David Kemp, Greg Sheridan redux, and the ongoing war on the dangerous elites ...

(Above: vile law? Now there's a handy form of coarse abuse).

There's some kind of deep psychosis at work in The Australian, and it's on view every day, as it conducts wars with its enemies on all fronts.

A favourite font of childishness and retribution is the Cut and Paste section of the rag - bring on the paywall, bring it on now - wherein quotes are dragged in and assembled in a certain order to smite the foes.

This day it's the enemies of Greg Sheridan who must be smitten, and it's the lot of hapless Mona Elthawy to especially be smitten, and in the process Sheridan's enormous blunder and ignorance on show in Monday night's Q&A can be re-written, and so we now learn what he should have said if he'd had the first clue ...

It's all there in Who knows better what George W. Bush said? George W. Bush or Mahmoud Abbas?, to which the corollary should be, is George W. Bush a born again Christian who talks regularly to his imaginary friend, or is George W. Bush a devout secularist?

But it's the capper quote of the anonymous cut and paster which is most peculiar and a dead give away:

Right Pulse blog on October 3:

Feeling like some Monday night punishment so I have tuned into the ABC's . . . Q&A. Some real nutters on tonight. A Marxist that is making no sense and highly fidgety. Even Tony Jones is trying to shut him up.

You can imagine the anon cut and paster writhing with satisfaction, rubbing hands and cracking knuckles in a Uriah Heep way, thinking, there, that's nailed the Marxists, Q&A, Tony Jones, Mona Elthaway, stray foreign philosophers with a funny peculiar kind of fidgety accent, and all the cardigan wearers at the ABC ... when in reality the pathetic tawdriness of quoting a comment which bears all the hallmarks of a loon blogger (deep in Andrew Bolt la la land) doesn't seem to impinge at all on the lizard Oz's consciousness.

The anonymous editorialist for the Oz also joins in the chase with Minding our p's and q's on Q&A, wherein they chide the ABC for coarse language and note swearwords are often a lazy form of speech.

Calling people nutters or fascists is apparently a much more elevated form of speech, which is no doubt why The Australian features so regularly in a pond written by a loon for loons ...

After copping a shitty cartoon (remember swearwords and coarseness are a lazy form of discourse), the cut and paste treatment, and a barrage of letters going the way of the newspaper, an apparently bruised Robert Manne, in Out of Control: More Bad News, put it this way:

There is, in my view, no other serious newspaper in the English-speaking world that would have responded in the mad, obsessive way the Australian has responded to the publication of “Bad News”. It is as if the paper has been determined to prove my thesis true, namely that it is not only the principal enforcer in this country of the core values of the Murdoch empire – market fundamentalism and American global hegemony – but also that it is now so boastful and bullying in character that it cannot rest until it feels that those who have dared to criticise it have been crushed. In addition, the response has confirmed another hypothesis of the essay: the paper’s cult-like character. The manic response of the Australian to “Bad News” makes it clear that even its most senior journalists cannot bring themselves to tell its editor-in-chief that his behaviour is not only doing harm to his personal reputation but is helping to destroy the credibility of their paper in the eyes of the observing, discerning public.

Indeed. The only surprising thing is that Manne claims to have read the rag assiduously over the past thirty years, and is surprised by the feral, cult-like response to his piece.

Apparently he hasn't been reading it as closely as he fancies.

When it comes to war and the mad, obsessive way The Australian goes about its business, it takes its tone from the aggressive, pugnacious, in the face stylings of Andrew Bolt.

What's curious is the way the minions of Bolt feel the need to go out and troll the world, if there's the slightest hint that their hero might be under some kind of attack. Reading the comments in The Monthly for their plug for Anne Summers' forthcoming profile of Bolt (Andrew Bolt Profile in October issue) is more interesting than reading the puff piece, because it's wall to wall trolling of the "fidgety Marxist making no sense" kind.

Follow the link there to an Age puff piece about the Bolt profile - Bolt an opportunist keen on Fox News, says writer - and yes, it is a relatively innocuous puff piece recycling some of the tasty bits from the Summers' piece (including a comment on Bolt's EQ) - and you get the same wall to wall trolling in favour of Bolt.

Stroll over to Stephen Mayne at Crikey asking After a phenomenal peak, is Andrew Bolt in decline?, and again the most interesting thing isn't Mayne's by now standard demolition job on Bolt, or his helpful reproduction of the IPA advertisement dropped into The Australian in support of Bolt - how bizarre - but the rampant trolling in favour of Bolt in the comments section below.

It's as if a flock of Indian mynah birds, squawking and territorial, have been let loose in the garden, determined to shit on everything in sight (reminder: a cartoon about shitting isn't a coarse or lazy form of debate).

Well the good news about Bolt is that his television ratings are dropping. When we last caught up with the news in the #LOLBolt quarantine zone, it seems the Bolter's ratings had then reached the level of the banished Video Hits previously occupying the morning slot (and the afternoon repeat wasn't doing much better). In the cruel cut and thrust world of television, if you believe in a free market and what a free market is saying to you, Bolt's show should be gone by Xmas.

If on the other hand it survives ... well, you'd have to ask why anyone would bother to keep on a limp wounded demagogue at some expense in a way that makes very little commercial sense. Back at the end of August, the Bolt watchers provided this nifty chart:

But there's commercial reality, and then there's relentless warfare, and just like Bolt, once The Australian sinks its teeth into an issue, a bit like one of the uglier American pit bull terriers, it can't let go.

Typically, it acts like one of those rolling stoppages that causes such inconvenience to travellers, and rolls out a series of commissioned pieces all striking and slashing away, and designed to prove the rag's current blinkered, one sided, warring with all point.

So yesterday in the matter of Bolt, it had the splenetic Brendan O'Neill spluttering and gnashing his teeth in an utterly predictable way in Silence of the illiberal lambs, moaning how a punch in the chops for Bolt was actually a massive slap in the face for freedom of thought and freedom of expression. As usual, it's the elites that cop the blame:

The most shocking thing about the Andrew Bolt case is not the judge's decision but the slavish, unquestioning acceptance of it by huge swaths of Australia's cultural elite.

This is of course a gross distortion of reality, but why let reality get in the way of a Brendan O'Neill state of siege and shock.

Naturally it's only a quick hop and a step from talking about uppity blacks to talking about dangerous Islamics, Danish cartoons, effete liberals, homophobic Christians, irrational hate-filled feminists and so on and so forth ...

What a terrible way to run society. We need to go back to allowing people to believe and say whatever they choose. Anything less is an insult to democracy.

Indeed. Bring back Adolf Hitler, the pond says, so we can sort out the question of the Jews, the effete liberals, the homosexuals and the feminists, and the sooner the better ...

But of course one bleating O'Neill doesn't amount to much more than a sparrow's fart on the front line (remember a shitty cartoon isn't a corse form of argument), and so today we have the pleasure of reading David Kemp advising us that Vile law should be abolished.

Vile? As in the dictionary definition, loathsome, disgusting, morally depraved, ignoble or wicked, miserably poor and degrading, wretched?

Dearie me, and there was Kemp and his cohorts sitting on the benches for a decade or more allowing this vile law to stand unmolested. How vile of them ...

