Stephen Conroy, the internet filter scheme, and copping a jail term for watching an MA+ video

(Above: a neat illustration from Purple Hat Munchkin, here).

Bondage for beginners. Anal for straights. The illustrated guide to oral sexual pleasure, by Slick Willy.

Just some of the wild ideas we're tossing around in a desperate bid to get listed on Communications Minister Stephen Conroy's intertubes blacklist.

There's a possible hitch. If we get frisky and raunchy, blogger might suggest we hide behind a wall with a warning of adult content and an opt in opt out button. If we go over the top in depravity, it might be deemed a breach of terms of service, and then we'd disappear off into the void, trudging around in the basement in search of of a new service provider.

Of course you have an alternative. Cruise around with the safe filter switched on in your browser, and you will remain blissfully unaware of Slick Willy's advice, if that's your choice.

I usually search with the safe filter off. I don't mind the sex that bobs up along the way, though I do get a little consternated by the hate and the eternal pop ups for online casinos and poker games. If you go to porn sites, you're likely to get porn pop ups but most of the time they're quarantined to that area, and provide the cash flow for the free porn some like to consume. You select your poison, and it's your choice.

And if you care enough, you can avoid the poison altogether, and make sure your brood are also on a leash (though you can never underestimate the skill level of teenage nerds in search of a porn fix).

Last I heard the results of Conroy's trial into his network wide filtering system were to be released in August and here we are in September, though as they were started last December with a supposed six week time frame, the concept of time now stretches into the fourth dimension.

Asher Moses' story Conroy urged to 'end net censorship farce' is a couple of days old now, and it doesn't seem to have dislodged any response from the government.

The main point of the story is that there's still no news and no results, and he provides a re-hash of some of the sorrier low points in the never-ending saga, along with another dig from Nick Minchin demanding the results be produced.

Well it's a fair bet that there's trouble in mill, if the endless, protracted delays are any guide, perhaps more related to effectiveness than the effect on internet speed. After all, China has shown how you can put a clamp on the intertubes and it will nonetheless amble along and grow, and if the new broadband network ever gets going, it might provide enough speed to compensate for any inefficiencies induced along the way by an ISP level filter.

A more important question is why we are contemplating a system which puts us right up there with the likes of China, North Korea and Iran. And what's the bet that once it's in place, there will be demands from everywhere about its uses, like banning on line gambling, pornography, the promotion of binge drinking, smoking, eating junk food and any other social vice that we're heir to.

It's hard not to get repetitive in this phony war phase, with the statis producing a kind of disbelieving inertia. Conroy himself just keeps on repeating the same old mantra, perhaps on the basis that if he clicks his heels three times he might find himself in Kansas and all will be well. According to Moses:

... Senator Conroy has so far refused to enter the debate about the freedom of speech issues associated with his internet censorship plan. Today, he continued to paint people who oppose his policy as child abuse supporters.

"Nick Minchin and the Liberal Party should explain why they don't support using the latest technology to restrict access to child abuse content and other Refused Classification material," Senator Conroy said this morning.

Well the likely result of the Conroy plan is a big increase in business for proxy providers, and other alternative methods of distribution of content on the intertubes. And zilch impact on those intent on supplying or consuming kiddie porn, especially those who know about alternative mechanisms. And by definition, since kiddie porn is illegal almost everywhere, they're already in the know, below the surface, need winkling out, and will keep on evading the clumsy sledgehammer Conroy proposes to deploy.

Money spent on effective cyber policing would be much more to the point - get cops to infiltrate porn rings, track consumers who make the mistake of using credit cards to purchase material (some amazingly do), and otherwise use standard policing techniques to catch paedophiles, and it would have a lot more impact than pious mouthings about reducing child abuse content.

If Conroy thinks that Canute-like Australia on its own can hold back the flow of more mainstream pornography, he's seriously deluded.

Meantime, we await the end of the farce, with the battlelines clearly drawn and Conroy, having painted himself into a corner, now surely in search of a solution which will enable any egg to be smoothly wiped from face. Which is not to say he'll give up the game, because he's shown a remarkable stubborn streak throughout the saga.

In the interim, what fresh bizarreness can we find? Well Asher Moses strikes once again with his story Over the top: 'child-abuse' video rated MA15+.

The story involves a man who uploaded a video of a man swinging around a baby like a rag doll:

Despite having no involvement in the creation of the three-minute clip, he was committed to a trial by jury in the District Court on July 8. He faces a maximum penalty of 10 years' imprisonment for each of the two charges.

Illingworth's solicitor, Chelsea Emery, of Ryan and Bosccher Lawyers, has said that, if the case goes ahead, every Australian who surfs the net could be vulnerable to police prosecution.

But the Australian Communications and Media Authority, responding to a complaint about the video on July 9, sent the clip to the Classification Board, which classified the content MA15+.

Under the Classification Board's guidelines, the impact of MA15+ material "should be no higher than strong" and violence and strong themes "should be justified by context". MA15+ material is considered unsuitable for persons under 15 years of age.

"As a result of the Classification Board's decision, the content is not prohibited under the Broadcasting Services Act 1992," read a letter from ACMA, seen by this website.

Queensland Police has said any Australians who simply view the clip could face a maximum of 10 years in jail but today it refused to comment on the apparent disparity between its and the Classification Board's definition of child-abuse material.

By golly, I know they're strange in Queensland, but go read the story in detail. And contemplate the fact that. as a result of this new moral panic, in Stephen Conroy's brave new world you could theoretically cop a ten year jail sentence for uploading or watching a video rated MA+.

(Below: cartoon by Nicholson as seen in The Australian. More Nicholson here).

Pat Buchanan, Obama as Hitler, Hitler as a peace lover, and the world is happy and gay

(Above: did the creator of this image have any recollection how Adolf Hitler responded to the win of Jesse Owens in the 100 metres race in the Berlin Olympics in 1936?)

America the brave and the free is also the land of the biggest and best crazies, so big and craggy they make the Rockies look like mole hills instead of mountains.

First a lot of people, loons of the first water, are now spending a lot of time and energy proving that Obama is the new Hitler, and Hitler was of course bad, evil, and even thoroughly unpleasant.

Obama's plan to speak to schoolchildren - without parents present - has been presented as a dire, evil plot to recruit children to his civilian army, his "Hitler youth brigade".

Yep, it's all here in that invaluable home for loons, World Net Daily, under the header Parents rebel against Obama TV speech to schools.

A sample:

"Hitler knew that if you control the youth, you control the future. I wrote about him in 'The Threats to Homeschooling: From Hitler to the NEA.' As I noted in that article, Hitler said: 'The Youth of today is ever the people of tomorrow. For this reason we have set before ourselves the task of innoculating our youth with the spirit of this community of the people at a very early age, at an age when human beings are still unperverted and therefore unspoiled,'" he wrote.

Another:

"Let the brain washing begin. Yes, it is a bit of a stretch. But I remember from history class that some other very prominent figures in history started out like this, all about education and change for the better. Capture the hearts and minds and all that. You can call it what you will but Obama Youth or Hitler Youth … This is much too slippery a slope, this day and age with the role of government becoming more invasive the last thing I want is for 'them' to get a tooth into my kids."

Gee, apparently Obama wanted to urge American kids to do their readin' and writin' and work on their 'rithmetic skills, and get focused and begin the school year strong. Seems like that's just another word for a totalitarian regime intent on spreading its propaganda and entrenching its power by brainwashing children. Next thing you know they'll be disputing creationism in class.

On no, America is going Nazi. What will the real Nazis at Storm Front, worried about white survival, do about it when they learn their black President is really Adolf Hitler reborn?

But wait, what noble crusader riding on a steed from the east brings good news?

Why it's none other than Pat Buchanan and he's made his epic journey to let us know that Hitler was in fact a peace loving good guy.

