Caroline Overington, Peter Costello, Mark Scott, the ABC and onward Christian soldiers

(Above: Mark Scott standing in front of a Sydney Institute sign. Hmmm).

Reading Caroline Overington today - the chores of loon pond are tedious, vexatious and troublesome - reminded me of the current fearless leader of the ABC, Mark Scott.

In Slings and arrows keep raining, Overington spends a little time on Peter Costello's column griping about the ranks of the ABC being filled with socialists - except for one man in Perth - and then equal opportunity time abusing the Australian media for the hard time offered up to Australian politicians.

But one thing spiked a memory deep in the hard drive:

Costello went on to say there is only one known conservative at the ABC, a fellow who works in Perth but actually, there might be one other. During his time at Fairfax Media, it was generally accepted that Mark Scott - then a reporter, now the bloke who runs the ABC - was a hard-right conservative.

I once asked a colleague how this was known. He looked at me and said: “He goes to church.” The whole shirt and tie thing bothered people, too.

Well not just a church but a kinda clap happy church of the sort Peter Costello would surely love (and yes I know the church, no I'm not telling). Yep the hunt for conservatives and liberal leaners within the ABC is now game on with a vengeance.

Now I don't have a problem with Mark Scott. Compared to Jonathan Shier (the Wiki stub needs help), he's a model at avoiding controversy, managing the unruly beast, and tickling up the government for money. I don't think much of the drama department or its output during his regime, but I also don't believe in pushing managerial responsibility up the line when the malfunctioning drama department can take the blame (and little credit) on its own.

There's also a fundamental misunderstanding of the ABC's demographic at work in most discussions of the organisation. It has a large rural constituency, and its city audience consists of people who hate advertising, love BBC drama and comedies, or take an interest in current affairs. It serves up classical music, and caters to a younger music demographic with that cockroach of the airwaves triple j, and even Radio National carries a country hour along with its grab bag of poetics and dialectics (and, groan, Phillip Adams).

It's a broad church, united mainly in a lack of interest in its audience in commercial broadcasters. If you were to change the programming, especially in television, by inserting more blatant propaganda of a prejudiced kind, there'd be all kinds of protests or switch offs. As it is, the current affairs area on television is carefully quarantined - to a half hour after the news, to a much later combo of news and interviews, and to Sunday morning, with Four Corners and Media Watch taking up little more than an hour on Monday.

The rest of the time you can get very conservative, suitable for cardigan wearers and librarians, entertainment of a best of British, or tree hugger, sea changer kind (usually with Richard Roxburgh, designed to make middle aged women drool, though he represents a drool proof factor to me). Why they even make a comedy about librarians. Lordy, how racy is that. A socialist comedy about socialist book workers serving the community with government purchased books so unemployed dole bludgers and working class stiffs don't have to go buy stuff.

Not good. Because you see ideologues obsessed with ideology expect people to share their desire to sit through shows designed to support their world view.

You can assess the commercial appeal of this kind of notion by looking at how many overtly right wing and ideologically obsessed programs you can find on commercial television in Australia. Zip all. Unless you think Kyle Sandilands is a libertarian devoted to Ron Paul.

Radio is a better fit, because it allows for shock jockery and demagoguery, but even here you find specialist ranters have a very specific market appeal - for which the ABC and hits and memories stations provide shelter for listeners anxious to avoid the storm.

A few ABC shows have dressed in obligatory right wing types, which is fortunate because it means I've been able to cut Sunday morning television out of my viewing habits since the likes of Andrew Bolt and Piers Akerman started to turn up and berate anyone within ear shot, compounded by Nine's death wish to remove its last quality program - Sunday - from the tube.

All things considered, I'd venture to suggest that any hard right loon who took over control of the ABC would - if insisting on a fierce balancing of the books - see audience numbers drop.

But back to Mark Scott, who's been adept at steering the ship through the kind of blather regularly delivered by the likes of Peter Costello. If you go here, you can read up on his approach to faith, as provided by the Melbourne Anglican:

At the end of the day, “common garden variety Christian” is the title he bestows on himself, a boy raised in a Christian home who grew up in the Presbyterian Church, and is now a member of an independent church in his adulthood and married to the principal of a Sydney Anglican School.

Mark, a regular churchgoer, admits he dreads critical mention of the media in sermons. He accepts however that sermon illustrations do often make a valid point: “I would say that I think the media would much rather cover religion than they would faith,” he says.

Now start to throw in a few other details. Like this from the ABC's Sunday profile, here:

A book published last year, God Under Howard, quoted a Baptist pastor as saying Mr Scott was "yet another of God's secret agents trying to bring the life and light of Jesus into one of the most hostile parts of our society, the media".

Asked if that was fair, Mr Scott said some church people who thought they had a "pretty tough time" from journalists were excited to find a Christian in a senior media role. "I am who I am, but I don't view myself as a secret agent."

Then remember that Scott once worked for a state NSW Liberal Education minister, Terry Metherell, and even thought briefly about a political career with the Liberals, but never pursued it because the factionalism put him off:

...I worked for Terry in the Greiner opposition as it then was for about fifteen months before the election. The Liberals had been out of power for a long time in New South Wales. There was a young energetic leadership team under Nick Greiner so I got a taste of politics through there and then when they won the election I was in my mid twenties and I was an advisor to Terry Metherell and I remember there was this massive protest around parliament house, 80 000 to 100 000 people protesting, the police calling in and saying, "Please keep them out of line of line of sight of the window because we can't guarantee his safety." And there was this feeling of, "Well what have we done here. You know all these people are so angry." And for someone in their mid twenties to be operating in that environment was quite intense, you grow up pretty fast, I think you have to get to be politically savvy, you learn diplomatic skills, you learn to perform under pressure and it was a terrific experience for me. I never seriously pursued developing a political career for myself, I never did the numbers or...

JULIA BAIRD: But did you court the idea?

MARK SCOTT: Look I think there were, I think it could have been said that I had some skills that could have been valuable in a political career, I could give a good speech, I could talk pretty well, got on well with people and knew my way around some policy elements but there are other part of the political life that I didn't appreciate at all. I mean I was never a factional player and the prospect of wheeling and dealing and doing deals to win a seat, to get pre-selection for a seat - you know, it just wasn't me and I think at times, I look at the cost and the brawling around, pre-selections and factions and the like and in a personal sense I'm all the more glad that I never went down that road.

JULIA BAIRD: Would it have been for the Liberal party?

MARK SCOTT: Probably, I think I'd have been a staffer for the Liberal party but I'd even say to you that the Liberal party even in that area was a broader church in a sense than it is today.

There's plenty more you can find on Mark Scott on the full to overflowing intertubes - he did a number of 'get to know me' interviews when he got the gig - but let's cut to the chase. No matter how you try to present him, the current CEO of the ABC is no mad ravening socialist.

And if you applied the Tim Blair test - who did you associate with in your past, even if for a millisecond - then he probably comes up slightly Liberal, a lot Christian, and a worker in private enterprise from his days tilling the soil as editor in chief at Fairfax.

So as you'd expect, the comments on Overington's page continued to trot out the conspiracy theories as fomented by Costello.