Well you won't gain any more insights into the matter by reading Kemp. This time instead of the elites, we head off into a different kind of la la land:

It was not racial hatred but class hatred that raised the guillotine during the French Revolution, or when millions were starved and slaughtered in Stalin's attack on the "wealthy" peasants, or in Mao's collectivisation, or in his vicious Cultural Revolution, or in the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Uh huh. Please explain what this got to do with Bolt and the act in question?

Nothing much, but no doubt it makes Kemp feel good to get it off his chest, and how pleasing that it suggests Kemp is on the side of Marie Antoinette, and the peasants should have been happy with cake, royalty and the status quo. Dear lord, all that class hatred, and the French nobility so nice and obliging ...

There's loads more, all bizarre, over the top and unkempish, in a Kempish way, concluding with this resounding piece of rhetoric:

The processes of this law I find obscene in the full meaning of the words: offensive, loathsome, ill-omened, disgusting.

Yep, that'd be the law Kemp and his cohorts allowed to sit on the books for a decade or more ... and that'd be the law which sees Bolt elevated into a righteous sanctimonious martyr, St Andrew of the cloth eared ...

Of course some might think that the Bolt column in question was offensive, loathsome, ill-omened and disgusting, but of course that would be to coarsen the debate and use offensive language, typical of the chattering elites.

The end result? The opinion pages in The Australian, always filled with suppurating rage and vile words and obscene extremities, end up reading like the trolling vigilantes patrolling the intertubes to save their martyr and smote the wicked for their unkindly words ...

Who'd have thought we'd end up quoting David Penberthy (Penberthy: Andrew Bolt, you've got it wrong):

In my personal view journalists should examine tensions in society, not amplify those tensions. Bolt is a one-man amplifier. He has somehow got it into his head that with significant column inches and online space at Australia's biggest-selling daily newspaper, not to mention his own TV show, he is the victim of a conspiracy of silence, and has been ganged up on by the elites.

If you wield that kind of power you're not a victim of the elites. You are the elites.

Indeed, and in that tall poppy way beloved by Australians, it won't be the elites who decide on Andrew Bolt.

It'll be the ratings ... and the radio station finances ... and someone in the Murdoch empire finally working out that if you want to sell a newspaper to the high end demographic elites, then taking the part of an unseemly bar room brawler, and berating the elites on a daily basis for missing the point isn't much of a business plan ......

Let the Bolt trollers, that "army of abuse", deal with all that how they will ...

(Below: did someone mention the French revolution and women on the battlefield? Hmm, how did Neil James get into this column, when liberty is such a fine inspiration for Andrew Bolt? Never mind, it's a fine Delacroix vision of liberty for the thinking elites).

Greg Sheridan, Janet Albrechtsen, and hate media keeps on pumping out the hate ... and the ignorance ...

(Above: an easy quick quiz question to start the day by sharpening the brain. Spot the goose in the photo above.

A few clues. Two are pointing at the goose, and the goose is holding up his hand to say you got me good and feathery.

Alternative, more effective way to wake up: have a good strong coffee).

So there'd Greg Sheridan on Q&A chucking a hissy fit, and getting his knickers in a knot, as a result of Mona Eltahawy talking of a Christian brotherhood and daring to suggest George Bush had once said "God told me to invade Iraq" ...

Greg Sheridan: You made it up.

Mona Eltahawy: No, I did not make it up.

Greg Sheridan: There's something in your coffee.

Well whatever Eltahawy has in her coffee, it's way ahead of what Sheridan uses for a brain. Back in 2005, the story was all the go, as you can find by referring to Ewen MacAskill in The Guardian leading with George Bush: 'God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq'. Or Rupert Cornwell in The Independent with Bush: God told me to invade Iraq, or in dozens of other rags that ran with the BBC show that broke the story.

If Sheridan had his wits about him, at least he could have said the story came from Palestinian officials, and he didn't believe them, but like a mug punter, he accused Eltahawy of making it up. No way back from there, not as the cameras roll and catch the ignorance in action ...

Sheridan would have had an equally hard time dancing around the story that Bush and Blair hunkered down for a prayer session at the crucial summit in 2002 at which the invasion of Iraq was agreed in principle. Or maybe they were just praying for advice on the best way to eat a pretzel ...

And how about this Bush-ism?

Another telling sign of Mr Bush's religion was his answer to Mr Woodward's question on whether he had asked his father - the former president who refused to launch a full-scale invasion of Iraq after driving Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991 - for advice on what to do.

The current President replied that his earthly father was "the wrong father to appeal to for advice ... there is a higher father that I appeal to".

What a pity he didn't appeal to the lesser father, and get more solid, realistic advice, and perhaps avoided the sordid mess that Iraq became.

Why Sheridan should be surprised that a born again Christian believes he talks to and gets advice from god, and indulges in prayer fests with his absent friend is an even greater mystery than the nature of the trinity.

Hasn't Sheridan ever met a born again? Doesn't he know that their imaginary friend guides them in all they think and do? This isn't rocket science, and yes, I've lived with a born again, though not for long after they went clap happy (oh dear, was it me, was it the coffee ...?)

Amazingly Sheridan is listed as The Australian's foreign editor, "the most influential foreign affairs analyst in Australian journalism". Does influential encompass peddling the most fatuous and ill-informed twittery on television?

Ah well it's just another day in la la land, off with the pixies and the gurus at The Australian, and today is of course Janet Albrechtsen day. Think of that, Greg Sheridan and Dame Slap shaping your news of the day. When was the last time you were completely and utterly befuddled? When will you ever think again?

Dame Slap is in typically fine form in Yes, there's a silver lining to PM's green salad days, though it's a piece she could have written in her sleep, and perhaps did.

It's yet another waltz through the federal political landscape, and it concludes with this resounding flourish:

In short, we have learned about Brown's clever tactics as Greens leader using an environmental cloak to hide a much broader, more radical agenda to change the way we live and work to reflect the party's anti-commerce, anti-growth beliefs. We should be eternally grateful the Greens have educated us so well these past 12 months. More voters now understand that former Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore was right when he said that when the Cold War was over and the Berlin Wall fell, the leftists moved into the environmental movement, bringing with them their neo-Marxist, far-left agendas: agendas that have more to do with opposing capitalism and globalisation than with science or ecology.

Ah yes, the wretched watermelons, green on the outside, red on the inside, and their wretched radical agenda.

Where would we all be - especially the commentariat - without a radical agenda? If you want pure meaningless cant, there's nothing like invoking radical and far out agendas, as featured in every five and dime conspiracy store.

There's the gays, a collective horde, all acting in unison, like a flock of starlings, rolling out their radical agenda. Then there's the feminists, full of radical agendas. There's rock 'n roll with its hideous radical agenda to subvert western civilisation, a role lately taken over the intertubes, with its radical agenda to change the very shape of our brains ...

Of course sensible folk don't have radical agendas. Like Angry Anderson. He has a radical silliness, but silliness doesn't amount to a radical agenda ... it just amounts to an ageing rock 'n roller from Sydney's northern beaches joining the National Party (Angry Anderson joins National Party). Is this the best the Nationals can do to match Peter 'short memory' Garrett? The screecher from Rose Tattoo?

