Murdoch's minions, and how to waste government money, unless it's a program about the hypocrisy of Andrew Bolt's disgust ...

(Above: are you living up to the Australian American dream this Xmas?)

By golly, the hits have dropped off this blog. The small readership seems to have jumped off a cliff, and in the land of the lotus down under the Xmas season does call.

If only it was because I'd managed to alienate every possible reader in the blogosphere. Sad to say, I suspect it's also partly due to the needs of material consumption - where would Xmas be without materialism - and to public servants going on holidays.

That's right, you fat cat bureaucrats, indolently ruining the world while spending your well paid days wasting time reading the blogs. What about the mission statements, and the beavering away to make Australia a world class country and a haven for the free markets?

Okay, never mind that you don't do a shred of work before ten, preferring to read blogs and so boost my hits, until holidays call and the fickle finger of indolence takes you elsewhere, here's what I'll do, I'll balance the fat cat abuse with proof that you're not the only bludgers and welfare cheats doing the rounds.

For starters, it was beguiling to read Ben Eltham's excellent Why do unis still support the Australian Literary Review?

Eltham wondered why the sandstone group of eight universities forked out $500k a year to help chairman Rupert and Oz editor Chris Mitchell look like some kind of Renaissance enlightenment figures, when in a fair world, a resemblance to Genghis Khan might be more noticeable ... especially if it weren't for the unis funding the Australian Literary Review as a kind of intellectual padding, window dressing for the Oz, designed to shore up the rag's feral behaviour and relentless ideological ratbaggery.

Much as he tried, Eltham couldn't come up with a decent reason.

Here at the pond we couldn't come up with a decent answer either, because truth to tell there isn't one, it's completely inexplicable, unless you think Luke Slattery is some kind of inspired editor rather than a Murdoch minion ... unless you think the recently featured Michael Costa is some kind of insightful saint and literary master, instead of a retired Labor party hack ... or unless you think that it's right and proper for the government to make chairman Rupert look good while his minions spend most of their time making government look bad ... or unless you think that it's right and fair for the government to piss money against the wall on the Literary Review, because the cash in the paw is cunningly laundered through the universities in the hope that no one will notice the money comes from the government or hapless fee paying students.

Okay, in its own way, it's no worse than some kind of cultural esoteric version of a pink batts or BER scheme, to name but two of the lizard Oz's routine rants about wasteful government spending.

Strangely, we choke, gag, and fail to swallow the lumpy porridge of News Corp publications, when they routinely and regularly carry on about government spending being an evil waste of the taxpayers' money ... because they manage at the same time and in the same breath to stick out the paw and indulge in this kind of cash grab hypocrisy. (Actually, it felt more like choking on our vomit, but we didn't think channeling Jimi Hendrix or Mama Cass was the best way forward today ... or anyway didn't Cass just have a heart attack?)

But it did remind us just how much Murdoch and News Corp love to suck on the public teat.

Want another example? How about Foxtel putting out its hand to Screen Australia for subsidy of documentaries and dramas?

That's right, while Murdoch's minions rabbit on about the free market and the waste of taxpayer money, a narrowcaster with one third of the national audience sucks on the teat of the taxpayer, takes the cash, then shoves the result behind the paywall.

Oh sure you can buy the stuff on DVD down the track, unless Channel BT's your thing, or a show might earn a broadcast on FTA down the track via a window, but two thirds of the mug punters out in taxpayer land are forking over cash for shows funded in the national cultural interest, which they can then only see by forking over more cash to chairman Rupert ...

Go figure at the sense in that.

By the way, did I mention the key players on the board of Screen Australia that sanction this? Glen Boreham's the chair, and Ian Robertson's the deputy chair, and you can read about the rest of the fellow travellers here, and meanwhile the sanctimonious Kim Williams pretends that free to air broadcasters, especially the ABC, are kissing cousins to Satan, as he puts out his paw for a little assistance with his programming. Try explaining to an American at HBO how that works ...

What about key performance indicators you ask?

How does shoving programming behind a paywall, which two thirds of the Australian public refuse to pay, help Screen Australia's KPI to develop, produce and promote and provide access to diverse Australian programs? You know, to invest in a range of audience-engaging and culturally relevant programs ...

Well, silly, it's bleeding obvious, you engage the audience and give them access by encouraging them to subscribe to a Murdoch paywall.

And you make it culturally relevant by offering it to people who can afford to pay. And you don't provide any audience numbers whatsoever, because if you did they'd be embarrassing. So you do that for the ABC and SBS, and you let sweet old Foxtel, sweet hypocritical member of the Murdoch empire, off the hook ...

Yep the simple answer in the current Screen Australia annual report is to have a bunch of watered down KPIs of the most pathetic kind, and in the case of Foxtel, not have any key performance indicators of any kind (don't believe me, want to nod off while reading a pdf? Go here for the 09/10 annual report. Warning, tedious, may devour bandwidth).

There, that takes care of that.

Go on Ben Eltham, give Screen Australia and Foxtel a going over, and I bet you come to the same conclusion as you did about the Australian Literary Review.