Can I just suggest an alternative view? One that allows a little bit of room for rural folk, and classical music, and BBC programs, and doesn't get too antsy about the asterisk that represents the listening audience for Radio National (oh okay it breaks the blip but not by much).

The ABC is in fact deeply conservative, and shows like AM and PM are in fact the first port of call for many politicians and many commentariat columnists who want to find out what's happening. And since getting published in a fawning, worshipful way is an important part of a politician's career, they hate it when they get criticized. Or even asked intelligent questions. Which they can't answer. In an intelligent, coherent way. Like: "Are you retiring or running deep in a bid to become leader of the opposition Mr. Costello?"

It's not the job of the ABC to promote the world view of Peter Costello. It is indeed the only real home for political junkies in terms of coverage - unless like John Howard you preferred to cosy up to Alan Jones - but dare I suggest that, if anyone cared passionately enough, they could set up a rival network featuring the best of Australian conservative thinking.

And everybody in Australia, being so starved of such intelligent thought, would just up and pay for it, which would be a great relief because you wouldn't want a capitalist think tank funded from the public purse, now would you. The contradiction would be just too much to bear.

Unless you can stand the sight of the right wing commentariat stumping up for a bit of cash from Aunty while biting the hand that feeds them.

In the meantime, let's also agree that some ABC users think Peter Costello is a dickhead. In much the same way as John Howard did. And who could argue with that.

(Below: more First Dog on the Moon here).

Henry Ergas, Piers Akerman, sound principles, clear goals, carefully considered options, and never mind any evidence

It seems Henry Ergas hasn't caught up with Piers Akerman's demand that the national broadband network be put underground for reasons of aesthetics, urban harmony, a clear sky, and a sheltering away from the ravages of storms, floods, fire and perhaps even famine (not to mention the blight of ugly rotting wooden poles). (Powerful arguments for Rudd to go underground).

Ergas still thinks the whole thing is a waste of money, as outlined in Proof needed for policy.

Consider infrastructure policy, where more than $60 billion in taxpayers' funds has been committed in the space of 12 months. Yet staggeringly large decisions, such as the decision to build a national broadband network, have been made without any cost-benefit analysis at all. What is the objective the NBN intended to achieve? It is the objective of having an NBN. Why? As Kylie Mole said: "Cos."

Oh dear. I do wish he'd apply a cost benefit analysis to Akker Dakker's proposal to shift the NBN underground. But would that constitute evidence based policy making?

And wait, how would Akker Dakker cope, since Ergas is a long time hero, whom he's ever so fond of quoting?

Never mind. It seems as if Ergas has suddenly turned socialist:

As for indigenous Australians, welfare recipients and the mentally ill, they are among the weakest constituencies in the country. Could it be that we are willing to carefully analyse our policies for the weak but would rather buy silence, cut deals, trade favours with the strong? A policy of being strong with the weak and weak with the strong is a recipe for inefficiency and inequity.

Inequity? What on earth do the markets have to do with inequity?

Even more peculiar, in his rage against evidence-based policy, Ergas spends a lot of time critiquing the White Australia policy, and its use of evidence, data, statistics, and so forth and etcetera in support of it. Including of all things league tables:

As the 20th century dawned, Australia's elites were seized by the fear that a process of "racial suicide" was under way. The 1904 royal commission and subsequent reviews focused on three issues that needed careful assessment and a well-informed policy response: the risk of progressive degeneracy of the white urban child, as the "physically unfit and feeble-minded" (who, it was thought, would have died off in the harsher British climes) continued to breed; the capacity of the "white race" to adapt to the tropics; and the effects of miscegenation on the offspring's intelligence and ability to withstand heat and humidity.

From these came a mighty evidentiary effort, shaping our statistical system. As one distinguished historian has written, "measurement of the growth, development and intelligence quotient of schoolchildren became national obsessions", with league table comparisons featuring frequently in the press, often in lurid terms.

Is this a side-swipe at the current Liberal fetish for league tables? In cahoots with the socialists currently in power? Who knows.

Ergas also notes the attention paid in early federation days to moulding whites so that they could live in Queensland:

No less obsessive were efforts to monitor every aspect of the development of the white population, particularly in northern Australia.

The objective, in the words of the president of the Royal Society of Queensland, was to determine the conditions favourable to "the formation of a type of (white) human beings specially adapted to live in tropical Queensland. The type would be based on British blood and be so sustained and nourished, and be British in sentiment, but would be amended by the sun and the soil in appearance, physique, speech and temperament."

Hmm, clearly that policy, at least on an evidence based assessment, failed dismally, since Queenslanders living in the far north generally show signs of having been driven mad by the noon day sun, usually no later than the age of twenty five.

But it is fun to watch a conservative berate past conservative thinking - and it is important to remember that when Ergas sets about the elites of that time, he's actually talking about a muddle of rulers and popular racial thinking which ran through every level of society.

And continued right up to the time when John Howard called in 1988 for the slow down of Asian immigration, without any evidence based analysis apart from thinking that, if people in the community thought it was an immediate issue for social cohesion, then indeed it was an issue.

But then Ergas somehow thinks that fuzzy thinking is its own reward:

... history teaches us that you cannot keep a bad idea down. So I want to start by disposing of the myth that evidence-based policy is good policy. Nothing could be further from the truth. The value of public policy does not depend on whether it rests on evidence but on whether it seeks goals that are worth pursuing.

Well how's that for a subjective out clause? Let's ignore the evidence, if there is any, because long ago, lots of people had silly ideas about race (and lots of people still do), and let's just decide on goals that are worth pursuing.

Great, then I really don't care about the economic merits of the NBN, I just want a faster connection, and the sooner the better. Make it so. And Piers Akerman wants it put underground, so it won't contribute to urban blight. Make it so. And I'd like it with pretty bells and ribbons on, so make it so.

By golly, applied to the world at large, ignoring any evidence sounds pretty fine to me, provided that is I get to decide the goals that are worth pursuing. And if you don't like them, well you can always bugger off to where you came from.

But soft, let's not get agitated, let's get moral:

Ultimately, hypocrisy is the highest homage that virtue can be paid by vice. Statements of devotion to evidence are no substitute for policy based on sound principle, clear goals and careful consideration of options, and that is not merely open to independent scrutiny but genuinely invites it, especially for decisions where powerful interests are at stake. That is hardly the easy or always popular road; but as all the evidence shows, the alternative brings only ultimate failure, with much needless pain along the way.

Sound principle, clear goals and careful consideration of options? Well of course all this begs the question of whose principles, whose goals and whose options?

But by then Ergas is deep in confusion, because he constantly berates the government for making decisions without considering cost-benefit analysis. You know evidence based assessments with data and projections and costings and benefits analysis, preferably prepared by consultants at lavish expense.

So it would seem evidence based analysis might have a role to play after all:

Of course, analysis of evidence has not completely disappeared. The tax review is, by all reports, doing an excellent job. In social policy, too, there is increased interest in careful analysis of data and in experimentation.

Give that man a raw pretzel. Anyone who can deliver a speech bemoaning and berating evidence based policy, then note with gratitude that analysis of evidence hasn't completely disappeared has managed a remarkable intellectual leap.