But we digress, when clearly we should be marvelling at the way Janet Albrechtsen has a deep abiding concern for science and ecology, which you might begin to think is some kind of radical agenda. Which is why we were so lucky she was to hand to channel Lord Monckton and warn the world Beware the UN's Copenhagen plot.

Yes, climate science is just an excuse to introduce world government. Talk about a radical agenda from a bunch of conspiratorial fat cat bureaucratic scientists ...

We have learned that the Greens don't have much time for other old-fashioned notions of democracy either. At the National Press Club, Brown laid out his preference for a world government. That's Brown's elitist view of participatory democracy.

Eek, Bob Brown's in on it too, demanding a world government, like all those elitists with their inner city elitist agenda, demanding good lattes and sippable chardonnay.

Fortunately there's nothing elitist about hauling down a lavish salary package and typing out abusive columns from an ivory tower for a low selling right wing national newspaper sponsored by chairman Rupert for the political influence it provides ...

Now on with the green bashing, with a cry of tally ho:

We learned that the Greens have a peculiar view of freedom of the press. When Brown labelled News Limited the "hate media", it became clear that a newspaper knows it is doing precisely the right thing when the Greens are upset by the scrutiny. And now the Greens leader is suggesting individual journalists should be licensed. This is the green face of fascism.

Yes, it's vital to remember that freedom of the press means the freedom of chairman Rupert and his family to own the bulk of print media in Australia, and if you don't like that, go off and start your own newspaper (oh okay you can inherit one if you're lucky).

And let's deliver a rigorous scrutiny of the greenies and the policies, by examining the green face of fascism.

What's that you say, that's mere petulant abuse of a Godwin's Law offending kind?

Is it possible - anywhere outside a "hate media" driven agenda - to compare Bob Brown to the kind of fascism created by Mussolini and friends in Italy in the twenties? Especially when Brown would be off to one of the concentration camps quick enough for his sexual orientation? Is there something peculiarly offensive linking Brown to fascism, when in 1931 the Italian government declared homosexuality illegal?

Is it possible that Albrechtsen has once again fallen for idle word abuse, as pointed out as long ago as 1944 by George Orwell?

All one can do for the moment is to use the word (fascism) with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

Well for degradation to the level of a swearword, look no further than Albrechtsen.

Hang on, hang on, as usual, reading Orwell is way more fun than reading Albrechtsen:

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Ah George, if only you'd been around in the days of the hate media agenda.

You could have heard the word applied to inner city dwellers and greenies and hippies, and understood in a blinding flash that greenies are fascists who should be hung from the nearest lamp post (along with any stray hippies or scientists urging world government on the world).

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

Yes, we'd accept bully as a synonym for fascist, provided the verbal bullying of Janet Albrechtsen can be counted as fascist.

Oh dear, you see what happens when you run into Dame Slap on a Wednesday. Suddenly there's hate in the air and fascism is flung around like a swear word and the English language is rolled in the mud-soiled gutters like an abused child.

Yes, you fascist astrologers and dog lovers, with your abuse of reason and the English language, that includes you too ...

Conclusion? Feel free to keep reading Albrechtsen. There's lots more in her piece - flatulent and fatuous and with enough hot air to fill the average balloon intent on doing a Hunter valley winery tour - all about the independents and Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor and their effrontery and clamouring self-interest, along with some pot shots and snipes at the federal government, before it devolves into a tirade about the greens and their policies, which is, according to Dame Slap, giving them a proper analysis and a rigorous scrutiny.

Which is to say calling them a bunch of greenie fascists ...

You'll pardon the pond however, if we revert to George Orwell and What is Fascism? before moving on to his excellent essay Politics and the English Language:

If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.

Solidity to pure wind? Yep every day in The Australian there's the sound of pure wind at work, and you can recognise it by the vocabulary, which features worn-out and useless phrases, such as fascism, and Orwellian and world government and radical agendas and so on and so forth until the cows come home for their milking.

Poor George. If there was life after death, they'd have to install a rotating spit to assist in his eternal revolutions as he rolls in his grave ... but if you like, feel free in his honour to throw Janet Albrechtsen's lump of verbal refuse into the dustbin where it belongs ...

Gerard Henderson, Tony Abbott, Cardinal Pell, and sssh, whatever you do don't mention that sectarian issue, climate change ...

(Above: the Fairfax subbies play a cruel joke on Gerard Henderson, using this photo of Tony 'death stare' Abbott practising his top Darth Vader look on Julie 'death stare' Bishop, as an example of Abbott's employing senior women on his personal staff. Did they consider a shot of a python contemplating a feed?)

Now that the Danes have delivered a fat tax - you can already hear fat lovers shrieking about the 16 kroner a kilo assault and the food police coming to get them - the time has come to consider a tax on the saturated, sugary, simpering, salty, bloated offerings of the commentariat.

According to a hastily devised pond rating system, that means Gerard Henderson's piece this morning, Sectarian rant against Abbott is full of holes, despite QC's excitement would attract at least a twenty kroner super tax.

Put simply, Henderson could have used a single ingredient as his theme - Tony Abbott is a wonderful human being, and kind to women to boot - but instead spends the entire column whipping up a frothy, enticing offering , featuring Tony Abbott with a choc chip topping and a creamy, caring, rich raspberry jam centre.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of our very own Polonius that his very favourite word of abuse is "sectarian", usually with a solemn reference to history, as when erecting fortifications to guard against Susan Mitchell's recently published assault on Tony Abbott:

Mitchell's 196-page tome is essentially an anti-Catholic sectarian rant of a kind prevalent in Australia a century ago.

Uh huh. It would seem that drawing attention to Abbott's Catholicism, or the peculiar theologies and social philosophies at work in the church, should be off-limits, or you risk being labelled a whiskery old sectarian reliving the Irish Catholics versus the Masons wars:

Mitchell's message is that Australians should not elect the Coalition led by Abbott because he is a conservative Catholic who has "never left the Catholic Church". Mitchell, who did not attempt to interview Abbott for her book, presents the Opposition Leader as a "mad monk" and an immature "zealot" who is ingrained with "sexism and misogyny" and who does not acknowledge the separation of church and state.

Yes, yes, but we already know all that. What's the real point Mr. Henderson?

In the author's view, Abbott has been reliant on "a series of older male mentors throughout his life". They include, wait for it, "his father, who once hoped to become a Catholic priest". Shame. Then there are the Jesuit priest Father Emmet Costello, John Howard, Cardinal George Pell and the late political activist B.A. Santamaria. All except Howard are Catholic.

Yes, yes, but we know all that, and we fondly treasure that famous moment during the 2004 election campaign when on Lateline, Tony Abbott disremembered meeting George Pell then suddenly remembered meeting him (The two Tonys and George Pell). We like to think of it as part of Abbott's "Peter" moment, though the cock didn't really crow at all ...

It's of more than passing interest that Tony "climate change is crap" Abbott remains fondly attached to the Pellist heresy, and that the Cardinal is a leading proponent of climate change denialism - as charted in Cardinal Pell damaging the reputation of the Catholic Church and Cardinal Pell embarrasses himself and perhaps most amazingly outlined in The Bureau of Meteorology fights back, which features exchanges between Pell, Senator Ian Macdonald and Dr. Ayers of the ABM.

