker to lead with trivia about Abbott. How to deal with this?

Yes, the alternative, Tony Abbott, has a proclivity for foot-in-mouth disease.

Ah you see, this is an attempt to sound fair and balanced. For a nano second. Then it's on with the cheerleading:

Having challenged Gillard to three formal debates, he declined her belated reciprocal challenge to a second. But Abbott has remained authentic, sometimes painfully so. He is a veteran of the government which stormproofed the Australian economy, and offers real choices to the electorate in this campaign.

And of course at this point on the pond, it's natural to feel a surge of irritation, since Abbott is notoriously lead footed on economic matters, and being an authentic gherkin doesn't in any way affect the intrinsic quality of gherkin-ness, and you don't need to see a Labor party attack ad to remember Peter Costello's view of Abbott's economic skills.

Here he is in March before it became necessary to unite and stand together during the election campaign, in Coalition brushes off Costello's criticism:

Mr Costello accuses Mr Abbott of taking a "Crocodile Dundee" approach to policy making, by attempting to outflank Labor with an even bigger proposal.

"[Mr Abbott] keeps being told he needs to appeal more to female voters. So he adopts the Crocodile Dundee approach," he writes.

"In the movie a New York mugger pulls a switchblade on Mick Dundee. Our hero laughs at the blade. 'That's not a knife, this is a knife'. The terrified mugger disappears into the night.

"The point of Abbott's proposal is to tell the public that Rudd does not have a maternity leave scheme. 'This is a maternity leave scheme', he declares.

"Your opponent has a mildly bad idea, so you come up with a more extreme one and have a race to the bottom."

You won't read any of that in Sheehan's blather because Sheehan is really only interested in cheerleading, and not recalling the time when possible future treasurer Joe Hockey professed a disdain for the dismal art of economics, never mind his liking of Delta Goodrem.

But it's when Sheehan gets on to hospitals that the fix becomes truly clear:

Many policies differentiate the major parties, from border control to paid parental leave, but on the most basic policy issue, healthcare, where structural inefficiencies can kill people, the difference between Labor and the Coalition is stark.

It might be stark to Sheehan, but that requires some structural erasure and re-formatting of the hard drive, so that it's possible to forget Abbott's time as Health Minister, and the splendid sight of Abbott and Howard standing outside a hospital in Tasmania announcing that the federal government would splash cash in marginal hospital electorates and then take over the whole damn thing from the states.

Sheehan's tactic is to forget that the push for federal intervention and control came from his mates, and instead rushes off to get a quote from John Graham, who has had a steady career as serial whinger from back in the day when he was arguing that Sydney Hospital should be upgraded to cope with a terrorist attack (Plea for federal help refused, says doctor) and who has a bee in his bonnet about bureaucrats who refuse to help out Sydney Hospital (Back to better hospitals).

But quoting Graham allows Sheehan this little flourish:

I can't vouch for his estimate, but it sits plausibly with the pattern of Whitlamesque excesses that have been the hallmark of the Rudd-Gillard government.

Uh huh. Whitlamesque excess. Simple minded abuse, suggesting Sheehan didn't live through the actual years of Whitlamesque excess. But he did, and it's just a simple minded smear.

As usual, you need to look elsewhere for an intelligent conversation about health, and especially the upcoming impact of baby boomers on the hospital system as they start letting go, and ways to manage it, but for that you should trot off to The New Yorker, which has Atul Gawande's Letting Go, What should medicine do when it can't save your life? currently sitting outside the paywall. It's a tough read, but a caring and thoughtful one, and it doesn't deliver kneejerk blather about excesses ...

The Sheehan agenda becomes a little clearer when we get to the penultimate paragraph, when it becomes clear it's more of the same:

When the Howard government introduced a tax rebate on private health insurance, it took pressure off the public hospitals as people moved to private care. The government was able to move $1 billion, earmarked for public hospitals, to tax relief for health insurance payments. It was a shift of spending, not a reduction.

Strange then that one of the biggest gripes during the Howard years was just how fucked the public hospital system became, and how peeved people were to learn that a billion had been shifted out of the system to provide tax relief for ponces scribbling from their eastern suburbs eerie about excesses ....

And then we come to the final par:

So great is the growing gap between rhetoric and reality that Gillard not answering simple questions is a symptom of something much deeper: an abdication of public honesty in the pursuit of power.

And then I wondered, remembering how much of a gherkin Sheehan has been about climate change, how that might read if we contemplated other areas of policy making:

So great is the growing gap between rhetoric and reality that Abbott not answering simple questions is a symptom of something much deeper: an abdication of public honesty in the pursuit of power.

Why I don't even have to mention climate change. It's just a simple minded slur that you could apply freely to anyone you don't like, provided you don't want any meaning attached to the words. Humbug fries with the fatty humbug burger sir?

And then I thought a pox on both their houses, but especially a pox on the simple minded cheerleading of Sheehan and Miranda the Devine and their kind ...

Perhaps it's the proudly independent genes of Tamworth - yes, Tony Windsor's the man up there, as featured on this morning's ABC's AM - but this kind of simple minded cheerleading should not be allowed to stand ...

In the meantime, since perhaps a trip to loon pond in Newfoundland is a tad ambitious, perhaps it's time to get out the Buffy discs, or maybe start re-watching the entire, complete in its entirety, copy of The Wire lurking under the coffee table ...

A couple more weeks and it'll all be only, and then all we'll left with is the eternal, restless, ongoing squawking of the loons on the pond ...

Oh dear, I feel a sentimental song coming on. Perhaps I can dress it up as a tribute to Larry David's episode in Curb Your Enthusiasm which was a tribute to Officer Krupke ...

There's a loon pond for us,
Somewhere a pond for us.
Peace and quiet and open air
Wait for us
Somewhere.

There's a time for us,
Some day a time for us,
Time together with time spare,
Time to learn, time to care,
Some day!

Somewhere.
We'll find a new way of living,
We'll find a way of forgiving
Somewhere . . .

There's a pond for us,
A time and place for us.
Hold my hand and we're halfway there.
Hold my hand and I'll take you there
Somehow,
Some day,
Somewhere!

And now for Officer Krupke complete with subtitles.

And then it's off to the analyst to understand why I keep thinking of Sheehan as that dumbbell Krupke ...