Just as anyone who can insists it all depends on sound principle and clear goals, yet demand a careful consideration of options (presumably on the basis of evidence and cost benefit analysis) is as large as Walt Whitman in his ability to embrace contradiction.

Which is why I look forward to his assessment of the sound principles and clear goals underlying Piers Akerman calling for the NBN to go underground, while at the same time carefully considering the evidence Akerman offers up.

Ah the problematic NBN and the petrol head, or should that be geek head desire for speed at any price, performance at any cost. What a disaster, when slow and certain was always good enough for the tortoise (and you know what happened to the hare).

It's not just the White Australia policy that reverberates with the squawking of loons.

A bit like the Liberal party turning itself in to a bastion of conservatism when if you read the dictionary definition liberal, the party (and its adherents) might like to turn a hand these days to proposals for reform, being open to new ideas for progress, and being broad-minded and tolerant.

I look forward to this freedom from bigotry, authoritarian attitudes and dogmas being distributed at super fast speed over the new NBN ... if it ever amounts to more than a metro line on the road to Rozelle and nowhere ...

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

Walt Whitman

Kate
The internet is really really great
Trekkie Monster
For porn
Kate
Ive got a fast connection so I dont have to wait
Trekkie
For porn
Kate
Huh?
There's always some new site,
Trekkie
For porn!

Kate
I browse all day and night
Trekkie
For porn!
Kate
It's like I'm surfing at the speed of light
Trekkie
For porn!
Kate
Trekkie!

Trekkie
The internet is for porn
Kate
Trekkie!
Trekkie
The internet is for porn,
Kate
What are you doing!?
Trekkie
Why you think the net was born?
Porn porn porn

Oh yes high minded goals, but would Mr. Ergas approve as Avenue Q finally lands in Sydney?

Tim Blair, William Ayers, Ted and Robert Kennedy, Obama and how many degrees are you away from godless communist satanism?

(Above: for Adam, and if you want a more specious reason for including it, because here on loon pond we feel so together with the loons of the world, including and especially all those readers of Tim Blair).

Thinking on the futility of having a debate with loons recently, I came up with the following four immutable laws, and a corollary:

1. By refracting everything through ideology, no satisfying understanding of anything can be achieved.

2. Following 1, exaggeration, distortion, wilful omission and commission become essential tools for debate. Tenuous connections and outright lies are especially valuable.

3. Never give in, or concede an alternative viewpoint. As in extreme fighting, submission via a choke hold is the only meaningful end game (or check mate, or your opponent storming off in a fit of rage if you prefer chess as a metaphor).

4. Always go to the extreme. Thus if you are ridiculing someone's argument, if they say nothing much will happen, insist the end of the world is nigh. If they insist it's a disaster, accuse them of chicken little tactics.

The corollary? Irrationality and hate, emotional panic, fear, uncertainty doubt and loathing are important tonal qualities which will add to the quality and impact of any debate. But wait, debate is such a sissy mamby pamby word. Remember: argument, fight, verbal glassings and choke holds, shutting out any alternatives, are essential for submission.

We recently saw a classic example of this with Piers Akerman on the national broadband network: it's a disastrous uneconomic idea with the potential for a huge blow out. Followed by: build it underground for aesthetic and practical reasons, thereby ensuring it will become a disastrous uneconomic idea.

The beauty and poignancy of this kind of tactic ensures there's no actual point in debating with a loon. You just nod and smile and listen to the charming squawk with either wild eyed alarm or ecstasy.

And I'm indebted to Tim Blair yet again for today's reading, under the header Respect for the Dead.

It's only two lines, but it contains a wealth of meaning:

“Is now the time to remind everyone,” emails KP, “that Obama’s babysitters Ayers and Dohrm dedicated their communist manifesto to Robert Kennedy’s assassin, amongst others.

The first link takes you through to a blog, Gateway Pundit, which repeats the AP news that Obama is going to deliver the eulogy at Ted Kennedy's funeral, which then allows assorted loons to squawk about the news. Shock, horror and consternation. A vile socialist orator speaking about a vile dead socialist orator.

The second link takes you to a Zombie Times piece which establishes that William Ayers at one time proclaimed communism and was involved in the writing of a Weather Underground tract Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, which in turn - gasp - was dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy.

Sure the dedication sits in long rows, along with dozens of other names, including such luminaries as Micky Finn and Ja Ja Omar Kenyatta, and all the political prisoners in the United States (with only Harriet Tubman and John Brown scoring a big print tribute). When I read it, I felt a surge of relief - it seems someone else other than Ja Ja Binks got tagged with the name.

But worse still, Ayers remained a communist at the time he associated with Obama, which QED means Obama is a communist. Or at least a supporter of Sirhan Sirhan, who is Robert Kennedy's assassin.

Bob Ellis used to play this game, which is a variant on the six degrees of separation, often played with Kevin Bacon as a linchpin or a Baldwin, because they've been in so much crap, inevitably you can meet someone else involved in the crap, and thereby quickly establish a close degree of separation. The trouble is, if you play this game, what happens when you've actually met someone like Jon Voight, as I have? Suddenly the whole of Imdb falls into an intricate patten of connectivity right before your disbelieving B and C and Z grade movie loving eyes.

And of course Fred Schepisi made a movie with that title back in 1993 with a young Will Smith in one of the roles, and hey I can claim no degree of separation, because I've meet Fred Schepisi. But then I can also claim a very close degree of separation from the last three presidents of the United States, such is the laxity and the uselessness of the game these days when politicians press the flesh of thousands.

It gets more interesting if you play Bob Ellis's variant, which he used to dub sperm lines, which charted who had fucked whom, and how by following these sperm trails you might construct a vast oneiric chart of cosmic orgasmic human interconnectivity. Ellis of course liked to think that his brand of studmanship led him via these sperm trails to connect to anyone in a position of power and influence on the planet. Which shows the general uselessness of the game, unless of course you're an ego in search of a support structure.

Now the reality that Sirhan Sirhan was a Palestinian immigrant who was an Arab nationalist who was disappointed by Robert Kennedy's support for Israel in the 1967 six day war, and had nothing to do with the Weather Underground when he shot Kennedy doesn't matter in this context. Or that the Weather Underground were a bunch of quixotic loons of a left wing kind who also dedicated their tome to H. Rap Brown.

Now follow me closely here. Brown is black, and when he spoke of America as a place where violence was as natural as cherry pie, the next question is inevitably, how much difference is there between Obama's (former?) spiritual advisor the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and H. Rap Brown? None! QED Obama is a racist who hates whites. Glenn Beck tells me so.

So: the important thing is that Sirhan Sirhan leads to Ayers and Dorhm leads to Obama leads to a vast gigantic and tragic conspiracy of socialists which leads to the destruction of America, not to mention the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

You see how in just two lines you can conform to all the requirements of loon logic, and tinge the world so that you look at it through a fuzzy glass darkly? Best of all, you don't even have to get tangled up in other related conspiracy theories surrounding Robert Kennedy's assassination, such a rich stomping ground for American fruitloops, which gets the CIA involved, or a second gunman firing the fatal shot.