Now it might well be that Pell is simply a meddlesome priest, boxing out of his depth in the matter of climate science, but it's simply not good enough to deliver a flurry of accusations of sectarian bias of a kind that was common a hundred years ago, and dismiss the alarming way that Pell and Abbott continue to row the same climate boat in tandem.

Heck, almost a hundred years ago, the church was taking a vigorous stand against conscription in the first world war, and who could argue with that? But these days the church is in the grip of an arch-conservative with peculiar views of science, and it takes the singular skills of Henderson not to note or even mention this baleful influence.

Instead, Henderson gets terribly agitated - in a sectarian way - and delivers unto others some broad satirical flourishes, because you see Tony Abbott gets on terribly well with Julie 'death stare' Bishop, and Bronnie 'kerosene baths' Bishop, and has employed a number of senior women on his personal staff:

The evidence suggests that, unlike Mitchell and Burnside, many voters do not regard him as a dangerous misogynist intending to create a Christian theocracy in the Antipodes.

Indeed. Especially women, because it's more common to see them ironing rather than attending to politics, thanks be unto Abbott for that insight, and when it comes to no, no doesn't mean no. (Oh no no).

Speaking of 'no', there's plenty of evidence that when in his Dr. No phase, Tony Abbott is tremendously good at negativity, but has bugger all in the way of actual policies to deal with matters such as an effective response to concerns arising from climate science. For that we get instead the humbuggery and disingenuous nonsense of the Pellists, who are seemingly intent on creating a Christian theocracy in the Antipodes.

But wait, there's trouble at mill, or on the home front, or whatever other metaphor you might dig up to describe Peter Costello's sectarian rant, Liberals must protect values of freedom and choice, of a kind which was apparently common a hundred years ago.

The fact that many of the old DLP supporters were able to find a home in the Liberal Party indicates how it widened its appeal, at least in terms of religious background. Most senior players in the federal Coalition today were educated in the Catholic school system - the leader, the manager of opposition business, the shadow treasurer, shadow attorney-general and finance spokesman.

Costello then goes on to single out Barnaby Joyce for his DLP tendencies - trust Costello to pick out the easiest target, the runt of the litter so to speak - but there's also more than a broad hint that Abbott himself is something of a DLP policy splitter ...

Oh dear, Peter Costello and Susan Mitchell together, the unlikeliest peas lurking together in the sectarian pod, and guaranteed to send Henderson into a defensive sectarian frenzy:

Three leading Coalition figures - Abbott, Andrew Robb and George Brandis - have had some relationship with Santamaria and/or the DLP.

Costello also mentions three others educated in the Catholic school system - Christopher Pyne, Joe Hockey and Barnaby Joyce. Yet there is no common position among this lot on economic or social policy. Some are ardent economic reformers - Robb and Hockey come to mind. Others are quite liberal on social policy - for example, Brandis and Pyne. Moreover, Santamaria was a protectionist and a social conservative who attempted to talk Abbott out of becoming a Liberal MP.

Uh huh. Tremendously diverse, showing the complete policy chaos in the Liberal Nationals alliance.

Oh wait, Gerard didn't mean that. Of course they all sing from the same song sheet, he was just using a figure of speech to suggest that instead of robots, they were free-thinking individualists. All of like mind ...

If it weren't sectarian to do so, it could be noted that there is one common thing amongst them. They're all Catholic, and educated in the Catholic school system, which would make their views on the current bizarre federal funding of private schools dedicated to scientology, fundamentalist Christianity and fundie Islam something to hear.

And it's even more sectarianly surprising that Henderson should be so busy putting out sectarian fires started not by Mitchell, but by Peter Costello, and which sees - of all things - Henderson defending the valiant policy positions of the DLP:

According to Costello, the "DLP was good on defence and the Cold War but not up to much on economic issues". Fair enough. But the DLP was also the first parliamentary party to oppose the White Australia policy and its principal influence on social policy was to achieve government funding for non-government schools which, in time, benefited the families of both Catholic Abbott and Protestant Costello and many more besides.

Why there's your answer right there, on the matter of schools and funding, because the many more besides includes the Church of Scientology and the Exclusive Brethren, amongst others peddling creationism or skimming the taxpayer funding (Malek Fahd Islamic School 'fees' funding Australian Federation of Islamic Councils).

Oops, that's sounding dangerously sectarian. Why shouldn't the taxpayers just shovel money down the throats of eccentric religions so that they can nurture their young and maintain their eccentricities for generations to come? Why soon enough we'll have a whole flock of little Pellists peddling his routines on climate science ...

And so to the rousing Henderson finale - perhaps worth a five kroner super 'fatty adoration' tax:

Abbott's political success has surprised many commentators. The key to understanding the Opposition Leader is to play down ideology. Mitchell's sectarian rant obviously excited Burnside. But it is unlikely to have much long-term effect.

Let's just re-word that a little:

Abbott's political success has surprised many commentators, including an envious and jealous Peter Costello. The key to understanding the Opposition Leader, if you happen to be a Catholic commentator like Gerard Henderson, is to play down theology, and dismiss anyone who raises it as an issue as a sectarian ideologue.

Costello's sectarian rant obviously excited Henderson, but he'd prefer to take on Susan Mitchell while making a stand for the DLP and its policies. But this whole sectarian storm in a tea cup is unlikely to have much long-term effect, especially when it comes to climate science and the mad theological musings of the Pellist conspiracy, and its alarming influence on Tony Abbott ...

Or some such thing. You see accusing others of sectarianism is no simple 'get out of real policy discussions free' card, especially when it comes to an opposition leader inclined to furtive meetings and memory lapses ...

(Below: who can remember a meeting with Cardinal Pell, such an unremarkable man?)

The daily war on the left liberal agenda continues, as you'd expect from a family fiefdom that imagines it's a symbol of a free press ...

(Above: The Australian on the warpath today, with its usual orchestrated sing a long).

It says something about the United States presidential election campaign - still so far away that there's an eternity of suffering to come in the phoney Republican wars - that a man who wears strange underclothes, and believes in strange stories about gold tablets and the resurrected Jesus ministering to the Nephites in America appears as one of the saner, more balanced candidates, with some appeal across the aisle.

It says something about the Fairfax press that Paul Sheehan continues as a member of its commentariat, and continues to blight each Monday with a round of depressing, gloomy, generally grumpy views of the world, usually tinged with ethnic prejudices of the lazy, bludging Celt and lazy, cheating Greek bashing kind.

But this week in Even lust loses in this story of dirt, Sheehan plays the role of common fishmonger delivering dirt, aka common gossip, about billionaire Richard Pratt and those around him. As befits a common gossip, there's clucking and tut tutting and a moral to the story, though the moral seems to be that we should sympathise with the filthy rich and their associates, because the more money you have, the less latitude society offers you, until it all falls away. If only the pond had some of that less latitude ... or more money ...

Meanwhile, over at The Australian, sundry members of the commentariat maintain the rage in the opinion pages, all brooding in one way or another on the matter of Andrew Bolt. Yep, it's a standard sing along, so class, get out your music sheets, and let's follow the notes.

The tags on the summary page show the way to conduct the argument. Confronted with a bald statement like The Bolt case reveals leftists prefer symbolic victories to dealing with disadvantage, what can you say? Could leftists chew gum, which is to say deal with disadvantage and enjoy symbolic victories all at the same time?