Yep, it's all there in Did Hitler Want War?, proving that Pat Buchanan is way dumber than the British PM of the time, one Neville Chamberlain, waving his sheet of paper and announcing peace in his time.

I can't begin to convey just how whacky and historically crazy this bit of revisionist nonsense is, but let's just go with the last couple of paras:

Hitler had never wanted war with Poland, but an alliance with Poland such as he had with Francisco Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy, Miklos Horthy’s Hungary and Father Jozef Tiso’s Slovakia.

Indeed, why would he want war when, by 1939, he was surrounded by allied, friendly or neutral neighbors, save France. And he had written off Alsace, because reconquering Alsace meant war with France, and that meant war with Britain, whose empire he admired and whom he had always sought as an ally.

As of March 1939, Hitler did not even have a border with Russia. How then could he invade Russia?

Like the lack of a precisely defined border would somehow spike your invasion plans? Like he only wanted to be friends with England and re-instal the Duke of Windsor on the throne? Like he only wanted to treat Poland the way his goons treated Austria? Like he was surrounded by friends?

Who is this blathering idiot and why hasn't he read any history? Or has Obama recruited him n his drive to establish National Socialism in America?

Well as you know, Buchanan was a senior advisor to Nixon, Ford and Reagan, and he still turns up on the MSNBC network as an expert, and he was even considered a Republican presidential contender in 1992 and 1996 (you can wiki on him here). He's also notoriously and predictably outrageous when writing about this kind of stuff, but he's really excelled himself this time.

He even has the cheek to quote Winston Churchill to end his column:

Winston Churchill was right when he called it “The Unnecessary War” — the war that may yet prove the mortal blow to our civilization.

Well actually Winston Churchill spent the thirties saying war was inevitable and urging Britain to prepare for war, but what would he know. Except he'd probably read Hitler's Mein Kampf and saw a pattern and got a little worried at the notion of lebensraum and slave nations:

Without consideration of traditions and prejudices, Germany must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil, and hence also free it from the danger of vanishing from the earth or of serving others as a slave nation.

The National Socialist Movement must strive to eliminate the disproportion between our population and our area—viewing this latter as a source of food as well as a basis for power politics—between our historical past and the hopelessness of our present impotence.

Perhaps best of all is Buchanan's evocative line that Hitler wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps. Yep, the Holocaust must be the fault of the Poles, or the British or all the others who didn't sue for peace, and work out a deal with that nice man Adolf Hitler.

I guess being either profoundly ignorant about, or profoundly sympathetic to, what Hitler got up to with German Jews in the thirties might be one handy explanation for this remarkably silly - no remarkably offensive - line.

There's more, a lot more, but no more spoilers, so you can enjoy the preposterous feast yourself.

Because I want to draw attention to the upside. Since Hitler is actually a nice kind of peacenik, who's just got a bad rap from history, why are the hysterical Republicans getting so anxious about Obama being Hitler?

He's just a good guy peacenik who wants to imitate another good guy peacenik. Pat Buchanan tells me so.

Phew, I can now wear my "Liberal Fascist" badge with pride. All I want is peace and love and flowers in my hair, Adolf Hitler style, and sing a song of peace:

Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Deutschland is happy and gay!
We're marching to a faster pace
Look out, here comes the master race!
Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Rhineland's a fine land once more!
Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Watch out, Europe
We're going on tour!
Springtime for Hitler and Germany...

The Fuhrer is causing a furor!
He's got those Russians on the run
You gotta love that wacky hun!
The Fuhrer is causing a furor
They can't say "no" to his demands
They're freaking out in foreign lands
He's got the whole world in his hands
The Fuhrer is causing a furor!

Oops, those last lyrics don't quite fit. Damn you Mel Brooks, World War II is all your fault, persuading Hitler to bring it on just so you could have a hit movie and a musical.

(Below: it turns out that some nightmares are just passing dreams, and the world can wake up a better place).

The Daily Telegraph, the John Della Bosca story, and a strangely suddenly muted sex scandal

(Above: the Daily Telegraph being terribly discreet about a NSW political scandal today).

You know, once upon a time, the Daily Terror aka the Daily Telegraph would have been all over the revelation of the name of the woman who had the affair with John Della Bosca.

Last night it was a hit with channels Seven and Nine, while Ten caught up with it later in the evening. Only the ABC and SBS retained a kind of po-faced silence.

But it looked like a biggie for the next day. So what's the splash for the Terror in its online incarnation?

Something to do with a bikie lawyer taking on the cops? (see above).

The story about the affair? Well it's headed John Della Bosca - the two-minute man, and features Della Bosca sitting on the back benches for the two minutes he was allegedly there. As for the woman and her identity? (Naturally one of their readers picked up on the sly innuendo of the two minute man header, noting it could refer to most Australian men. Nice one subbie).

Ms Neill, who agreed to be identified last night, revealed details of the six-month relationship exclusively to The Daily Telegraph.

The rest of the story is about the fallout from the scandal. No shrieking headlines, no actual photo of the woman involved. Instead a strange, muted silence.

Well there's also a link another story, dated September 1st, headed I've taken my medicine over secret affair, disgraced ex-minister John Della Bosca admits.

Duck into Tim Blair for the good oil, and sure enough there's a link. To the ninemsn story about the woman's identity. Ninemsn!

Oh and there's a link to a really silly wretched cartoon sending up Nathan Rees as super premier man. Even comic book man in The Simpsons won't be stocking this one.

So I headed off to The Punch, certain that it would relish the controversy, in its own inimitable cheap-skate way, as yesterday it had asked the penetrating question Do Australans care if politicians fool around?

So what have we got? Well the lead piece is on Australia's scorching August, another wants the diggers in France to rest, a third does a standard bit of inter-generational fluff, a fourth, in perhaps the most penetrating journalism ever exposed to readers, discovers that the coffee in Queensland is bad, thereby denying it the status of actual civilization, a fifth is on about equal pay for women, a sixth takes a look at diving in soccer (apparently no spring board is involved), and the last two round out the day with a look at the rort of extended warranties and the way swine flu madness has fueled bogus vaccination claims.

The scarlet woman, the woman in red, the woman who brought down a potential future premier, of the grand old state of NSW, is invisible.

So it was off to The Australian, and at last the apparent News Corp boycott broke. The good old broadsheet had it all over the tabloid, and you can read it all here if you can be bothered. Why there's even a YouTube link, and a front page splash with a photo. Even the Hun, otherwise known by dullards as the Herald Sun, Melbourne's glory, found time for a front page piece linking to re-print of The Australian's story (here).

So what gives? Why the comely silence in the Terror? It's not as if they haven't had enough time to join the story - they even provide a link to the revelation in The Australian. Could they have done a deal with the woman which led to the funereal note that she'd 'agreed' to be identified and say no more? Was that the price of the exclusive? Well it seems so, if you can follow the convoluted logic of Telegraph editor Garry Linnell, who said they'd agreed to out her in their rag only if she gave approval, so they noted she'd agreed to be outed, then said no more. So protective and caring.

Not even a listing in Sydney Confidential, which manages today to take a look at Rachael Finch, Natalie Imbruglia, and even poor old Jill Hickson Wran on a drink driving charge? Et tu, Annette Sharp?

By golly, if you can't turn to the Daily Terror for an even handed expose of a sex scandal, where can you turn? Has the world gone mad? Are we all narcissists in the grip of malignant narcissism?

And Chairman Rupert wants me to pay for the content in the Daily Terror? When it's a content free zone when it comes to coverage of the continuing saga of the sex scandal it initiated?

I think I'd rather pay for a walk over red hot coals ... as recommended by leading psychologists for people in the grip of malignant narcissism.

(Below: The Australian being more tabloid than its tabloid sister The Daily Telegraph).

Miranda Devine, Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull, and the age of preening narcissists

(Above: oh go look in a mirror, under thirty dummy).