There's the government funding cultural activities, and then there's the vampires working for Chairman Rupert sucking deep on the necks of Australian taxpayers (yes, mixed metaphor man, we've gone from fat cats to vampires and taxpayers' blood, and I still have the urge to mention pigs).

The only upside? Nobody gives a fuck, because nobody wants to watch Australian content ...

Ah well, coterie of readers, brave small band of anarcho Marxist brothers and sisters on a Saurday, that's it for the rant.

Fat cat public servants take a deep breath, and sigh in relief. Deep down chairman Rupert loves you and your cash, providing you know how to present the right kind of funding form to the right kind of board, and knock down the cash to the most generous private bidder without worrying too much about actual KPIs.

Regional Halliburtonism anyone? Did we mention that Peter Garrett was once in charge of this wretched organisation? Anyone up for a verse of Short Memory? If you read the history books, you'll see the same things happen again and again ...

Now where were we? Well happily the last Saturday before Saturday Xmas was made a little happier by John Birmingham's savaging yesterday of Andrew Bolt in Are your hands clean of blood, Andrew? (and pray tell me subbie why the title isn't the same as the header that comes up in the browser, Andrew Bolt Spits Rhetorical Gob Of Purest Partisan Venom, which rather neatly captures the tone).

It seems Bolt got up Birmingham's nose with his usual blend of righteousness and hypocrisy, so Birmingham took to him with the ferocity of a greyhound in company with a real rabbit, as he contemplates the conundrum of the fools who cheered on the Iraq war, then wonder why people are still fleeing Iraq for what they perceive as safer havens:

As did Bolt himself, I would argue, being one of the crudest advocates of that war and the aftermath from which so many have fled, or tried to flee, until they ran into the Ring of Iron with which he would protect us from the bloody anarchy his heroes loosed upon the world.

If Julia Gillard has blood on her hands, Mister Bolt, might we look forward to the spectre of John Howard scraping at his palms one day and muttering, “Out, out damn’d spot”.

Will you attend him then with the same loyalty and steadfastness that kept you at his side through the bloodswarm he helped unleash upon Iraq, from whence at least some of the dead hailed this week? Might you ponder you own hands then?

Are they clean?

Well, of course they're not clean, but you can't expect a delusional man to acknowledge any mistakes. I took it as a purely rhetorical question, in much the same way as Fareed Zakaria, after dismissing Glenn Beck's notion of 10% of Muslims being terrorists, wondered what you might call Glenn Beck - if supporting anger against the American government makes you a terrorist. How would you describe Glenn Beck? (here)

It gets you to wondering how you might describe an antipodean Glenn Beck.

And here we have a confession to make. We sometimes feel guilty about Andrew Bolt not being represented on the pond, because without doubt he's the looniest lad of all the commentariat - you know, in that fairy story where the commentariat columnist keeps looking at the mirror and asking "did I not just write the ugliest column in the land", the mirror always answers "truly you are the vilest of the vile".

But also truth to say we simply don't have the stomach to deal with Bolt on a daily basis. That's best left to others, like the stoic Spartans at Pure Poison who step into the cesspit of depravity regularly ...

Instead we're left to read the likes of Birmingham or Mike Carlton for a little balance, as with Carlton today, scribbling Spare us this disgusting hypocrisy, berating Bolt as a village idiot, along with the equally uncouth Tim Blair:

The selective cynicism is despicable, the hypocrisy disgusting. It doesn't get much nastier than to employ the death of innocents as a political weapon.

It did of course get much nastier, as Carlton points out, in the Howard years, and we've yet to see the WikiLeaks documents from those days. Meanwhile, Carlton offers a taster:

Thursday's lot of WikiLeaks cables blew the Tory gaff. American diplomats in Canberra reported that a ''key Liberal Party strategist'' told them last year the refugee issue was ''fantastic'' for the opposition. ''The more boats that come the better,'' this anonymous guru was quoted as saying. So much for the crocodile tears over the dead and the traumatised.

Carlton rounds out his piece with a fond memory of James Dibble - now there was a newsreader - and the way a cargo cult developed around Oprah Winfrey in her down under incarnation.

We tend to get a little defensive when we're reminded how there's very little difference between various forms of cargo cultism in the Pacific region - truth to tell the NSW Labor party couldn't exist without its own peculiar form of cargo cultism - and damned if Oprah didn't outdo John Frum in her cultish behaviour.

Well at least it gives me an idea for something to do this weekend.

Must whip up a one pager, let's call it The Disgust of Hypocrisy, or perhaps The Hypocrisy of Disgust or how about The Righteousness of Disgusting Hypocrisy, and head off to Screen Australia to make a documentary for Foxtel about the appalling cavortings of the Murdoch media.

What's that you say, it'll never fly? But, but, I've already built an aeroplane designed to collect the booty ...

(Below: oh sure, it's only a replica, found here, but there's more than enough room for me and a half dozen of the commentariat bleating about wasteful government spending, except on the war in Iraq and on Murdoch publications, and oodles of government cash which would otherwise be wasted on useless things like schools or a cheaper tertiary education).