Away with the wild things and Asia ...

(Above: from China Digital News, a website blocked in China, explanation here)


Ni hao ma, the pond asks any stray passerby, steadfast in the knowledge that this century is Asian, the future is Asian, and as a result Australians will experience a wondrous boost in the pay packets, and score an endless supply of apple pie to keep things ticking over in the sweet bye and bye.

Was it only a couple of days ago that the pond was reading the New York Times' story Billions in Hidden Riches for Family of Chinese Leader, and the follow-up story China Blocks Web Access To Times After Article?

No wonder Senator Stephen Conroy loves the Chinese leadership style, and their great big filter on everything.

And in a less spectacular way, breakfast table reading has been devoted to Evan Osnos's excellent piece for The New Yorker, Boss Rail, happily outside the paywall at the moment, with a sub-title that explains everything, The disaster that exposed the underside of the boom.

Just one quote is all that's needed to add a sweet and sour tang:

The other view holds that the compact between the people and their leaders is fraying, that the ruling class is scrambling to get what it can in the final years of frenzied growth, and that the Party will be no more capable of reforming itself from within than the Soviets were. Last year, the central bank accidentally posted an internal report estimating that, since 1990, eighteen thousand corrupt officials have fled the country, having stolen a hundred and twenty billion dollars—a sum large enough to buy Disney or Amazon. The government has vowed that officials will forgo luxury cigarettes and shark’s-fin soup, but vigilant Chinese bloggers continue to post photographs of cadres wearing luxury watches and police departments with Maseratis and Porsches painted blue and white. Even Wen Jiabao, the Prime Minister, who will leave the Politburo next month, declared that corruption was “the biggest danger facing the ruling party”—a threat that, left unchecked, could “terminate the political regime.” 

Indeed. And don't get the pond started on the corruption in India, or the byzantine understanding required to do business in Indonesia, or the precarious situation of Japan, or the way that Malaysia is run in a way that would make a Mafia don weep with envy.

Just another quote:

China’s recent scandals seem to have hastened a moment of truth: the new Politburo will take office next month knowing that the people are not as content as before with what they have gained from the country’s rise. Over a generation, the Party has raised five hundred million citizens from poverty, and constructed a physical and economic world previously inconceivable. Yet people see no shortage of reasons to demand better: Beijing spends more today on domestic security, protecting the state from a daily parade of public grievances and unrest, than it does on foreign defense. Despite the efforts of the censors, Chinese people can go online and read that their leaders eat uncontaminated vegetables grown at remote, guarded farms, and breathe air that has been scrubbed by filters. The fall of Bo Xilai and Great Leap Liu dramatized the culture of entitlement run amok. For years, Liu and Bo dedicated themselves to enhancing their own prospects along with those of the nation. They lost their sense of proportion, and the question is whether their government has, too.

Not that the Americans can talk, not with the Republicans rampant, but let no one accuse the pond of not being Asian-centric, because apparently that's a thought crime and we should get on board and take the money and run.

In which case, just leave the Porsche out the front with a nicely stuffed sum - better make it big if you want that fast rail connection to Bazza O'Farrell's second Sydney airport in Canberra - and a good Swiss watch.

(Speaking of Bazza, didn't he cop an independent pounding on the weekend. Watch out Bazza, the inner city elites are after you).

The pond has always had a taste for the more restrained Patek Philippe models - a snip at 10k or so - and make sure it's none of that damned shanzhai stuff, we have enough innovation with a peasant-mind set at work in the Australian Labor Party.

Do they really think the offer of a growth spurt in wages is enough to blind both eyes?

Moving along, you have to think Maxine McKew might have a few image problems, if even The Australian turns up its nose, sniffs, and runs Troy Bramston's McKew wins a Maxine for sycophancy but doesn't do Rudd a favour (inside the paywall, but you know all about googling that). Wow, did he get fed the right attitude.

The opening gambit is a ripper:

After Labor caucus meetings during the Rudd government, a group of wry MPs and senators would bestow the "Maxine" award on the person who most blatantly sucked up to Kevin Rudd with the most vacuous and sycophantic question. 
 It was named after then Labor MP Maxine McKew -- who, ironically, won the award almost every time... 

