"He must think I'm a fucking dog, forgives the blow first friendly scratch at the ear ..."

(Above: more Leunig here)

Does it get any cheekier or post-modernist hipster ironic than the spectacle offered up by the position the Australian government has got itself into in relation to the Chinese government?

In the old days, China relied on the treatment of Aboriginal citizens for counter-attack when its abuse of human rights were noted. Now they have a new club, and it isn't even George Brandis's plans to censor the intertubes:

The Abbott government has suffered the ignominy of having its asylum seeker policy publicly criticised by another foreign government – this time China, a country with its own chequered human rights record. 
In a sign of lingering bilateral tension between Australia and its largest trading partner, China’s vice-minister of foreign affairs, Li Baodong, said he was concerned about the “very important issue” of the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, especially children, who arrive in Australia by boat. “Indeed, we have proposed this question very candidly and also stated our concerns,” Mr Li told reporters in Beijing. 
“We also asked if these refugees will be illegally repatriated to other countries.” (here)

Of course they mentioned the Aborigines too, but that's water off a duck's back to Tony Abbott. How's your Spanish?

China expresó su preocupación por el trato a los refugiados en Australia y la situación de los aborígenes, dice el comunicado de prensa. (here)

And of course the reptiles at the lizard Oz were sent into a frenzy at the news that Iranian authorities had made a few agitated remarks about the violence and mistreatment in Australian-run detention centres, which saw the death of a 24 year old Iranian man.

Naturally Abbott bunkered down and foamed and frothed about being fair but firm, or is that firm but fair, but this has a long way to play out. Why even the Daily Terror, the least trusted newspaper in Australia, seems to think there might be the need for ongoing investigation, at least if you take a look at today's top splash:

If you read the story, Shocking claims after Manus Island bloodbath: security guards 'stomped on Iranian asylum seeker's head, killing him' (forced video), it will take some fancy dancing to stay fair but firm while mounting a murder investigation:

As blame is exchanged on the Manus Island detention centre bloodbath, it has been claimed that the Iranian asylum seeker killed on Monday night may have been murdered by out-of-control guards who stomped his skull as he lay defenceless on the ground. 
According to an account from an Australian guard working for security contractor GS4, obtained by New Corp, local guards working for GS4 were in a frenzy and jumped on the man’s head in a rage on Monday night, inside the detention compound. But Papua New Guinea clearly believes the Australians are covering up, with Prime Minister Peter O’Neill insisting that no New Guineans were involved in any of the troubles, which led to the one death and two others being medi-vacced to Australia. 

And the corollary?

The debacle — apparently a combination of poor crowd control, inadequate fencing and furious asylum seekers, who have been unable to get answers on what their future holds — has raised serious questions about Australia’s reliance on outsourced security in far-flung offshore centres.

Yep, what we need is better, more effective gulags.

Hang on, is that Vladimir on the line? Can someone conjure up good old Uncle Joe? Is Sheriff Joe available? Oh hang on, they're doing his good works in Queensland already.

So there's the solution. Put Newman Campbell in charge. He'll know how to be firm, and all this talk of fairness will evaporate like spit on a shovel on a hot summer's day ...

Remember all that outrage at pink batt deaths? Royal Commissions? Oh shush, let's just have an internal inquiry, and waiter, bring very large bowls of water ...

Never mind, it's Friday, and you don't get to experience that sense of relief if you happen to be in a gulag on Manus island.

But it left the pond inclined to leave the commentariat alone. After all, is there any point in reading the quisling Graham "Swiss bank accounts" Richardson scribbling for the reptiles at the lizard Oz, and pretending to be left of Tony Abbott, why even more left than Genghis Khan, and now - having sabotaged Labor for years - pretending to hold Abbott to account?

What a preposterous nauseating spectacle ...

Oh wait there's an even more nauseating spectacle ...

Yep, it's the bouffant one, still hard at work knob polishing and grovelling, this time ostensibly concerned for the poor, trudging the lonely hard-working road of the Sisyphean hagiographer. Or is that Hercules up to his fifth labor, carting the shit out of the Augean stables?

Let's have some good news. How about When Tony went to Sophie's wedding?

Yep, back in the day, the rorter Abbott routinely dipped his porky nose in the trough, travelling to weddings and other junkets around the land, in fine Slipper style, and only took a back step when he was found out. As for the watchdog?

Say what? Who, which, what watchdog?