Thank the lord I finally know how to deal with anyone under thirty if they approach me for some reason.

You might think it's enough to carry a wooden cross, or at least make the sign of the cross, or pack a silver bullet, or perhaps a clove of garlic and a little holy water in a bottle. It's like acid to them, that distilled essence of goodness.

But I think a healthy shouted bit of abuse will be enough. How about this?

Begone vile narcissist, get you gone from my presence, you preening coxcomb prat.

And who's helped me to understand the young? Why none other than Miranda the Devine, who has taken Brendan Nelson's psychological analysis of Malcolm Turnbull to its logical conclusion in Face it, we are all narcissists now:

Nelson has good reason to be critical of Turnbull. But his diagnosis could equally apply to most people aged under 30, to politicians, entertainers, lawyers, business people and, no doubt, to a good number of byline-chasing journalists.

You see! Not that Miranda or I are in any way into pop psychology or intergenerational judgment, but you know I look at young people, anyone under thirty, and they seem well like preening narcissists. Look at the way they have youthful bodies, and move with ease or dress in outrageously attractive ways because they're young and can get away with it.

How I hate their self-regard, and their arrogance and certainty and I "suck on it old dude and dude-ess" air, and that certainly applies to most people under 30. Sure a few ugly ones aren't narcissist in the obvious way, but even the geeks and nerds have a preening self-regard for their ability to sort out a kernel panic. As for the goths and the emos, have you ever seen such self-regarding Emily Bronte types, with their inclination to suicide so 'me, me, look at me' and emotionally selfish.

Everyone's a potential narcissist these days, as 15 minutes of fame has become a 24/7 proposition. For instance, the average Australian woman is said to spend at least 3 ½ hours looking at herself in the mirror each week, according to a survey last month by the Bureau of Statistics.

Yep, it had to be the women. Little princesses preening in front of a mirror each week, unless you're wondering how you might describe the behavior of the little man in the corner in the bathroom with a stopwatch working out that it was three and a half hours for each woman in the survey. Sick voyeuristic stalking gratification by statisticians? Skewed by a few self-regarding commentariat columnists?

Of course it wouldn't be an in depth study unless the scandal du jour was dragged into the analysis:

The 26-year-old mistress of the recently resigned NSW Health Minister, John Della Bosca, appears to have diagnosed her "spunky" former lover with similar symptoms, telling The Daily Telegraph: ''I now realise … he liked me being in love with him because it was all about ego … It is incredulous [sic] that he thought the way he treated people would not have consequences.''

That's narcissists for you. They never see the karma train coming.

Well we'll see about the karma train, because now the woman's name is out in the public arena, and she's already copped a bizarre psychological analysis from Janet Hall, a Melbourne-based clinical psychologist who has probably never met the woman but who nonetheless - on the basis of her ramblings in the Daily Terror, decided that she was predatory, delusional and at risk of ruining her life (Mistress who dumped Della 'predatory': psychologist). Of course she needs counselling. Will the work of psychologists urging counselling ever be done? May Freud and his bounty be blessed for ever and ever amen.

But back to the Devine, so that we can understand that the narcissists who now walk and work amongst us are much larger in number that the vampires and zombies we so rightly fear:

What's more, narcissism is on the increase, becoming a pervasive condition of society, according to two American psychologists, Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, who published a book this year, The Narcissism Epidemic.They include a long-term study of 37,000 American college students, in which the incidence of narcissistic personality traits increased on a scale rivalling obesity, accelerating in the past decade.

In 1982, 15 per cent of students scored highly for narcissistic personality traits. By 2006 the percentage had climbed to 25. Twenge claims only 12 per cent of students in the 1950s agreed with the statement ''I am an important person''; by the late 1980s that percentage had climbed to 80. The reason for the explosion in narcissism in recent years, according to the Melbourne adolescent psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg, is not just the self-esteem movement but poor parenting.

Yep, you might think you're important, but really that's just in your own self-deluded lunchtime. Actually you're nothing, a nobody, a very unimportant person, a speck of dust on a remote planet revolving around a minor star in a corner of a rather large galaxy which is in turn just a mote in the eye of the universe.

Before leaving the house today, please recite at least ten times "I am a very unimportant person". And if you're under thirty, triple the dose please (and lawyers, and entertainers and politicians and business people and journalists, but not of course psychologists who only need to say it once).

At least you might be able to feel important about your unimportance. But let's get back to the poor parenting. I think we can all take that as a sign that baby boomers have failed dismally, and their spawn have produced tadpoles which are the blight of loon pond, what with the self indulgent croaking and the self regard, and the bizarre expectation that they will transform from frogs into princes and princesses:

"Parents are becoming increasingly self absorbed [believing] 'the single most important thing in the world is for me to work like a dog to get the house, the car and the holiday house' and don't … realise all their kids want is to be loved and to have one-on-one time with their parents.'' He says an "epidemic of poor parenting" is to blame for a drastic rise in psychological problems in young people. "Generation Y is being ravaged by depression, anxiety disorders and stress disorders."

Well thank the lord that materialism has nothing to do with the capitalist system, as espoused by the Devine, with its constant emphasis on the marketplace, constant growth, the price of shares and the eternal dilemma of the prime interest rate. Because you see, it's genetic first:

For narcissistic personality disorder to take root, a person has to be born with a genetic "template" for over-sensitivity and over-reactivity. "Then something has to happen."

And then it's environmental:

Carr-Gregg says parental abandonment, coupled with invalidation of the child's corresponding emotional pain, triggers the disorder. "If you grew up in an environment with time-poor parents, you are brought up in a Lord of the Flies [type of] emotional silo by other disaffected young people. It's the psychologically blind leading the blind.

"I see … kids who are overindulged from a very early age … and become incapable of delayed gratification. When I meet these kids in later life they tend to exaggerate their achievements and talents, tend to believe they are special and unique and interesting. They require excessive amounts of admiration and if they don't get it, they'll wipe you off the face of the planet."

You know, like becoming PM or leader of the opposition is such an under-achievement, such an exaggeration of talent, that it's almost obscene that those two gherkins should require excessive amounts of admiration. But hey I'm suddenly terrified because if we don't worship our fearless leaders, they're going to wipe us off the face of the planet. Like we're suddenly trapped in Lord of the Flies, and they'll smash up my glasses and use my body as a punching bag.

Carr-Gregg - who coincidentally was three years behind Turnbull at Sydney Grammar - won't comment publicly on the Nelson diagnosis.

But, along with the psychometrician Simon Kinsella, he is working on a series of psychological profiles of famous Australians for an upcoming book, to identify personality structure and psychopathology in different professions, from politicians and journalists to creative artists and sports people.

What a pity there's no mention of psychologists and psychiatrists and the class war between those two bunches of mental health experts.

Never mind, I'm sure a pill or two will fix what ails us all. Must rush off for a script now.

"I would give anything to do Malcolm Turnbull," he says. It's one way for Turnbull to prove Nelson wrong.

Sigh. So now Malcolm Turnbull has to sit down and go through a shrink fest to prove Brendan Nelson wrong. All this from a clever put down by Nelson which the Devine herself announced was a delicious diagnosis by a fallen rival with an axe to grind (with her only good line, Brendan's own case study involving "post-traumatic embitterment syndrome", borrowed from the filthy intertubes).

You'd hope it was a game. The Devine says it is, right at the start of her column:

Let's play a game: who doesn't have narcissistic personality disorder in our self-obsessed age? A surfeit of self-love is almost a prerequisite for success now, and the proliferation of egomaniac sites, from Twitter and MySpace to Facebook and YouTube, make the peer pressure to be grandiose and irrationally self-confident almost irresistible.

See! I told you the intertubes were filthy, a psychological nightmare, a deep endless pit without light from which you never return.

