Paul Kelly, and another we'll all be rooned spray from the insider media elite ...

(Above: no it's not just you, Paul Kelly thinks like a cartoonist too).

After his epic offering WikiLeaks heralds the birth of Fellow Travellers 2.0, heroic Chris Gardiner will have a tremendous amount of work to do, naming and shaming the lick spittle Fellow Travellers who are enabling WikiLeaks and so reducing western civilisation to rubble.

Why only this morning another preening journalist outed himself as a notable Fellow Traveller, as Cameron Forbes scribbles Trusted news gatekeepers will endure:

The marvellous WikiLeaks trove proves the point. Whatever the cloaks and the technology, whatever the daggers aimed at Julian Assange, this has basically been the product of good, old-fashioned journalism, with newspapers such as this one doing the culling and providing the context.

Shame Mr Forbes shame, and all the more shocking that you present this boastful self-congratulation in the context of a Gentlemen's Discussion Group, which women rarely attend. I'm hopeful that Mr. Gardiner will be sending his thought police around this very morning to issue you a Fellow Traveller ticket. Trusted gatekeeper indeed! Lickspittle lackey of an anarcho Marxist is your new lot in life ...

Oh dear, playing the McCarthyite game is so intoxicating and such fun, and if enough hysteria can be whipped up, we might be able to ruin people's lives on a whim and a false accusation. Such joy.

Someone else who should be on Mr. Gardiner's list is Paul Kelly, a man so dull that not even Mr. Sheen can produce a lively shiny surface.

If ever you wanted to read a bizarre metaphor, Kelly does his best in No time to rest on our laurels, as he explains how we've all been rooned, are currently in the process of being rooned, or shortly will be rooned:

The failures of the Australian cricket team have become a bizarre metaphor for the nation; too pampered and too complacent, it has lost competitive excellence and successful implementation.

Can we amend that? Cricket as a bizarre metaphor for the state of a nation suggests a pampered complacent scribbler with too much time on his hands - perhaps as much as five days, like the flanneled fools who go out in the noon day sun and flog a leather ball around and drive any sensible spectator of this Cowardian folly to contemplate ending it all.

Five days of wasted life, and for this we should strive for, with competitive excellence and successful implementation?

Someone get some soap and wash the bitter ashes out of Mr. Kelly's mouth, and never let us speak of cricket again.

Meanwhile, the rest of Kelly's piece is an epic bout of doomism and gloomism, proving that the spirit of Hanrahan is still alive in this country. Everything is at risk, more crises loom, the very notion of fairness threatens productivity, and there are alarming signs that the sheep, instead of settling down to work hard and get a good shearing, might want to break out of the back paddock.

The warming warning bells are clamouring - if climate change nonsense doesn't get you coming, then quoting Ross Garnaut talking about great complacency undermining Australia's national purpose and direction will get you going.

Judith Sloan, in a rare analysis, comes to the rare analysis that there are distinct threats to the economy, while the OECD reports Australia's maths testing is stuffed, and the gap between the lowest and highest socioeconomic groups is three years schooling, which is why we must give more money to the rich, so that the "trickle down" understanding of maths will kick into gear ...

Oh quickly waiter, give me another port, I say by jingo that's not a bad drop, now where was I?

During the past generation the OECD praised the "Australian model" of pro-market reform based on leadership, identifying and selling reforms that united equity and productivity. But that model has faded, lost in a mire of retail politics, short-termism, renewed regulation and faith in deeper government control.

Oh dear, within a generation, we were in the golden years of the Howard government, embarking on international adventures without a care in the world, winning at cricket, and putting the boot in to the wharfies and the builders' labourers and now all is lost ...

Treasurer Wayne Swan rightly says Australia is perfectly placed to enjoy the transfer of global economic power from the West to Asia. Sounds great. But ask another question: is Australia in its values more at home with declining Europe or with rising Asia? In Asia the values are personal improvement, economic competition, educational excellence, national pride, strong family ties, cultural traditionalism and rising religious faith. Are these Australia's values? Let's get honest: this list is anathema to much of the social-democratic and Green progressivism that shapes Labor thinking.

Yes, yes, this is what we need, strident calls to embrace the cultural values of Asia and a rising religious faith.

At last a man ready to face down Australia's values and make a clarion call for the Islamisation of the country. Or if not Islam, then perhaps the one party policy, which along with the one child policy, has made China a most suitable country to emulate. And what a dab internet filter they have. No slacking off to look at porn in China.

Not to mention a most useful attitude to corruption and bribery as a way of doing business and politics, the sort of thing that is woefully under-exploited in this country, along with children, who simply refuse to go off to factories to make shoes and iPads, and so are quickly bringing Australia to ruin ...

Why only this morning, there was talk in the lizard Oz of the wealthy and the political class in India laundering $19 billion a year (Disillusioned by rampant graft scandals), and while it's sometimes said that India isn't really part of Asia, being more an adjoining super power, still it has immaculate values, and a wonderful sense that people living in poverty can keep living in poverty, provided the rich can make out as bandits, and they do, and here's the capper ... they do tremendously well at cricket and are currently, so I'm told, top of the world.

