Mark Day, and let the whacking day season for snakes and the ABC begin ...

Expect for the next six months or so, right up to election day, for the Murdoch hacks and serfs to carry a big stick and give the ABC a right royal paddywhacking on a regular basis, as if they were roused by listening to Barry White records and imagined that they were in the Simpsons' episode about snake whacking (oh Fox, you've done it again).

For the last couple of weeks, Mark Day has been flailing away in his ineffably polite away about the evils of the ABC becoming too large an empire, and ruining the commercial prospects of all the key players in Oz. Which is to say Chairman Rupert, oligopolist and aspirational monopolist in the Australian old media news marketplace.

Here's how the tap dog routine goes. First of all sing loudly the praises of the ABC:

I have long been a supporter of the ABC, and believe Scott has it in a sweet spot at the moment.

Because it's always right to praise Caesar before you give him a good knifing and bury him. It's the decent thing to do. Then start throwing around the adjectives, like imperial dreams and visions and teats - always with the teats and the breast feeding fixation - and maybe throw in a red herring

But that shouldn’t prevent us from questioning Scott’s imperial-sounding plans for the future and debating the right mix between commercial media organisations and those that rely on the public teat. Are we prepared to underwrite more and more media services by ever-growing amounts? How valid is a system that gives the ABC a billion to compete with the commercial networks and then gives the commercials $250m to survive against growing competition?

Que? What's the beef here? The government flinging largesse at the ABC and the commercials is a problem? Well of course it is if you have a commercial interest in Sky Television and pay TV.

Which is why in his first outing, ABC's role as niche provider needs to be redefined, Day spent starts by whinging about the $250 million gift, and explaining how broken newspapers under a technological tsunami aren't getting any tax breaks or handouts. Before hastily noting "Nor should there but, but it illustrates the point that nothing is untouched by the digital revolution".

Then it's on to whining about the ABC having a website and developing regional hubs, and soon enough Day trots out APN honcho Brendan Hopkins having a whinge about the hubs, and then he drags in Fairfax sobbing about public funds building empires, and then rounds it out with poor old Sky News battling the evil empire, unable to compete fairly for Australia TV channel.

It seems the ABC's proposed 24/7 channel is a sin because it will drag eyeballs away from Sky News and drain ad revenues. To which the simple answer might be for Sky News to produce a decent product which stops the eyeball drain, but don't you know, in the world of oligopolists, competition based on quality and desirability and viewer appeal is a definite no no.

That's why the ABC is suddenly a threat. People might be watching!

And then Day dares to dream that a Commonwealth Bank or a Qantas move might just be around the corner:

Politically, it is probably impossible to flog it off, but the government has in the recent past got out of businesses such as banking, telecommunications and airlines. Does it really need to be in media?

To which one cruel correspondent replied:

Without the ABC or SBS Australian television would be at as low a standard as television in Berlusconian Italy. Not worth viewing.

Yep, you can rip the remote control out of my cold dead hands, but damned if you'll get me subscribing to pay TV, paying for News Ltd content, or come to that, watching commercial television. Except when I'm recovering from root canal work because then it's the lesser pain.

In his second outing, Day led with A leaner ABC will better fit its mission, and spends an unseemly amount of time gloating about the way the BBC has recently been forced into pre-emptive surgery in fear that an incoming conservative government will deliver even bigger blows.

Day doesn't have anything fresh to add by way of insight or complaints, he just wants to gnaw at an old bone, or tear apart a boot, and explain why Mark Scott should tear the ABC apart, and downsize it BBC-style.

Choosing his own version of serendipity, Day insists that the situation of the BBC and the ABC is the same, never mind that he estimates that the BBC gets about three times the ABC's budget on a per capita basis. And never mind the political situation the BBC finds itself in, hounded by the Murdochs, disliked by the wounded, failing Labor party, and thought a juicy target by the Tories if they hit an election home run.

Even Rupert's up-market UK rag The Times could see a political point to the Beeb's manoeuvres as it contemplates cutting a couple of youth orientated radio stations, reducing spending on US programming, and hacking into the pages on its website, as leaked in a strategic review at the end of last month:

The report is being considered by the corporation’s governing body, the BBC Trust, and is due to be made public next month. (and is now here in pdf form).

It was drawn up by the corporation’s director of policy and strategy, John Tate, a former head of the Conservative policy unit, who co-wrote the party’s 2005 manifesto with David Cameron. It will be seen as an attempt to show a potential Tory government that the BBC understands the effect the deep advertising recession has had on commercial rivals and that it does not need outside intervention to get its house in order. (here).

Naturally The Times saw through it in a flash: Big, bloated and cunning Proposals for ostensible reform of the BBC are nothing but a smokescreen. The corporation must stop empire-building and get back to doing what it does best

The new proposals were written to serve the best interests of the BBC, not the public. The next government will need to take on what Channel 4’s chairman last year described as “the most powerful lobbying and effective organisation in Britain”. Until then, Auntie Beeb’s warm embrace will simultaneously be a stranglehold that is unpleasant and untenable.

Ah yes, the deadly embrace of Chairman Rupert is so much sweeter. Such a nice caring stranglehold. Empty that purse or wallet now, and send unmarked bills to the subscription division.

On rages The Times:

The real giveaway in the proposals is that the BBC seems to have no plans to give anything back to licence-fee payers. The public wants the BBC to continue to make beautiful dramas, powerful journalism and terrific entertainment. It does not want or need a BBC that tries to do everything. The best way to make that happen would be to make a substantial cut to the licence fee and give money back to people to spend as they like.

Licence fees? Who can remember the radio licence fee introduced in 1932 to fund ABC broadcasts, topped up with television licence fees in 1956, only to be abolished by the devious and cunning Whitlam government in 1974? The United Kingdom has a quaint relationship to public broadcasting via its licence fees, which provides another significant difference in the way Australians relate to our public broadcaster. In the old days you could get dobbed in if you didn't have a licence, there were inspectors, and it was all a little bit fraught. These days it's still a tax, but it's a hidden tax, not like forking out £142-50 a year, and it's not such a hearty slug as the Beeb cops.

Never mind, Day knows how to sing righteously from the same song book as The Times:

The BBC report explains the benefits it hopes to achieve from the reduction of some services, including two digital radio channels. The money saved—close to a billion quid—will go towards more and better program making.

It then concludes: “The BBC’s mission is as relevant today as it was nearly 90 years ago: to inform, educate and entertain to fulfil its public purposes at best possible value to the widest possible audience. This strategy is intended to deliver a BBC focused on high-quality content within clearer limits, keeping open a digital public space for all. Not a BBC in retreat, but a strong and confident BBC capable of living up to the expectations of an increasingly demanding audience.”

Scott may do us all a favour by embracing that philosophy, rather than arguing that things are different down here.

Huh? but if they make more and better programming, won't they thrash the hell out of the commercial broadcasters? Unless the proposition's that Oz viewers have no taste and more and better programming will be wasted on them, visual pearls before down under swine.

Of course not. It's just Mark Day and News Ltd code for telling the ABC to get out of Sky's turf, and get out of the news game, and make more and more shows featuring Kerry Armstrong having a sea change in some god forsaken fictional town called Rainbow's End. Oh the humanity, oh the horror of Bed of Roses, now in its godforsaken second series.

Oh, and if you don't mind auntie, stay off the intertubes.

But what happens when, as it will in the next decade, the intertubes becomes a key mechanism for delivering old media digital content down the pipes? Sorry, leave that playground for Chairman Rupert and his chums.

But why am I nervous about Chairman Rupert and his chums and their oligopolistic ways?

Well why not have a read of Coulson comes under fresh scrutiny over News of the World activities.