Troy doesn't spare the whip, and his final check and mate is just as withering:

McKew regularly quotes Keating's comment to her that politics is "a contest of ideas". But there are no new ideas in this book. She makes no attempt to provide any kind of reform manifesto, new policy platform or answers to Labor's cultural and political challenges. McKew is interested only in tearing down Labor's house rather than helping to rebuild it. 
 This makes her analysis of modern Labor particularly self-serving. McKew has no commitment to the party's future, the seat she lost or to serious public debate about how to reform and rebuild the Labor Party. It is not deserving of a Walkley award, but it is a shoo-in for a Maxine award.

Lordy, lordy and all that in The Australian, home of Labor splitters, renegades, deviants, perverts and Gary Johns ...

Okay, okay, it's 'fess up time. Almost anything is better than reading the braying drone of generally grumpy Paul Sheehan, especially today's piece, in which he mourns the loss of sundry scribblers from the Fairfax ranks, courtesy redundancy and resignation, without mentioning once the most hoped for outcome, his own departure.

Instead, in Faster news, but mind the quality, he poses two completely contradictory notions without giving the faintest indication he's done so.

First he celebrates the eccentrics - and since Doug Anderson is one of the departures, who can argue with that, or that he's a loss for Fairfax - but then somehow Sheehan equates eccentricity with the ability to deliver quality news.

And then he proves conclusively why, despite his professional curmudgeon-ish ways, he can't deliver a quality column anymore. For starters, who would farewell Helen Anderson, travel editor, this way?

And there was Helen Anderson, the doyenne of travel journalism in Australia, our travel editor, whose limpid brown eyes were, in recent months, sometimes reduced to yellow lizard slits caused by overwork. 

Eccentric? Yep. Quality?

There's simply no way the lizard-slitted pond could bring itself to that line, no matter how eccentric it might sound:

Readers respond to informed eccentrics and eccentricity. People like relationships with writers and they like surprises. 

But there's never a surprise reading Sheehan. His views are as pre-packaged and pre-shaped as a bi-weekly slice of devon (South Australians will understand the word).

Today the commodity called news comes faster than ever before, from more sources, with fewer lulls and mostly it comes at no cost. There is always a cost, at the root, it is just a question of who pays. What are readers willing to pay for? This is the great question of the digital age. 

Actually it's not so hard. The pond pays handsomely for all sorts of opinion, from The New Yorker through to The New York Review of Books but damned if it will pay for Paul Sheehan's opinions. Or this little flurry of defiant paranoia and floozies:

It will not matter in what format the journalism is delivered. It doesn't matter if newspapers survive without paper - or even without news. It matters a great deal, however, if the ozone layer in the public debate formed by quality journalism is degraded into irrelevance. Because the public relations industry dwarfs the news media. Governments have enormous resources of message delivery and spin. So do corporations. So do advocacy groups.

Which is rich, coming from a man who routinely spins everything to the right, seemingly incapable of tweaking anything to the left (the pond is proud of its ongoing progress in understanding cricketing metaphors, just don't propose watching actual cricket this summer).

In the end Sheehan takes comfort from the rise in share prices of a minor media mob, A. H. Belo, as if that's some model for the phoenix-like re-birth of Fairfax, and ends with a nice quote from Anderson quoting D. H. Lawrence.

Which is a double shame, because it shows what a muddle-headed wombat Fairfax is, having let go Anderson, who really did engage his readers, while keeping the generally grumpy Sheehan, who infuriates his ... which is why the pond might have been better off reading Toodle-ooh, dear readers, because fury is no basis for sales.

Oh it's a funny old world, and reading D. H. Lawrence is always a dangerous thing. As for the bit before the quoted quote?

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.

Lawrence never did get out and about much, and perhaps never killed anything or went rabbiting in the wilds around Tamworth ... he couldn't even manage to hit a snake with a clumsy log ... because the pond has often seen wild things look sorry for themselves in the moments before death ... moments the pond remembers and regrets ...

Perhaps it was all just projection and they wanted to turn into hats and food? And make a quick buck out of Asia, and never mind the reality on the ground?

Never mind. The sight of Sheehan scribbling at least suggests that domestic things might sometimes look sorry for themselves, but for once the pond finds it hard to summon regret.

Perhaps it has something to do with climate science and the giant storm bearing down on the United States at this very moment, as the pond contemplates a trip to New York ...

Summer grass
all that remains
of warriors' dreams

Oh yes, the pond goes Asian ...

(Below: some poor translations of Basho but more evocative calligraphy here)

(Deep autumn-
my neighbour,
how does he live, I wonder?)