Gerard Henderson, Phillip Adams, and let loose the bats, fly my pretties, fly ...

Credit where credit is due, and today that prattling Polonius, Gerard Henderson, deserves credit for dragging the phrase 'activist judges' from out behind the arras, and putting it front and centre in his column Activist judges give mixed signals. (Warning: forced video at other end of link).

By the pond's reckoning, this is at least a whole day ahead of Janet Albrechtsen, who if there's any justice in the world will spend her full column tomorrow fulminating about activist judges.

Of course it places Henderson in the awkward position of defending Julia Gillard and her policies against Robert French and his activist ways, but he resolves this by blaming Kevin Rudd, first for appointing the activist French and second for taking down the Howard's red light and putting up an amber one in the matter of refugees and asylum seekers.

The dilemma of course for conservatives is the dread prospect that the Nauru solution might no longer be a solution, and Australia might have to assume its actual international obligations. Now that would be shocking activism of the worst kind.

Meanwhile, the cause of all Henderson and Gillard's pain is being given yet another revival by Phillip Adams over at the lizard oz, as he calls for the return of Kevin Rudd in Let Rudd resume rightful role.

Adams man love for Kevin Rudd is almost as painful to watch, or listen to, as Christopher Pearson rabbiting on about Tony Abbott, and yet he loves to play Dr. Frankenstein.

He opens with this powerful thrust:

JULIA, resign. (When I drafted this column a month ago, friends in the ALP begged me not to run it. Not because of any profound dispute with the content but because "it might make things worse". Now, things couldn't be worse.)

The most amazing thing about his friends in the ALP begging him not to run the piece is that they didn't tell Adams no one gives much of a toss about what he thinks, and that his man love for Kevin Rudd is so well known that anything he says about it turns into a comedy spectacle worthy of a two ring circus.

Still, you have to hand it to Adams, as he shows he knows how to grind the same axe he's been grinding since former Chairperson Rudd's demise, and presumably he'll go on grinding away like a broken two bob watch for the foreseeable future.

It's poignant to see Adams imagine that somehow a revived Rudd will lead the Labor party to the promised land, but at one point, he steps off into la la land, and the apocalypse:

... the most urgent issue is GFC II. Rudd is far better equipped to deal with it than you. (Julia)

Yes another round of pink batts and school halls should provide excellent fodder for the rantings of Adams' fellow columnists in The Australian.

Speaking of The Australian, the commentariat is in full hue and cry, with a gathering of the hounds, or at least the chattering beer gluggers:

(screen cap, no hot links).

So Adams finds himself in the excellent company of Dennis 'the tie' Shanahan scribbling Only a miracle can save her now, and Niki Savva scribbling Curtain closing on Gillard experiment, and then there's the anonymous editorialist scribbling Labor looking for a messiah.

Sadly, the anon edit doesn't share Adams' enthusiasm for former chairman Rudd, but what matter, since surely the point of the commentariat is to fill the air with the sounds of chaos, lamenting, and tearing of robes (perhaps with the splashing about of ashes, and the coating of faces with mud).

A return to Mr Rudd would embody an apology for pre-emptively dispatching a leader the electorate had initially embraced, but it would also require contrition from Mr Rudd for surrendering on climate action and losing his way.

Uh huh. So how about an alternative?

Any other new leader, whether Bill Shorten, Greg Combet or Stephen Smith, would need to seek forgiveness for last year's leadership coup, and promise a more collaborative culture.

Oh dear, that sounds problematic.

These gymnastics of blame make Mr Rudd a plausible option, especially with Newspoll showing his support doubling Ms Gillard's.

Spare me days and stone the crows, he isn't just a naughty boy, he might be the messiah after all. And how might the returned messiah, the vampire let loose from the basement, exercise his messiahdom?

Climate policy remains central. Labor turned its back on the mandate for action after the 2007 election, and then broke its carbon tax pledge from last year's poll.

It's at that point that the pond snorted into the breakfast bowl, sending cornflakes and milk everywhere.

Climate policy remains central? A mandate for action?