And of course Blair gets in his innuendo by restricting himself to the header, replete with such irony that it cries out for god to wreak vengeful justice. "Respect for the dead", it says, and you can almost imagine him standing, hand over heart, as he mourns the loss of Ted Kennedy, so shamed by the socialist Obama and his direct link to Robert Kennedy's assassin (because his baby sitter one time published a book with a part dedication to Sirhan Sirhan). He doesn't even have to use an ironic post modernist question mark to make his point. Because we loons will understand the loonacy of the world.

Well of course there's nothing you can say about such loonacy and nothing you can do about the squawking of the loons, so let's leave it at that. I won't even mention the notion that some of them are quite probably connected to Bob Ellis via sperm lines. The shock and the shame would be way too much for them.

And no, I'm not going to tell you about my sperm line connections, but I can assure you they're impeccable. They lead directly to the devil himself, which of course puts me to the left hand side of god, that wretched interfering Jesus Christ, and the shadowy, vaporous, rather timid and invisible holy ghost ... and oh, hadn't you heard? As well as being a communist socialist deviant, Obama is the anti-christ? So because of my Satanism I'm only a couple of degrees away from Obama. And I've been to Bali.

Well friend, I bring you good news about the world tomorrow. Oops, sorry, I suddenly started channeling Garner Ted Armstrong, and for the life of me I can't think why.

By the way, speaking of Obama, Slate has been running a poll as to whether he's a Nazi. You can access the strawpoll as well as get your daily Doonesbury fix by going here.

SPOILER ALERT: click on the link above first, if you haven't already voted. For those who have voted, click on the image below to see the cleverness of the strawpoll deviser, and the results from a few days ago. Now I know that in a democracy the secret ballot is everything but I have to confess that I voted for Obama being a Nazi, while noting that my peer group was Nazi, because as Jonah Goldberg keeps telling us, all liberals are fascists.

And not that I'm trying to influence you, whatever you do, don't vote for option c, or I'll send Tim Blair around to sort you out, you poncy poseur chardonnay sipping latte loving wimpy burger eating pussy footing moderate.

It's a funny old world, but where would humor be without a decent bunch of ratbag paranoid conspiracy theorists?

Peter Costello, Arthur Sinodinos, Phillip Adams and a gaggle of right wingers trying to be Phillip Adams

(Above: Peter Costello.

Below: a cheshire cat. Note the befuddled rulers clustered beneath the cat).

As surely as night follows day, so Arthur Sinodinos's column in The Australian Doors haven't yet closed on Costello was inevitably followed by this story in The Age with the header 'He had a good laugh': Costello not entering state politics, says Baillieu.

So in the morning Costello is standing by to become the premier of Victoria, and after he's rescued that state from Ted Baillieu and John Brumby, he'll be back lickety-split in federal politics to save Australia from Chairman Rudd.

And without pausing for breath, Costello has had a chance to dash off a column for Fairfax abusing the ABC's lefty tendencies, astonishing and upsetting poor old aging and harmless presenter Phillip Adams (Left to its devices, it's their ABC).

The indignant, deeply shocked Adams pertly reminds Mr. Costello that the demand for a right wing Phillip Adams came from Costello's boss John Howard, and resulted not just in Michael Duffy and Paul Comrie-Thomson's program, but in a show called The Continuing Crisis, a calamity of a show hosted by Imre Salusinsky and Tim Blair, wherein they showed radio skills that makes Adams seem like a golden tonsils of the microphone (yet such is the traditionalist hidebound conservatism of the ABC, it still has its own web page here).

If you want to listen to Adams, you can stream or download the show here, but beware, he's too old to be as innocent as he sounds.

Which perhaps might explain a little recent bitterness by Tim Blair when he refers to Michael Duffy as a friend often described as conservative ... who just happens to vote Green (Blair here, Duffy's green tendencies here).

Which in turn prompted me to look up the last rites of the show, and a tetchy report on Blair's co-host, as delivered in Gerard Henderson's Media Watch way back when (here):

Imre Salusinszky
And then there is the case of Blaming Ourselves co-editor Imre Salusinszky. From June to September 2001, he was given a gig (along with journalist Tim Blair) as host of a Friday evening program on ABC Radio National. You've heard about the old leftist motto: "Give peace a chance". Well the idea of the Salusinszky-Blair program was to give a so-called "right-wing Phillip Adams" a chance on the ABC. The program, The Continuing Crisis, was no worse than much – and better than some – of what passes for a comment on Radio National. In any event, the Salusinszky/Blair gig was soon terminated (the full story is told by Salusinszky in the July-August 2002 issue of Quadrant magazine).

So it cannot be said whether or not Imre S. would have succeeded as a "right wing Phillip Adams". But we do know that Mr Salusinszky was once, along with Phillip Adams himself, a financial member of the "Kerr's A Bastard" Club. Remember Sir John Kerr? The Governor-General who dismissed Gough Whitlam's Labor government in November 1975, no less.

Well, once upon a time, Imre Salunsinszky wrote to The Age (14 June 1976) defending himself against the Age editorial which claimed that he and others who had demonstrated against Sir John were "young hoodlums". Wrote Young Imre:

Now, there was some damage done to Sir John's Rolls-Royce. Though I did not do it, I do not dissociate myself from that, either. I do not feel overwhelming remorse at seeing some dents in a luxury Rolls-Royce containing the man who destroyed what history, despite the harpings of your newspaper, will see as the best Government in this nation's history. I do not think that Sir John should be riding around in that Rolls-Royce. After what he did last November, I don't think there should be any Governor-General riding around in a Rolls-Royce. In the light of this, I don't regard it as absolutely tragic that the car was dented.

And so on – until Imre Salusinszky's (somewhat pompous) designation of himself as "National Affairs Correspondent, Farrago newspaper, Melbourne University" Whereupon well known anti communist academic Frank Knopfelmacher wrote to The Age (18 June 1976) in a somewhat light-hearted view:

May I say that Mr Salusinszky's belief that the Whitlam Government was the best in Australia's history is shared by many people and organisations (e.g. the Iraqi and Soviet Governments and the PLO, and certainly Mr Whitlam himself though apparently not by the Chinese Government) and it is, therefore, by no means eccentrically unique.

What a metamorphosis. From a leftist Whitlamite, to a right-wing Phillip Adams, in a mere quarter of a century. It's the kind of transformation which could have been discussed, say, on a program like The Continuing Crisis.

But back to the Victorian crisis this morning:

Mr Baillieu rang Mr Costello this morning after John Howard’s former chief of staff, Arthur Sinodinos, urged the former federal treasurer to consider entering Victorian politics with the hope of becoming premier.

‘‘I can assure you that he made it very clear to me that that’s not going to happen.’’

Asked whether he believed Mr Costello would make a good premier, Mr Baillieu replied: ‘‘I think Peter Costello would have made a fantastic prime minister, but that opportunity has gone.

Sob, all our hopes so cruelly raised now so cruelly and cavalierly dashed. Who's the head of the Liberal opposition at the moment? Malcolm someone? Isn't he rich or something?

What about Peter Costello? Great, always around, can't get enough of him, always shoving it up the ABC and ruffling feathers in Victoria, and still getting everyone excited and speculating, as they keep reading his columns, and casting the runes and fishing through the entrails and consulting the Delphic oracle and wondering if just at the last moment, as he reaches the edge of the cliff, he might pull out a whip and Indiana Jones style use it to swing to a tree over the other side, and go on to be the first ruler in the coming World Government, snatching it away from Chairman Rudd.

Me, I just don't get the obsession with Cheshire cats. Is this the longest, slowest payback in Australian political history, as the grin keeps hovering in the trees, above the current players?

Here's how it should work:

And then? No! No 'and then'!

Piers Akerman, the NBN, and a plea to keep Australia beautiful and efficient, never mind the cost

(Above: and just think with the poles and the wiring of the NBN how ugly we'll look on Google).

Sometimes it takes a little while for the commentariat to get on the bandwagon, but hey once the horses start to roll, we surely do get a wagon train.

You might recall that it was only in April that Akker Dakker was jumping up and down about the cost of the National Broadband Network: $47 billion to be flushed down a broadband pipe dream.

Back then the angle of attack was to quote Henry Ergas saying we'd all be ruined:

Ergas says Rudd has provided no breakdown of the $43 billion project, no estimate of the risk of costs blowing out or evidence the project is actually achievable, let alone an analysis of the potential barriers and risks involved. Taxpayers, he says, are being asked to sign a blank cheque.

Yep, it was a disaster, borrowing cash on a never never plan to seek the impossible dream.

Now Akker Dakker wants Chairman Rudd to blow a few more billion putting all the cabling underground - Powerful arguments for Rudd to go underground. Not, I want you to understand, because anything like global warming has been making the end of winter unseasonably warm or gales have started blowing. No, nothing's unusual:

News broadcasts yesterday headlined reports of power outages across Victoria which left thousands of homes without electricity.

On Monday and Tuesday, it was Sydney’s turn to succumb to winds generated from a strong cold front which cut power to nearly 10,000 homes as electricity lines came down.

The weather was by no means unusual, nor was the loss of power. It’s the price we pay for having power lines strung from poles across the metropolitan area. They will come down whenever the wind blows.

So it doesn’t make much sense for the Rudd Labor Government to string its much-vaunted hi-tech glass fibre national broadband networks (NBN) lines on the same rotting wooden poles.

Surely the whole 21st century concept of providing a “nation-building infrastructure needed for tomorrow”, to use Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s own overblown description of the scheme, demands something more substantial than transmission towers built to meet the demands of the 19th century?

Yes, the news that parts of Australia have enjoyed their warmest winter ever is surely unexceptional news (here).

Moving on, it seems that at last Akker Dakker has caught up with Nick Minchin's July FUD column Look, up in the sky! There's an ugly downside to Labor's broadband project.

But really Akker's logic is so desperate it's hard to resist a quiet chortle. Because in the time we've been in our house, we've had Foxtel (hiss) and Optus (back when there was Optus) and broadband and phones and power all delivered through overhead wires, and we still have the quaint sight of two sets of cables competing to deliver pay, telephony and broadband services.

Ugly? Sure, and even uglier if a third cable gets installed to deliver the NBN, if neither Optus nor Telstra can be persuaded to play the game.

But it really is cheeky of Akker Dakker to call the NBN a delusionary dream, then demand it go underground on the basis of a strong wind or two. So that he and the Liberals can then maintain their rage about the rampant blowout to the already excessive cost. And the debt! Never forget the intergenerational debt!

And what about the imagery?

NSW has suffered enough from patch-work solutions to pressing problems (look at the Cahill Expressway) and the repeatedly-announced plans to fix the public transport system. It seems that the Federal Labor Government is now determined to impose a second-rate Third World solution to this latest challenge.

Anyone who has seen the webs of wires hanging from poles in Asian and South and Central American slums will be familiar with the answer the Rudd Government has in mind for its broadband rollout.

Cheap and nasty comes to mind but ugly, inefficient and ultimately more costly is closer to the mark.

Slums?

So where's the campaign to get all the power poles and their overhead wires underground?

Because while they litter the urban landscape I'm afraid it's going to remind us of the web of wires familiar from urban slums around the world. Well at least the urban slums that can actually afford an electrical connection to run their double door fridges and 50" plasma screens.

Well Akker Dakker is right there at the cutting edge. Put everything underground, hang the cost, everyone is in favor of it, and instead of crashing into power poles, motorists can instead crash into trees or front fences or other more helpful barriers:

In a number of submissions to the Federal Government’s Senate Select Committee, a variety of groups have pointed out the foolishness of the low-cost overhead roll-out.

Some refer to the findings of a $1.5 million study conducted for the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts by Optus and Telstra in 1998 titled Putting Cables Underground which concluded (presciently) that undergrounding electricity lines would decrease transmission losses and reduce so-called greenhouse gas emissions.

Other timely conclusions included the reduction of bushfire risk, reduced electricity outages and a reduction in the number of electrocutions, reduced network maintenance costs, reduced numbers of vehicle collisions with poles, reduced costs of tree pruning and a beneficial impact on property values.

Placing all cables underground makes sense. Up to 10 per cent of all road deaths currently involve a roadside pole.

Won't someone think of the motorists? And what's this about cutting greenhouse gas emissions for the non-existent problem of global warming.

But hey, hang the expense, let's spend like there's tomorrow. Rack up the debt. What's a few more billion amongst chums?

And of course there's the bushfire threat:

If we are to believe the Government, there is a crying need to go into hock to pay for the NBN because it will essentially replace all other forms of communication.

To place such a network at risk by stringing it between poles rather than undergrounding negates the thinking behind building a modern web.

In every bushfire around Sydney in the past 30 years, wooden power and telephone poles have been burnt down, cutting communications in a crisis.

In some areas, those wooden poles have now been replaced with concrete replicas but the threat to the wires is the same.

In the 1994 bushfires there were power and communications failures to the south, west and north of the city. In the 2003 ACT fires suburbs of Canberra lost communication and power lines.

The severe storms that sweep NSW are just as likely to smash the communication and power distribution networks - as Blacktown residents learnt to their cost in February last year, when thousands were left without power or communications for weeks.

Yep, suddenly we've gone from dreaming the impossible, silly dream, to not spending enough money to get the vision thing right, saving motorists, keeping the vital lines of communication open and avoiding a South American slum look in an urban setting.

So what I want to know is how did Akker Dakker reach this change of heart, and come to the vision thing? Where instead of cheap and nasty, he now wants expensive and good looking in a Steve Jobs kinda way. Where instead of ugly and inefficient, he wants beautiful and efficient and a big increase in the initial cost outlay.

Is it just simple ignorance?

Commonsense should apply. Even an amateur DIY handyman would understand the difference between repairing a broken copper wire connection with a simple twist and the technical difficulties involved in joining a brittle glass fibre.

Commonsense would actually tell anyone that the real problem is that Telstra controls the bulk of underground networks, and that they have been the fly in the ointment as a result of the botched privatization by the Howard government.

