In which the pond hits a few private casinos in the Cross in company with prattling Polonius and cock Robin ...

Say what?

It's all go in the Surry Hills bunker and the reptiles are leaping off their hot rocks with excitement.

The pastie Hastie is top of the digital page, and who knows, a stern defence of a young earth and creationism might be on the cards, as the onion muncher gazes in awe at someone even more devout and barking mad than he is ...

Meanwhile, there were japes and wheezes, dressed up as stern warnings ...

Too rich, too rich.

"I say, old thing, you really have gone a bit too far, wot wot, tone it down a bit, eh old chum, wot wot ... now let's put the warm lettuce leaf aside and practise saying 'no'" ...

Across the Pacific, there was much agitation and excitement at the way that one crazed psycho armed with nukes had out-Englished a tweeting psycho armed with nukes, by delivering the ultimate verbal weapon of "dotard" ...yes WaPo felt the need to go wild with "A short history of the word 'dotard,' which North Korea called Trump" ...

Back home some refuse from the land of Trump and the world of chairman Rupert washed up on our shores, and Dame Slap found a soul mate ...

And speaking of climate denialists, Lloydie was out and about in his usual way, spreading his usual FUD ...

And lo, over there was the dog botherer, getting agitated about having said 'yes' ...

Such a tortured soul, but in all this fuss and excitement and hullabaloo, was it really truly true that the pond's favourite, prattling Polonius, used rocket stick in the mud, and pedant cranked up to tedious 11, was scribbling about Robin Askin, one of the most corrupt of NSW premiers?

Okay, Robin might not have been Joh, but give him an A+ for trying, and for helping produce one of the most corrupt police forces the country had seen ...

Please, say it ain't so, because that would be an extreme test of loyalty, even for a pond who has followed Polonius down the most arcane alleyways ...

 

Phew that's a relief ... it's a chance to have a go at Lionel ... order and sanity is restored to the world ...

Now the pond is still out on the subject of Murphy ... and sadly for the salivating conservative commentariat reptiles, the recent release of Murphy-related papers proved something of a dud, with much of it rumour and gossip. That's why most of the caravan moved on, but then Polonius is one of the more stubborn and slow-moving camels ...

Still, Polonius does his best with the cards he's been dealt ... helped along by a snap of his hero trading off by association with royalty ...

Yes, yes, but what a pity that in all that, Polonius has to revert not to the recent bunch of papers but to a book published last year ...

And the pond's still waiting for the main game. What about Robin the Queen's man, who hated to be called Robin, perhaps because of taunts that he was something of a seed sowing cock, this Robin?

Hasten slowly, this is Polonius after all, the hansom cab of scribblers and we will get there in the end ...

Speaking of Askin's corpse, the pond's favourite bit in the ADB's short, circumspect biography of this corrupt politician comes right at the end ...

Askin died on 9 September 1981 at Darlinghurst and was cremated. Anticipating that questions might be asked about his estate, valued at $1.958 million, he had explained to his former press secretary, Geoffrey Reading, that for years he had been `the highest paid public officer in the State’, that `his lifestyle was frugal’, that he had `taken out a series of maturing endowment policies’, that `he was a very successful punter’, that he had benefited from the will of his brother, and that he was skilled in financial affairs and a most successful stock market investor. Though the Department of Taxation made no finding of criminality, it determined that a substantial part of Askin’s estate was generated through undisclosed income from sources other than shares or punting and taxed it accordingly. Lady Askin, childless, and a devoted wife who almost certainly had no idea that he conducted a number of extramarital affairs, survived him and inherited most of his estate. Her estate was valued at $3.725 million; a substantial part of it, too, was taxed. A portrait (1968) of Askin by Judy Cassab hangs in the New South Wales Parliament.

And if you believe that's how cock Robin and his wife got so rich the pond trusts you enjoy the Opera House and harbour bridge the pond has arranged for Santa to slip into your stocking this year ...

The pond ran that collective total through the Reserve Bank's handy inflation calculator, and that basket of $5,683,000 in 1981 comes out at a tidy $21.481 million in 2016 ...