Well anyone who bothered to read Robert Manne's lengthy piece on The Australian and climate science, The truth is out there, might wonder how the anonymous editorialist can lie straight in bed at night. The teaser began thus:

One newspaper's unrelenting campaign against the facts of climate change defies all reason, writes Robert Manne

And by the end of his promo for his Quarterly Essay, Bad News: Murdoch's Australian and the Shaping of the Nation (it'll cost you a rounded twenty bucks, too much in my opinion for a statement of the bleeding obvious), Manne concluded:

...The Australian not only waged a war on science but also threatened the always vulnerable place of reason in public life.

Uh huh. So what might a revived Chairman Rudd do to strike a bold new note on the matter of climate science, take a stand, embark on direct action?

Well according to to the anon edit:

A new leader might need to impose a moratorium on climate action until the ALP can take a clearly articulated policy to the next election, with a commitment to stick to that. If the task is too urgent to wait, the election could be brought forward -- that is in the remit of government.

A bloody moratorium or in other words, do bloody nothing, or embark on an electoral massacre. At that point memories of Sophie's Choice brought tears to the eyes of the pond, partly because it features a typically hammy Meryl Streep and partly because no amount of ham could match the anon edit for seriously silly scribbling.

But at least now you can see why anyone in the Labor party who listens to the anon edit at The Australian has to have rocks in their heads, because a dumber prescription couldn't be imagined, even in the most parlous circumstances of the current Gillard government.

Meanwhile, it seems that Australia is ruined, or about to be ruined, or certain to be ruined in the near future, unless the unions are tamed, individual contracts are introduced, and flexibility in the labor market return to the good old days under John Howard.

Or so the anon edit at The Australian assures us in Australia's luck is ebbing away, as he (or pray not she) parrots the party line of Don Argus and Heather Ridout.

Yes Hanrahan we'll all be ruined before the year is out and only former Chairman Rudd can save us, by providing each household with a new improved purple set of batts®.

Hang on, hang on, what's this we read from the man who ten years ago predicted the mining boom and Australian dollar parity, at a time we travelled in the United States for fifty cents in the US dollar? Lay some of that ruin, doom and gloom on us Ken Courtis:

And Australia? ''Australia is positioned where everybody would like to be,'' Courtis says. It has the benefits of being a rich country without the debt burdens of the US, Britain, Europe or Japan, and the ability to exploit the rise of the developing countries.

''You have strong connections into China, into India, into Japan - which is going to move from nuclear to coal and LNG - and into south-east Asia and into the US.

''You have high quality of living, big space, clean air, the rule of law, it's reasonably safe and clean - people hold Australia up and look at it and say, wow.'' (The future in the lucky country?)

Dearie me, epic fail Ken, no way you'll get a job working for the commentariat as a minion of Murdoch at The Australian, and no way you'll get a chance to bemoan the lack of a messiah to lead us through the GFC II wilderness, as patiently explained by Phillip Adams on his tiny little radio show dedicated to catastrophes and apocalypses. (yes you can have plural apocalypses, all requiring either former Chairman Rudd or Tony Abbott to save us).

Next thing you know you'll be telling us that based on UNHCR data for the end of 2010, there were more than 10.55 million refugees under UNHCR responsibility, including some 597,000 in refugee-like situations (UNHCR Global Trends 2010)

Yet the commentariat in Australia routinely get themselves in a lather about a few thousand people turning up by boat, while thousands turn up by plane and hundreds of thousands head for Europe and most refugees are actually hosted in developing countries, so that the burden of assisting the world's asylum seekers and refugees actually falls on some of the world's poorest countries.

You can read all this and more in a sober background note prepared by Janet Phillips for the federal Parliamentary Library under the header Asylum seekers and refugees: what are the facts? (as a pdf).

Facts ma'am? Facts? We'll have no such fancy words and fancy conceits on the pond, not when there are so many prejudices, distortions and dim views to be had for breakfast.

Yes, damn those activist judges and their activist ways, because truth to tell, the lucky country doesn't have the first clue of much about anything, whether it comes to climate science or refugees, and for that we can thank the commentariat in all their lathering fury ...

Now look at long suffering Australia at the top of the data in its suffering: