Christopher Pearson, Piers Akerman, and a very Murdoch story ...

(Above: the bright side of Christian civilisation).

The other night by mistake I happened to catch five searing minutes of Letters and Numbers, the game show produced by Shine Australia, which pollutes the airwaves of SBS in much the same way as you can never get rid of cockroaches from the kitchen in Sydney.

It represents a kind of nadir of broadcasting, thanks to Elisabeth Murdoch, but also thanks to the reappointed CEO Shane Brown, who is still hanging around in 2011, for no particular reason, thanks to the board that reappointed him, led (or perhaps not led) by Carla Zampatti, and featuring Christopher Pearson who was reappointed to another four year turn that only expires in October 2011 ...

Being a site inspired by monotonous repetition and bees in bonnets, we can't stop moaning about the way this once proud, even if recently formed, Australian broadcasting tradition has been comprehensively trashed, when a poverty of budget shouldn't automatically lead to a poverty of ideas ...

Which leads us to Pearson's latest column in The Australian, No sizzle on the nationalist barbie, where belatedly, three long day after Australia Day, he gets agitated about the constitution and the flag and the trashing of national institutions ...

No, he doesn't mention SBS or the National Museum for that matter, but instead settles for a starting shot across the bow of Simon McKeon, who dared to say he was in favour of a republic and a new flag, and so has already got up the nose of Piers "Akker Dakker" Akerman, the Billy Bunter of the press, who goes on a rampage in Under attack but flag will fly.

Akker Dakker lets all barrels fly at McKeon as a symbol of the ideals of inner-city latte lappers across the nation. What a pathetic, spiteful, preening, splenetic attack dog he is, given to verbal diarrhea and rabies of the most peculiar kind, with his call for gracious anonymity and McKeon not lecturing anyone about political causes such as the republic and the flag, and never mind the way Akker Dakker hectors, lectures, bashes and berates from his podium like a din of cicadas in the summer heat ...

But leaving the bilious Akker Dakker to stew in his plentiful juices, we return to Pearson, who of all things then leaves McKeon aside to berate the media, and most particularly the Weekend Magazine of The Australian for running a story by Ross Bilton celebrating Australia Day in the bush ...

Could this be, the pond wonders, a ploy to get people to sign up to the smart edition of The Australian so they can reference the piece?

It's the second week in a row that Pearson's rabbited on about the Weekend Magazine - last week he babbled on about a piece by Kate Legge involving lesbians having babies - and compared to Akker Dakker's full blooded, go for the throat and the carotid artery attack, it's a most peculiar and feeble quibbling bit of nonsense, revolving as it does around whether the good folk in Cambooya might have put a framed picture of young Queen Bess over the door to the men's toilet at the memorial hall.

Perhaps to give comfort to the men as they take a nationalistic piss while thinking god save good Queen Bess ...

After wondering if it's a set up - clearly Pearson hasn't been in many country memorial halls - the plucky lad gets quite a lump in the throat:

No fair-minded observer could doubt that she has honoured her coronation oath of a life lived in service to her people, or that she has been a model of constitutional propriety. As well, for many she's an embodiment of social stability, the rule of law and Christian civilisation.

Christian civilisation? Yes, I know he left out the white man's burden, Lady Di, the talking tampon, and the tremendous way that Britain waged relentless war on heretical Catholics until quite recent times, but you can't cover everything ...

Funnily enough, Pearson objects to an alleged tone of self-congratulatory banality in Bilton's piece.

So he seeks to match Bilton's photographer Patrick Hamilton's talk of barbecued lamb chops, wine and friends (oh no not the wine lappers) with a splendid militarism:

Forget about our country's contributions to defeating fascism in World War II, a more recent triumph in East Timor or battlefield valour in Afghanistan. It's as though, chez Hamilton, remembering them on the national holiday were somehow anachronistic, perhaps almost in bad taste.

I'm not quite sure where this leaves Pearson and the battlefield valour he weekly displays pounding away at a keyboard for The Australian, but it leads to a kind of heretical attack on the good folk of Cambooya, and their concept of mateship and civic virtue:

As if, for Bilton, one self-congratulatory banality weren't enough to be going on with, he tells us that for Hamilton, the kindness of complete strangers to victims of the Brisbane floods "says far more to him about our national identity than the Queen, or the flag, ever will".

Far be it from me to underestimate the Good Samaritan instinct wherever it emerges, but I often wonder whether the notion that we're more richly endowed with it than other countries isn't self-serving mythology.

Yes, far be it from me to be a ponce and a prat, but back in your cages good folk of Cambooya, and rally around the Queen and the flag, instead of indulging in your self-serving mythologies of mateship, helping out, kindness to strangers and community, or even worse lamb chops, wine and friends.

And while you're at it, please read Akker Dakker so you can be filled with venomous fury and loathing at women on stamps, political incorrectness, the bleeding obvious, while filled with joy about Max the dog. It's the News Corp way ...