By golly, Barry O'Farrell must be feeling a tad under-done at copping the shaft for a 3k bottle of Grange ... talk about small beer.

Of course Askin was discreet about his corruption, but sometimes it's not what you do, but what you don't do, as noted by an ADB reluctant to dob him in ...

At the height of Askin’s popularity, candidates had to be restrained from dropping 'Liberal' from their publicity material and substituting 'Askin'. But towards the end of his career, an opinion poll reported that, of all the premiers, Askin was `the most unpopular’. Elected in place of a Labor regime seen as 'worm-eaten' by 'graft, corruption, nepotism and general chicanery', the coalition was responsible for a police force widely seen as even more corrupt. According to David Hickie, while campaigning for office Askin had seen 'both the potential votes and finance available to him through the SP network'. Certainly Askin, who attended assiduously to inequities in police pensions, did little to encourage the enforcement of the laws on gambling, other than to call for police reports; he rejected demands for a racing control board; and rather than bet off-course through the Totalisator Agency Board, established in 1964, he maintained an account with one of the biggest SP firms in town. He 'almost entirely' ignored the recommendations of Justice Athol Moffitt’s royal commission on allegations of organised crime in clubs.

Now the pond had family in the SP game, and for a time worked in the Cross in the golden era of private casinos, drugs, R and R, and hookers, and the cops were so brazenly corrupt you could see the brown paper bags handed over in public ...

Askin was at the heart of it, yet rather like Joh, a craven and timid press never laid a glove on him, and only tried it on after he was dead.

But Sydney is a town that doesn't like dobbers, and crims aren't big on paperwork or blabber, and besides just because cock Robin was gone didn't mean the game had to go away ... and so it was on to an even more golden era of police corruption ...it wasn't until 1986 that the plods said enough was enough to Roger Rogerson ...

Now the pond doesn't mind. Where would NSW feature films and television series be without the series of colourful Sydney identities that have produced the likes of Blue Murder?

Now here's the funny thing, even funnier, for a man who wrote about people believing what they want to believe, and mentioning only Perce Galea as a source ....

A nanosecond's googling would have led poor old Polonius to Kate McClymont back in July 2008, here ...

No doubt there's some big-noting in the yarn, but trust the pond, in good old Sydney town, both sides of the political fence have been profoundly corrupt in their day, with each side doing the dance with villains and property developers, and it's been that way since the days of rum and the lash ...

There's a lot more and it's a fun read, and by good luck, Trove has three excerpts from David Hickie's book The Prince and the Premier, in The Canberra Times, starting here ... (and McClymont has a tasty story on Ian Macdonald here showing how the game has continued to this day).

And there's a lot more, like this celebration of corruption at Sydney's crime museum here concerning one baccarat operator, Richard Gabriel Reilly, who also helps balance the books in terms of political corruption...

...Widely known in the underworld for his close political contacts with the State Labor Party, Reilly emerged by the early 1960s as the most powerful criminal in Sydney. Although a bankrupt radio technician in 1952, a decade later he wore $200 suits, drove a $17,000 Maserati, owned a $100,000 home in Castle Cove and maintained an expensive mistress. His exceptional income came from ownership of two baccarat schools in Kings Cross, the Kellet Club and the Spade Room Club, and a neatly kept little notebook containing figures and some three hundred names and telephone numbers — including a senior police officer, some abortionists, several massage parlour operators, the former N.S.W. Minister of Justice Mr M. N. Mannix, and the Labor MLA, A.R. Sloss. Reilly was assassinated in the 1967-8 gang wars and the discovery of his famous black book caused an enormous controversy. Mannix explained that he had known Reilly for twenty years, exchanged Christmas cards with him for ten years and had found employment for released prisoners upon his recommendation. ‘I knew he was a criminal’, said Mr Mannix, ‘but I saw nothing wrong in having him for a friend while I was Minister of Justice’. Somewhat less expansive in his explanations, Sloss said his relations with Sydney’s leading criminal were of ‘a normal parliamentary nature’.

Ah the good old days - you've got to love good old Sydney town and the taste of rum and the lash - but enough is enough, it's time for some intentional comedy, and who better for it than the immortal Rowe, with more Rowe here ...