Yet by the end of her column, you have to believe that the Devine actually believes a narcissist plague is sweeping the globe with Napoleonic fervor, with the Devine's damning everyone under thirty as narcissists and everyone over thirty for making them so.

Thereby allowing the Devine to ride off into the sunset having pronounced the end of the world in yet another and new form - psychopathological.

Yep, she's right as usual. I see I have some trouble-makers in the corner of the pond, making trouble for all us terribly unimportant people going about our terribly unimportant lives. While we happy helots and slaves head off to work, hoping to get together enough of a grubstake to ensure we can afford psychoanalysis for these next thirty years or so, the lazy sods are staring into the water again ... and of course they're under thirty, worried if the obesity epidemic is going to end their good looks and a career as a porn star on the intertubes ...

(Above: section of Echo and Narcissus painting by John William Waterhouse, 1903. Below: a terribly self-indulgent cartoon which perhaps only someone over thirty could understand).

Tim Blair, an ugly alleged 9/11 ad, the WWF and the rush to smear

Well well well and splosh. Since I got that totally wrong, and the folly will be preserved elsewhere on the intertubes, here's a lesson to rubes that rush in where angels fear to tread.

For the latest state of play on this image, go to Advertising Age, for the story 9/11 Ad for WWF Causes Tusanami of a Crisis for DDB Brasil.

It includes a link to Keith Olbermann naming DDB Brasil as winner in his worst persons in the world segment. Anything Keith says is good enough for me.

Since the intertubes is full to overflowing with error, I've deleted the erroneous post from this site. No need to keep perpetuating a myth. For anyone offended or mislead, apologies. Clearly the WWF Brasil and DDB Brasil are dummies.

UPDATE: Well perhaps I mis-spoke yet again, and too soon. Here's the latest on the ever unfolding scam ad situation via Mumbrella (here).

There's also more on the debacle here at Ad Age, and this amusing AdRANTs, under the happy header An Hour Went By -- Must Be WWF DDB 9/11 Ad Update Time.

Not to mention the WWF apology here.

Bottom line is that the WWF Brasil and DDB Brasil remain dummies, but the One Show advertising competition is also a bunch of dills, by now yammering on about fake ads:

The One Club defines “fake ads” as: ads created for nonexistent clients or made and run without a client’s approval, or ads created expressly for award shows that are run once to meet the requirements of a tear sheet.

And the advertising industry's inability to regulate itself when it comes to chasing awards and glory has also copped the spot light.

It seems DDB has antipodean form in this regard - having played full page print advertisements in The Manly Daily on July 14th 2007, with the companies featured - Cycling Australia and Wrigley - saying that they didn't commission or pay for them (DDB Booked Ads to enter Awards).

I think I'll stop with this from Ad Age, under the header Bad for DDB, Bad For Ad Shows, Just Plain Bad:

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Insensitive and simply awful creative. Lust for awards at the expense of a client. Ignorance on the part of executives about what's going on at -- and coming out of -- their own agency. Truly awful crisis management at both the local and global level.

This parade of horribles, many of which represent the worst of the agency business, marched last week on DDB's much-celebrated Brazilian agency, spiraling the creative powerhouse into a days-long crisis that could have been averted with even halfway-decent PR. The scandal began when a little-seen print ad that exploited the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks made on behalf of the World Wildlife Fund was outed and condemned widely on the internet. It widened when the agency denied it had anything to do with a video version that was entered in Cannes -- a claim that turned out to be a lie.

Complicit in the crisis was awards-show culture that doesn't do nearly enough to weed out scam ads, those edgy creative concoctions that get only enough media weight to qualify for the awards circuit. As tasteless and ineffective as it might have been, "Tsunami," the DDB ad in question, actually netted a so-called "merit award" in the prestigious One Show this year. That award was withdrawn during last week's outcry, which sparked the One Show board to create new rules to regulate scam ads ...

... "Obviously somebody made this ad to win awards and get attention," said Bob Moore, chief creative officer at Publicis USA, when consulted on the matter. "It's absolutely tasteless. It probably was a rogue creative team trying to win awards. This desperation to win awards is getting out of control."

"This ad also shows us there is no such thing as local," he continued. "Digital distribution has made it so that everything is global. You need to be sensitive to a wider audience. But that's not the case here because they entered it into international awards shows. That's half the problem."

Between a muddle and downright stupidity and a conspiracy, always go with the muddle and the stupidity. Offensive stupidity.

I think I'll stop now, it's just a relief to know that I'm not the only loon in the world ...

Janet Albrechtsen, men's clubs, the right to be a religious loon and the soft left liberal mindset

(Above: a hardened dinkum Aussie sorts out a soft left liberal mindset).

The cherry tree out the back has lost its bright red blossoms, and the squawking parrots have moved on. We're only blessed with their jibber jabber a couple of weeks a year - and is it wrong, too nativist of me - to prefer these brightly colored baubles to the fiendish Indian mynah birds and their wretched cries of alarm each time I step into the backyard?

Am I going slightly Cronulla?

Never mind, we always have a different kind of squawking to relieve the tedium, and today it's the turn of Janet Albrechtsen, in Dos and don'ts of discrimination.

Now the first half of her column is spent railing against UN consultant James Anaya blowing in for a few days to do a report on the Northern Territory and then blowing out again, making all the loons on the pond jump about in startled indignation, as if he wasn't saying what had already been said by a large number of dissidents not entirely happy with the way the NT intervention has unfolded.

Never mind, away she goes and has tremendous fun, and that in turn allows her to carp against Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma and his report, and ex-GG Bill Deane cringing each time he hears the "intervention" word.

All well and good, as Dame Slap mounts three cheers for Sue Gordon, and even manages a hooray for Jenny Macklin, indigenous affairs minister.

Then she gets down to the nub of it, to the heart of the problem, to the heart of darkness. And wouldn't you know it, it's the fault of ... well you guessed it:

Whether the issue is solemn or trivial, the wider soft-left liberal mindset is equally unable to comprehend any kind of complexity where there is the slightest hint of discrimination.

Oh you simple minded, soft cock liberals and your stupid mindset, completely incapable of understanding any kind of complexity.

Men’s clubs are inherently evil - “a relic of earlier times”, according to Julia Gillard. The Deputy Prime Minister has publicly taunted them for not accepting Governor-General Quentin Bryce as a member. Last week, when Bryce was made an honorary member of Lyceum, the exclusive women-only club in Melbourne, the sisterhood had nothing to say about relics.

Well actually dear Dame Slap, the Lyceum is a relic, established in 1912 and directly modelled on the lyceum clubs of England. And poor old Federal Sex Discrimination Elizabeth Broderick got a wrap over the knuckles by at least one commentariat columnist for this remark:

Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick, who holds the position Ms Bryce occupied in the early 1990s, has also weighed into the debate, declaring it is "not smart" for any institution that claims to reflect a city's elite to lock out half of the population. (here).

But how can you win an argument if you aren't allowed a sweeping assertion about the sisterhood?

While I was looking around on the subject of Lyceum Clubs - they now seem to flourish more in the colonies than mother England - I stumbled across a quaint piece here in the NZ Illustrated Magazine, as held in the NZ national library:

All over the civilized world, unions of various kinds are being formed; and at last it is one's pleasant duty to tell of a woman's club, which, though conducted on advanced lines, is not intended as a club for the dissection of man and his alleged meannesses (sic). Nor is it a club to further the introduction of a female parliament.

Phew, for a moment there I thought we were talking revolution, but it was of course a way for women (in this case especially artistic, university and scientfically inclined women) to carve out a space away from the actual (as well as alleged) meannesses of the male kind. It now feels incredibly quaint, not to mention colonial, but back to Dame Slap:

Now here’s a really thorny one. How to respond to recent reports in Britain where local municipal swimming pools have banned swimmers during certain hours unless they comply with a “modest” code of dress required by Islamic custom: women covered neck to ankle and men covered navel to knees. A “relic of earlier times” or culturally appropriate discrimination?

