In which the theme is common gossip facilitated by fibre to the home ...

(Above: in your dreams. Common gossip is common).


Before we go any further, please let the pond note the descent of Radio National into the garbage dump, courtesy of Jonathan Green, who conducted one of the most inept interviews with Larry Pickering imaginable.

The only excuse that Green can offer is that he was dropped into the show late because of the sickness of the usual host, Waheed Ali, but even so, it's interview 101 skills to be across the material being discussed.

Green was embarrassing, the ABC is embarrassing, and no doubt Pickering is sniggering away at the snow job. It was shoddy, slack and lazy (and if you can stand it, no doubt it will turn up here in due course).

Green next interviewed Andrew Wilkie, who demanded that Gillard make a statement to parliament to answer the questions.

But once you've denied the matter to hand, what further statement could clear the air, or clarify matters?

Is it so that she makes a statement on the record and then can be hung, drawn and quartered for misleading the parliament? Or is a gratuitous repetition of a denial, over and over again, the point here? The pond is of course just asking questions, which is all anyone seems to be doing, just asking rhetorical useless questions ...

The pond almost hoped that the super trawler would fuck over Tasmania, just to teach the impudent dingbat Wilkie a lesson.

The point is that the hounds involved in the witch hunt don't want answers, they don't want denials, they want a confession, they want an admission of guilt, they want Gillard hung, they want her to go in a ritual exorcism, and they'll settle for nothing less. There's no point in conducting a pleasant discourse contemplating the meaning of fanaticism with fanatics.

Naturally the hounds at The Australian are in full rabid intoxicated cry this morning, the mud in hand, fling it, fling it, the smell of blood in the nostrils, like a gang of white pointers, with their dull grey leaden eyes, the full weight of the feral pack wheeling in unison as the rag embarks on yet another crusade:

Yes it's the full panoply of kool aid drinkers.

That pathetic pompous puffed up shadow of his imagined self Paul Kelly, Janet 'Dame Slap' Albrechtsen just asking questions (as she did on the wretched Q&A), and Dennis "the tie" Shanahan also demanding answers to questions.

Questions, always with the questions, and the speculation, and not much else.

Meanwhile genuine scandals such as the one swirling around the Reserve Bank, or Fair Work Australia are shuffled down the chain (just as the Australian Wheat Board scandal disappeared up its fundament once people lost interest in the outcome, and never mind the comfort given to a villain so bad it required a war and thousands of civilian deaths to save the world from him).

Why does any of this matter? Apart from the stupidity and ineptness of Green, which we can take as a given?

Well the pond doesn't have much time for Mark Latham, except when he's doing lunch with poodle Pyne and turns in a tremendous comedy routine, but in Lunar right crusades against Gillard, he gets more than a few things right, as he notes how the Birthers have transmuted in Australia into the Brucers:

Like the Birthers, they are obsessed with ancient history: in this case, a belief that Julia Gillard should resign over a trade union financial dispute 20 years ago involving her then boyfriend, Bruce Wilson. No one has ever been charged with an offence and, despite repeated investigations by her political opponents, there is no evidence of Gillard having broken the law.
The Brucers are an example of the damaging impact of obsessiveness in public life. They fit the first rule of fanaticism: when all is lost, redouble your efforts. These political fringe dwellers specialise in myth-making and the harassment of innocent people – not just Gillard, but media figures who stand up to them and refuse to peddle their conspiratorial theories.
Not surprisingly, the anti-Labor newspaper The Australian has given succour to Smith and Pickering, deploying a so-called investigative reporter to pursue the Prime Minister. So far his efforts have not taken the story any further than when the matter was first raised by the Liberal Party in the Victorian Parliament 17 years ago.

The Brucers! The Australian is full of bloody Brucers!

By golly, if only for that conceit, the pond owes Latham a lunch in the local kebab shop (or perhaps Faheems Fast Foods on Enmore road, a local secret which the pond never reveals to anyone for fear it will be rushed, and so must remain a secret between the pond and any stray reader lost in the inner west of Sydney).

Latham can now add the ABC to the list willing to peddle conspiracy theories by allowing a half-baked interview, that was alternately soft, inept, meandering and useless. No hard questions were asked of the man asking questions.