Seems not.

As generalisations go, it's as silly as saying the Bolt case reveals twits at The Australian prefer rhetorical arguments to dealing with disadvantage.

Then when you get inside Chris Kenny's piece Silencing dissent won't resolve indigenous issues, you get a wondrous bit of conflation, and inflation.

The federal court's finding in relation to Bolt has drastic implications for free speech, and it almost goes without saying, it is frighteningly Orwellian.

I propose, "the [n]th rule of cynicism:"
As a political conversation progresses, the chances someone brings up 1984, Brave New World, or some other dystopic novel, approaches one.

Truth to tell, as someone else remarked, there's never been such a yammering and a blathering, with Bolt preening and posing as a martyr and sounding off all over the place, and the screeching and the yowling coming from the minions of Murdoch getting ever more desperate, exaggerated and pitiful. Oh and dissembling, never forget the dissembling:

Much has been made of the findings about errors of fact. Errors are always unfortunate and sometimes egregious but in this case they are hardly the central point.

Well in Murdoch land, I guess it's far to say that errors of fact are hardly ever central to the point. They rarely seem central to the point when discussing climate science, for example, not when any any rube might be invited in, fresh off the street, to have their denialist day.

For the rest of Kenny's piece, there's much blather about leftists and liberals and the leftist liberal agenda, which presumably encompasses the gay agenda and the feminist agenda, and perhaps even the agenda for the public school tuck shop committee meeting.

Naturally there's also an activist judge, who displayed his activist agenda by interpreting a law left on the books by the Howard government for a decade with what others might see as a routine interpretation and following of the words of the legislators ...

But when you get a wind up Chinese alarm clock like Kenny really wound up, there's no stopping him, and so we get a detour via Bill Henson's nude photos:

The modus operandi of the morally vain liberal Left has always been to trumpetits tolerance by denouncing others. Still, that is the point; we must be allowed to offend each other.

Morally vain?

More, to the point Trumpetits? Sic, so and thus, but it has to be said, the vision of trumpet tits conjured up by the typo quite distracted the pond from Chris Kenny's most serious and solemn points.

Which somehow took us on an even grander tour of the Hindmarsh island affair and an even grander defence of the Northern Territory intervention.

When shocking abuse of indigenous children was revealed, triggering the Northern Territory intervention, the debate was not about repairing communities and providing hope for children, but about indigenous rights and discriminatory paternalism.

Of course if you were seriously libertarian - as opposed to paternalist, discriminatory and frighteningly Orwellian - and you invoked the Larry Flynt defence - defend the worst you've got in the name of free speech, then you would rightly deplore the Northern Territory intervention.

You'd even argue for the right of blacks to enjoy access to pornography in the same way whites do. Since certain forms are legal, and since even Catholic priests have access to it, no matter what it might drive them to do with altar boys ...

But Kenny's piece isn't about logical positions, it's just a standard, all to typical lizard Oz opinion piece, about the evils of the left liberal agenda, and how people, especially indigenous folk, can only succeed by triumphing over environmental and cultural policies to somehow arrive at an economically self-sustaining future ... though how long self-sustaining policies might last in a completely fucked environment can only be discerned by the more adept acolytes of Murdoch.

Meanwhile, moving along to Wesley Aird and More transparency, less hypocrisy, he's found the right people to blame in the Bolt affair, and it's the pesky professional blacks, because we all know that the real professionals in race-based discrimination are Aboriginal people.

Remember, always shoot the victim, it's the only way to keep the place tidy.

The tag at the end of the piece tells you that Aird is a member of the Gold Coast native title group, but it would have been grand of the editorial team to remind us that Aird is a board member of the Bennelong Society, working with that luminary president Gary Johns, as they did at the bottom of his piece Great Aboriginal con.

Aird, who found himself on the Howard government's tokenist National Indigenous Council, is a reliable man when it comes to finding people to step up to the Oz plate, with a long history of columns berating despicable left liberal agenda, sorry day, and so on and on, and most particularly the broken "indigenous industry", which is of course an insidious part of the left liberal agenda.

Not for Aird a flexible inclusiveness:

If we are ever going to get anywhere then we need to talk about issues such as identity and entitlement. We need to have a collective understanding of what it means to be indigenous.

To illustrate the confusion, not even the Australian Bureau of Statistics has a uniform approach for the national census when it comes to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

But at a time when we need tolerance and discussion about indigenous identity it is clear that debate is extremely risky for fear of being taken to court.

Yes, of course. It's much more important to have tolerance and discussion of Andrew Bolt's offensive meanderings about indigenous identity, personally assaulting sundry people with factual errors, than to sympathise without people who seem to have thought that they might somehow be indigenous.

And as for that question of flexibility and individuality and individual circumstances? No, no we must have a rigorous, one policy suits all approach of the usual blinkered kind ...

Naturally these valiant attacks on the liberal left agenda leads us to Mark Day's No one can deny benefits of free press, to which wags might add a corollary, No one can deny the benefits of a press free of the baleful influence of the Murdochs.

After brooding about the high flown British inquiry into the press, and then the more prosaic, mundane questions being asked by the low rent antipodean inquiry, inevitably Day adds his two cents on the Bolt matter:

I accept that these are relevant questions, but I do not accept that they should be answered in the affirmative. We talk of a free press, but in fact it is anything but free.

Indeed. In the antipodes, it's largely owned by Chairman Rupert, and it's anything but free, and hopefully will be even less free once the paywall clangs into place (why here we are in October, and the paywall soon to land like an early Chrissie present), so the pond can pay what's worth. By renewing subscriptions to quality international magazines ...

Journalists and publishers must find their way through a minefield of legal restraints on what they can say, ranging from defamation to the Racial Discrimination Act, as the Bolt case attests. The last thing we need is new restrictions.

Yes, I guess in much the same way as the last thing we need is fact checking, or sub-editors, or prominently featured corrections for egregious errors and shameless assaults on people's integrity. Because truth to tell, in the online world as well as in Murdoch tabloids, it's now the extremists who drive the hits and the distortions, and who never bother with what might have been described as the conventional virtues of factual news reporting ...

It is more popular than usual at the moment to condemn the media for its faults and shortcomings, and the reasons are understandable. A loss of trust linked to the phone hacking and a fiercely partisan political environment are two major causes.

But we must not lose sight of the benefits a free press brings society as it lifts the lid on government secrets, corporate and public corruption and shines a light in places where crooks, crims and politicians would prefer darkness.

Uh huh. Well it would be even better if we never lost sight of the way that a shackled press provided chairman Rupert with unholy access to, and influence upon politicians in the UK (just as Fox News hoes its own path in the United States). Nor should we lose sight of the way that the Prime Minister of Australia trotted off to a News Limited private briefing to give them an insider's treat - an elitist big city treat you might say if you liked News Corp rhetoric - in a way that's far more privileged than that afforded the average Australian.

And we should never lose sight of the way that an owned and abused press can attempt to hide its own corporate secrets and its private corruption, and avoid shining a light in places where grasping, self-interested proprietors would prefer darkness.

But I guess if ever there was a willing terrier, ready to bark up any tree for his master, Day's your man:

Even the rambunctious tabloids can be a force for good. Until the phone hacking you could win a debate that the News of the World's contribution was positive, even if its methods were, in an Australian context, questionable.

