Gerard Henderson, and once more with feeling and surging silliness, beware the fatalistic eco-catastrophists ...

(Above: a mood setter from First Dog, more here).

Everybody has an opinion, which is why the pond is full of shrieking, squawking, unsubstantiated opinion mongering of the worst kind on a daily basis.

It's an amateur sport, requiring no facts, research, reason or analytical thinking.

But the idea of having a professional opinion - being a paid up member of the chattering commentariat class, obliged to dump a load of opinions on a sometimes unsuspecting public on a weekly basis - is vaguely disturbing, a bit like those lumpen working class oafs forced to walk through the professional gate in cricket in the good old days ...

Not that Gerard Henderson is a working class oaf. He's a paid up piece of spouting on a drain pipe, full of predictable thunderstorm opinions, handsomely on view in Don won't, but Libs can stop left, routinely featuring either bias in the ABC, or the Greens, or fatalistic eco-catastrophists ...

As an opening flourish this week, the garrulous gargoyle Henderson celebrates the return of Don in David Williamson's Don Parties On:

There is a lot to be said for the Williamson genre. The playwright is entertaining and witty, the audience stay awake and return after the interval and most have a good time. What's more, Williamson's work is commercially successful and does not require the support of taxpayers.

The current production is being staged by the Melbourne Theatre Company, which on its home page, replete with logos, notes:

Melbourne Theatre Company is assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body and by the State Goverment of Victoria through Arts Victoria. (here)

And the MTC now resides in a splendid 500 seat theatre, with bonus intimate studio space, part of a recent Victorian Government support for the arts package worth $128 million. And when in Sydney, the MTC loves to perform at the Sydney Theatre which is managed by the STC, which is of course handsomely funded by government on a state and federal level (oh and did we mention that the STC's Walsh Bay home is equipped with the largest building-integrated solar photovoltaic array in the country as part of a $1.17 million greening program under the NSW Climate Change Fund?)

As a writer, Williamson himself has done handsomely through fees derived from film and television productions funded courtesy of the 10B/10BA tax break government funding days, and knows how to sign a begging letter to the Australia Council (see the AWG petition for Guild funding here).

The notion that Williamson is somehow a commercial success on his own, and above the government funding scene, is risible, since all the arts bandits have had, will have or are having a finger in the trough, one way or another, and nothing wrong with that.

This saw is sometimes spread by artists upset with the way they get ravaged by the critics (and Williamson has certainly been ravaged), and reminds me of the way that Paul Cox used to boast how he didn't need government funding bodies because his films were commercially successfully. That was before I saw the returns on his government assisted films ...

It's not the main point in Henderson's article, but it tends to discount anything he scribbles as riddled with ideologically driven ill-informed sly innuendoes about the role of government in the arts - oh let's face, why not just call it out as the pig stupid jab of ignorant bias that it is.

Let's see Williamson four wall a theatre, put on his play and see how he makes out without benefit of the MTC ... But why would he? He's no fool ... not like some who live in an ideologically pure Alice in non-funding land ...

The rest of Henderson's piece is a typical Polonius pontification about the dangers of the greens.

Let's just highlight the key notions: eco catastrophists, a move to the Greens in inner-city areas of the capital cities (and the STC and MTC), but the dangerous virus, often present in thespians, and David Williamson, has been contained, and has yet to reach the suburbs, regional centres or rural areas, which can be relied upon to keep on putting up MacMansions and ravaging their environment and their bodies, because fat is good, and its dangers vastly over-rated (oops that snuck in from Michael Duffy's Counterpoint) ...

... and Barry O'Farrell needs to take a stance on the Greens, because the Greens standing in Marrickville and Balmain are close to the hard-left Greens camp, and shriek, howl, watch out there's a purple cookie monster under the bed, and it likes to eat the toes of children as they try to clamber under the sheets ...

The Liberal Party, like Labor, has always supported the right of Israel to exist within secure borders. It is the Greens, not Labor, who challenge Israel, question the Australian-American alliance and are soft on counterterrorism legislation. Moreover, the Greens are well to the left of Labor on economic and social issues.

Yes, how outrageous to challenge Israel, and not just toe the line and tug the forelock and say in a humble way, USA all the way, and run the bastards over and so on and so forth, in lock step like robotic automatons with a single world view, and a single culture. One language, one law, one culture, one blinkered eye, one viewpoint, on and on until the end of time ... and let's just keep on vetoing resolutions so building can keep on apace in Gaza (generously supported by government funding of course).

Meanwhile, at a time when the middle east is in turmoil, it takes a blithely blinkered outlook to hark back to the days of H. V. Evatt and the left's support of Israel (and never mind that in any other context, Evatt would be dismissed as barking mad by the right wing commentariat). And to scribble this:

Byrne and her Greens comrades seem unaware that Israel and increasingly Iraq are the only two democracies in the Middle East and that Arabs who are citizens of Israel have more democratic rights than Arabs domiciled in Arab nations.

Yes, and they're completely unaware of the way the United States poured billions into Egypt in support of the dictator Mubarak and the way the United States is great friends with that repressive monarchical regime in Saudi Arabia, the source of fundamentalist Wahhabism and the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice ... just as they're most unlikely aware that the Minister of Minority Affairs (what a wonderful title) once said that Israel has the most unequal society amongst western nations (here).

And so to the conclusion:

It makes sense for Liberals in inner-city Sydney to give their preferences to Tebbutt ahead of Byrne and to Firth ahead of Parker.

And there I was thinking of voting for the Happy Birthday party, and suddenly it makes wonderful sense to do exactly the opposite of what Gerard Henderson proposes ...

... if nothing else, so a suitable level of funding can be maintained for the greens at the STC, and so David Williamson can proceed on to great commercial success by staging his plays in a tent in the domain ...

(Below: it took a tremendous amount of courage to run this snap of the insufferable pair, found at Blanchett launches star power, but anything to get up the nose of Gerard Henderson).