As tabloid journalism, the staple diet of News Limited and rags like News of the World, gets sleazier and sleazier - hard to imagine, but they manage it - about the only show I like to check out is Media Watch as it unveils some fresh horror - say a Herald Sun newspaper photographer chasing a six month pregnant woman up the stairs to get a snap to illustrate a story about identity theft.

If you follow that logic, you end up in the same lounge chair as one of Day's correspondents:

Is it at all surprising that the local News Ltd media should start a campaign against the ABC after their masters launched a similar one against the BBC? Whilst I believe columnists are entitled to their own views, it is only too clear that The Australian has been running a substantial number of pieces critical of the position of the ABC recently. This may be presented as being out of concern for having a diverse media landscape, but seems all too clearly to be driven by commercial interests. Indeed, it makes a very good argument for why we need an independent, non-commercial broadcaster, just like the ABC!

Surprisingly, Day's second coat-trailing column didn't get the response of his first trawl - maybe the trout had tired of the game - and the few that bothered were negative:

Murdoch employee echoes boss’s views on media! Sun rises in the east! Whatever will they think of next?!

Hmm, thinking. Thinking hard.

How about instead of an ABC whacking day we declare a whole season?

With a jolly good result for the mayor, I mean the Murdoch:

Paul Sheehan, Chris Berg, and la la la on the village green ...

Being a little slow these days, I missed Chris Berg's gem of free thinking, in Schools should be free to teach what they want.

It shows the same kind of spirit as Paul Sheehan, who is clearly free to scribble what he wants, and does in PM's obsession rolls on, taking hospitals in the wrong direction.

Sheehan manages within three pars to conjure up a vast army of health bureaucrats centred in Canberra. 10,000 strong! Enough to unify the three kingdoms of China. And instead of alphabet soup, this week the favourite word is debacle - here a debacle, there a debacle. Where would the commentariat columnists be without a disaster, and costly debacles?

You'd swear Australia is grinding to a halt as the apocalypse approaches - why we're doing it tougher than Chile and Haiti put together, with this ongoing jolting from a series of costly earthquake debacles. The green energy revolution lies in ruins, and now the hospital revolution is a costly debacle, before it even begins, as Canberra bureaucrats storm the system, and lay waste to hapless doctors.

Why last I heard Australia's health system was somewhere below the ones run by tinpot African dictators! And Sheehan will confirm that in a trice:

Despite this bureaucratic burden, Australia still has one of the best health and hospital systems in the world, ranking high in performance measures among members of the OECD.

Que. Say what? WTF? Ah well, one of my favourite quotes belongs to Walt Whitman.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.

There's nothing like debacles and disasters that turn out not to be so bad after all. Kinda lifts the spirits.

Which shouldn't of course stop me from denouncing Chairman Rudd for his nonsensical threats and his hypocrisy and his contradictions and the paper castles of his various revolutions and his grand promises and his trust-me politics, and his rhetorical over-stretch which masquerades once again for an Orwellian brave new world.

Phew, that felt good. Nothing like a venting of the spleen to relieve the built up juices in the liver of a crusty curmudgeon on a grumpy Monday.

But back to Berg, who has a much more splendid idea. In a bid to improve the Chairman Rudd Gillard costly education debacle, and the thousands of new bureaucrats required to manage the education system - which experts estimate by 2012 will result in Canberra tripling its population before becoming the first victim of the end of the Mayan calendar - Berg proposes an excellent solution:

If some parents wanted their children to be taught that capitalism has brought misery and oppression and darkness, they could choose that. If other parents wanted their children to understand how market relationships lead to mutual gain, and free trade alleviates poverty, they could choose that too.

And if parents want to drown commentariat columnists like unwanted kittens, I'm down with that too.

Until the government gives control of the curriculum back to schools, parents and students will always be somewhat unsatisfied with what Australian children are taught.

Indeed. Let educational anarchy and chaos reign supreme. If creationists want to teach creationism, let them. If scientologists want to run schools to make sure that their kids are taught in a healthy Xenu and volcano free environment, who's to argue. If Islamics want to make sure that their kids learn the basics of jihad, they shouldn't feel constrained by petty-minded secularists. If the Brethren want to make sure their flock dress like remnants of a nineteenth century mid-western US village, where's the harm? If Catholics want to learn about the spiritual benefits of cannibalism - nothing like a snack of blood and flesh in communion, beats the school tuckshop - they can go at it as hard as they like.

Oh wait, they already do, and they're funded by the Australian taxpayer.

Never mind, it always seemed to me that we could improve the study of science by introducing mythologies. Oh wait, it seems Berg has a problem with that:

The science curriculum's insistence that science should be taught as a cultural endeavour - with Asian and Aboriginal perspectives such as the Dreamtime - seems more like cultural studies. Worthy in their own right perhaps, but teaching myths in science class is a bit odd.

And its emphasis on ''the human responsibility to contribute to sustainability'' seems just a touch ideologically loaded.

Never mind, just give the students what the parents want. Will you sign my petition to have the scientific insights of Lord of the Rings included in the science curriculum, because that's what we want in this house! And it's our right as libertarians to demand it, just as it's our choice to choose choice!

At the very least, the study of history, which can be subject to many more interpretations than mathematics, could be left to the discretion of schools. After all, most of the bitterness over the history wars was about ideological control over the curriculum.

Sheesh, Chris, all the teachers in schools are lefties. Handing over the curriculum to them would just be inviting the Marxists to take over.

Well it gave me the grand idea that it was about time I opened a school dedicated to sensible historical interpretations of the past. Like:

The white Australia policy wasn't racist, it was more a designer motif, like an all white room in a Swedish Ikea display home.

Hitler was a much misunderstood man. Perhaps David Irving can do a guest lecture.

The Japanese only invaded China to free Asia from western imperial dominance.

The Inquisition was a generous attempt by the church to save souls from hell.

The end times are around the corner, so let's nuke Iran.

Sorry, don't know where that one came from, but it seems like a good idea, and could be made to fit into any decent history curriculum.

Now why not devise your own history curriculum and insist it be taught at your school today? Why not make an appointment with your child's history teacher right this minute? And in the process tear off the black armband he or she is wearing, and offer your own St. Christopher Pyne medal for their spiritual guidance.

What is most touching in both Berg and Sheehan is the notion that if you return everything to a grass roots level, away from evil Canberra, everything will be alright. The demon of centralisation drives everyone into a frenzy, even if, as Franz Kafka - an impeccable bureaucrat dreaming of nightmare bureaucracies persecuting Joseph K - knows that events in Peking are sometimes a little hard to connect to the hinterland:

Our land is so huge, that no fairy tale can adequately deal with its size. Heaven hardly covers it all. And Peking is only a point, the imperial palace only a tiny dot. It’s true that, by contrast, throughout all the different levels of the world the emperor, as emperor, is great. But the living emperor, a man like us, lies on a peaceful bed, just as we do. It is, no doubt, of ample proportions, but it could be merely narrow and short. Like us, he sometime stretches out his limbs and, if he is very tired, yawns with his delicately delineated mouth. But how are we to know about that thousands of miles to the south, where we almost border on the Tibetan highlands? Besides, any report which came, even if it reached us, would get there much too late and would be long out of date. (The Great Wall of China).

These days China is in the Tibetan highlands, and we have the intertubes and modern media to provide more up to date news on the emperor in his bed or outside his coy little church doing a church stopper, but still the provinces are recalcitrant and resist and develop their own perverse idiosyncrasies, even as Canberra tries to herd the cats.

But Sheehan dreams the pastoral idyll of autonomous hospital boards, and village green community based administration. Which should work tremendously well with my local hospital, the Royal Prince Alfred, which has a staff of over 4,000 people, bigger than many a country town (as featured on television!)

And it should easily fix the dilemma of the aggregation of expertise and extremely expensive equipment in this kind of teaching hospital, as opposed to the need of every country town to have their very own computerised axial tomography scanner and magnetic resonance imaging machine. Not to mention a facility for liver transplants open heart surgery and a decent cyclotron. No, there's no need to think about the allocation and most effective use of extremely expensive resources while the states go the biff amongst themselves.

I remember talking to one of Australia's leading hospital administrators about the business of bringing hospitals online, and he was the one who used the term herding cats. Because truth to tell, I've never yet met a doctor who wants to be herded or has an interest in herding. As perverse and irascible a group of recalcitrant individuals as might be imagined. And nothing wrong with that. Just don't try to get them organised to take off their socks in unison or do business online.

Meanwhile, Chris Berg is terribly worried about the fate of the students at Gochin Jiny Jirra school in the NT, with 25 students, knowing that Chairman Rudd is likely to drop in any day and give them a personal exam and then roundly denounce them all as failures for not meeting the standards of his national curriculum. Oh wait, they do that anyway, and even without benefit of Chairman Rudd's personal attendance. Still, it's a dream, that village green dream:

The federal government seems to believe a national curriculum will be inherently better than state curriculums. But ''national'' is not a synonym for ''awesome''.

If we really wanted a revolution in education, we'd give schools flexibility to tailor the curriculum to the needs and profile of their student body.

Well I'm not quite sure about the subtle distinction between a state city-based bureaucrat organising a curriculum for a school out back of Bourke, and a federal city-based bureaucrat organising one. Unless of course you think the NSW state Labor government is "awesome".

You know, I'm beginning to think what this country needs is a Pol Pot. A much misunderstood man, he was clearly on to something when he arranged for intellectuals and commentariat columnists to be sent out into the countryside, to earn their living as honest peasants, at one with the earth and the village green and a decent day's toil in the fields.

Because usually I find that city based folk who blather on about the right to independence of country folk (a) have never lived in the bush and (b) have no idea of the benefits of agrarian socialism.

Great, another subject area for my new history curriculum. Now all I need is a school dumb enough, with teachers silly and inexperienced enough, to think the answer is to devise a curriculum according to the whims and desires of parents and students.

First up? The films of Hollywood, consisting of five masterpieces a day, with popcorn and choc top for lunch, until they wilt and begin to demand a little fibre in their diet, not to mention anything but Bruce Willis up on the screen ...

There, I think that sock's boiled.

Somewhere in the nation there's no doubt a sensible discussion of the issues involving the federation, and commonwealth v state, and education and health, and their assorted revolutions going down amongst sensible thinkers, but not on these pages. Because we rely on commentariat columnists as the source for our curricula. Doomed.

4 Corners and chaos and terror manufactured by psychiatry

(Above: the startling news doing the rounds on the intertubes, found here).

I hate to scoop Four Corners, but it has to be done.

Tonight they'll be running a program on Scientology, interviewing people about their experiences with the religion. You can find a preview here, which will eventually drop down the page and be replaced by the actual program, and more details here.

And in the usual soft leftie way we've come to expect of the cardigan wearers, they'll miss stunning revelations that have been doing the rounds on the intertubes.

I'll bet it comes as no surprise to you to learn that psychiatrists and psychiatry were behind Osama bin Laden and 9/11. As you can see and hear in the above clip, this stunning relevation comes to us all thanks to Scientology, or more properly thanks to its front organisation the Citizens Commission on Human Rights. Mad bombers are nothing to do with mad fundie Islamics, it's all to do with shrinks and drugs:

“Whether it’s a person who’s gonna carry a bomb into a marketplace, you know, in a crowded, inner city area, or whether he’s gonna jump on a plane and fly into the World Trade Center, it’s documented that these guys are on some form of psychiatric drug, and/or have psychiatric influence in their backgrounds.”

Unsurprisingly, it's Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri who's in charge of Osama, and running the show. No wonder in 2009 he became Al Qaeda's operation and strategical commander, with Bin Laden only an ideological figurehead:

“We got a mental patient here in this fellow Osama bin Laden, does anybody doubt that? That’s his psychiatrist right there. That’s the guy giving the orders. That’s the guy who’s running him.”

Now sceptics might quibble, and point to al-Zawahiri's actual medical training:

Al-Zawahiri graduating from Cairo University in 1974 with gayyid giddan. Following that he served three years as a surgeon in the Egyptian Army after which he established a clinic near his parents. In 1978, he also earned a master's degree in surgery. (here).

Proving once again that sceptics know nothing about deep cover and the cunning ways of psychiatrists intent on taking over the world (at lunchtime on Friday, after the global warming cabal of scientific conspiracists fail in their attempt, defeated by Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt).

Sure mad Al pretends to be a surgeon, but all doctors do a little shrinkery as part of their training. Eek, that means all doctors are in on the conspiracy!

Now what's the bet you won't hear a word of this in the Four Corners story? Proving once again that loon pond is the only place for breaking headlines. Okay the story's almost a year old - you can read about it here - but my psychiatrist told me not to reveal the details of the scoop for fear that the plot would be foiled, and he threatened to stop writing scripts for my meds. And that would mean loon pond goes truly loony.

Damn, another chance to shout 'hold the front page' goes missing, and it's all psychiatry's fault.

I keed, I keed. Perhaps I can make up for it with this exciting news:

Katie (Holmes) has been undergoing intense Scientology 'auditing' and is 'being prepared' for her child with Cruise, who is also a high-priest of the sect, the New York Post reported.

She is now back to spending hours at the Hollywood Scientology Centre, after recently promoting the Kevin Kline movie The Extra Man, and The Romantics, at Sundance.

A source told the newspaper: 'This is exactly what happened just before she got pregnant with Suri.
'Tom has made no secret of the fact that he would like another baby. It is almost as if she is being prepared for it.'
Scientologists believe the 'health and the sanity of the child begin long before birth,' according to a church-run website, which campaigns for silent birth.

I could have run a snap of Holmes, but I simply didn't have the heart for it. You can find some here at the Mail Online, and you can find the original New York Post story that started the hares running here.

So instead here's a happy snap from South Park:

And here's the good oil, full of paranoia and perhaps in need of a psychiatrist or at least a toke or two on some weed. Mellow out dudes. Chill.

Lara Bingle, and the nude Bingle storm in a teacup controversy ...

(Above: the Daily Terror, and below that the Sunday Terror, caught up in a feeding frenzy over the Bingle. Screen caps, so no hot links, links below).

Warning: scroll down and you'll find a potentially NSFW image. Well it's safe in my workplace, but you might end up like a Macquarie banker.

Sometimes I think that the reason blogs get hits is that other bloggers go to other blogs to get stills to illustrate their blogs about other bloggers. It's a virtuous circle, as we used to say when writing reports explaining why governments should piss money against the wall on new economic multiplier schemes designed to turn the arts into the engine room of the economy.

No need to actually worry about the contents of said blogs - just 'here's a tasty image', and 'ta, I'll have that thank you very much', just what I needed to illustrate my indepth dissertation on the significance of Marilyn Monroe's tits.

Did I say tits? Well sadly, it's come to this. I must lay out my web of tasty stills to titillate the vast unwashed horde of bloggers, who will then turn up to borrow the stills I've borrowed, and so complete the virtuous circle, and so meaning is established in the world, because we all get hits.

By the way, did you catch Jon Stewart's analysis of web trends and Chatroulette?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Tech-Talch - Chatroulette
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

Why did I think of The Punch's attempts to be trendy and relevant? And why so forlorn and desperate? Why stick Jon Stewart in the middle of an item to make sure readers click through to watch the best American comedian going around do his thing?

Well you see this is the second Sunday in a row we don't have Akker Dakker aka Piers Akerman's column in the Sunday Terror to contemplate. Last week I advised people to go read his greatest hits and mammaries (oh those tits, they keep bobbing up everywhere), but frankly that strategy is a bit long in the tooth.

Meanwhile Chairman Rudd is laying waste to the country, ruining everything, and fat cat scientists in black helicopters are devising clever schemes to rule the world, under the guise of global warming, and where's the noble warrior at the Sunday Telegraph battling against the fiends? Gone MIA (and anyone who's watched Rambo will know exactly what that means). That only leaves a few comrades - valiant expert scientists like Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt - to carry on the fight. Or the tilting at windmills.

Instead, Kate DeBrito, doing her Miss Lonelyhearts impersonation, snares top spot in the blogs front page splash, and this week she's helping out a couple who earn over $200k a year and donate $450 a month to charity, and now the wife is pregnant. (Charity starts at home). They earn over $200k a year and they write to Kate for financial advice? Who on earth are these people?

So casting around for something earth shattering, something totally meaningful, that had preoccupied not just the tabloids, but the chattering classes, I came up with Lara Bingle nude.

Now I'm a little slow on such matters. The best bloggers have already tasted the low hanging fruit, but since I had only a vague idea of who Lara Bingle was, had even less of an idea who Michael Clarke might be (it turns out he's a cricketer), and had never heard of Brendan Fevola (it turns out he's an AFL footballer), you can see that I was starting behind the eightball.

So where better place to start than the Daily and Sunday Terrors, which in lieu of Akker Dakker, has devotedly kept a Lara Bingle splash (as above) on its front digital page for what seems like a couple of days on end.

By golly, this Bingle has star power, and so of course I clicked and was immediately transported - like accepting a magic carpet ride from an obliging genie - to Sydney Confidential's Annette Sharp doing one of the most incisive and moving studies of popular culture - handily illustrated by a bikini clad Lara Bingle - in Where the bloody hell did Brand Bingle go wrong?

This is such a deeply existential question - the bloody hell wrongness of Brand Bingle going - that if answered might well contain the seeds to a solution for human unhappiness and misery around the world. And of course once they'd hooked me, they just reeled me in with Jonathon Moran and Elle Halliwell's equally incisive and poignant Lara Bingle faces reality (so much more exciting than Portia Faces Life).

When writing this kind of story, it's important to do a chapter and verse history which allows the writer to trawl over all the past Lara Bingle incidents contained in the tabloid archives. You know, bad boy here, silly girl there, bad boy there, silly girl here, culminating in the latest incident, which has seen Fevola allegedly release a mobile phone snap of Bingle in the nude, and then allegedly Bingle copping $200,000 to tell all about it in Woman's Day, and in the meantime allegedly proposing to sue Fevola, and Fevola allegedly saying he dun nuthink.

And now - if the Sunday Terror is to be trusted - it seems that Lara allegedly wants to be packaged as a Paris Hilton-type reality star for a cool million (yep, I wanted to work in a reference to Nathanael West's A Cool Million, available here at Project Gutenberg).

I say allegedly, because frankly I don't have a clue. As I trawled through Sharp's masterwork, slowly getting an oily, greasy glutinous feeling, I realized I had indeed seen Bingle on the box, in that disastrous Where the bloody hell are you tourist campaign, which seemed designed to remind people why you should never trust government agencies to mount a decent advertising campaign.

Well I can understand a tabloid getting into the action - even if reading Sharp or the million dollar beat up is like gorging on a serving of tropical fruit pavlova - and this sort of thing is grist to the mill of Woman's Day, who had first bite with Lara and Michael: The nude photo, the footballer ex and the public meltdown.

But then it turns out that heavy hitters were also deeply vexed and engaged. Why over at The Sydney Morning Herald Peter Fitzsimons is devastated in Naked truth is Fev has hit a new low. And Jessica Lake delivered an exceptionally solemn piece headed Sorry Lara, we have no right to privacy.

As if a model in quest of the spotlight was in search of privacy, so much as public exposure and private life on her own sweet terms. Show me the money!

Dear sweet lord, even colourful Sydney identity Charlie Waterstreet - on ya Charlie - gets into the game with Serve it up Lara, noting that Lara has been photographed more times than a Mossad agent. And over at Crikey, an indignant Andrew Crook gets agitated by the media circus and the clowns in The whole Bingle Bungle, and hands out Wankleys all over the place.

And that's just for starters. If you use one of these fancy new aggregators - leeches on the soul of honest Chairman Rupert Daily and Sunday investigative journalism producing content of the highest quality, well worth a subscription - the Bingle produces so much copy you could waste a life time reading it (yes, Interceder, I'm talking about you and your kind).

Why on earth are so many loons squawking on the pond about Lara Bingle?

And then it came to me in a flash. It's just tits. Presumably in their youth men sucked on them as a way of getting healthy nutrition, while building up useful disease preventing antibodies, or else had to settle for a bottle and a deep yearning, and given half a chance in later life, they still like to suck away, ostensibly to give the woman pleasure, but we know the truth about all that ...

... and look at tits endlessly, and fondle them, and then - when actually confronted with real boobs in actual photographs - generate moral panics as if a tit might herald the downfall of Rome - and then in extreme cases, turn around and write about the filth on the intertubes, and the need for censorship and a great big filter, excepting of course for the salacious rubbish churned out by Chairman Rupert's minions, which is serious quality journalism about the deep reality check (or is it a 200k or million dollar cheque) confronting imperilled Lara Bingle ...

Come on down Woody Allen ...

And as a result of these media follies, driven by an unhealthy fixation on tits, which suggests that weaning is still poorly understood in Australia, Bingle's going to make out like a bandit and pocket a healthy slice of $200k, with talk of zillions to follow.

Now tell me, who's the clowns in all this. Bingle or the media, slavering and slobbering after a look at her tits?

Sure it's not nice for someone to publish a photo of someone nude on the intertubes without their consent - castration might be a sound cure in some cases, or at least joining the Catholic church priesthood so they can get fixated on boys instead - but my anxiety was ameliorated by hitting the intertubes in search of the photo.

What's the first image that came up in an unfiltered search? As sampled by those naughty Web Wombat people?

Sure there was a little seismic tremble, the earth moved a little for my partner, but amazingly Rome is still standing, and the barbarians haven't made it through the gate.

It turns out that Bingle has been featured on the German GQ in the nude, and got into an argument with Zoo about some other snaps of an explicit kind.

I'm told that alleged images of Bingle allegedly posing in the nude are not all they seem, and that allegedly she alleges she was deceived by the photographer in question. Well it takes a fair kind of deception to take off your top and pose in front of a camera while a photographer clicks away, and then say you were allegedly not aware of what you were allegedly doing.

Luckily, aware that the camera lens would fracture, I've never felt the need.

So what on earth is the fuss all about? Well it's just another day in a very parochial media, obsessed with football and cricket stars and their consorts, and if you pardon me, I'll just cruise on past this storm in a teacup.

Just remind me again the next time News Ltd talks about the dire state of the intertubes, that cant and hypocrisy and humbug and pious platitudes are the stock in trade of the tabloids and the women's magazines.

My advice? If you see Lara Bingle featured on the front page of a rag, don't stop to buy, just walk on by. Content you should pay for? In your dreams Chairman Rupert ...

Cash in the paw only eggs them on, when they all deserve a good Freudian egging ...

(Below: anyhoo, here's another snap for those bloggers).

James Allan, chardonnay swilling lawyers and a bill of rights ...

(Above: James Thurber cartoon about wine snobbery, which no doubt sounded fresh and funny in 1937, and there's more on Thurber here and here).

Sometimes it takes just an eye-glazing word to stop me dead in my tracks.

There I was browsing away at James Allan's Rights bill is still a threat, brooding about the possibility of a bill of Rights in Australia, and this comes up in the fourth par:

Enter Brennan and the invitation offered to him by Labor Party proponents of a bill to speak to caucus. Presumably the hope is that Brennan will stiffen the spine of the government and get it to think again. Let's hope not. I'm a long-time opponent of these anti-democratic instruments and the Rudd government was brave to stand up to the chardonnay-sipping lawyers' wing of the party over this.

Now you'd think, and perhaps James did, that - what with the reference to the lawyers and to anti-democracy - he'd delivered such a devastating gotcha that he'd got me, won me over to his point of view.

But I'm sorry, I just can't overlook the vile slander of chardonnay.

I mean, it's okay in a jokey way when talking about loons on the pond, to rabbit on about latte sipping chardonnay gulping leftie wankers, but actual sightings of the conceit in serious papers by serious scribblers is now rare. Even in that doyen of inner urban hating elite columnists, Janet Albrechtsen, rarely uses it, though it does turn up frequently in her comments section (eg latte and chardonnay are the new Bex).

You have to turn to the banal mind of Gerard Henderson to discover a prattling Polonius commentariat columnist at easy with cliches, but even he's moved on from chardonnay:

The inner-city radical middle class has moved beyond bread and butter - and even focaccia and caviar - to such issues as international and national security, nuclear power and the environment. (here)

You see! It's not even humble focaccia, graced with a dash of caviar, that tells you you're in the presence of a "European" argument.

Indeed Henderson has even been known, in rare moments of reflection, to send up the concept of political correctness and inner city evil, as when he wrote about a Quadrant knees up party in Balmain (yep, Quadrant's office is in Rosebery Place, Balmain, presumably so they can make a close up study of cork sniffers, chardonnay sniffers and latte sippers in an anthropological, sociological way):

The Prime Minister praised Quadrant's role in questioning "political correctness", commenting: "Perhaps the intellectual divide, if you want to use that expression, in our community now is not so much between so-called elite opinion and popular opinion, but between political correctness and common sense". According to reports, no one said precisely what "political correctness" meant. However, this may well have been the first occasion in which the concept had been bagged in elitist/latte drinking/trendy inner-city Balmain. The alleged home of, er, political correctness - where P. P. both lives and works. (here).

But that was in the days of John Howard at the helm, and Paddy McGuiness was still roaming the earth, and beastly chardonnay swilling Labor lawyers were locked outside the gate, and a double irony would allow that Balmain was an elitist latte drinking basket weaving hell hole for all that it was also the new home of Quadrant.

Truth to tell, whenever someone defames the drinking of chardonnay, you know their arguments have the paper-strength thickness of tissue paper, and they're also out of date. In my area of the inner west NZ sauvignon blanc is the new chardonnay, so if you were going to talk about drinking habits of Labor party lawyers, you'd have to allow for more than a delicate unwooded chardonnay with soft fruitiness.

There's nothing like zesty tropical gooseberry passionfruit flavours delivered by an abundance of NZ brews to make you think you're drinking new age passiona - until you end up on the floor as drunk as a Labor lawyer skunk.

As long ago as 2007, Dennis Altman was scribbling in The Australian, Forget the culture wars, we all drink chardonnay now. The point being that you can now turn up in the dining room of the West Tamworth Leagues club and find worthy Tamworthians having a glass of wine with their steak. Sure most still drink beer, but you no longer have to be "European" (code words for French or Italian) to like a drink of wine.

As a result of being so upset about Allan resorting to chardonnay-sipping in what was supposed to be a serious column on a serious issue, I quite lost track of his arguments.

From what I could make out, they seemed to be as cliched as you might expect from a judgmental non-chardonnay quaffer. As dull as a glass of mineral water.

It seems that a bill of rights would transfer all democratic powers to top unelected judges who love to jet off to international conferences, thereby making huge inroads into democratic decision-making. Allan seemed to think that this was terrible, disastrous, and possibly very Canadian.

On another day, I might have gone with the flow, but I kept brooding about a mind which would resort to abusing chardonnay in such a careless, cheap way.

What if these judges love to quaff a decent chardonnay? What then?

(Below: aah, come on mate, forget that NZ muck, get some passiona into you).

Christopher Pearson, Ruth Ostrow, Jim Schembri, and the battle to be top dog on the feral cat pond ...

(Above: I can't believe it. My first legitimate reason to run a lolcat, and I owe it all to Ruth Ostrow. Is not the world a good place?)

We were exceptionally pleased to read that Mike Carlton has instituted a "loony of the week" award. When talking about his email correspondents, he noted 80% hit the spot, 10% came from barking mad High Tories, and then there was another unhappy differently barking mad 10%:

The bottom 10 per cent, I have to say, are barking mad, and from them I like to choose a Loony of the Week. This week's winner frothed that I hate the Premier because ''Kristine [sic] is Catholic and right wing.'' Amazing.

The rest of the column - Savaged by a mincing poodle with his finger on the mouse - begins with an amusing take down of Christopher Maurice Pyne, but we were more excited by the notion that "loony" could become an exemplar of political discourse.

We've long held the view that it's the right of everyone to be as loony as they can be, and for looniness to be celebrated, revered and enjoyed. Let loons everywhere flourish and compete for the Mike Carlton award.

That said, this weekend is a very disappointing turn out of competitors, a bit like holding a winter Olympics with too little snow so the home country can win all the gongs. Go Canada.

Oh sure, there's Christopher Pearson, offering up PM's face is smiling, his mind is not, but he spends his words carelessly, for the second week in a row tediously explaining how Chairman Rudd is terrified and on the run and a rising Tony Abbott - when not lost amongst the fossils - is rampant.

Then he wheels in Rod Cameron to explain why Rudd is doomed, and then has to spin his way out of what Cameron said about Abbott being unelectable, by criticising Cameron for partisan spin. Not that someone who boasts of his friendship with Tony Abbott and a shared passion for the Latin mass could ever be accused of partisan spin.

Did someone pass me the kettle when I specifically asked for the carbon-stained pot?

Cameron is a long-term Labor strategist and allowances have to be made for the partisan spin that comes as second nature while sifting his remarks for substance. For example, the suggestion that Abbott is unelectable flies in the face of the polling but consoles the party faithful that everything will turn out well in the end.

Well played, a nice double twist with pike, but not quite what the judges were looking for, since it somehow evokes the need to sift Pearson's commentary for substance.

How about determining what the election campaign will be about?

The fact that the Prime Minister repeatedly recommitted to enacting an emissions scheme on Insiders last weekend means that, health and tax policy notwithstanding, the election campaign will be a referendum on the issue.

Sorry, a private fantasy life and wish fulfilment might be personally satisfying, but can only be seen as a gutter ball by those without a religious belief in denialism. As if the matter of climate change was now done and dusted, in the way that the issue of limbo has been resolved.

No, these days we need to step up to some real meat, and who better than Ruth Ostrow. I confess I've ignored Ostrow for way too long, but she's shaping up as a real contender.

Take Born to be wild. Yes, you can take it, and bury it out the back with the kitty litter if you like, or you can read it.

If you decide to ruin your eyeballs, you'll get a harrowing story of a lion tearing the head off a woman, and then a harrowing story about how Ostrow's docile, ever so cute Persian fluff-ball cat, when confronted by a snake in the garden, took an attitude to Ostrow's intervention:

My motherly instincts took over and I shot across the garden and grabbed the cat. The feeling of something coming up behind must have seemed like certain death and my right arm was ripped from one end to the other, as the cat, operating from terror and adrenalin, attacked its captor.

Wow. Powerful stuff. A suburban tragedy, and surely the logical conclusion is that lions should be banned, and cat owning relegated to the realm of witches. There's simply no reason to allow the keeping of these Ostrow-ripping urban terrorists, so they can live in the city, tom catting on the tiles and killing birds like Terminators determined to eradicate our feathered friends (myna birds excluded of course).

Sure, cats purr, and look cute, in a remote Mehitabel kind of way, but they're killers, still strolling the savannah in their mind's eye. No wonder Ostrow demands they be banned:

I don't begrudge fiery dogs their right to be wild creatures or to have adrenalin surges out of fear or rivalry. I just don't think humans should own them.

Que? Say what? WTF? It was the cat that done it, and dogs should be banned? And the cat walks free? Saunters outside to think of another excuse for an arm ripping?

Oh the humanity.

Next week, a call to ban bicyclists for running their bicycles into hapless, quivering jellyfish owners of Hummers, who only drive them because the size of the exhaust pipes prove they have a big penis? Deep down they're sweet little pussy cats?

Well I guess you could always find yourself reading Jim Schembri. Unlike Miranda the Devine, in her wonderful and insightful Hit by the leftie sledgehammer demolition, shock and awe flattening of the evil greenie James Cameron's socialist propaganda film Avatar, covertly funded by Mosfilm, Jim is terrified the show might win best picture or best director Oscar.

In Pray that Kryptonite is Avatar's undoing, Jim is particularly upset by the notion of floating mountains:

''Really? That bothers you?'' said Cameron. ''There's floating mountains in the movie and that bothers you?''

Well, yeah, because it doesn't make any sense. Story coherence has nothing to do with floating mountains.

Um, Jim, let me break this to you gently. The hero turns into a blue CGI, and mates with another tall blue creature, who isn't a CGI, except she is, not being an avatar, but real in a blue kind of way. These blue creatures ride dragons, and do mind fucks by entwining their tails with themselves and other creatures (and never mind the bestiality implications).

All this talk of the Na'vi mind link, and avatars and the Omaticaya way of knowledge, and the Tree of Souls, and god knows what else in the way of mystical gibberish, and you suddenly baulk at floating mountains? Sheesh, if that's the only thing that didn't make any sense to you, you were on a winner.

Then he added: ''That's the most minutia-based question I've ever received doing hundreds of interviews whose sole purpose was to talk about Avatar.''

There it is, folks, confirmation from the biggest filmmaker in history - Titanic, True Lies, Terminator 1 and 2, Aliens - that story matters less than floating mountains.

Oh dear lord. I'm suddenly with you Jim. No, not you Jim, the other Jim. James. Give James Cameron an Oscar, if only for plausible denial. And get Jim Schembri back on his medication quickly, before he falls off a floating mountain.

And there you have it. Week after week, valiant protagonists, like natives trying to defeat cruel miners hunting for unobtainium, wage desperate battle to become 'loony of the week', and thereby bring a smile to the face of devotees of looniness everywhere. Long may it continue ...

And now, Mehitabel the cat takes a walk on the dark side (here):

one day she was talking to me
of the kittens
and the next day when i asked
her about them
she said innocently
what kittens
interrogation point
and that was all
i could ever get out
of her on the subject
we had a heavy rain
right after she spoke to me
but probably that garbage can
leaks so the kittens
have not yet
been drowned

(Below: eek, it's a floating mountain. Please explain why James Cameron had to ruin his intensely neo-realistic, emotionally convincing study of blue people and their flying dragon friends with the risibly unrealistic concept of floating mountains? Instead of making the first science fiction Bicycle Thief, he's ended up with a gross travesty of story telling. Take out the floating mountains Jim! Do a recall and scrub them out with your whiz bang CGI skills. But whatever you do, however you cope, leave in the blue creatures and the dragons. Keep the realism! And don't try and tell me that the unobtainium in the floating mountains is what fuels the anti-grav devices in the interstellar time warp space ships. I've seen Star Trek - the warp drives tap the energy released in the deuterium matter-antimatter annihilation process, with the aid of regulating 'dilithium crystals'. Keep the science real Jim. Use deuterium! Stay coherent!)

Mirana Devine, and Paul Keating for Napoleonic mayor of old Sydney town ...

(Above: Finger wharf. Hiss boo, tear it down, throw Russell Crowe out on the streets, where he and his bunnies belong!)

Here's Paul Keating in one of his sensitive moments of concern for inner city dwellers and his rage at the way a finger wharf became the most grotesque private property heist in New South Wales public history:

Now, I wasn't quick enough off the mark on this one. I had a decision by the Cabinet of New South Wales to take this down. Laurie Brereton, the Minister for Public Works, and Premier Neville Wran had agreed to take it down. The Labor Council of New South Wales put on a stink and said they wouldn't allow Labor to take it down. So I said to Hawke, 'Look, we'll buy it, and we'll get the army to take it down'

And here's a little more on that grand vision:

... I wanted to, of course, in an earlier day, I wanted to put this underground, this road. Take the Cahill Expressway down, put this underground, bring the Botanical Gardens and the Domain back as one, and see this extended back down to its natural shoreline by subsuming that wharf in the green space here and building a boardwalk around here and turfing the navy out of the parking station.

[Laughter]

But once Clover and the rest of them told me, no, no, I was wrong, and that we had to have this with its great cathedral spaces, I decided, well, I'd leave the navy here. And, you know, they're always banging away down there, annoying all these residents.

How about another grand vision? Paul Keating on shifting the Federal parliament to Sydney:

Garden Island lends itself either to being a natural headland, or accommodating a ceremonial building. I have long believed that this should be the site of the Commonwealth Parliament and the Commonwealth parliamentary chambers, with perhaps parliamentary offices built, St Petersburg-like, in a low-level horseshoe around the historic Captain Cook Dock...

...We could formalise this event, or these events, by putting the Parliament at the centre, and on the most panoramic point of the largest and most international Australian city, and that's, of course, Garden Island. The Commonwealth spent $1 billion on the current Parliament building, but that was 20 years ago.

There's plenty more here, in Paul Keating on the design of East Darling Harbour, all entertaining, and designed to get citizens outside Sydney, which is after all, the known centre of the civilised universe of Australia, frothing and foaming at the mouth. As for heritage folk?

But you know what'll happen. Some toolshed in 1890 will have to go down here and you'll get the Heritage mafia fighting you to knock it over. They will. They're nutters.

[Laughter]

They're absolute nutters. They have a complete confusion between ends and means, about what is important. And if we were to build, let's say, we were to build a Commonwealth Parliament here, wouldn't it be worth the price of a couple of machine sheds? You know, however built? In brick, with however the radius was done in steel. Not unnecessarily knocking them out, but if they have to be knocked out, they get knocked out.

Of course while Keating rambles on about his grand vision for the harbour precinct there are a couple of practical matters that require attention, like trains that run on time, ferries that work, and an airport that doesn't lay siege to the city by abandoning the curfew. But that's not as much fun as knocking over a toolshed with a lot of banner-waving nutters inside.

These days of course Keating is very strong on his shock at the way the government has abandoned, or seems to be in the process of abandoning, Badgery's Creek as Sydney's second airport, but of course when in government, Bob Hawke and Keating went missing in action:

However, despite a vast number of favourable words being written on the subject, the Hawke government backtracked in 1994 and instead of building a new airport, a second runway (known as the third) was added to the existing airport. The bad publicity did not seem to bother Hawke, nor did it seem to bother prime minister Paul Keating when he opened it, dubbing it the runway "the nation had to have".

Never mind. We also had to have a recession for fear of becoming a banana republic.

As an eccentric Napoleon with grandiose visions, Keating is great fun - worthy of a musical - and always entertaining, and the idea that Barangaroo is much more than a land grab of office blocks and apartments and hotel rooms is a worthy delusion to maintain, as he keeps rabbiting on about public interests and public needs and public enthusiasms. As if the developers are somehow at arm's length when it comes to making a buck from Barangaroo ...

You know the game's afoot when you get this kind of guff peddled in stern letters to the press:

Some critics of the Lend Lease plan have argued that it is not right to gift 7 hectares of waterfront land to a developer and allow them to evolve the design into something very different to that which has been presented to the public.

This statement is fundamentally untrue. Firstly, the land is not gifted, but leased in stages for each building and only after approval of each part, by the Barangaroo Delivery Authority.