The evidence Day leads with? The Pakistani betting scandal, and exposing the desperate pathetic Duchess of York to the world, using secret recording devices? These are the scandals that justify illegality and ruined lives? That the best the NOTW has got?

How about the scandal of an intimidatory proprietor in bed with Tony Blair, seeking to gain a stranglehold on pay television in the UK while encouraging middle eastern adventurism? Nailing politicians to the world in the interests of commercial advantage and unholy power should be overlooked while the tabloids bay at a few cricketers and an ex-royal, and do gotcha honeypot entrapments that would do the secret service proud?

Well for for a more sensible answer to that, you'd have to read The Guardian or some of the other rags doing the rounds, which makes the pond grateful for there being an alternatively owned press still at large in the world.

And for the moment a relatively free intertubes, which reminds the pond of why it will never vote for a Labor government so long as Senator Conroy and his giant internet filter remains lurking in the shadows.

Bugger an already owned press with a pre-set agenda, routinely carrying out its left liberal bashing wars of the day, and as in the Bolt matter, always assuring us that the freedom of a right wing demagogue is supposed to guard the freedom of us all.

If that's a free press practising freedom of the press, for the love of the absent lord, let's just keep the intertubes relatively free ... so that there are places where the political guards of the political inmates can be guarded ...

Crikey, long may they vex and beard the solemn priests who somehow think a daily gang tackle of the left liberal agenda indicates the lucky country enjoys a free press.

Free press? as John Elliott might ask. Pig's rectum, as he might answer ...

(Below: a nice sketch accompanying Heather Stewart's When you run a multinational like News Corp as a family fiefdom, expect to run into trouble, though we personally would have given it the header When you pretend a multinational family fiefdom like News Corp represents a free press, expect to run into trouble).

David Penberthy, Cardinal Pell, Phillip Jensen, and how to confuse race with religion ...

(Above: found at the 20 coolest atheist T-shirts for sale on the web, thanks to the UK Terror).

Over at The Punch today, in Deeply irritating columnist versus seriously flawed law, David Penberthy manages to expose the level of stupidity, and the level of hysteria, and the level of paranoia in News Limited in relation to the matter of Andrew Bolt:

I went on radio last year to decry a plan by a Newcastle health service to perform female circumcisions on the basis that some Islamic communities were performing backyard operations. I described the practice as barbaric and sub-human and said legitimising it was the worst form of moral relativism where we surrendered our own standards to practices which had no place in this country. Sounds a bit racist in retrospect.

Actually if the reference was to Islam, it wasn't even the slightest bit racist in retrospect or right at this moment. Islam isn't a race, and 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act doesn't refer to religion.

And so on and on, as he babbles on about Bob Carr talking of a problem of criminality within the Lebanese community. Lebanon isn't a race. And when he babbles about Jewish Australians suing the Greens for their boycott of Israel, he suggests they do so on the basis that such a boycott is anti-semitic.

Last time I checked Israel described itself as a parliamentary republic. It's hard to be racist about the policies of a republic. And so on and on, as acccording to Penberthy, it seems the Serbs and the Sudanese also fall under the blanket matter of race.

He might be referring to the wording of Section 18C of the act, which talks of national or ethnic origin, as well as race or colour (18C).

But if you're going to defend Bolt - as Penberthy does with many disclaimers and much hand-wringing and comparing him to notorious pornographer Larry Flynt - get the phrasing of the paranoid examples right.

And then there's the other paranoias:

It’s been written since, most notably in the Fairfax press where the festival of schadenfreude is entering its fourth day, that Bolt could have avoided sanction if he simply got his facts right.

Uh huh. Still the war with Fairfax, as if any of this has to do deep down with some tribal journalism thing, as opposed to people pointing out the emperor didn't wear any clothes, and as if cardigan wearers at the ABC like Jonathan Holmes didn't stand up for Bolt. (Bolt, Bromberg and a profoundly disturbing judgment).

The counterpoint to this is that if Bolt got his facts wrong, as the Judge said he did, there is an existing redress for the plaintiffs through the laws of defamation, where it is impossible for a fair or accurate comment to be made about an individual if it is based on a falsehood. Each of the nine plaintiffs could have sued him for defamation. Instead, they have pursued him under a law which puts the onus on the respondent to prove they have an exemption to an otherwise racist act.

But the provision relating to offensive behaviour because of race, colour or national or ethnic origin has been around since 1995, and Bolt presumably knew it - if he didn't he's even more derelict than simply getting his facts wrong - and he should have adjusted his copy and got things right. But the piece reads as if he wanted to be offensive and provocative for the sake of being offensive, and to hell with the law.

And it's not up to those offended to use defamation simply because it suits Andrew Bolt or others better. The plaintiffs weren't after money, they wanted a symbolic victory and they got one.

Sure, Bolt is deeply offensive, and he has the right to be deeply offensive, but the squealing coming from News Limited is tragic, as they treasure their source of hits and advertising revenue, while simultaneously trying to wash their hands of the vexatious, troublesome beast.

Such is life, and in the meantime, could someone please explain the difference to Penberthy between race, nation, colour and ethnicity.

Hey ho, on we go, knowing that Collingwood was beaten, Eddie "poker machines a footy tax" McGuire suffered mightily, and it was all for the good of the game.

So what news from the pews this week?

Well let's remember that in the good old days, sitting in a pew was rather like getting a seat in the dress circle, or a box, as a way of avoiding standing in the pit's rush-strewn, nutshell-layered floor, surrounded by penny-paying groundlings (Globe Theatre).

Yep, you could get a slightly easier path to god if you had the cash and the contacts:

In some churches, pews were installed at the expense of the congregants, and were their personal property; there was no general public seating in the church itself. In these churches, pew deeds recorded title to the pews, and were used to convey them. Pews were originally purchased from the church by their owners under this system, and the purchase price of the pews went to the costs of building the church. When the pews were privately owned, their owners sometimes enclosed them in lockable pew boxes, and the pews were frequently not of uniform construction. (Pew)

Ah the good old days of a capitalist path to heaven. Blessed are the rich pew owners, because they can pass through the eye of a camel, or a stitch in time needle, or some such thing.

But enough already with the pews, though they're more interesting than Cardinal Pell's week old letter from Jerusalem in the Sunday Terror.

About the only point of interest is that Pell has taken to quoting that Irish sociopath Ned Kelly for his closing line:

Such is life.

What next? Pell quoting from the Jerilderie letter?

Any man knows it is possible to swear a lie, and if a Policeman loses a conviction for the sake of swearing a lie, he has broke his oath. Therefore he is a perjuror either ways. A Policeman is a disgrace to his country, not alone to the mother that suckled him. In the first place he is a rogue in his heart, but too cowardly to follow it up without having the Force to disguise it. Next, he is a traitor to his country, ancestors and religion, as they were all Catholics before the Saxons and Cranmore yoke held sway. Since then they were persecuted, massacred, thrown into martyrdom and tortured beyond the ideas of the present generation.

Ah Ned, the suffering's still the same for the faithful:

On our return in the evening our descent was punctuated by loud explosions from fire crackers, which some Arab youths were letting off to disconcert or delight the pilgrims.

Damned Arab youths. Calling David Penberthy!