Green tried to claw it back later in the show by reading some SMSs called Pickering a nutter, and a scaredy cat misogynist and so on, but by then the ass had bolted through the open gate.

It's troubling times for the pond in relation to RN. There's also the problem of the constant nausea induced by listening to Fran Kelly and the incessantly repeated stings in the morning show. The sting, the sting, it sounds in the mind like a tolling bell of doom.

Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the sting,
Of the sting, sting, sting -
To the sobbing of the sting;
Keeping time, time, time,
As it knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the sting
Of the sting, sting, sting -
To the tolling of the sting,
Of the sting, sting, sting, sting ...
(you can catch the rest of Edgar Allan Poe's poem about bells here, in unabused form).

Okay, it's a little OT, but you catch the drift. Bringing Australia together? Bringing the pond into contact with Jonathan Green, Fran Kelly and her sting? They've got to be dreaming.

For the past few weeks the pond had cultivated false hope.

With nothing on television - thanks to Gina Rinehart and the complete collapse of Lara Bingle's dreams - there was a chance to listen to an interviewer on Late Night Live who didn't talk over his guests, didn't interrupt, listened and asked intelligent questions, and was genteel and reluctant to lead with his own opinions, remembering that the reason you have a guest on the program is to find out what they think, rather than having them and the listeners suffer the interminable pompous meandering opinions of the interviewer.

And then Phillip Adams came back.

Adams did have the grace to propose that Norman Swan did it better than him. Damn right and in spades.

But as a result of all this, RN is off the pond's list. It seems simpler just to tap away at the noggin with a baseball bat, and see if brain damage can be induced in a less painful way.

In one dangerously experimental moment, we've even listened to Richard Glover play Kenny Rogers' Island in the Stream (with Dolly of course).

Oh yes it's an edgy Sydney experience and the pond knows how to live dangerously, but no doubt listeners in other states to Local Radio can tell of similar hair-raising near-death experiences.

Hey nonny nonny no, on we go, if only so we can note the deliciousness of the Fairfax story Turnbull likes fibre to the home - in France. And before we go any further, kudos to the Fairfax designer who came up with this splash. Oh you do big Mal proud, in an ethereal wired sort of way:

Because Australians tend to be myopic and don't get out and about enough - even though these days you can travel with the click of a mouse - there's a segment of the population who are routinely startled to learn that other countries are doing something about climate change, and take seriously the prospect of a broadband wired economy (the myopia is cultivated by rags like The Australian, always ready to crusade, rarely willing to inform).

So there's a nicely piquant spicy sauce of hypocrisy served up with the news that big Malcolm Turnbull has been caught out investing in France Telecom, which is planning to connect sixty per cent of French households by fibre to the home by 2020.

Big Mal's spokesperson fired back:

"France is utterly unlike Conrovian Australia,'' the spokesman said. ''There is no government monopoly building a near-universal fibre-to-the-premises network.
''Private telcos are building fibre to the premises where they think it is viable and, to date, take-up is not very high.''

So either big Mal is a terrible investor - France Telecom performs a little like Telstra and its take up isn't high and so Mal and his investment doesn't have the first clue about what the public wants.

Or he's resolutely opposed to the notion that rural citizens should be disconnected from the intertubes, because connecting the bush, especially remote locations, isn't particularly viable on a commercial level.

Of course the bush badly needs to be connected, and benefits from the connection, but ain't it grand to see big Mal denouncing the agrarian socialism that runs rife through the Nationals.

The Labor party has catered to this socialist tendency by making the bush a priority for connections. Will the bush care and reward them? Almost certainly not ...

Will big Mal ever acknowledge that fibre to the home is the way to go? Probably ...

But not until the hornswoggling has served its purpose and Tony Abbott wins the election ... and then we'll see whether Dr. No has the first clue about broadband and climate science.

Probably not ... but will big Mal then come out of his shell and admit that fibre to the home is the way the rest of the world is heading ...

Well even a turtle sticks its head out occasionally to see what the world is doing ... except perhaps if you're a turtle working at The Australian.

(Below: and now thanks to old time radio, something for the gentleman reader, found in the ABC archives Flicker account here).