Paul Sheehan, Chris Back, and don't just talk about the money, show the conspiracy ...

(Above: some commentator analysts contend this Newtown wall, as sampled from an old Google map, is an apt visual metaphor for the columns of Fairfax scribbler Paul Sheehan - a chaotic, aimless set of confused and meaningless doodles. Wrong!)

(Above: Inside the dark cavernous mind of Paul Sheehan, as imagined by a Newtown street artist on the very same wall. A gloomy approximation of a Victorian railway station with huddled figures overwhelmed by a world about to end by 5 pm Friday. Right!)

Well with that visual introduction, Paul Sheehan had better not disappoint, and sure enough, in Cattlemen driven to desperation by Canberra, everything is doom and gloom

You see, Sheehan has gone all tea party, or at least become a faithful reporter of all the fears and laments of the antipodean tea partiers, and what starts out as a lament about the fate of the live cattle industry takes a most curious detour quite early in the column, as one participant in a cattlecade of trucks explains that the protest involves much more than cattle:

''We were hesitant to participate due to time and cost, but two things put us over the line,'' said Thompson, who will be driving a campervan. ''The first was reading the 340-page Clean Energy Bill 2011 [the federal carbon tax bill], and the other 12 bills to which it is attached.

''The words 'global warming' are not mentioned but monetary transfers to the United Nations are outlined and power is given to an international consortium of finance companies. This bill makes the Copenhagen treaty [COP15] look like a children's book.

Uh huh. An international conspiracy involving the UN and finance companies. Well I guess that lets the banks and the Jews off the hook.

But something even stranger happens in the latter half of the column, when Sheehan takes to quoting WA Liberal Senator Chris Back on the fate of the cattle industry.

Not once does Sheehan quote Back explaining how the filming which took place at the Indonesian abattoirs was a conspiracy involving workers acting out cruelty for the cameras for payment.

This conspiracy much vexed Christopher Pearson at the weekend in The Australian, in Crusaders or live cattle dumb chums?

It's strange to contemplate the possibility that Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig may have made a career-ending blunder on the strength of televised displays of cruelty, which may in turn all have been choreographed by a local activist and-or an over-helpful driver keen to get the customers the footage they were looking for.

Strange indeed, and a weekend is a long time in politics, but still it would have been nice for the tag team of Sheehan and Back to have shed some more light on this career-ending blunder by Joe Ludwig, and provide the evidence which would surely be a sufficient scandal to cause sackings at the ABC, red faces at Animals Australia and the RSPCA, profound apologies to Indonesia, and a diplomatic scandal that would run for months.

Sorry.

Here's the intrepid reporter Sheehan asking the hard questions, doing the hard yards, taking the ball up the middle, spilling his guts to score a story, and probing deeply into the mind of Senator Back:

Senator Back told me: ''Everyone in the convoy to Canberra will be making a significant sacrifice in terms of time, money and energy. They want to draw attention to the plight of the bush and the feeling they are being ignored by the federal government. This convoy is driven by sheer frustration.''

That's it? He has the story and the details - and an affidavit no less - that could rock the government to its foundations, and all we get is blather about sheer frustration?

And it's not as if Sheehan didn't have a chance in his little fireside chat with the Senator. Here's the introduction of the good Senator, after a little raillery about the ABC and the Four Corners show A Bloody Business:

The federal politician most expert in the live cattle trade, Senator Chris Back, a veterinarian and former consultant to the trade, described the images broadcast on Four Corners as ''repulsive'' but he also proposed practical advice which, if taken, would have prevented a government suspension of the live export trade.

Practical advice?

Hang on, hang on, was it only five days ago that Fake footage claims from Senator Chris Back rock federal inquiry into live cattle exports.

Senator Back told the inquiry he had been informed a taxi driver had arranged the mistreatment of the cattle with a bribe of 150,000 rupiah, and the abuse was then captured on video.

Yep, there it was, five days ago:

He said had an affidavit from “an Australian man who has spoken to that worker (who was beaten up) having visited him at that facility”.

“What I was advised, as I have just said in the hearing, was that the man who was paid 150,000 rupiah - which is about eight day's salary - that that person has since been turned on by his co-workers and that has been the retribution,'' said Senator Back.

No mention of rape in that report, which was alleged to have been part of the retribution, a bit of the embroidery that made even Christopher Pearson baulk:

This is a saga that has a long way to run.

For example, Back's assertions that one of the meatworkers who'd been bribed had been bashed on a daily basis and that his wife and daughter had been raped sounds a bit far-fetched, although perhaps not in light of the disruption caused to so many Indonesians' livelihoods.

Well it seems it was a saga that had a long way to run ... right up to today and Paul Sheehan's column, only to be greeted by a deathly silence and the cloak of invisibility.

Sheehan could have done his UN and international finance company fearing global warming comrades a great service, by confirming Back's story of conspiracy to defraud, and corruption.

Instead he simply presents their noble aim:

In Canberra the assembled protesters will call for a double dissolution of Parliament so the government can seek a mandate for the sweeping changes it is proposing, especially the carbon tax which the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, ruled out during last year's election campaign.

Uh huh. A double dissolution? So it's actually about bringing down the government, installing Tony Abbott, and battling the carbon tax, and the bit about the long suffering cattlemen is just a sideshow.

Every so often, a friend of mine calls Sheehan a foot stool, a man without ideas, ready to recycle any half-baked notion of a conservative kind which comes his way, without questioning or probing beneath the surface, and always citing his failure in the matter of the 'magic water' scandal (The Original Story: Paul Sheehan on the effect of the water, and then to Too good to be true Paul Sheehan and the magic water debate).

I stopped contending he was being unfair a long time ago - about the time of the magic water affair actually.

But in this particular column, Sheehan's not so much a foot stool, as a willing patsy, willing to beg off from a big story in order to serve up whatever tosh Chris Back and his cattle truck chums want to deliver to the mug punters.

The pond can contemplate with equanimity the notion that Animals Australia and the RSPCA are guilty of fraud, and that the makers of the ABC's Four Corners program were deceived, taken in like a bunch of mug punters, and so all involved deserve a sound boxing of the ears.

And it follows that Joe Ludwig and the government, for accepting it all, should also be given an extremely hard time, and so all the poignant stories of truckers losing time, money, gas, and wear and tear on their trucks to make the trip to Canberra would be rendered irrelevant. They could stay at home, and watch the government take a tumble.

Unless of course Back doesn't have any evidence, and was talking through his backside, an insight we could contemplate with equal equanimity.

Whatever. You won't find anything useful in the way of solving the conundrum by contemplating the scribbles of that foot stool Paul Sheehan.

Instead his mind remains just a vast cavern of doom and gloom, and sure to provoke a bout of sheer frustration from a man who claims to be a hard hitting columnist of the investigative kind ...

Hard hitting? Investigative? Must have spent too long listening to fictional radio stories about hard hitting investigative journalists in my young days ...

(Below: or maybe Paul Sheehan is just a post-modern relativist, and stories start and end in many different ways).