Well actually that's no more tricky than responding to the notion that somehow men's and women's only clubs aren't relics from quaint Victorian times, with no better or more likely home than in Melbourne in these modern times.

My suggestion? Where the pools are municipal, which is to say funded by taxpayer dollars, they should conform to current community standards, and not indulge in any kind of censorship required by any religion. What are current community standards? Well that's a bit chewy, but I think we're mainly arguing about whether thongs should be limited to the pages of The Punch or Bondi beach.

Of course following Dame Slap's standards, a private pool funded by private money can impose any standard it might like. So include me out, but feel free to impose whatever dress standard you like in your quaint relic of earlier times.

Which brings us to her now standard whine about religious schools:

And what about religious schools? Victorian Attorney-General Rob Hulls has called for a review of the exemptions under the state’s Equal Opportunity Act that allow schools to hire on the basis of religious faith. That’s discrimination. It is also a basic exercise of the right to religious freedom. Will the Left’s legal crusader, Hulls, defend that right by using his Charter of Human Rights? Probably not.

Well I'm sure Albrechtsen is very happy for taxpayer dollars to go to the support of educational establishments promoting the beliefs of the Exclusive Brethren, Scientology and fundamentalist Islam, or any other cuckoo philosophy that can round up enough cash for bricks and mortar and enough kids for indoctrination. Thereby earning themselves nice kickbacks as part of the funding of the private school industry.

But again where's the inconsistency in suggesting that if taxpayers' dollars are involved then such schools should not be exempted from requirements placed on other schools, including the exemption involving the right to hire on the basis of religious faith. Allowing a creationist school to hire science teachers on the basis of a belief in creationism will see us heading down the US road to religious lunacy sooner than trying to tell the time with a broken two bob watch.

Of course there's a way around this, if you're a school and a tribe intent on maintaining your righteous vision of the world. Give up sucking on the teat of the taxpayer, go off and live apart and teach how you will in your private enterprise. There's a few towns in the north of South Australia ailing a little who could do with your presence.

Dame Slap's first comment got it right:

There is no intellectual inconsistency on men’s clubs and religious schools. The separation of sexes involved in Men’s clubs serves no valuable function, while reinforcing socially harmful attitudes (a trait shared by private schools and religious schools, incidentally).

But by then Albrechtsen had bolted, the horse was well and truly out of the stable, and righteous indignation knew no bounds:

Intellectually inconsistent carping about men-only clubs and religious schools pales into insignificance compared with the hollow morality of those who preach about discrimination in indigenous communities. Consider the sad irony that those hailed as protectors of human rights and seekers of social justice continue to give succour to an outdated mindset that has demonstrably failed our youngest and most disadvantaged citizens. Fortunately, it is a sign more sensible times have prevailed when these misguided people are increasingly relegated to the fringes of meaningful debate while ever small children suffer abuse and neglect.

Well I guess I could marvel at the sad irony of those hailed as devotees of small government, asserters of the rights of individuals and haters of paternalistic, patrician big government dominance and interference in the rights of citizens would demonstrably fail to care about the individual rights of Australian citizens, but I guess I'd just be adding to the hot air quotient of the week, based on the insistent desire to treat every issue as an ideological outing.

If there's a soft left liberal mindset, then just as surely there's a hardened right wing ratbag mind set.

As for the rights of commentariat columnists? Send in the troops I say, that'll sort them out, and the first one to write a line like "soft-left liberal mindset", put 'em up against a wall and shoot them. That'll soon teach them about subtlety and nuance and the way to understand complexity when it comes to a particular view of the world.

John Della Bosca, Kate, Tim Blair cracks a joke and living in the rum state

Today the reading takes its theme from the splash in the Daily Terror on the fate of a woman who loved a state Labor minister too well and not too wisely.

I was a fool to love him, she cries (learn more here), explaining how all her friends told her she was being stupid:

One told me that, "Here's this fun girl and then there's an old fat politician in a suit with a big question mark over him."

They meant that you can't trust a politician. Looking back I now realise I was never on a level playing field.

I used to think I was smarter and, to be honest, a lot of my anger is at myself.

I realise now I was naive and he played me like a fool.

I don't want to be identified because I'm already embarrassed about having had an affair with John.

On and on it goes, and the end result is I began to feel some pity for John Della Bosca, getting tangled up with the payback bitch from hell.

As for the explanation of keeping her anonymity and maintaining the rage by doing yet another rant for the Daily Terror, somehow the excuse is that she's embarrassed about having an affair? With a fat old politician?

Honey, you do the crime, you do the time.

Well we know how much Tim Blair hates anonymity on the intertubes, so we turned to him for a revelation, an expose of the woman by naming names. After all, if someone's dumb enough to fuck a state Labor politician, surely there should be a naming and a shaming ...

But no, we just get links to other journals celebrating the juicy scandal, along with a quip that there were two big warning signs at the start of the affair: the woman lived in Newtown and met him in an art gallery. (Lotsa Bosca).

Given Blair's ability to bash academics, it's strange that he missed the biggest sign of all - she's a postgraduate student and therefore disbarred from reading The Punch, Chairman Rupert's contribution to lowering the IQ on the intertubes.

The days of John F. Kennedy being able to fuck anything that moved in private, including the girlfriends of mobsters and movie stars, have long gone, but it's quaint that anonymity for the woman scorned remains a pious reality in the press.

In the United States the moll tucked away in Argentina for benefit of Republican governor was quickly outed, but the best Rick Feneley and Andrew Clennell can do in The Sydney Morning Herald is provide an obscured photo of a house in Newtown, the love nest for the furtive "liaisions" - sic, so and thus. (you can find the love nest photo here, but be warned it's just a bright window light in a Victorian two up two down obscured by trees).

These brave lads even provide a first name - it's Kate said this, and Kate said that, and last night there was no sign that Kate was at home, but still Kate of Newtown must remain a mystery.

But not her opinions:

I feel so stupid now.

I gave him so much yet I came to believe towards the end of the relationship that he just wanted sex and the cheap thrill of knowing that this young, attractive bird doted on him.

I now realise it was a game and he liked me being in love with him because it was all about ego.

I broke up with him once but he kept texting me to get back with him, so I did.

It is incredulous (sic) that he thought the way he treated people would not have consequences.

I was not one of his political minions who simply has to take being treated like dirt.

For a man who is a master tactician he should have known that it's not smart to totally stuff someone around who is in love.

If you want to have the hedonistic type of life where you can sleep with someone other than your wife without consequences, then don't get into politics where you are supposed to represent a certain level of community values.

I wouldn't say "moral fibre" because no one expects politicians to have that these days.

Ah well, people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, and we can understand the comfort of anonymous rage, but I do so wonder where Tim Blair's outrage at the anonymous behavior in the blogosphere and on the intertubes has gone, as private payback goes wild in public.

But today's sermon wouldn't be complete without a word from Bob Carr, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, under the header As you give Della a kick, remember his successes.

Ritualistic exorcism is part of democracy. Hence John Della Bosca's political corpse lies in the sawdust and every citizen is entitled to stand in line and thrust another blade in his flesh.

Et tu, NSW citizens?

Carr then outlines everything that Della Bosca achieved in the area of negotiations with James Hardie, about water allocation for the Snowy, about the Kings Cross injecting room, and about a whole of life care scheme for catastrophic accident victims. On and on it goes, celebrating the deeds of the man and the Labor government, until it ends with a maudlin flourish:

Right now he is sprawling in the political mud.

Join the mob. Give him a kick.

But not if you have been catastrophically injured in a motor accident or had campaigned for the Snowy waters.

And not if you ever wore James Hardie overalls.

