A host of daffodil-coloured ironies ...

(Above: meals you need to eat at the start of a working week. More cartoons here).


Could there be any greater irony?

Abbott repaying expenses for attending Peter Slipper's wedding?

Presumably at last becoming aware that the professional opportunities and obligations of said attendance now looked a little worn and torn?

Well there could be other, richer ironies if you look for them. 

Why not start with Greg Hunt cheerfully explaining in Q and A how MPs should just apologise, pay back any errant expenses, and move on ... easy for Hunt to say, a tad harder for Slipper to do ...

Or Barners, always short a sheep in the top paddock, explaining how Gina Rinehart had saved the taxpayers a motza by springing for half his wedding trip, not pausing for a second to contemplate how exposing himself to this sort of generosity might pose a potential conflict of interest ... possibly because Barners, aspirational climber, and Gina, mountain to be climbed, preferably with African sherpas at two  dollars the day, are as one ...

Or the infamous Peter Reith going into bat for the wedding guests, and indirectly his own profligate careless ways, but never a word about Slipper  ...

All the dangers of the feral behaviour of sundry Liberals and double standards was pointed out long ago - try How Finance defied protocol to crucify Slipper - but those were the days when a witch hunt would score you a front page on the Murdoch press portraying Slipper as a rat. 

Any chance of a front page dedicated to the wedding party fraudsters as champagne-sipping and cheese-sniffing rats? In your dreams ... why that's like wishing rank hypocrisy wasn't central to politics ...

Meanwhile, speaking of crucifixions, another pond prediction has come to pass.

This morning there's a campaign on several fronts to abuse the ABC.

First out of the blocks is Nick Cater, one time BBC worker, now lickspittle fellow traveller with the Murdochians, for all those lovers of ironies:

It is of course classic Cater, which is to say meaningless gibberish, with nothing new to say and no new insights, and the splash shows how to do it, by throwing in a reference to the digital age. It sounds dreadfully modern, but it is in fact code for the ABC is free on the intertubes and it's killing us ...

Should you make the effort to get around the reptiles' lite barrier to their paranoid musings, and google Outdated Aunty needs new act, you will cop all the usual Soviet rhetoric of the 1930s, even an illustration in the approved social realist in house style:

Sometimes the pond wonders whether the reptiles have a central desk where witty references to the Soviet Union and the fascists and Orwellian pigs are assembled and distributed so that the hacks don't have to think too much as they go about the business of preparing diatribes ...

You can if you like go back decades to find this sort of bog standard ABC bashing, updated only because now Cater can make reference to a Tweet about Tony Abbott, and deplore an anti-Semitic comment on Facebook, and the usual critique is dressed up to explain how the ABC is failing in the digital age, because nobody watches it and nobody likes it ...

The irony of all this coming from a newspaper whose readership and circulation is in free fall is beyond irony ...

What the chorus builds to is also beyond the predictable ... what this country and this broadcaster needs is an enquiry. 

Being Cater, and therefore being a bear of very little brain, we're never quite sure why. He doesn't go as far as demanding the ABC be privatised, and instead he offers up waffle as a solution:

A growing number of those on the unsentimental Right would like to the see the ABC sold off, but that would be a mistake. 
Despite its transparent failings, the ABC largely retains public trust and is a significant national institution with a history and a reputation worth defending. 
It will need to be rebuilt from the bottom up, however, if it is to operate in the public interest in the digital age. 

What exactly does Cater mean, with operate in the public interest in the digital age?

He never says.

Does he mean go populist and bury the Murdochians by dominating ratings and the intertubes? Or does he mean abolish Triple J because it sets youff and the ABC off on the wrong path?

The only clue?

The extent of its responsibilities, and the limits of what it should attempt to do, must first be prescribed by parliament, in amendments to the ABC's 81-year-old act.

The limits of what it should attempt to do - yep, code for not making it hard for the Murdochians and the Fairfaxians, those purveyors of top notch, first rate journalism, long on quality and very short on Stakhanovite quantity, and if you believe that after reading all the Murdoch tabloids in a single sitting, the pond has a choice set of size 12 gum boots waiting for you ...

Meanwhile, over at Fairfax, long time user of the ABC, and constant frustrated dreamer of getting a gig, any gig at all as the conservative voice broadcast to the nation, our very own prattling Polonius, Gerard Henderson is also at it yet again ...

Here you go.

The nakedness of the job application is either beguiling or tragic, depending on your viewpoint. 

Polonius - inevitably - uses the Chaser lads as his cudgel to give clap happy Mark Scott a sound thrashing, but he too veers away from the notion of privatising the joint.

Instead:

The best that can be hoped for is that Scott finally delivers on his 2006 promise to ensure that a greater diversity of views is heard on the public broadcaster.

Oh yes, it isn't too late, it's never too late.

But as it's likely not to happen - is it possible to imagine Henderson doing anything at all on the ABC without sending its ratings into freefall, even on Radio National where an * is marked a top notch effort?

So all that's left is spleen and vindictiveness:

From a taxpayer's point of view, the best outcome would be if governments denied the ABC funds for new projects. In recent years, the ABC has effectively moved into print and is dumping written material on its electronic news and opinion outlets.