But enough of the suffering of the Irish and the vexations of Arab youths, it's off to the Sydney Anglicans, and by golly, Phillip Jensen is suffering too, as he explains in Black and White Evangelism:

He was wearing a black t-shirt with white writing on it proclaiming himself a member of the atheist club. His shirt and the message it bore were stark and confronting.

I was speaking at a lunchtime public meeting on a university campus when I saw him – or rather his shirt. There was no doubting the sincerity and earnestness with which he held his viewpoint. However, his shirt made it clear that he came not to listen, but to argue.

Dear sweet lord, a black T-shirt with an atheist message is stark and confronting? What on earth did it say?

Just guessing, but if it did, now that's outrageous. How to return fire?

Whether by accident or purpose, the Christians were advertising their meetings with similar black t-shirts and white writing. Our message was as confronting and stark as the atheists. But when it is your own message the volume with which you shout seems a lot quieter than those who shout at you.

Dear sweet absent lord, what on earth did they say?


Oh right, the promise of hellfire for all eternity, and as we know, eternity is way past the twelfth of never.

Well there are a couple of handy T-shirts for that line of argument:

But we digress, which is terribly easy to do when forced to chose between reading Phillip Jensen and googling up images of atheist T-shirts (go on, you can do it too).

Anyhoo, the long and the short of Jensen's anguished piece is that while you can be self-effacing, or build bridges, or be culturally sensitive or engage in public debate, and so on and so forth, the atheists have lowered the bar (remember, offering people an eternity of abuse in hellfire is just telling the truth about justifiable punishment for naughty behaviour):

While all manner of people have argued with great subtlety of mind and diplomacy of language for causes like atheism and feminism, it is the Richard Dawkins and Germaine Greer’s of this world, with their ‘take-no-captive’ approach, who have forced their issues onto the public agenda and brought about a shift in culture. Their opponents may not like them, and they may embarrass their friends but their crude advocacy has had an enormous impact.

Dammit, the shameless crude vulgarians.

This does not mean that Christian preachers should model themselves on these advocates, but the pragmatic argument of effectiveness in communication must take their success into account.

Indeed. So what's a preacher to do when confronted by these satanic fiends? Well you can forget the hypocrisy of self-effacement for starters, or trying to soften the message or engaging in debate.

... in the end the gospel is a proclaimed truth not an optional opinion for humans to sit in judgement upon.

Dr Lloyd Jones wrote against debating the gospel - for the gospel is not open to debate. It is not for people to sit in judgement of God, for we are under the judgement of God. Professor Lennox recently said in Sydney that he does not aim to win debates but to use them to give a credible explanation of the gospel.

Move along folks, nothing to debate here. It's all over, and you've been judged and found wanting, it's an eternity of hell for you, and that's all to be said about it.

As for that talk of a Credible Explanation of the gospel? Oh right, that needs a different T-shirt or two:

In the way of any rounded essayist or sermoniser, Jensen returns to his T-shirt theme in his concluding par, just to wrap things up:

Black and white t-shirts are loud advertisements – too loud for private conversation. But hiding them under our jumper risks the hypocrisy of people not willing to nail their colours to the mast.

Yep, it's time for preachers to get down and dirty, nail their black and white colours (oh okay maybe they aren't colours, but you catch the drift) to the wall, drag out their confronting T-shirts, and really hammer it to those wretched satanic atheists. Trouble is, the atheists seem to be doing a better line in punchy T-shirts:

Hmm. Maybe not. Let's keep it light:

Oh no, not the bloody dinosaurs. Let's just settle down with a nice drop:

Calling David Penberthy. This site has been racist about Christians. Well to balance it, let's make a note of Islamic justice systems:

Oh dear, that's a bit like that one Atheists don't fly aeroplanes into buildings. Calling Penberthy. This site has been racist about the Islamic religion ...

Christopher Pearson, and most people's expectations of what Aborigines should look like ...

(Above: time for a fresh invasion?)


In recent weeks, that indefatigable, always obliging and helpful member of the commentariat, Christopher Pearson, has been beavering away, doing what he can to sort out the federal Labor party.

Bring back Simon Crean, he thundered one week, to be followed by a clamorous demand for the return of Chairman Rudd the next, and above all the removal of that outrageous, ruinous hussy Julia Gillard, and an election if not be this week, then certainly by the next. A massacre at the polls would offer a chance for reflection and self-improvement, and perhaps a chance to govern sometime in the next century ...

But this week, in Repeal dusty sections of Racial Discrimination Act, Pearson has more important business, not sorry business or sit down business, but business business, which is to explain blackness to blacks, and anyone else who will listen.

It seems there are amazing advantages to being black in Australia, a fact seized upon by some about the time that aboriginality became "negotiable", when it's always been as clear cut as quadroon, octoroon and terceron:

It was a development that suited some people very well. For example, a poor, fair-skinned Tasmanian could claim a slight element of Aboriginal descent but, being unable to prove it beyond doubt, could affirm their identity, claim their extended family had a mixed-race connection they'd been encouraged to keep quiet about, and suddenly be eligible to apply for various grants and special entitlements.

Yes, if you ever head off to Tasmania, you'll find whites, thinly disguised as blacks, living as high as hogs off the various grants and special entitlements they managed to collar by claiming a mixed race connection.

Come to think of it, look around Australia anywhere you like, and the major advantage of being black will become apparent to you. In my old town of Tamworth, it immediately earned you the right to live in Coledale, a run down community with a derelict school on the edge of town ...

I google mapped it just to make sure it's still doing well ...

Yep, looking good. You see, there's no end to the lavish lifestyle for blacks in Australia, and truly on some dark days when seized with resentment, I've often thought of doing a blackface, getting out the boot polish, and going black because of all the various grants, special entitlements, lavish riches, endless suitors and community respect that I'd garner on the spot.

Or at least a job in the Black and White Minstrels. What's that you say, they've fallen out of favour? Is there no end to discrimination and prejudice?

Yep, look around. Note well the number of blacks in major board rooms, in the dominant political parties, leading the way in health and longevity of life, and you too would be itching for a slice of all those various grants and special entitlements.

Unless of course you turn into a lazy black, a ne'er do well who simply won't work for a living, a bludger, who pisses their various grants and special entitlements up against the wall.

So goes the politics of race envy.

Of course instead of reading Pearson, you might want to read a more informed view of matters of kinship and identity and legal definitions of Aboriginality, and you'll find it here at the ALRC.

There you might find hints that the Pearson argument about personal or financial gains by Tasmanians of a non-indigenous kind led to something of a ruckus:

These concerns led ATSIC to trial an Indigenous Electoral Roll for the purpose of the Tasmanian Regional Aboriginal Council Elections. Individuals could object to an applicant being included on the roll on the basis that he or she was not of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent. Where an objection was made, the applicant was required to provide documentary evidence addressing his or her Aboriginal ancestry, self-identification and community acceptance. To prove ancestry, the person generally was required to provide a verifiable family tree, or archival or historical documentation that linked the person to a traditional family or person. The Inquiry understands that several applicants sought genetic testing to produce evidence supporting their claims of Aboriginal descent.

Now you might wonder if the fuss and the ruckus was worth it, given that the alleged advantages of being a black in Australia amounts to three fifths of bugger all.