In tone it reminded me of that great speech by Mark Antony in Act 3, scene 2 of Julius Caesar (freely available on the intertubes and via Project Gutenberg(:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him;
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones,
So let it be with Caesar ... The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it ...

And so on, and as I read it, it occurred to me that Carr is still in profound denial at the state of NSW under Labor, a state that he did much to promote by ignoring infrastructure and splashing out on panem et circenses such as the Sydney Olympics.

Now of course he's long gone, off to millionaire's row at Macquarie Bank, spending his time arguing for the opening up of the book industry to fierce competition, while the NSW Labor government shelters behind fixed four year terms and a wave of public hostility.

Speaking of Newtown and Kate, it's just as well she has two strong good working legs to trot off to her affair with Della Bosca, because if she was in a wheelchair and wanted to get down to Newtown railway station, she couldn't. Not unless she minded rolling down a very large stairway. (About the only discreet thing about this state of affairs is that the state government didn't hang up a shingle saying "No crip passengers wanted here").

And you can multiply those complaints about, and observations of, decay around Sydney and the state by hundreds, if not thousands. If the wretched opposition manages to keep verging towards the centre, and sounding managerial and structural, rather than ideological and mad loony right, they'll canter in at the next election.

So for all Carr's righteous indignation, hard rain is going to fall, and voters will go sobbing to the ballot boxes, saying "state Labor? I was a fool to love them." There'll be a kicking then, and instead of Della Bosca being the one in the mud taking the blows, I think I'd rather imagine it was smug Bob Carr's phantom head copping a pounding.

And what part will Della Bosca's foolishness play in all this? No more than a passing example of the hubris and delusions, and yes - in a way the hedonistic desperation of the cabin'd, cribbed and confined world - of the political class.

Was it only four years ago that John Brogden resigned as Liberal leader and then attempted suicide for calling Bob Carr's Malaysian-born wife a "mail order bride ", along with allegations that he'd sexually harassed two female journalists? (Lateline transcript here)

At times like this, you might think we're in the final days of the decline and fall of Rome, if you have enough hubris to imagine Sydney bears some remote connection to that empire, but I like to think of it as just another day in the Rum Colony. With a new Rum puncheon rebellion always just around the corner ...

It's entertaining, just don't expect the trains to run on time. Or be able to access the station to wait for them if you happen to be old or handicapped or otherwise considered useless and irrelevant ... while the media spends its time lapping up the revelations of a sex scandal between to consenting adults, one known, one unknown (let's not get into the unknown unknowns).

It's a funny old world, no doubt about it.

Nedahl Stelio, Vanessa Hudgens, thinking of the children and sweet young things

(Above: 2.3 million images of Vanessa Hudgens when you google up her name with the filter off. What a celebrity! What a sweet young thing, with a flower in her hair! Are you going to San Francisco ....)

Silliest story of the week in The Punch, Australia's most cheap assed conversation?

Surely the gong would have to go to Nedahl Stelio for Sexifying young Hollywood, in which she clucks about Vanessa Hudgens getting caught up in an online sex scandal - beneath a photo of a skimpily clad Ms Hudgens looking like she wants to be the love child of a couple of sixties hippies.

Well Ms Stelio, physician heal thyself. Remove that snap at once! Put in a photo of Germaine Greer looking disapproving.

Fat chance.

Which is why we've put photos of Ms Hudgens top and bottom of this piece. Hey we want to take care of the male demographic and we're anxious to keep up the clicks, just like those cynical Chairman Rupert operatives. Traffic is its own reward.

Ms. Stelio offers up all kinds of fragrant advice to sweet young things thinking about taking off their clothes as a way of getting ahead, especially because of the evils of the intertubes these days. Why once a magazine could double sales with a scoop scandal, but these days everybody's got it in a flash and then discarded it with a meh.

Young innocent things understand none of this. What a pity Jodie Foster couldn't benefit from her advice before playing a 12 year old prostitute in Taxi Driver. Ruined Jodie's career it did.

The piece is of course just a chance for Ms. Stelio to do a glib round up of current tired Hollywood scandals. Well Frances Farmer to all that I say, or perhaps I should say Fatty Arbuckle, to take it back to the silent days. Or Charlie Chaplin if you want a man interested in sweet young things.

The routine always involves a standard twist of the "I'm no ... but" kind, and Ms. Stelio obliges:

I’m no prude, but I don’t think taking one’s clothes off or acting like a stripper should get you anywhere. Isn’t it just a modern day version of the casting couch?

Well I'm no idiot savant, just a loon, but can I just say John Della Bosca to that.

She even recycles Hugh Hefner, his play girls and Playboy as a scandal. Well it's a scandal mainly in the sense that they keep on allowing the old dotard to go on making a public fool of himself and his brainless harem, but beyond that, where's the harm.

Dearie me, the nineteen fifties still pulses strongly in the world of the enfeebled. And of course it wouldn't do to finish off without a dire warning about the imminent decline and fall of western morality as we know it:

... the point isn’t how famous they are, how they got there or how incredibly tacky they must be. The point is that these girls are the new role models for every teenage girl watching their shows, stalking the celebrities and wanting their lifestyle. Naked piccies and all. And that’s what’s worrying.

Oh yes, let's all sit around and worry. Better still let's have a prayer meeting with Helen Lovejoy and Ned Flanders.

Every young girl wants a celebrity lifestyle! Ah well we have a bubble headed booby in our mast, so perhaps every now and then we need to feature a fashionista airhead.

The funniest thing is that in her attached CV, it's revealed that Nedahl Stelio has a weekly celebrity gossip segment on 2DayFM, which no doubt feeds off the celebrity scandal du jour, and in her past she had three years as Deputy Editor at Cosmpolitan and editor of Cleo for five years.

That'd be the Cleo magazine that helped get Sydney primary school teacher Lynne Tziolas sacked for appearing in the nude, and discussing her and her husband's bedroom habits, back in 2008.

Let's hope Somebody Think of the Children! discussing censorship and moral panic in Australia gets on Ms. Stelio's case, because I'm thinking The Punch is likely to encourage moral panics as a way of getting pictures of pretty young things into their stories. The relentless march of the Murdoch empire is always downwards to the gutter.

So why not join them? Just practice that clicking and clucking with your tongue, a tch tch here and a tch tch there, here a cluck cluck, there a cluck cluck ..

Yes, I know I usually deal with the political end of loon pond, but sometimes it just gets too exhausting. Over at the Daily Terror there's Piers Akerman rabbiting on yet again in his quintessentially monomaniacal obsessive way about the Heiner Affair is one of the world's major political scandals, and I fell apart. I couldn't write about it in detail, it's just too absurd and surreal, as Akker Dakker uses Chairman Rudd's proposal to apologize to victims of institutional abuse as an excuse to get back on his hobby horse (PM's abuse apology ignores rape scandal).

Here's the Reader's Digest version: hypocrisy, robbed of their innocence, beyond breath-taking, putative apology, massive abuse of power, thwarted carriage of justice, destroying documents, illegal treatment, conflicting and incredible versions, criminal destruction of files, destruction of evidence, conspiracy to defeat justice, world's major political scandal (and then with a quick flip over to the AWB affair "outrageous smear", before back to Heiner), deliberately avoiding the truth when inconvenient, false claims, credibility as shredded as the Heiner documents, stage props at yet another Labor stunt.

Add Bligh or Rudd to any adjective and you can reconstitute this desiccated story into a full blown coconut

Phew, I got through it, but why do I always think of Günter Grass's novel The Tin Drum and the boy shrieking and banging the drum to drown out the noise? Is that the only way to go?

Now back to sweet young things.

(Below: yes it's Vanessa Hudgens again. But you didn't really think I'd show her nude snaps or her so-called lesbian photos, which are only a couple of kids having fun? Really that'd make me even more pathetic than The Punch. Still, you know how to google with the filter off. Don't let me stop you, but remember it wasn't the Christians who ruined Rome, it was the wild orgies in white sheets of the kind you can only see these days in Animal House. Can Chairman Rupert achieve the same as Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus?)