Yes, let's stop anything new, anything original, anything innovative, and above all anything interesting.

At least Henderson nakedly acknowledges the real point - hobble the ABC, stop the dumping, end the competition, degut them ...

On Insiders last Sunday, Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull said that the commercial print media's essential problem turns on declining advertising revenue. However, the ABC's dumping of news for free does not help. 

Dumping the news for free!

Outrageous and shocking, and all the more so because both the Murdochians and the Fairfaxians have adopted a faux paywall as solid as a piece of tissue paper ... and never mind news.com.au dumping the news for free ...

But wait, the pond is always looking for irony, and by golly, does Hendo do irony.

Here he is getting stuck into clap happy Scott for recycling content:

Last Friday, Scott defended ABC TV's running of repeat programs since it ''can't afford to buy as much content as we once did''. This suggests that Scott has erred in recent years in extending the ABC's outlets at the expense of its basic programs.

So what does Hendo do? Yep, he recycle his very own content:

The August issue of The Sydney Institute Quarterly (now online) documents serious errors in Paul Clarke's Whitlam: The Power and The Passion which was advertised as ''definitive''. 

August and it's now online in Ocober? By golly, that's dumping the news for free, and quikstix too!! There, that's how you do it, Aunty.

What follows - after a little bashing of the ABC for its fact checking unit competing with an allegedly commercial fact checker - is a classic Hendo whine and whinge about a documentary - Whitlam: The Power and the Passion - now long gone into the ether.

The obsessive compulsive Hendo has given this show a dust-up before, and you can just imagine the satisfaction he felt when he put down his quill after rebutting an arcane alleged comment by Mao wrongly featured in the show, and his secretarial assistant typed this into the computer:

No doubt the ABC Head of Factual will declare this a ''lyrical'' truth and reject all criticism. A non-lyrical truth is that the ABC should refrain from spending taxpayers' money checking the facts of others, while it runs fiction in its self-declared definitive documentaries.

Silly old Hendo. The program, by featuring many re-enacted scenes, should at best be called a drama documentary, and like most other dramadocs, it is by definition a fiction. The actor Mao is not the real Mao, the actor Whitlam not the real Gough, and so on and so forth ...

The thing represented is not the thing itself, and getting a few details or comments wrong is the least of the failings of the monstrous cult of the dramadoc, the documentary way of getting around all the tired old devices that focus on real people doing real things ... the newsreel footage and interviews with actual witnesses and the Ken Burns' style zooming in on photographs and documentary evidence ...

You can have too much reality in a documentary!

Everybody does it of course - the plague began in the United States and quickly spread around the world - and it's an indication of Hendo's singular paranoid blindness that he should fixate on one flaw in one re-enacted scene in one dramadoc show on the ABC, while all around him dramadocs flourish and bloom like the zombies in  World War Z.

Does anybody at Fairfax ever bother to read and check his tired old columns and the amount of repetition and self-promotion contained therein?

But after this orgy of ABC bashing, let's end on a high.

It turns out that the Bolter was cancelled on Sunday because of "sporting commitments" and never mind that the Ten network managed to find space for a gormless US talk show The Doctors, an episode of Good Chef, Bad Chef and a gormless well meaning local doc about Canine Angels between said sporting commitments.

The real news is that the primaryABC channel managed to defeat the Ten network primary on FTA share, 9.6% to 9.1% on the Sunday, and if you think that's skewed because of the football grand final (here), take a look at Saturday, with the ABC doing 24.6% and Ten doing 8.9% (even worse, the ABC's total all channels was 30.9% and Ten's a humble 14.6%).

So where's your Gina and Lachlan now, Nick Cater?

Where's your idle chatter about ABC audiences?

No wonder they're all shrieking out in Murdoch and Hendo la la land.

But the pond has a simple explanation, which might either be a prophecy or a curse. So long as the Ten network carries The Bolt Report, it is doomed to lurk in the commercial wilderness ...

The pond was so moved by the figures that we began to work on a poem

It is an ancient Mariness, 
And she stoppeth one of three. 
'By thy long grey locks and glittering eye, 
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me? 
The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide, 
And I am next of kin; 
The guests are met, the feast is set: 
May'st hear the merry din.' 
She holds him with her skinny hand, 
'There was a Bolt Report,' quoth she. 
'Hold off! unhand me, grey-locked loon!' 
Eftsoons her hand dropt she. 
She holds him with her glittering eye— 
The Ten programmer stood still, 
And listens like a three years' child: 
The Mariness hath her will. 
The Ten programmer sat on a stone: 
He cannot choose but hear; 
And thus spake on that ancient crone, 
The bright-eyed Mariness ...

O TV Programmert! this soul hath been
Alone on the wide wide sea 
Of Bolt Report and Ten Sunday ratings.
So lonely 'twas, that God herself
Scarce seemed there to be ...

Well it needs a bit of work - there's a lot more to do - but you catch the drift, and we can expect a fine old flurry of ABC bashing in the coming months, as the reptiles begin to feel the crunch and they turn to the nearest whipping boy to explain their own commercial failings and their inability to connect with an audience which long ago left their feral outrage for the rich ironies of the intertubes ...

(Below: and so thanks to The New Yorker, we turn to another existential question, link at top of page)