Never mind, there's a rather jolly coda in Pearson's piece, involving Pearson, Tony Abbott and "some of the more moderate leaders of Sydney's gay community" called together at luncheon to work out ways to get gays to vote Liberal (thanks the lord they were moderate because we all know that most of them are immoderate, raging, outrageous, extremist queens, don't we, not that we indulge in stereotypes).

It seems one of the luncheon's attendees, Garry Wotherspoon, has written a memoir of the event, albeit with a tone, claims Pearson, that's inclined to be 'poisonous'.

Rather unsportingly Pearson doesn't provide a link to the 'poisonous' piece, but here it is, under the header An 'unthreatening' lunch with Tony Abbott ...

Pardon me, I like it so well, let me quote a little chunk as Wotherspoon explains why the ALP's candidate Susan Harben, even though a former President of the Mardi Gras, had a hard time up against Clover Moore:

Harben had lost convincingly, and Pearson and Abbott wanted to meet with us, to build on this anti-ALP sentiment within a community that had some political and economic clout in Sydney.

There was a stunned and incredulous silence when this was explained to us.

Did Abbott and Pearson have any idea who they were dealing with? We were not some cabal of conservatives - most of the gay men at the table would never have voted for the Coalition; it epitomized everything we abhorred. Most attacks on the gay community came from Coalition people such as state National Party MP Peter Rowland-Smith, who wanted the Mardi Gras parade to be banned from Sydney streets; or Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan, Howard’s bovver-boy, who made false accusations under Parliamentary privilege against High Court Justice Michael Kirby; or the National Party’s Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson, who wanted a book featuring two lesbians and their children to be banned from schools.

Those two so-called political sophisticates - Abbott from the refined wastes of Sydney’s North Shore, and Pearson from Adelaide, the "Athens of the South" had utterly misread the Bligh campaign and what it was about, which was having an independent voice in state Parliament, rather than some hack who would do a party’s bidding. Our anti-ALP stance was for Clover, a long-time gay rights supporter, not for the conservatives.

Oh dear, that's a bit severe. The pompous Pearson doesn't quite know how to cope, and so provides his own interpretation of the motivation and meaning of the lunch:

I remember Abbott remarking in a jocular way that if gays could prefer a good independent candidate over a gay Labor candidate, perhaps it was possible that one day they'd prefer a good Liberal candidate in the same way and Labor's stranglehold on the gay vote in Sydney would loosen.

Um yes, but isn't the whole point of the story that Labor didn't have a stranglehold on the gay vote, hence Clover Moore?

Never mind, at the end Pearson tries on a comeback which can only be called bizarre:

For all its venom, had Wotherspoon written this piece during the federal election, it might have lent weight to Abbott's claim that he had longstanding friendships with gay men.

On which benighted, deluded planet might that be? Even as a jest, it's a tragic jest. And then this optimistic flourish:

Can it be that its appearance just before the NSW elections betokens the unthinkable and that Labor is finally losing its stranglehold on the gay vote in Sydney?

You know, the only credible response to that remark is a stunned, incredulous silence.

Oh sure we could point out there's only one electorate where the gay vote is truly meaningful (the Member for Sydney), though it does rumble through a couple of other electorates (come on down north Newtown, Camperdown and Glebe), and that conflating the current situation of the state government in NSW with a gay/straight divide, and the federal scene is utterly bizarre, and that the entire Wotherspoon piece is testament to the way Labor doesn't have a stranglehold on the gay vote in Sydney - hence Clover Moore - but we'll settle for a stunned, incredulous silence.

Yep, Pearson resolutely remains a cloth-eared blow-in gherkin ...

So why not a little more Wotherspoon, remember it's available here, as he notes that, while much was discussed, and Abbott and Pearson were attentive, but not particularly forthcoming, the stunned silence was followed by the wrap ...

As might be expected, the meal ended shortly thereafter. We all paid for our food, and Abbott generously offered to pay for the wine. We Sydney gay men wandered off into the afternoon sun, a trifle befuddled perhaps, but much bemused by these blow-ins. We left Abbott and Pearson on the footpath outside Beppi’s, waiting for the ministerial limousine to sweep them off into a Sydney sunset.

It was a very Sydney story.

Poisonous tone? As opposed to bemused and befuddled? And a funny evocation of a clash of cultures ...

So there you go, Akker Dakker and Pearson, two attack dogs doing their usual rounds, and meanwhile that proud Australian tradition, SBS, laid to waste and ruin, but elsewhere amusing writing to be sampled ...

It's a very Murdoch story ...

(Below: and it's a very old story. You can get an idea of Akker Dakker's tone and visceral contempt for anyone he doesn't like in this leaflet circulated during the anti-conscription campaign during the First World War, found here. Click to enlarge).