Greg Melleuish, Chairman Rudd, the history wars, the black armband and the joys of chasing your tail

(Above: the black arm band view of romance).

Where would we be without Greg Melleuish in The Australian?

Follow this logic if you can:

The so-called history wars were bad:

Some historians in the 1970s and 80s forgot that their role was to inquire into the past and provide as accurate a view of it as possible. For them history was the handmaiden of politics, to be used to support contemporary causes...

...This is not the purpose of studying history. Historians seek to understand the past, to gain an appreciation of how and why people acted in the way they did.

But:

...there will always be history wars because historians, as with scientists, will invariably differ about the interpretation of evidence. This sort of disagreement is a healthy aspect of a liberal democratic society.

So we seek the truth about the past, but because the past will always be refracted through present perspectives and prejudices, the past is a moveable feast. History wars are bad, but there will always be history wars.

There's been a lot of choking of toast around here recently, but Melleuish's column Leave history alone led to frequent deployment of the Heimlich Maneuver.

For a start, I'm not so sure what we've done to history that sees it want to do a Greta Garbo and demand to be left a loam (I know, I know, it's a shocking pun, but don't blame me, blame vaudeville).

History's big enough to stand a little intellectual debate. Why it's even big enough to withstand Mr. Melleuish's attempt to mingle baby boomers, birth dates and astrology (more on that here).

Of course what's really got Greg Melleuish going is the usual. Chairman Rudd.

Kevin Rudd's speech launching Thomas Keneally's Australians: Origins to Eureka has left me scratching my head. It is an odd piece. For example, it includes the statement: "The love for history is, I believe, the handmaiden of country." I have thought hard about what this means but I still do not have a clue; it is just meaningless sludge.

But does that explain why Melleuish himself indulges in some verbal sludge by using handmaiden himself? Remember?

For them history was the handmaiden of politics, to be used to support contemporary causes.

Well thank the lord I have never once used the past to argue a current point. Cross my heart and hope to die (yep, that clunk was the sound of the writer expiring and falling to the floor).

Actually I think both hand maidens are pretty obvious. Chairman Rudd's is the usual 'patriot as scoundrel' suggestion that if you love your country, you should read up on its history, which can lead to a somnolescent state in some, especially if contemplating the birth and growth of that convict free colony known as South Australia. While Mr. Melleuish somehow thinks that some perverted historians like to shack up history with contemporary causes in an out of wedlock fornicating way.

Well being something of a cultural warrior himself, he'd know all about that, but even so it's piquant to read his damning list of failed historian prophets, which includes Manning Clark and Henry Reynolds (a tad old testament) and Geoffrey Blainey (inclined to the new testament, three cheers to the paracletes school of writing).

Mr. Melleuish gets himself into quite a lather about how problematic this all is. First the damning of Chairman Rudd continues:

Rudd wants to go beyond "the arid intellectual debates of the history wars". But surely the study of history moves forward only when it engages in intellectual debates, when present interpretations of the evidence are challenged and their inadequacies exposed. Rudd wants to bring the two interpretations, the "black armband" and the "three cheers", together in a love-in. He wants a history that "unapologetically celebrates the good. A history that unapologetically exposes the bad." The problem with this is that he is perpetuating the facile view that the study of history is all about making moral judgments. For him, history is about alternately cheering and booing the past.

Well actually I don't think Chairman Rudd was saying that all. In fact, if you want to find out what Chairman Rudd was actually saying, you might - as would any decent historian - like to consult a primary source. Namely Mr. Rudd's actual speech, which you can find here.

But let's not let an actual report of the actual usual two bob each way political speechifying get in the way of Mr. Melleuish's version of reality:

The history wars to which Rudd refers long predate the prime ministership of John Howard. They came to public prominence because the agenda of the black-armband brigade was taken up by Paul Keating as part of his "big picture". Their willingness to use history for political purposes provided useful ammunition for Keating on matters such as indigenous affairs, the republic and multiculturalism. Howard was essentially reacting to what he saw as the extreme nature of Keating and his ideological supporters. Rather than going beyond this division, Rudd's approach indicates that he is intent on entrenching it. He seems to think that historical inquiry consists of a constant cycle of celebration and condemnation.

This is not the purpose of studying history. Historians seek to understand the past, to gain an appreciation of how and why people acted in the way they did.

Um. I got lost there. Historians are somehow objective embodiments of an objective understanding of the past? Unlike the fiercely contending Keating and Howard, we must stand above the ruck?

Historians who begin with moral presuppositions, whose concerns are primarily with contemporary political issues, will invariably fail in their endeavour. They will lack the empathy to understand the actions of humans who were quite different from them.

Hmm, that's going to be a little tricky. Seems like it might require what we could call a terra nullius kind of historian. Of the kind who has no moral presuppositions, who has no interest in contemporary political issues, for fear that they might contaminate an intrinsic understanding and emapthy with the past. Seeing as how they were quite different, those old folks.

It certainly precludes astrologers from the ranks of historians, especially when the astrology is used to divide the failed from the successful, the losers from the winners, and the boomers from the rest (boomers bad, like appearances over principle, damage country, moral judgment. Make Hulk angry, very angry).

The division of the past into good and bad events is futile. Sometimes bad things happen through no one's fault. For example, the British settlers were not responsible for the diseases they carried with them that wreaked havoc in the indigenous population.

Well that's a relief. Next time I contemplate the holocaust I'll remember that it's quite futile to divide it into a bad event.

It is not the job of the historian to right the wrongs of the past. They are not prophets, nor will the nation be redeemed if it collectively repents the actions of a past generation. Responsibility for actions in the past lies with the individuals who made them, not with those living decades or centuries after those actions.

Wow. That's even better. And there I was thinking I'd be able to go back in my newly invented time machine, assassinate Hitler and prevent World War II. Sob, you mean I can't right the wrongs of the past? Not even - as the Germans after World War II did - admit that a few naughty things went down?

No, no, none of that, nor any collective repentance, though collective celebration on Australia Day is really quite okay, provided these days you don't bash up late comers to these fine shores. Nope, it's all the fault of grand dad and grandma, and don't you worry about any of that. Sure you might think someone who killed someone forty years ago might still be brought to account - isn't that why they leave murder always open - but really why bother.

While contemplating history without a moral compass, I can also do a Pontius Pilate about anything else that went down. No need to repent slavery, no reason for the Germans to have any guilt about the Nazis, no need to think there might be some kind of continuum in human activity and thinking. It's all in the past, locked away in a tidy cupboard, in which objective historians can frolic, fiercely indifferent to any assessment of the rights and wrongs of the past. Massacres, holocausts, wars, colonization, murders, assassinations, 9/11, bring it all on. Nothing to do with me. Not to someone living years and years after those actions.

The reduction of historical inquiry to moral instruction is not the only piece of muddled thinking in Rudd's speech. He claims that "history is the memory of a nation", that memory "informs and shapes behaviour" and that this "collective memory of the past" is the foundation on which the future is built.

The only problem is that memory is not history. Memory is simply unreliable. The role of the historian is to interrogate the past, to inquire and investigate, to check if the "memory of the nation" is true or false. Their job is to establish, as far as they can, what actually happened. Often they will disagree because they will interpret the available evidence in different ways.

Oops, interrogate the past! That's sounding so ... well, it has to be said, French ... or even worse, like Henry Reynolds when he talks about societies who suffered under oppressive regimes wanting to discover their history:

A central concern of the societies in question was to investigate and interrogate the past in order to prevent a return to the tyrannies, whether practised by communist party officials, death squads or police and para-military forces of right-wing dictatorships.

(If you want more Henry Reynolds on history, though be warned it could send you into a moral prophetic time warp of subjectivism, you can read the rest of that paper here).