But Pearson's real target is the world from which he came:

In the early 1980s the politics of identity were played pretty relentlessly. Any of the usual indicators from what Marxists would describe as your class position to your sexual orientation, ethnic origins and faith or lack of it could be used in a combative way, with scant regard for individual complexity, to pin down who essentially you were.

Yes indeed the thousands of Marxists roaming the streets in Tamworth had scant regard for the individual complexity of family and cultural connections on view in Coledale. But let's zero in on that matter of sexuality:

Marxists of various kinds tended to think your class position determined and explained almost everything about you. For women's and gay liberation, it was at least as much about where you located yourself on the straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender spectrum. (If you had the misfortune to be both male and straight, it helped if you were noisily apologetic about it.)

But hang on a second. Pearson claims to be homosexual, though at times when it comes to Catholicism, he sometimes sounds noisily apologetic about it.

What would be the odds he'd take offence if someone claimed he'd been claiming a homosexual connection because it suddenly made him eligible to apply for various grants and special entitlements?

Sounds extraordinary? Sounds offensive?

Well in the day in Adelaide, you only had to stop a passer by in the streets and ask them about the gay mafia running Adelaide, and you'd be told that Don Dunstan was gay, and the gays ran the arts ministry, and several other ministries able to offer various grants and special entitlements and being gay wasn't so much an innate thing as a matter of choice and advantage, because gays were being showered with all kinds of advantages.

Yep it was a closet brother and sisterhood collective roughly equivalent to the Masons and the Catholics all rolled into one giant, vast conspiracy, giving each other a leg up over the hets.

Except of course when they had the stuffing beaten out of them, and then they were tossed into the Torrens river, and left there to drown.

But back to the rambling Pearson and his musings:

Just about any non-English racial connections tended to be seen as assets in those days. Aboriginal ancestry brought instant credibility, as did African and African-American origins. They were in a special category where religious affiliation was not merely able to be overlooked but was a positive advantage, especially if funky and tribal.

And at that point you suddenly realise - if you hadn't already - that whatever Pearson is drinking, you need some of it, and at once, and whatever planet he's living on, it surely isn't planet earth.

What on earth - since earlier he'd talked of a judge's gnomic utterances in the matter of descent - does his second sentence mean? They were in a special category where religious affiliation was not merely able to be overlooked but was a positive advantage, especially if funky and tribal?

For the life of me, I can't remember meeting a practitioner of voodoo (Haitian or Louisiana) while living in Adelaide, and for the life of me I can't remember encountering anyone connected to the sundry secretisms of other Afro-American religions, nor for that matter all the richly diverse kinds of witchcraft to be found in Africa. In fact in Adelaide in the eighties you had to look long and hard to find anyone of colour, in contrast to recent times where the relentless wasp tone has loosened its grip a little (and thank the absent lord for that).

Suddenly Pearson realises he might be sounding a tad weird, and slips in a disclaimer:

For younger readers, the last few paragraphs may seem fanciful -- the sort of thing that couldn't really happen in modern Australia. But every generation's ideological blinkers come to look a bit bizarre in time.

Indeed. In much the same way Pearson's ideological blinkers look as bit bizarre, right here, and right now. Because suddenly we're back with the Tasmanians, and those privileges and a sudden cachet:

In the 80s, when Aboriginality enjoyed a sudden cachet and some privileges, Tasmanian people with claims to one part in 64 of indigenous descent were making the most of them and adopting a rhetoric in which the other 63 parts were dismissed as being of no consequence.

Who knows? Maybe Pearson will be tempted to do an Eddie Murphy and trade places to enjoy all that tremendous cachet and all those wonderful privileges.

Here's how Pearson copes with that particular issue:

At the same time, many of their siblings exercised the conscious choice not to identify as Aboriginal. In some cases, it was a matter of having struggled so hard to keep up within the lumpenproletariat that they couldn't bear the idea of falling what many would regard as one rung further down the ladder. While most people who now identify as Aboriginal are inclined to say they've always done so, at least in urban settings racial identity tends to be less of a fait accompli than a liminal zone, where individuals have options.

Yes, you get options, and you get the chance to call yourself black in urban zones, because living at the block in Redfern is a sure fire way to enjoy all the rich advantages of a liminal zone (complementary harassment by police and bonus riots available on request).

But wait, it gets even richer:

There have been other cases, where people with South Sea Islander backgrounds or fathers or grandfathers who had been black American servicemen stationed here in World War II ended up identifying as Aborigines. Sometimes it was self-deceiving, sometimes an orphan's honest mistake. Often it was the easiest way to turn life at the margins to advantage. But, along with the other elements of negotiability, it has left a legacy of suspicion that attaches to people claiming Aboriginality who don't conform to most people's expectations about what Aborigines look like.

Yep, the man who has ranted about the subjective notions of Aboriginality, and its negotiability, rounds it all up by suggesting when considering matters of Aboriginality, it helps if you conform to what most people's expectations are when it comes to what Aborigines look like ...

And what might these expectations be?

Well I once worked with a blonde woman with fair skin who claimed Aboriginality because she came from a family with extensive Aboriginal connections. She was recognised and respected within the community, and was in a leadership position, and funnily enough, even though she'd married a fair-skinned man claiming Aboriginality, it was their children who conformed more to what most people's expectations about what Aborigines look like.

And in the end what does that say about her Aboriginality? Nothing, except perhaps the ability of some Australians to be profoundly offensive about it, just as they can be profoundly offensive about gays, or single mothers who cause riots in London ... or whatever other prejudice is doing the rounds this week in the commentariat.

So where are we heading? Well inevitably to the matter of Bolt:

Herald Sun journalist and blogger Andrew Bolt has just lost a famous case. Two of his articles conveyed offensive messages about the complainants, saying they were not genuinely Aboriginal but were pretending to be "so they could access benefits that are available to Aboriginal people". Unusually, the case wasn't a defamation suit but was fought over some contentious provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act.

Yep, Bolt conveyed offensive messages, but what's the difference to Pearson, who also suggests that people pretend to be aboriginal so they can access special benefits available to Aboriginal people?

Well Bolt named names and did so in a way that was snide and scurrilous and replete with factual errors ...

So what's Pearson's conclusion? A remonstration of Bolt for his errors? And his problematic googling ways?

No it's to demand - in the usual commentariat way - that the act's problematic provisions be repealed, if not overturned on appeal, and to quote Gary Johns berating the blacks:

... Australia is entering a world where Aboriginal people, especially those of light colour and claiming discrimination (or favours) based upon their race, become a laughing-stock. Is this what the activists wanted? Forget constitutional recognition, this decision has undercut goodwill."

Yep it isn't Bolt's fault, it's all the fault of those pesky blacks, especially the laughing stock of light coloured folk seeking favours or claiming discrimination, or getting agitated because Bolt insinuated sundry things about them.

And yet some people will assure you up hill and down dale that being black in the lucky country gives you special advantages ...

If you assume being examined, roasted, invaded, down-graded and abused on a daily basis is a special advantage with a special cachet.

(Below: now here's what an Aboriginal person should look like. Image courtesy of screen cap of an old ABC miniseries The Timeless Land, filmed back in 1980, a golden age for blacks in Australia, what with all the trendies and the hippies and the exotic tribal religions).