Oh I know I said we need never talk of cricket again, but look what it says about a country on the move. Perhaps what we need are the religious values of Hinduism, and a caste system, and cow worship, so that we can immediately promote Paul Kelly into the ranks of the braying Brahmins ... while removing beef and bacon from the national diet.

Once he's Brahmin, Kelly can don a decent set of clean rishi clothes to deliver this kind of clap trap:

The GFC has delivered a shattering intellectual and moral message to the world: while the US is wounded, the European model is crippled. Europe's system of government debt, entrenched welfare, extensive regulation and mushy "tolerance towards all" as its unifying value is broken. Does Labor not see the obvious?

Extensive regulation? Would that be the extensive regulation that saw the banks of Ireland go off over the bogs and moors chasing the imaginary hound of infinite wealth?

What I most love is the way pundits like Kelly - some might call them a handsomely paid media elite - can attribute a GFC to welfare and government debt and extensive regulation, when nakedly and in the most bleedingly obvious fashion, welfare recipients were not running the banks, not indulging in mortgage speculation of the most baleful kind and not earning tidy Wall Street size bonuses in the process.

Meanwhile, the real bandits get away scot free, propped up by loans from anxious governments, who had in the past decade or so abandoned sensible regulation, and left everything to the greed of the markets, and were then astonished to discover that bankers could indeed be speculative, greedy risk-takers ...

Just a quick look at the celtic tiger - we had a sense of doom the time we were there and saw the skies littered with cranes and the tedious work being done by European imports, including a plentiful swag of Poles - would sweep away Kelly's guff, and establish that Ireland, like Iceland before it, was sold a free market pup, which was supposed to deliver untold benefits but actually turned into the Hound of the Baskervilles ...

But as a result, one thing's true. These days it's very hard to extend mushy tolerance towards the kind of simple-minded, stupefyingly prejudiced dumbness on view in Kelly's piece.

Waiter, bring me another port. Yes, I might try that Hardy's vintage drop from '54. Oh that's splendid stuff, I feel a concluding flourish coming on ...

It is time Labor put steel into its intellectual thinking.

Yes, yes because if it's like the pig iron and popcorn on view in Paul Kelly, we're all doomed.

The requirements for national success have rarely been more obvious.

Yes, yes, Asian values, and Islam and Hinduism and perhaps a dash of Buddhism and secular Communism for balance, and a one party state, or at least an ability to get the leader of the opposition sent to jail on sodomy charges, and a one child policy, and children to go to work in factories or the fields if they can't do a decent day of maths, and never mind the pollution, or the corruption, it's all so we can move forward into the future utilising Asian values ...

Yet they are never articulated in Canberra's insider political-media culture.

And never mind that I'm an editor at large for The Australian, and so a member of the insider political-media culture, and have myself failed in this piece in a most singular and spectacular way to actually set out meaningful requirements for national success, whatever that might mean, apart from somehow getting our act together and beating the Indians at cricket. Or even the English ...

No, that's for others. Now, wait a second, let's play a game of eeny, meeny, miney moe, well at least the politically correct versions:

Over the summer Gillard should do some hard thinking, then lay down a few home truths about Australia's direction in place of the weasel words that pass for such debate.

Yes, it's your turn Julia, Paul Kelly has done his bit of weasel wording, now what are you going to do about a nation emulating its cricketers and turning into a bunch of mollygrubber tossers, or worse still, turning into a bunch of wankers and emulating Paul Kelly blathering on about Asian values in a myopic, rear end of the telescope way?

You know, it was bad enough to have to endure years of headmasters and prefects yammering away in my ear about how we must all pull up our stockings (or our socks), but to listen to Kelly pontificate like a goose in this way is verging on the intolerable. Enough of mushy tolerance, strip him of his Brahminism and turn him into an untouchable, or at least an unreadable ...

What has she got to lose?

Well perhaps she's got nothing to lose, but I am worried about the sanity of the nation if someone starts preaching the values of Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Vietnam and so on to Australians.

They don't play cricket ...

"We'll all be rooned," said O'Kellyhan,
In accents most forlorn,
Outside the church, ere Mass began,
One frosty Sunday morn.

The congregation stood about,
Coat-collars to the ears,
And talked of stock, and crops, and drought,
As it had done for years.

"It's looking crook," said Daniel Croke;
"Bedad, it's cruke, me lad,
For never since the banks went broke
Has seasons been so bad."

"It's dry, all right," said young O'Neil,
With which astute remark
He squatted down upon his heel
And chewed a piece of bark.

And so around the chorus ran
"Cricketers will lose again, no doubt."
"We'll all be rooned," said O'Kellyhan,
"Before the year is out."

(apologies to John O'Brien and you can read his original exposure of the Kelly psyche - without a glass of port - in Said Hanrahan here).

(Below: as always there are retail opportunities when times are tough, so we look forward to Mr. Kelly opening his own chain around the country shortly).