And as for the inability to actually work out the truth about the past? It sounds quite existentialist, even bleak. All that interrogation, and we fail because memory is fallible.

So inevitably we return to that central salient point which suggests everything that Mr. Melleuish has offered up is just idle blather:

In this sense there will always be history wars because historians, as with scientists, will invariably differ about the interpretation of evidence. This sort of disagreement is a healthy aspect of a liberal democratic society.

So history wars are inevitable and healthy. Well roll on Chairman Rudd and dissemble as much as you like, pretending to move on - past the history wars - as a clever way of maintaining the history wars. No argument there. Oops, wrong again.

Unfortunately, Rudd's speech does nothing to assist Australia's history wars to move from an unhealthy obsession with cheering or booing the past to one in which there is informed intellectual debate. If anything, his speech encourages the unhelpful idea that the real purpose of history is serve moral and political concerns.

But, but ... the history wars and such disagreements are a healthy aspect of a liberal democratic society. Cheering and booing the past according to our preferences, and as frequently indulged in by Mr. Melleuish himself.

Ever felt like a dog chasing its tail? Read Greg Melleuish and you'll understand that Chairman Rudd is the tail, and you can whirl and twist and turn in the breeze for as long and as hard as you like, provided you end up catching the tail.

Of course you never do, but that's the great fun of chasing tails while thinking you're talking about the business of history ...

(Below: the regrettable influence of the black arm band view of history. First FDR wearing one for his mother, Calvin Coolidge putting it on for Warren G. Harding, and Dr. Joseph Moloney mourning the loss of his leader Captain William Stairs on the Stairs Expedition to Katanga in 1891-92 Will no one ever rid of this black arm band approach to the past?).

Gerard Henderson, John Howard, Malcolm Turnbull, and the 'guess the jellybean' competition heats up

Fortunes were once again won and lost on this week's internationally famous Gerard Henderson competition.

Competition you ask? What competition? Well for those who came in late to the story, the Phantom swore on the skull of his father's murderer ...

Sorry, sorry, it's really hard to focus when thinking on Gerard Henderson. Extensive readership surveys suggest hits on this site drop to zero, while a meditative slumber - roughly equivalent to a Spanish siesta - hits the land.

But the idea of the competition was this. You bet on which paragraph the name of Oz's valiant ex-PM will be mentioned in Henderson's column for The Sydney Morning Herald, and then if you're feeling really sharp you estimate the number of times the Howard name will be mentioned throughout the piece. A bit like a 'guess the lollies in the jar' competition, though it is terribly hard to think of John Howard as a lolly. Even a lip smacking jelly bean. Perhaps more a stick of liquorice, though that was my father's favorite lolly, and he wasn't a mad John Howard fan.

Anyhoo, as Mr. Burns would say, this week John Howard turns up in paragraph two of Enter the young conservatives.

For the loyal faithful, this is a guaranteed if short odds result. So you might have to put down a million to win a hundred thousand, but hey it's a low risk gamble. Delusionary fools who think there might be zero mentions of Howard in a Henderson column can get odds of a million to one and always end up losing their dollar.

This week for example by our google count there were seven Howard mentions, a seemly number, and lucky as well, neither an unctuous too many nor a miserly too few. It seems around five to eight is the likely weekly tally, and accordingly my partner has found the bookie very shrewd and canny these last few weeks. (That's covert domestic patter for loser).

I guess you could also open a book on how many favorable mentions John Howard is given by Mr. Henderson, but that introduces all kinds of equivocations and uncertainties, and gambling should be a game of numbers.

Even so, you can imagine how we all choked on our toast when we read this:

It's almost two years since the Coalition lost the election and its prime minister lost his seat. The years have not been kind to Howard's refusal to hand over to Costello in his final term. The opportunity of a Costello leadership is now lost. The task is to rebuild the party with young, articulate political conservatives who believe in their cause. Traditionally, the conservative intellectual political tradition has been weak in Australia. There is no reason why this should remain the case.

Bradfield offers the Liberals a chance to demonstrate that they are willing to engage in the battle of ideas with a view to returning to government.

You could, if you were cruel, consider that a criticism of John Howard. The years have not been kind ... Well on this site we still get down on bended knee to thank Howard for keeping the desultory, smirking, smug clap happy Costello from the reins, and are grateful that finally it seems the Costello leadership dream is now lost. But wait, he's still in parliament, he could be parachuted into Bradfield to bring us all to Valhalla ...

The rest of Henderson's piece rambles on about the battle for ideas by mainly considering the horses lining up for the gate at the Bradfield by-election, an anxiety attack about the quality of the current Labor front-bench ("a dozen really impressive performers"), and a denigratory survey of the form of the current Liberal front row.

Tony Abbott emerges as a hooker with few ball skills, who played a bad game in the 2007 election (perhaps because he liked to ruck the opponent's head rather than the ball) and who is"regarded by some colleagues as a risk."

Nelson was a competent performer in the Howard government and a fine education minister. Yet he was never leadership material. He was too inclined to emote in public and wobble on policy. Turnbull was Nelson's obvious replacement. His essential weakness is that he lacks experience.

Well vale Nelson, always too willing to cry. Does the Phantom ever cry? Never!

As for Turnbull, lacks experience?

Actually I much prefer Brendan Nelson's diagnosis which you can read in Peter Hartcher's Doctor out of the house: Nelson's final diagnosis.

... the former medical practitioner feels the need to diagnose Malcolm Turnbull's condition. Says Dr Nelson: "You need to look up narcissistic personality disorder. There's about 5 per cent of the population who are born with narcissistic traits, and about 2 per cent have narcissism. He's got narcissistic personality disorder.

"He says the most appalling things and can't understand why people get upset. He has no empathy.

"At first, I thought he was demonstrative, demanding, emotional and narcissistic, using his wealth and charm for seduction, and always with a sinister threat just beneath the surface."

Hartcher goes on to look up the American Psychiatric Association's definition of narcissistic personality disorder, which I commend to you, but will save time by just mentioning Napoleon.

If you want further fun at the expense of the hapless Malcolm in the middle, you will find that Georgina Robinson's Disorder in the House: battle of the narcissists starts with the very first word being Napoleon, and in short order we then get Picasso and Jack Nicholson.

Robinson purports to take Nelson's diagnosis seriously - after all he is a doctor - but of course concludes that both Rudd and Turnbull display healthy narcissistic streaks.

But I see we've strayed far from Henderson and the battle of ideas, perhaps because his column is devoid of any idea other than analysing the form of various Liberal contenders and players as if they were so much horse flesh, within a still deeply felt yearning for the lost Valhalla of the Howard years.

Henderson's aversion to actual ideas in the column is perhaps best shown when he takes a pot shot at former Labor leader Mark Latham for enjoying the parliamentary superannuation scheme benefits whittled away by John Howard after a campaign by Mark Latham. It's what we call a "mreow" moment, with the claws extended to make sure the carpet shows permanent wear and tear.

Tch, tch, I wonder which ex-Liberal moaned into Mr. Henderson's ear about the indignity and injustice of it all.

But ould we take it as a criticism of John Howard? That he buckled up against Latham. Not really, it was just real politics, but it does show how hard it is to run a book on Henderson's righteous support for Howard.

Better to stick to the known knowns - first mention and number of mentions of the inestimable Mr. Howard - but for that competition, we will have to wait until next week and the next chance to play verbal lotto.

This week the race has been run, the field considered, the young contenders found hopeful and possibly glorious, and fortunes have been won and lost. You might think this doesn't have much to do with the battle of ideas, but the battle for the cash in the purse keeps us excited about the thought of reading Gerard Henderson.

Imagine that you comatose silly billies as you nod off into slumber land ... get betting, and you too will be able to grip it and rip it.

(Below: a role model for Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberals?)