Oh that's alright then, if we don't like it, then we'll just revoke the lease and knock all the buildings down. After all, it's fun knocking things down.

Meanwhile, the resident cafe latte handwringers at the Sydney Morning Herald have been looking slightly askance at Barangaroo - Keating: the new bandmaster leading our mini Manhattan - is a sample of the ambivalence, as distant memories of the splendid Toaster bequeathed to Sydney harbour bubble up in the collective beehive mind.

But the notion that Keating might have jumped the shark now becomes a certainty with Miranda the Devine's It's time for the old grey mayor:

For all his faults, Keating is a brilliant autodidact with verve and the chutzpah which got him from Bankstown to the Lodge without so much as a university degree. He has the balls Sydney lost.

So if we are to have a Greater Sydney council, let us have Keating for mayor.

Dear lord, I have to confess I immediately fell over in a deep swoon, and it was only with lashings of smelling salts that I came round.

With friends like these, Keating needs enemies? And of course the funniest thing is that the Devine strips all the nonsense about public benefit away, to praise the Barangaroo project's collection of high rise buildings, and the dictatorial manner in which it's being arranged, and bugger the public whingers:

Now, rather than a cowering collection of low-rise buildings, Barangaroo will give the city a much-needed new financial district "for a funds management industry of a trillion dollars of superannuation savings [and] the public gets a new botanical gardens''.

It's an exuberant, unashamedly urban plan. Being Sydney, it also has critics, who complain especially about the 40-storey hotel.

Keating dismisses the criticism as penny-ante carping, with no role in the ''greatest waterfront scheme currently in the world".

He knows you need a dictator for a great planned city; how much consultation did Haussmann do when he rebuilt Paris?

Well as for the new botanical gardens, don't hold your breath. This is just a fancy way to dress up a public park with typical public landscaping, and there's no confirmation that the Botanic Gardens Trust will be running the show in a botanical way:

QUENTIN DEMPSTER: But this is not revegetated Aussie bushland, Australian bushland that we'd had here when Captain Phillip was here. This is - I'm right about botanic garden standard landscaping, isn't it?

PAUL KEATING: Yep.

QUENTIN DEMPSTER: But robust for walkways ...

PAUL KEATING: But we've gotta do - this is the other technical problem with this, Quentin: when the basements of these large buildings are excavated, the soil has to go somewhere anyway. It either goes out by barge or by truck down Sussex Street or it goes into fill on the site and the obvious way to fill on the site is to recontour the headland. It's the sensible thing to do, you know? In the end, Phillip Thalis stamped his foot and we said, "Alright, Phillip. Next. Next." You know? (here)

Yep, it's a handy place for land fill, not that there's anything wrong with the artificiality of a Central Park if it's done right. But calling them botanical gardens? It's just window dressing, or landscaping, if you will ...

Meanwhile, the Devine rabbits on about how Sydney is going to double in size, and how Sydney will end up the most congested city in the country, and how already Melbourne - town of the alley way latte - beats wretched Sydney in terms of livability, and how there were dire sickening visions of future harmony when it came to latte chatter about Barangaroo:

... from the Barangaroo Delivery Authority, we had the utopia of 30,000 people strolling, biking and catching public transport, producing zero waste, being "carbon neutral" and "climate positive'', and providing the rest of Sydney with recycled water, whether from their own kidneys, or not, wasn't mentioned.

Nauseating.

Thank the lord Paul Keating's Napoleonic vision of tall towers, and dictatorial fiat shattered that kind of rhetorical nonsense and talk of public discussion in an instant.

But speaking of public transport, it's amusing that at some point recently someone must have looked at the grand vision of Barangaroo, and worked out that once the metro was a dead duck in the water - or a loon on an impractical expensive pond - there needed to be a gesture in the direction of public transport.

Cue light rail, which for years has been on the outer with the state government, and now becomes a central part of the vision, as if Sydney were suddenly aspiring to become Amsterdam:

Barangaroo will be a key destination on a massively expanded $500 million light rail network from Dulwich Hill to Circular Quay.
This light rail network will deliver 10,000 people an hour to the heart of the Barangaroo precinct
It will run through the Western corridor of the CBD, linking the new development with Circular Quay, Haymarket and the Inner West and key tourist destinations. (here)

There's more - ferries, cycle ways, strong pedestrian links, and only 4% car access - and then I look at Darling Harbour - well I don't look that often - and I laugh. Because this vision came about almost overnight, never mind the extensive lead time involving the Barangaroo development.

That's the great thing about Sydney. If you didn't have a sense of humour before you land in the town, pay attention to the parochial parish pump politics for longer than a second, and you'll rapidly develop one.

Paul Keating as Napoleonic mayor of greater Sydney? After the swoon, I laughed and laughed, until they got out the straight jacket and I sobered up a little.

Still thanks to Miranda the Devine it's another great day in the old town, a smile on everyone's faces.

Sure South Australia might be having an election, tainted by scandal, and good old Melbourne might be more liveable, and Tasmania more idyllic, but this is the town of the Rum Corps, and the Rum rebellion, and never you forget it ...

The waves beside them danced, but they

Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company!
I gazed, and gazed, but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Barangaroo daffodils. (complete here)

(Below: the grand vision - more images here. You'll be able to see the little patch of green off to the left more clearly. It's a botanical gardens in true Victorian style, don't ya know. Just say it's not about beds and office space, click your heels three times, and you could be in Kansas).

Tony Abbott, Barry Cohen, and such a rush of authenticity, why is it I feel nauseous?

(Above: a lovely shell craft display item. Ask your local unemployed artist to knock one up for you, and if the bum refuses, become an artist yourself and do it yourself, and teach the bum about the power of the free market. You see, the arts are that easy, any one can do them).

It's good news week,
Someone's dropped a bomb somewhere,
Contaminating atmosphere
And blackening the sky,
It's good news week,
Someones found a way to give,
The rotting dead a will to live,
Go on and never die.

Have you heard the news?
What did it say?
Who's won that race?
What's the weather like today?

So what's the news today?

Oh god, the tedium, the ennui, that's the news today. There's Tony Abbott explaining Abbott: Why I journeyed into the dead heart (and got lost like a city bred goose somewhere around Fossil creek):

That’s how I came to be on a quad bike, low on fuel, following tyre tracks in the gathering dark earlier this week. That’s how I sampled a witchety grub and honey ants dug up by the women of an outstation called Ukaka.

Yep, like any number of outback tourists, the brave lad has now sampled witchetty grubs. What next for the intrepid north shore warrior? A trip to Penrith to sample chops and three vegetables as a way of relating to authentic working class life?

(A tasty serve of witchetty grubs with bunya nuts and quandong dipping sauce. Yum, here).

Even more remarkable, Abbott leads with a further series of cliches which suggests he doesn't have a clue, opening with a truly original line about drop ins as delivered by locals:

In 2001, on my first trip to Cape York as a cabinet minister, a local person had likened government officials to seagulls: whities who fly in, scratch around, and fly off.

Oh that's so novel and new and clever.

Ever since, I have tried to build ongoing relationships with indigenous people based on something more than the standard drive around the community, meeting with the local council and, perhaps, visit to the art centre.

So instead sample some witchety grubs and honey ants, and get lost, and then fly out? (and for god's sake can we just spell them as witchetty grubs, the spell checker's giving me grief every time we adopt the Abbott way. Dear lord, is a new English curriculum needed in our schools, or what).

Proving that you're an inept bushman doesn't impress as a qualification, nor does this kind of blather:

Most remote Aboriginal people are only a couple of generations away from a hunter gather existence. Many have pre-modern connectedness to land, systems of kinship obligation, and sense of the sacred. This helps to explain contemporary Australia’s fascination with indigenous culture. Our mourning for the loss of so much traditional culture, in part, reflects regret for our own loss of authenticity.