Common sense would also tell you that the day power lines go underground all around Australia (as opposed to fancy new developments and in boutique council areas) is the day we've sold off Western Australia to the Chinese for a heap of moola.

In the meantime, what I'd like Minchin and other Liberals to confirm is that they're right behind the extra billions needed to stick the NBN underground, and that indeedy they're right behind the whole NBN vision thing, while hating Stephen Conroy's attempt to use it to introduce censorship to Australia at a network level that'll be as bad as the current Chinese government system.

And that they'll never make a fuss about the cost blow out their own desire to beautify Australia will necessarily involve. Cross their hearts and hope to die, as the underground option suddenly turns into a Nathan Rees type plan to run the metro to Rozelle.

Expect to hear that soon? You've got to be dreaming.

Oh and one more thing. Who's going to put up some token wires so the bullies who steal the shoes off nerdy kids will have somewhere to throw them as trophies? Won't anyone ever think of the children ...

(Below: a Mumbai slum. Notice the hideous abundance of power poles and ugly wiring).

Miranda Devine, Brendan Nelson, the seat of Bradfield and the hounds of hell after Nathan Rees

The other day I was wondering why Liberals never target media types as candidates, or for that matter why members of the conservative commentariat never put up their hands for the gig (while carrying on about the ABC's 7.30 Report offering up Labor party candidates).

Within the barest whiff of time passing, Miranda the Devine has provided the answer in Dare not sip this poisoned chalice.

The truth is of course that sitting on the sidelines shouting at everyone about how they've mucked things up is much more fun than trying and mucking things up.

It's the ultimate in paid social irresponsibility. All care and no responsibility, except to keep things stirring in the pot and ensuring attention is paid to the journal offering up column writing as employment. Thus controversy and extremism is its own reward.

So when the phone call came asking the Devine if she lived in the federal seat of Bradfield, the answer came 'no, no'. As the Devine points out, being a politician is not so easy:

There are few worse fates than being a politician. Having to be nice to people all the time. Having to endure the single-issue obsessives who turn up to every electorate event. Spending evenings attending branch meetings and community functions, making small talk with bores. Unable to freely speak your mind, having always to compromise, to bow to party discipline, and withstand the white-anting of Machiavellian colleagues. And all the while being humiliated and scrutinised by journalists.

As one jaded state Labor politician said yesterday: "I discourage as many young people as possible from going into politics. And if they do, I tell them 'make sure you have a career you can come back to'. Most political careers end in tears."

Who'd want it?

If you flip this, it'd be the perfect job description for membership in the commentariat. Never having to be nice to people. Never having to endure single issue obsessives. Never having to indulge in small talk with bores - you can always ignore the feedback in the comments section. Always freely able to speak your mind, in as mindless a way as you like, never having to compromise (unless your editor deems you've gone too far or strayed into litigious waters), never having to worry about discipline (unless that's your sexual preference), and always willing to white ant anyone about whom you form a disapproving opinion. And best of all of course endless opportunities to humiliate and scrutinize politicians.

The Devine then tries to get out of jail by praising politicians who do it for the noblest of reasons, and spends a few words extolling the virtues of Brendan Nelson, but what's the bet that she'll be back to bashing the bandicoots in short order time.

Then it's a few kind words about the main contenders for pre-selection, Tom Switzer and Sophe York, with the judgment that each is "successful, normal and fun, with a fine mind, good judgment, loving family and clear moral compass."

Normal? What on earth does that mean? Does that mean commentariat columnists are part of the great unwashed known as the 'abnorms'?

Quick, back to the bandicoot bashing before we forget what it's all about. So the Devine finds time at the end of the column to include a few short paragraphs looking at the state of disrepair of the NSW Labor government, as if the Devine had or has any interest in the repair of that government.

Instead she promotes the virtues of Frank Sartor. Presumably he's normal:

The former Sydney lord mayor, Frank Sartor, now languishing on the backbench, is the only viable option, with the ideas, experience and ability to get the state running. He wants the job, yet has not the support of the hacks who saddled NSW with the dud Premier, Rees.

Whether Sartor would win the next election is another question but he would at least give Labor dignity in defeat - and given enough time he might even impress voters. But he has all but given up his ambitions. Like Nelson, he has other options.

Good, I'm glad Mr. Sartor has other options, because if the Devine is selling Sartor, then there's surely something not normal about the deal.

Meantime, you can see the pleasure to be had in being part of the conservative commentariat, as opposed to actual involvement in doing things (perhaps it's just a high class form of brothel work, unlike bloggers who do it for free).

Arthur Sinodinos was once touted as an early likely contender for the Bradfield gig, but the ashes have barely grown cold on his press release denying any interest when he's got a column running in The Australian under the header Doors haven't yet closed on Costello.

In which he proposes that the smirking one known as Peter Costello turn into Gwneth Paltrow and become the next premier of Victoria. With a triumphant return to federal politics in due course when presumably he will then become the next PM of Australia.

Enough already. Let the caravan move on.

Well I guess that leaves Ted Baillieu just enough time to do a Nathan Rees. Surely the time has come for any further speculation on Peter Costello's future to be punishable by death, or at least ten years in jail, or failing that, losing the right to post a column on any subject for a month. If it's good enough for footballers to sit out a few games, how much more appropriate a sentence for those beguiled by the clap happy smirking one wanting to Nostradamus his new career. When he has an old one, bagging the ABC.

And speaking of Nathan Rees, the SMH has been doing a fine job of bagging him and his metro folly, conveniently grouped under its transport header here.

Which is perhaps part of a circulation war with the Daily Terror, who now bag Nathan Rees on such a regular basis, his only feeling of relief must be that he's not Ricky Ponting.

Perhaps the most incisive tearing apart of the Rees vision has been offered up by Mark Coultan in Electorate waits to punish NSW Labor's incompetence.

Not a word out of place, as he dissects the pachyderms galumphing around in Rees' mind.

Frank Sartor is lucky he only has the Devine's support, because if he makes it to the top job, what a feasting of crows there'd be on his carcass.

Yep better to stick to commentariat commentating rather than risk the righteous ire of the media and the public, especially when they're as incisive as Coultan.

Meantime, I'm thinking the time is right for me to suggest that Mark Latham is wasted writing bilious columns behind the paywall of the AFR. Surely it's time for him to step into the breech and run NSW?

I keed, I keed, but ain't it fun, all care and no responsibility for us 'abnorms', while the 'norms' go about the business of politics.

(Below: you can catch more Tom Tomorrow at Salon, here).

Ah the good old days. Remember Senator Alston? His mission taken up by Peter Costello. Everything changes so you can stay the same. You can catch more Nicholson here, where you can find memorabilia and help him alleviate his dependency on The Australian.

Lucy Kippist, George Orwell, Animal Farm, and a good reason not to read the column about a book that hasn't been read

(Above: cover to the first edition of Animal Farm).

Over at The Punch, Australia's most torpid, cheap assed, tepid conversation, Lucy Kippist delivers us Five reasons to read the book before watching the movie.

Her opener?

Today is the 64th anniversary of the mass publication in America of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a book considered one of the most influential of all time.

What a pity I’ve actually never read it.

And this is despite the fact that I’ve owned a copy since I was 17, when everyone else I knew read it. Or did they?

Dear lord, I wonder if this is the same Lucy who elsewhere tipped us off that Chairman Rupert has offered that no contributors be paid for their contributions to this wretched site (here). No matter if it isn't, because clearly what you pay is what you get. Or you get what you pay for.

Tip to Lucy. Animal Farm in its UK paperback edition runs only 112 pages, and even then it can hardly be said to be condensed or thick, seeing as how it's a parable running along the same lines as one of Aesop's fables. It's a simple, but great read, infinitely clever, vicious and funny.

Why on earth should anyone read the rest of your column and pay any attention to it, especially as you explain that reading the book before watching the movie is the way to go.

Because reading the book before writing a column is infinitely more preferable, and if you're going to write a column about the joys and virtues of reading a book, for the love of the lord, read the book first.

Even better in case you lost your unread childhood copy, you can get a copy of the text at Project Gutenberg for free here (and at sundry other places on the intertubes), even if these versions lack the nice pictures, and even if in some territories copyright is still asserted.

After a quick read, you might actually have some reasons to explain why the animated feature film version by Joy Batchelor and John Halas doesn't measure up to Orwell's novel, and therefore why reading the novel first is a good idea.

Sure it would have been a slam dunk - the animation isn't one of the finer moments in the British film industry - but it's way better than proclaiming ignorance as a virtue.

By the way, as sundry film versions have fallen into the public domain, you can find one version here at Google videos, and the Batcehlor and Halas version here on YouTube - takes time to load - but don't blame me if the links fail at some point when someone discovers the evil intertubes once again has failed to respect Senator Conroy's love of IP rights.

Now I don't blame Kippist for this outing - I'm sure she's a very nice person, and just doing what she can to fill up the gaps on the site - but you do have to wonder about those in charge of The Punch.

Is anyone home, and sub-editing, and advising the younger contributors on the finer points of not setting themselves up for a fall, so that they won't get comments like this:

You can read it easily in a day.

No valid excuses.

What a half baked exercise The Punch is, growing more imponderable by the day. Copy for nothing, and your illustrative Animal Farm trailer from YouTube for free. Another medal for Chairman Rupert please.

Bonnie Tyler, Andrew Bolt, the meaning of life, the song to sing at the end of the world and a graph that pulls it all together

I swore I'd never turn into a blog that strayed from loon pond - where all the deep philosophical, theological and political issues are discussed with loony profoundness by commentariat columnists - but this so tickled my fancy, I had to keep the chain letter going. You might need to click on the image to savor its full loonacy (which will also give you the link to the original site - oh okay, here).

Oh Bonnie Tyler five minutes and a half minutes of magic reduced to one graph! I think I'll have another drink of chardonnay and go out and howl at the moon. Turn around bright eyes, love in the dark is better than no love at all.

Why I'll bet that your song is the one we all share with Andrew Bolt, as he explains the meaning of life and the lessons he's learnt, apart from the therapeutic pleasure of destroying your enemies with verbal thunderbolts, denigrating them, sideswiping them, eviscerating them, castrating them, incarcerating them, demolishing them, obliterating them, and then dancing on their graves. In the light of a full moon.

Oh Bonnie,the hair, I had hair like that once, but it was never back lit in quite the same way. The female Meatloaf, who could ask for more from a Welsh lass.

Oh and the lyrics for the song? Here they are. Sing along:

Turn around
Every now and then I get a little bit lonely
and you're never coming round
Turn around
Every now and then I get a little bit tired of listening to the sound
of my tears
Turn around
Every now and then I get a little bit nervous that the best of all the
years've gone by
Turn around
Every now and then I get a little bit terrified and then
I see the look in your eyes
Turn around, bright eyes
Every now and then I fall apart
Turn around, bright eyes
Every now and then I fall apart

Turn around
Every now and then I get a little bit restless and I dream
of something wild
Turn around
Every now and then I get a little bit helpless and I'm lying
like a child in your arms
Turn around
Every now and then I get a little bit angry and I know I've got
to get out and cry
Turn around
Every now and then I get a little bit terrified but then I see the
look in your eyes
Turn around, bright eyes
Every now and then I fall apart
Turn around, bright eyes
Every now and then I fall apart

And I need you now tonight
And I need you more than ever
And if you'll only hold me tight
We'll be holding on forever
And we'll only be making it right
'Cause we'll never be wrong
Together we can take it to the end of the line
Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time
I don't know what to do
I'm always in the dark
We're living in a powder keg
And giving off sparks
I really need you tonight
Forever's gonna start tonight
Forever's gonna start tonight

Once upon a time I was falling in love
But now I'm only falling apart
There's nothing I can do
A total eclipse of the heart

Once upon a time there was light in my life
But now there's only love in the dark
Nothing I can say
A total eclipse of the heart

turn around, bright eyes
turn around, bright eyes

turn around
every now and then I know you'll never
be the boy you always wanted to be
turn around
every now and then I know you'll always be
the only boy who wanted me the way that I am
turn around
every now and then I know there's no one in the
universe as magical and wonderous as you
turn around
every now and then I know there's nothing any better
theres nothing that I just wouldn't do

turn around bright eyes
every now and then I fall apart
turn around bright eyes
every now and then I fall apart

And I need you now tonight
And I need you more than ever
And if you'll only hold me tight
We'll be holding on forever
And we'll only be making it right
'Cause we'll never be wrong
Together we can take it to the end of the line
Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time
I don't know what to do
I'm always in the dark
We're living in a powder keg
And giving off sparks
I really need you tonight
Forever's gonna start tonight
Forever's gonna start tonight

Once upon a time I was falling in love
But now I'm only falling apart
Nothing I can do
A total eclipse of the heart

Once upon a time there was light in my life
Now there's only love in the dark
Nothing I can say
A total eclipse of the heart
A total eclipse of the heart
A total eclipse of the heart

Oh Jim Steinman, we owe you so much. Can you remember 1983? I can, and the clip was directed by dinkum Aussie Russell Mulcahy, who gave the world Razorback. Why the song even has its own wiki here. What happened? Where did the eighties go? Sound of being hit by fast moving truck, exeunt stage right, arm in arm with Andrew Bolt.

Oops, it's been drawn to my attention that the clip features school boys doing very strange things with Bonnie. Naughty school boys. Sweet innocent Bonnie. And the hair! Not to mention the eye liner!

Settle down Clive Hamilton and the 'sexualization of children' crowd, it was the eighties. These days, forget the heart, what people want is a total eclipse of the loon. Well they can't have it. And remember together we can make it to the end of the line by giving off sparks.

Janet Albrechtsen, Chris Roberts, Cochlear, demon unions and the wishing and hoping for time bombs

(Above: yes it all went wrong in 1834 with the arrival of the Tolpuddle martyrs in Australia as convicts, and the tripe talked about the right of general association, and it's never been any good since then. Such a bright start to the age of enlightenment in 1750 but it only lasted 84 years. Just look at the ruffians).

The most distinctive feature of the apocalyptic loon is the clarion call that foresees the demise of civilization as we know it.