The failure of the department in charge of MP entitlements to provide a ruling follows a pattern in which it has been unwilling to comment or take action on any of the examples of questionable travel claims revealed by Fairfax Media. 
And it comes as the Australian National Audit Office interrogates the "effectiveness of the Department of Finance's administration of travel entitlements provided to parliamentarians". (more here)

Steady, don't get excited. The Audit Office is due to table in ... autumn 2015 ...

And then came this astonishing news:

Yes, even as he goes about the business of demolishing, ruining and obliterating the NBN, at his master's bidding, big Mal still has the wood on Tony Abbott. Abbott is so disliked that even a servile prat and ponce from Sydney's eastern suburbs can win a popularity poll, as you can read in Malcolm Turnbull trumps Tony Abbott in poll.

Yes, even as the sycophant fellow travels while Brandis raises the spectre of internet censorship, he still stays ahead of Abbott.

It doesn't ultimately mean much - Malcolm Fraser was routinely reviled and loathed yet the head prefect still won a few elections - but sheesh, when even jolly Joe Hockey does better, it'd be wise for the current head prefect not to look in a mirror ... or a painting. Who knows what the Dorian Gray visage might be hiding?

And at the same time, the news from WA unleashed some compelling speculation, as you can read in WA half-Senate election spells a whole lot of uncertainty for Tony Abbott.

Could the rest of the Abbott government's term see it reliant on the votes of Clive Palmer, in which case whither the reptiles at the lizard Oz and their war on Palmer? After all, if Abbott lies down in bed with Clive ...

And will he be reliant on the rabid DLP senator John Madigan, who will likely introduce all the old Catholic Harradine abortion and associated 'family' routines? And can South Australia look to Nick Xenophon for boondoggles while the gambling industry groans?

However it falls, it'll be a most just irony if Abbott continues to be tortured and to find a need to introduce some kind of consensus to get things through the Senate.

And so to yet another breach of Godwin's Law.

Students of the Nuremberg Trials will remember that one of the favourite excuses for committing a crime was "following orders". "Befehl Ist Befehl" didn't generally work, of course, though there were exceptions, as you can find by doing a Greg Hunt on Superior orders.

But in any case none of this has to do with the moral or legal culpability, guilt and responsibility of the superior who issued the orders, in this case Tony Abbott in consort with Scott Morrison.

So the pond had to remind itself why Abbott ordered the Royal Commission into the pink batts affair.

No, it wasn't petty spite and cheap political payback, it was noble and high minded.


"Australians deserve a full explanation of this massive policy failure to ensure such a disaster never happens again," Mr Abbott told News Corp. 
But the Government is also keen to ensure the Royal Commission focuses on the role played by former ministers and senior public servants - instead of examining the reasons behind numerous fires caused by faulty installation. 
Terms of reference - to be unveiled today - include identifying "risks arising from the program and the assessment and management of those risks". 
It will also look at whether any changes should be made by the government to its "laws, practices, processes, procedures and systems" to ensure that similar tragedies don't happen again. (here)

Uh huh. Manus island?

Ah, forget it, it's only an Iranian asylum seeker. Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown, and the man in charge puts Deadwood's Al Swearengen to shame. Come to think of it, the pond does the foul-mouthed Swearengen a disservice. He was an honest rogue, not a hypocritical one ... (but at last you get to an explanation of the header to this piece, it's an Al Swearengen quote)

Suicides, a possible murder, and yet it all rolls on, and as Waleed Aly notes, here, the government will likely enough get away with murder and no one will care much:

Through it all we maintain the heroic ability to exonerate ourselves through the fiction that we played no part in their misery, or that those who riot are immorally cynical. But the cynicism is ours. Even the briefest sampling of commercial talkback radio this week revealed a streak within us that sees a detainee's death merely as comeuppance. The political truth is that there is almost nothing any government could do that the electorate would deem too brutal, which is precisely how we got here. 
A poll last month had 60 per cent of us urging the Abbott government to ''increase the severity'' of our policies towards asylum seekers. That's not a pragmatic policy judgment. We find something cathartic about this official form of violence. 
The truth is we've never really come to terms with why it is people get on boats, and why it is that, faced with hopeless inaction once they're detained, they protest. In fact, our public conversation isn't even terribly interested in knowing. That's why, when we do finally discover the facts of Manus, they will mean nothing.

A pox on all their houses, but to end on a light note, if you've ever wondered who helped cultivate that sheltered sense of parochialism, paranoia and xenophobia, have a look at this Liberal advertisement from the October 1980 Malcolm Fraser government bid to get itself re-elected. Click to enlarge: