Gerard Henderson, and how a photo can lead to Sontagian rapture for a chattering member of the inner city professional elite ...

You can imagine the distress on the pond.

Inner city elites - commonly known as sophisticates - were shocked and appalled to see Julia Gillard in statesperson-like pose with the NATO secretary general while the pair issued unctuous, statesperson-like, self-congratulatory, self-serving words about how swimmingly things were going in Afghanistan, and how Australia and NATO want to get along in a key partnership.

You can read more here in the shock horror story NATO eager to deepen Australian ties.

Already there's speculation amongst informed sources that the photo might well cost Gillard and the Labor party several key inner city seats. Throw in the tour of Afghanistan routine, and all the snaps from that, and it's looking grim.

For more, we turn to regular columnist Gerard Henderson in the Herald, with Alliance may not play well for Gillard.

Great pictures. But what about the message?

Indeed, indeed. Once again our prattling Polonius has hit the nail firmly with a hammer.

Oops, sorry, it seems we have our wires crossed.

Last week the Prime Minister announced the formation of her government's climate change committee with a joint Labor-Greens news conference.

There was film and photographs of Julia Gillard with her colleagues Wayne Swan and Greg Combet and the Greens senators Bob Brown and Christine Milne.

Oh no. Actual live film and devastating photographs of Julia Gillard in consort with the vile humpbacked Greens. It sounds sickening. Horrify us some more:

In the Herald on Tuesday, a shot by Andrew Meares featured Gillard talking with the Greens leader close by. It is the kind of footage normally associated with a leader and deputy leader. But he is the leader of the political party intent on winning seats from the ALP in the lower house.

Here's the tawdry snap, reminiscent in political terms, of a Bill Henson photo (we use the metaphor because inner city sophisticates will understand it):

What a shocking sight. Of course if you take another view, one not compressed by a lens, and with other players included, you end up with the more banal network Ten story accompanying Phillip Coorey's Gillard ups the ante on carbon change:

Out of such gossamer threads a splendid weave can be woven:

In the medium term, the success of the Gillard-Brown images and Labor-Greens agreement will depend on interpretations in the electorate. Gillard's tactic will work for Labor if voters accept that she is leading a minority government that is all about resolving key policy issues, such as climate change. But the tactic will fail if it has the unintended consequence of giving legitimacy to the Greens, especially if there is no ultimate negotiated agreement between the parties on climate change.

What an astonishing concept. Political legitimacy for the Greens? Why you'd swear they were an actual functioning political party, with actual representation in the Federal parliament, when we know that they're simply deviate deviants without a shred of credibility, demonic demons designed solely to scare the sheep into staying in the top paddock.

Henderson of course is being profoundly Sontagian, or perhaps even Godardian, as when Sontag recalls Godard's sluggish lumpen-peasants in Les Carabiniers, who instead of actual booty bring back from the war picture postcards of all kinds of treasures:

Godard's gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image. Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge - and therefore, like power ...

Oops, don't know how we ended up down that existential alleyway.

Could it have something to do with the way Henderson uses one fragile image to get all agitated about the Greens and the fate of the Labor party, and their role on the climate change committee?

The committee will be meeting when Victoria and NSW go to the polls in November and March respectively. In these elections, the Greens have a real chance of winning lower house seats in inner-city Melbourne and Sydney, provided the Liberal Party puts the Greens ahead of Labor on its how-to-vote cards. This is how Adam Bandt recently won the seat of Melbourne from Labor. Andrew Wilkie, the former Green who is now a "small green" independent, also won the Hobart seat of Denison on Liberal Party preferences.

Uh huh. Shocking, terrifying, potentially catastrophic. Why and the NSW Labor party has governed NSW with such stunning success, and such care for infrastructure, who could imagine anyone wanting to vote for almost any other party - including the Happy Birthday party - having a go at running the state.

Never mind, it takes real skill to conflate federal and state issues, and wave the boogeyman flag that the defeat of the NSW government will have something to do with climate change and the Greens, as opposed to the simple awfulness of said government.

But of course the interesting thing in this alarmist fear mongering is the key 'if' - if the Liberal party puts the Greens ahead of Labor. Well surely that means if the two main parties want to continue their cosy duopoly, they should preference each other. There, that'd make sense for the electorate. A vote for Labor is a vote for the Liberals, and a vote for the Liberals is a handy vote for the Labor party. Anything but the Greens ...

But back to Polonius, now terribly anxious and befuddled:

It is understandable why Gillard reached an agreement with independent MPs Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor to form a minority government - and she tried to do a deal with the independent Bob Katter. Yet the rationale for the Labor-Greens deal was never obvious.

No, no, the idea of doing anything about climate change - to be seen to be actually doing something, anything - with the Greens in a position to swing the balance of power in the Senate by the time any bill hits the upper house is beyond translucent. It's totally opaque, completely impenetrable, as is the notion that parliamentarians should sit down together and try to nut out an effective response. So much simpler and more cogent to adopt the Dr. No line ...

As usual, it's the cardigan wearers that have muddied the waters and got it all wrong, not understanding that there was never a doubt for a single moment that there'd be a minority Labor government:

Sarah Ferguson's program "The Deal" on Four Corners last night demonstrated a certain naivety on the part of the presenter and her producer.

Ferguson was convinced by the two independents that they made up their minds to support Labor at the very last moment.

Indeed. What would the independents know about their actual state of mind? They were just pulling the wool over the eyes of the hapless ABC, themselves and the country all along. From the very beginning they were just lick spittle Marxist fellow travellers:

But Windsor was on record as equating the National Party with a cancerous condition. And, as Claire Harvey reported in The Sunday Telegraph last weekend, Oakeshott formed the view a decade ago that the Nationals were imbued with racism.

In view of this, it is highly unlikely that either man would have backed a government in which the National Party leader, Warren Truss, was the deputy prime minister.

Isn't hindsight a grand thing? The most useful kind of sight ...

Actually the reason was quite possibly simpler. Once the Liberals got the chair, and the polls swung their way, they'd have been off to the electorate, and ready to do the dirt on the independents. Or is that too Machiavellian?

Unlike Bandt and Wilkie, who won Labor seats, Oakeshott and Windsor had reason to maintain they were open-minded since they held conservative seats. Gillard could not afford to take a risk with either. But she and her advisers did not need to embrace what the Coalition has labelled the Labor-Greens alliance.

Uh huh. So you sit on a committee together and suddenly it's an alliance, signed, sealed and delivered. I guess that means if you sit in parliament together you're also in an alliance ...

But you know there's something still missing, some magic element or potion. Sure the ABC cardigan wearers are to blame for a lot, along with the lick spittle independents, but with the nation almost equally divided, in a state of fine balance, we should be careful about underestimating or overstating anything:

Some Labor operatives erred in underestimating Abbott and it would be unwise for the Liberal Party to underestimate Gillard's ability to revive Labor.

Yes, yes, it's a critical time. Remind us once again who to blame for the Greens:

If the divide prevails, the next election will probably be decided in the suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, in the seats now held by Oakeshott and Windsor in northern NSW, on the NSW central coast and in northern Tasmania. This is where there is likely to be a greater concern about rising power bills than the Greens' climate change agenda, which is popular among the party's radical middle-class base of inner-city professionals, academics, public servants and superannuants.

Eek, it's the radical middle-class, rampant in their radicalism. The suits storming the battlements, with leather patches on their elbows, or perhaps a nice string of fake pearls.

It's the elitist sophisticates, who yesterday were doing down sport, ruining Australia and chattering about the y'arts, and today demanding that Australians pay huge power bills to satisfy their idle whims about the environment. And not one of them owns a four wheel drive vehicle designed to tow the boat they don't own up the mountain they don't live near by ...

Or is that just the familiar sound of bees buzzing around in the besotted bonnet of our chattering Polonius, a certified member of the inner city elite professional class?

To win again, Gillard needs to increase Labor's vote in the suburbs and regions. These are the parts of the Australia where the electorate is least impressed by photos of a Labor-Greens unity ticket.

Hang on, hang on. It's only the chattering sophisticated elites who bother to read the Herald. The rest are happy with tabloids, like the Daily Terror and The Australian and the HUN... (we keed, The Australian just has the heart of a tabloid) ...

No one else cares a toss, while the inner city elites know the blather about a Labor-Greens unity ticket is ... well, to put it simply, blather ...

If the Labor party and the Greens run a unity ticket in the next state election in Marrickville, we'll be first to eat our hat - tomato sauce allowed - if the prattling Polonius is right about a single photo - in fine Sontagian fashion - representing a unity ticket ...

Because the way Henderson's set it up, it's a lose lose scenario. Labor loses the inner suburban seats because of an alliance - an alliance which exists in the mind of Tony Abbott and Polonius - or it loses the outer metropolitan seats because of an alliance carefully sold as a pup to the punters, or hopefully the electorate turns on the lickspittle treacherous independents because they were socialists and Dr No haters all along.

Whichever way you turn, it's all about how Dr. No might come to power ...

Meanwhile, might it not be better for the Labor government to enter into discussions with both Greens and independents to structure a policy response to climate change that might include taking the first tentative steps towards re-structuring the Australian economy towards more efficient energy use?

You know, an actual policy, actually implemented. Instead of getting spooked by photos and pundits who seem to think that Dr. No is the only way forward?

Yep, a long weekend away, and already we're back on the pond listening to the pundits berate the ABC and the inner city sophisticated elites ...

Same as it ever was. If only they'd bugger off to Kellyville, and give up their elite inner city professional chattering columnist ways ...

(Below: and now a joke for film buffs, with the opening title from Les Carabiniers, and samples of the postcards seized by the two soldiers as war booty, and inner city nonsense about death looking like sleep or a Greens Labor unity ticket alliance).