Gerard Henderson, and a little forgetfulness and pixie dust will fix what ails ya ...

(Above: Tony Abbott explaining how the carbon tax swung the NSW election).

Shock, horror, fear and loathing.

The dastardly wretched inner city elites and cardigan wearing ABC listeners failed to vote into office the Greens candidates standing in two New South Wales inner city latte sipping chardonnay swilling elitist electorates.

Of course it was Gerard Henderson that warned of the danger:

... the Greens' climate change agenda ...is popular among the party's radical middle-class base of inner-city professionals, academics, public servants and superannuants. (here)

According to Henderson, this dangerous clique of elitists gave the Greens a "real chance" of winning the seats.

But that was way back when. Now the record shows the Greens are on their way to losing when the results are officially declared.

This seems to allow only two possibilities. The dangerous elitists listened to Gerard Henderson's sage advice, proving that they are in fact lickspittle followers of conservative commentariat commentators, or they managed to vote without benefit of Henderson's sage advice, proving that Henderson is down at the bottom of the class with Bob Ellis when it comes to rabbiting on about the workings of inner city elites ...

Not to worry. This week our prattling Polonius continues on his usual wretched way, blathering on Credit where it's due - they just didn't see him coming, about the inner city and its constituency in ways full of Henderson's usual preposterous stereotypes:

Yesterday on ABC News Breakfast, the Melbourne academic Waleed Aly told the Melbourne journalist Michael Rowland that a carbon tax had nothing to do with the extent of Labor's defeat in NSW. Don't believe it. Academics and journalists spend a lot of time speaking to each other and to well-educated and relatively well-off professionals in permanent or at least secure employment.

Ah, those well off professionals. And what's worse they're well educated. Shame, boo, hisssss, shun them. What we need is mindless ignorance and a sheep-like unemployed pitch fork carrying rabble ... so they can turn up to Liberal party rallies.

And aaahh, the carbon tax. No doubt that explains why the polls in 2010 were so strong for the Labor party, and it's only the carbon tax that turned things around. At random I travelled back in the google tardis to this report, NSW Labor slumps to new low in polls from June 30, 2010:

NSW Labor under the leadership of Premier Kristina Keneally is polling worse than when former Premier Nathan Rees was pushed from the job in December last year.

The Newspoll results found that if an election were held today, NSW Labor would receive only 25 percent of the total vote and be almost entirely wiped out in NSW. The latest survey is based on 1,280 interviews among voters conducted over the last month, with a maximum margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Yes, yes, it must be the carbon tax of 2010 that did the damage.

But wait, hang on a moment, surely the carbon tax came a little later? Could it be that academics and journalists spend a lot of time remembering the news that they reported or read, and that the likes of Henderson spend a lot of time disremembering anything that smacks of inconvenient reality. Much like Bob Ellis ...

The Coalition made its biggest inroads on Saturday in outer suburban and regional areas, among the less educated and the less well off and where employment (for those who are in the workforce) is not all that secure. The fact is that men and women who run their own businesses, and who have dependent children, are less likely to embrace a carbon tax than inner-city sixty-something professors. Sure, Labor was almost destined to lose in NSW after 16 years of office. However, the extent of the defeat is not explained according to normal criteria. This election was different.

Ah yes, those inner-city sixty-something professors who infest the inner west like cockroaches, and who singlehandedly have voted the Greens into power in Balmain and Marrickville. Except somehow they didn't.

Could it be because the number of sixty years and over people in Marrickville amount to 16.88% of population (here) while the sixty years and over brigade in Penrith amount to 17.31% (here). Even more remarkable, if you lump together the top two occupations in Penrith - clerical and administrative workers - they amount to 35% - while in Marrickville professionals and clerical and administrative workers combined manage a respectable 43%.

How many university professors of sixty something age live in the inner west is a matter between Henderson and the bee roaming in perpetual motion in his bonnet.

It's the richness and baldness and breathtaking exaggeration of Henderson that puts him firmly in the Ellis camp of overblown exaggeration and distorting rhetoric.

"This election was different'?!

This election was called a year ago by the polls, and kept being called on a poll by poll basis month by month, with the result always a foregone conclusion.

Only lap poodles firmly in Tony Abbott's lap could manage to conflate the effect of a carbon tax with the foregone result of a year's standing.

Now it's understandable why Abbott would make the link. What's to lose when you're a climate change denialist who isn't a climate change denialist, and who managed to somehow associate himself with the likes of Pauline Hanson and a few extremists bussed in for a pathetically small rally.

As if somehow middle mainstream Australia is prone to demonstrating and demonstrations, when in my Anglo-Celtic tradition, no one dreamed of hitting the streets in a protest rally. We were too busy learning how to stand politely in queues ...

So Abbott needed a little pixie dust, and he'll grab any kind of magic spell and mantra in the hope of causing federal fear and doubt.

But why does Henderson think as a commentator that he too can put on the emperor's new clothes and no one will notice or remember the long standing poll results?

In the lead-up to the federal election last year, Labor underestimated Abbott. In the lead-up to the NSW election this year, Labor failed to appreciate that O'Farrell - and not the likes of Byrne and Parker - was the threat to its heartland. Labor's error at both federal and state levels has been to focus too much on inner-city concerns at the expense of the voters living in the suburbs and regions.

Which is of course blather of the most superficial kind. It's actually Henderson that has a bee in his bonnet about the alleged inner city concerns, without having a clue what they might actually be.

You see, if you live in the Newtown area, the kind of inner-city concern that bubbled up in relation to the state government was the long time it took to do a makeover of Newtown railway station (slowly beginning to happen, sorry Stanmore and Macdonaldtown, keep waiting patiently in line), and provide handicapped access.

Or how about getting agitated at the way trains kept skipping minor stations, or bemoaning the way buses suddenly became 'pre-buy' only, for the convenience of the buses and not occasional users, or what about the incessant need to campaign against the RTA and the government to prevent yet another freeway being ploughed through suburban streets ... thereby connecting outer city motorhead loons to inner-city concerns about being swamped by traffic ... or arguing for years in favour of light rail, only to be told it was unaffordable, only to be offered an extension as the bloodbath loomed ... or wondering how any government could urinate hundreds of millions of dollars against the wall on a metro scheme that will never be built ...

And so on and so forth. In the old days these would have been called bread and butter issues, and the reality is that in the usual way, the Labor party ignored its inner city constituencies and their state-based, state-funded concerns (go stand in emergency in Royal Prince Albert in Carillon avenue, and see how you feel about the health system; watch as public schools go underfunded and scientology schools pick up a hall, and see how you feel about the education system). Instead they frolicked off chasing the voters in the swinging outer city electorates.

There's a condescension and an arrogance and a complete incapacity to understand life in the city which makes any read of Henderson profoundly bemusing and amusing. Take this non-sequitur which is his closing par:

If you are of modest means and having trouble paying the power bill, it stands to reason that climate change is not the greatest moral challenge of our time.

Yep, it seems those ageing inner city professors simply have no problem paying their power bill, and that anyone living in the inner city must surely be of exaggerated and astonishing means.

I must remind the pensioner next door that she is a person of immoderate means, before I head around the corner to tell the pensioners there that their immodest lifestyle and conspicuous consumption of electricity and their willingness to toss electricity bills into the air like confetti is ruining the tone of the neighbourhood ...

Hey ho, that's the way it goes. And as usual, climate change is presented as a simple-minded either/or matter involving electricity bills or university professors.

It's amazing that Henderson fancies himself as superior in thinking to said ageing university professors while indulging in such elegant reductionist logic.

Well here's the thing. Let Henderson, and by extension Tony Abbott, keep following the carbon tax mantra down the rabbit hole, and let Abbott hold a dozen more tea party rallies, and see where it gets him.

Let Abbott keep dog whistling and denying, and taking the credit for the NSW election result, and attributing a hefty whack of it to the carbon tax, and see where it gets him. And let little sir echo keep doing the same in his columns.

The notion that the electorate is unintelligent is one of the greater follies of any politician, just like the notion that voters only care for their hip pocket, and have no greater understanding or motivation when it comes to voting. It is a profound form of cynicism, and Abbott is, in his own way, a profoundly cynical and shrill politician at the moment.

What does it get you? Well amazingly for the Courier Mail, it gets you this kind of commentary by Paul Syvret in Abbott takes the wrong approach to Right way of thinking.

Trawling through the attendees at the carbon tax tea party, Syret notes in passing the presence of the Australian League of Rights, the Citizens Electoral Council, the tattered remnants of One Nation, Pauline Hanson, and empty minded, motor mouthed shock jocks, a potpourri of the most base and ugely elements of Australian society:

... for the purposes of attacking (is he capable of anything else?) Labor's carbon scheme, these are the new best friends Abbott chose to associate himself with last week.

If, as one of the placards claimed, Julia Gillard is "Bob Brown's bitch", then by the same logic of association does this make Abbott the concubine of the likes of the League of Rights and the rest of these fringe-dwellers?

Or maybe he just thinks everything except his divine right to the prime ministerial office is "crap", regardless of principle, fact or common decency.

Henderson's argument that the carbon tax played a significant role in the NSW election is just part of the same addle-headed, fringe-dwelling nonsense.

And still Abbott goes on sticking his foot in it, as does his concubine Gerard Henderson (I'm assured such terms are now a moderate and elevated in tone part of the political discourse, only opposed by princesses), as you can read in Abbott won't take back climate comments.

So is there any upside for Henderson in carrying on like a right wing Bob Ellis?

Hardly. Right at this moment I can see an angry mob of sixty something professors congregating in the streets of Newtown with placards, and preparing to storm the Sydney Institute in agitated, over-excited protest at Henderson's defamatory column ...

By golly, there must be six or seven of them ... I understand one had to go to hospital for a hip replacement ...

Oh it's just another day reading the self seeking, self serving commentariat. Time to get out into the real world ...

(Below: an important scientific observation of professors).