It's in the nature of the world that sometimes the apocalyptic loon gets it right, though rarely for the right reasons. Faced with impending disaster, the world usually marches on, straight down the gurgler.

It wasn't within the imagination of the French nobility to imagine the French revolution, so abrupt, sudden and hideous was the transformation of their world, while the average Edwardian, contemplating a bucolic life, had no idea of the transforming effect of the carnage of World War 1 - even though the world had been busy for decades preparing the means for that carnage.

In a similar way, very few understood that World War 11 would match the first world war for brutality and carnage, with much improved killing technology, much better military strategies and an encompassing attitude to the destruction of civilians as collateral damage. Well progress is progress.

So okay the apocalypse will always catch up with us, and someday soon most likely. But what is it about people who yearn for the apocalypse, and preferably by tomorrow? This isn't a party political thing, because lefties and greenies expect - by way of punishment - that gaia will strike back and punish us all, and pretty soon at that, so we must be good and eat our broccoli, or else.

But it's also a way of looking at the world that infests right wingers and fundamentalists. It's almost as - if because of ideology or theology - the world should be punished and the rapture kick in and the sooner the better. Because if the world's failed to conform to the appropriate ideology or theology, and so being judged impure, it should be doomed.

Worse still, if a moderate keeps the world ticking over, then it's not a world the immoderate would want to inhabit.

I say all this as a preamble to Janet Albrechtsen's latest missive Rhetoric fails to tell the whole story, which positively yearns for failure. Of business, of Australian economy, of anything you've got, at least if you come from the wrong side of the political tracks. So she starts like this:

Ironically, the Rudd government’s Fair Work laws may have the same effect, though in a much quieter, slower way. While Work Choices was a short fuse - once lit, it didn’t take long to explode - Fair Work looks like being a long, slow burn. But in time, as its effects slowly grow more obvious and more drastic, perhaps it will deliver just as big a bang.

Increasingly, Fair Work appears to represent a dramatic overreach. And though the business community has been slow to react and even slower to pick fights with a government known to be vindictive, it seems the full horror of the new regime is starting to dawn on it. Even worse, workers will end up bearing the brunt of Labor’s IR hubris.

Oh where are you now my blue eyed son, what did you see my darling young one, because a hard, hard, hard rain is gonna fall.

So somehow Albrechtsen manages to get from the restaurant game - for which Julia Gillard introduced exemptions specific to the business - to Cochlear, which is indignant that it might have to sit down with the unions because 57% of their workers expressed a desire to bargain collectively.

Well that's sent the CEO of Cochlear, Chris Roberts, into a fair old lather:

As Roberts says: “The behaviour of the unions to fight against initiatives that drove up our productivity and delivered financial rewards to our people made no sense.” The problem, he says, is that unions “need a conflict to be relevant”. The other problem is that 43 per cent of workers have expressed a view that they do not want the unions representing them, “so what you end up with is a divided workforce”.

Roberts is most scathing about the government’s empty productivity rhetoric. There is, he says, “no immutable law that links collective bargaining with productivity” and he was amazed at the paucity of data to support the government’s proposition. “The fundamental basis of this IR legislation is false. We moved into the age of enlightenment 259 years ago - if you consider 1750 as the dawn of the age of reasoning and logic - and we shouldn’t walk away from evidence.”

Well I hope his labor relations skills are better than his sense of history. You might date the age of enlightenment from the American Declaration of Independence, the United States Bill of Rights, or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, but none of these will give you the date of 1750 (not to mention a certain anxiety about excluding the Greeks, the Romans, Shakespeare and the Renaissance).

Worse still, of course, the eighteenth century saw the drive towards unions, and even Adam Smith had a thing to say about all that:

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combination of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate.

When workers combine, masters ... never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combination of servants, laborers, and journeymen.

If Cochlear had taken care of its workers, while boasting about its massive growth and its increasing profits, and its hubris at being at the forefront of technology in Australia, maybe it wouldn't have scored a vote of 57% when its workers sat down to consider the current state of play.

Well Roberts says Cochlear is paying well above award, but as a result demanding leaner, more flexible operations to enhance productivity. Golly, will this enhance productivity mean that one day there'll come a time one human and a dozen robots can do the entire workload?

One thing's for sure - if Roberts thinks conducting labor relationships through the press, and in particular through the apocalyptic world view of Janet Albrechsten, apocalypse might just be what he gets.

It's just a union, not the anti-Christ. But soft, hush now, because Satan approaches and the bomb is lit, and soon it will explode:

On the evidence to date, Fair Work is not the softly, safely set of IR reforms promised by then economic conservative Kevin Rudd when he was seeking office. In fact, Gillard’s reforms have restored an adversarial culture she has the temerity to claim is holding back productivity. With the country’s most militant unions already on the warpath, it is only early days for this potentially long-fuse time bomb.

Oh yes, bring it on. Collapse and doom and gloom and failure and companies fleeing offshore. Sweep the socialists from office, and bring in ... Malcolm Turnbull, hard core republican and patrician?

Hold on, wait a second, after pocketing government money, haven't the likes of Pacific Brands have already gone offshore, taking their Bonds and King Gee with them? Well I can see Malcolm taking a firm John Howard approach - how much do you want? Got wheat to sell? What's the cost of the trucking?

So if it's all doom and gloom, let Cochlear rush off to China to hire a decent factory to do the job at rice wages.

Because I for one will at last be able to afford a cheap rip of their technology, which will last at least one year (or until warranty expires), and match by very favorite Swiss watch, obtained for US twenty bucks on the streets of Chinatown in New York. That's ten thousand bucks to you and Malcolm Turnbull, but hey it's lasted me a year, well above the zero day warranty it came with.

Meanwhile, the destructive workers and their ill-mannered union can contemplate life on the streets, or working for Chinese factory wages.

Yes let's show everybody every which way to head towards destruction instead of sane, moderate negotiation. Ideology is everything, and if you don't believe that, you're being bloody ideological.

Would Albrechtsen be satisfied by anything less than the abolition of all unions? The abolition of people who disagree with her? The abolition of a world that doesn't work the precise way she thinks it should?

Well I'm sure getting rid of the unions would surely be a satisfying apocalypse for her, but I'm not so sure Australia would travel along with her, not when they flinched from John Howard's work choices.

Not even if it meant going back to the age of enlightenment, whenever that might have started, and discovering that the right to collective bargaining had something going for it ... at least if it meant negotiating a contract with a huge impersonal employer determined to screw you into the ground, and would because they could.

But by golly Albrechtsen did her job well, with the comments page frothing and foaming, waxing and waning, just like her column. It's a living (and no unions involved please!) Me, I went a little mad, getting worried about when the age of enlightenment actually started, and when the ticking bomb might go off. 24 crossed with Broken Arrow.

Fun, but the meaning of life? Take it away Bobby Zimmerman:

Oh, what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',
But I'll know my song well before I start singin',
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

(Below: I'm told that in 1750 in England it was the highest point of the rococo style, and there was a striking decrease in the size of the hoops, but never fear the hoop would return. You can never ban a good thing. And so began the age of enlightenment. By golly I think I'm ready to write the latest update of 1066 and all that).