What on earth does he mean? Is he inauthentic? Does he feel he's lost his authenticity? Well let him speak for himself, and not mumble on about the regret at a loss of authenticity in others. As soon as I hear people speak of authenticity, I reach for my gun. Mumbo jumbo has that effect.

Abbott means well, no doubt, and has visited the outback on a number of occasions, but I'm willing to bet I've spent more time than him living and working in the dead heart, and it doesn't give me a feeling of authenticity.

Well you can read the rest of Abbott the intrepid outback venturer at your leisure, but I was after really exciting loonery, a real loon pond feature-ette.

And sure enough I found out that Barry Cohen's wife Rae is a dab quilter, and he's not a half bad scribbler, and neither of them need any subsidy, thank you very much, as he explains in Sorry, but some have to suffer for their art.

It turns out that Cohen was an arts minister in the Hawke government, and now that he's reached a certain age, he feels the need to imitate a grumpy old man. And is such a complete success, surely he'll be one of the few actors to keep in a regular job in these troubled days.

Cohen is one of those guys who should at a certain age have retired to playing with model train sets along with retired engineers and harumphers about inauthentic people, in contrast to authentic people doing authentic work:

Most occupations, be they clerks, sales assistants, miners, shearers, boilermakers, doctors, dentists or school teachers, have a limited number of positions available which, once filled, guarantees that those seeking employment in that area will look further afield. It's called the free market and it works.

There aren't thousands of aspiring boilermakers lining up for jobs that don't exist. They find work that puts a roof over their heads, food on the table and financial security.

Well actually there aren't thousands of aspiring artists lining up for jobs that don't exist either, and the notion that artists sustain a living by sucking on the public teat is surely one of the great myth-making follies. If you rely on an arts bureaucrat's whims to make a living, better sign up for the dole right now:

Artists, and I use the word loosely, are an entirely different kettle of fish. We must remember that there are millions of them in Australia out of a population of 22 million. Precisely how many I have no idea, but picture for a moment all those you know who fancy themselves as artists: painters, sculptors, singers, musicians, dancers, actors, composers and the millions of handicraft artists that indulge in embroidery, tatting, quilting and the like.

Yes and picture all those deluded scribblers who confuse handicrafts with other arts. And can I just say how bitterly I resent shell craft not being mentioned, as it's an ideal way to create decorative boxes, mirror frames and fanciful soap dishes to give your bathroom a colourful marine flourish.

Well he did say he was going to use the word 'arts' loosely, but shouldn't he have added 'goosely'?

Back to Cohen as he keeps conflating away:

My First Lady, the beauteous Rae, is a dab hand at any craft she puts her mind to. Her days are full making magnificent quilts. Recently, together with a local quilting group she delivered 73 quilts to fire victims in Victoria.

Does she earn anything from her art? Not a cent. Does she expect to? No and nor do her fellow quilters. They do it because they love doing it. It is an art but it is also their hobby.

I've been a little luckier over the past 20 years as a columnist with eight books, seven of which made the best-seller list. It's been a nice little earner, but thank God it wasn't my only source of income.

Oh dear god, you mean scribbling such tomes as Life with Gough, Whitlam to Winston, The Almost Complete Gough, How to Become Prime Minister, The Yartz, What about the Workers, The Life of The Party - Political Anecdotes, and After the Party? Not a decent novel or collection of short stories amongst them? Not that I'm in to book burning, but I can cheerfully say I've never read a Cohen work, and have quite happily passed up the opportunity to buy several in assorted op shop fifty cent sales.

Which is perhaps just as well, because it doesn't matter, because people just do it for the love of it:

Like Rae, I write because I love writing. Would I continue if there was no longer a market? Almost certainly, because of the pleasure it brings and not because of the financial reward.

A few artists are extremely well paid, earning in the millions, while a substantial number make a good living. However, in the arts, unlike most other trades and professions, there are 10 times more practitioners than there are opportunities for fame and fortune.

Never mind. What's remarkable is that a one time federal minister in the field peddles drivel about the need for artists to re-enact scenes from La bohème while starving in garrets.

It is of course a nonsense, and subsidy is an essential for many art forms, and generally worthwhile, except when Cate Blanchett opens her mouth, and tries to explain why subsidy is worthwhile (The arts are far more than just another industry). Never let an actor out on the stage without someone else's script to read.

The arts community should be honest with aspiring artists and warn them that their worth will be determined by the market, by who buys their records, books, paintings or pays to see them perform.

Well actually no, you goose. If you happen to be in an orchestra, you're not going to make a living through people buying your records. Nor if you're an opera singer. Without subsidy, classical music would be dead in an instant. Some might not care, some might not mourn the passing of its public performance in Australia. But at least they wouldn't carry on about how a free market should determine how artists make a living, or pays to see them perform.

Some expect governments to provide. And they do. The federal government picks up the tab for a vast number of artistic activities. Indeed the spending on everything from the National Gallery through to the Film and Television School comes to $696 million.

And then there's the ABC, SBS and extensive state and local government programs. Governments are continually expanding their arts programs, creating opportunities for artists while stimulating tourism and ensuring the arts are more widely enjoyed.

But here's the thing, since we've moved from quilts to film and television. If you were a television programmer, would you cheerfully drop $500,000 on an hour of television, when you could pick up another hour from the United States for a licence fee of $50,000? And still garner respectable ratings as you used the fodder as spacing for your television commercials?

And yet Australians do watch Australian drama on Australian television, courtesy of subsidy for the more expensive forms, with the Australian government handily helping out on the first two underbellies.

In a market of 22 million, up against the powerhouse of a dominant set of players, supported by a domestic market of 300 million, and a well entrenched choke hold on the international market, it's impossible to compete with US product on a level 'free market' playing field. Through the nineteen thirties and forties and fifties and sixties, Australia simply didn't see its own culture or faces on the screen, with a few honourable exceptions.

Now you might not care, but the few films that were made - by the likes of Chauvel and Ken Hall - are precious indicators of lost times, and old Australia's cultural values - and while the industry struggles for relevance today, and is mainly of interest for the way it's lost favour with audiences, the reality is that without subsidy, there simply wouldn't be any kind of high end film or television production.

It's incredibly tiresome to trek back over this territory time and again, especially when it's a former minister, carrying on about the virtues of fucking quilting and his own inane scribbling.

What's even worse is that this kind of nonsense is the best The Australian can apparently do in relation to the recent Throsby report into the arts:

We are indebted to David Throsby for his latest report on the plight of our artists. It's the 11th in a similar vein over the past 30 years. What is needed is some solutions.

Well one thing's for sure. There's no hope of a solution from Cohen as he beavers away leaving no cliche or free market nightmare unturned:

Let's hope we don't go the way as some European countries where those who are declared to be artists are guaranteed a salary for life. Denmark is one such country and so is Holland. Such a system guarantees there are any number of artists beavering away filling up warehouses with paintings no one will ever see.

There is a vital role for governments to play in developing talented artists, but please spare us from the nonsense that everyone who declares themselves an artist should be guaranteed an income.

Actually there's a vital role for the media to play in analysing the situation of the arts and artists in Australia, but please spare us from the nonsense that artists go around declaring that everyone who declares themselves an artist should be guaranteed an income for life.

Nobody's said that you goose, and even Cate Blanchett didn't claim that artists are treated as chimney-sweeps were back in Dickens' day. Go back to playing with your model train sets, and don't worry about the way in the future the models for artists making a buck will rapidly change, especially seeing how easy it is these days to pirate books, music, movies and television.

Ever worked out how a free market can compete with free, Mr. Cohen?

The Australian? Think. Again.

But there you have it, in the news today. Witchetty grubs and quilting as authentic signs of Australian life. Pardon me while I wander out into the authentic back yard with its authentic outside toilet, and heave a little ...

(Below: why even Homer Simpson can do great art, and for free too).