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The long, plodding March of Patriots
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There are people on the Oceanic Viking who will disagree with me, but few have fared worse from the recent refugee crisis than Paul Kelly (the journalist that is — the footballer and singer appear to have emerged unscathed). As the boats hove into view, Kelly floated his own standard assessment — on the one hand this, on the other that, hard heads, soft hearts, cautious governance, damn the Left and Right, but damn the Left more. It should have worked. Instead it all went kablooey. A couple of weeks into the crisis, both sides were plunging around, trying to find an angle. But the running was not with any easy division of hard and soft. For 48 hours, it was the Liberal party baiting Labor on its alleged cruelty, while both parties got down to a tussle on who had put more children behind razor wire. Then part of the Libs swing into a mode of Muslim-baiting, which was struck down by the central part of the party. Then the AWU pushed from the Left, reminding the government of what Labor was supposed to stand for. And on it went. Despite the chastening effect of Labor’s sudden drop in Newspoll — whose significance is yet to be fully determined — the issue simply wasn’t following the script. Kelly’s analysis, like that of many others, was hopelessly oversimplified. The complexity of political and social forces unleashed by the refugee crisis in the Howard years had come around in an entirely different direction — in part as a reaction to those years. It caught Kelly napping and a lot more people besides. That is a miniature of the virtues and problems of The March of Patriots, Kelly’s political history of the fall of Keating, and the first two terms of the Howard government, concluding in the aftermath of the 2001 election. The book is in the style of The End of Certainty, only more so — elephantine, exhaustive on matters behind closed doors, scrupulously researched and multi-sourced. It is also flat-footed and dull, very much in the Kelly style. One staggers for hundreds of pages desperate for a pen-portrait, a physical scene, a context. Save for the occasional second-hand apercu — a telling one about George W. Bush’s pre-presidential office having no books, only sporting trophies on the shelves — we are floating in a space that is more like a Beckett novel than a real world of clashing humans. Doesn’t anyone have bodies, surrounds? Doesn’t anything occur in place? By now, one simply expects that in a Paul Kelly book, but it makes the reading of it dull but dutiful work. It’s the literary equivalent of cleaning out the garage on a grey Saturday afternoon. That flatness of form is indicative of a limitation of understanding, but on certain areas it’s very good indeed. Kelly gives a clear picture of way in which Keating’s post-1993 budget was founded on pure hubris and, more than his national identity adventures, blew a hole in Labor’s ship of state. There are probably other takes on the events, but this one seems strong. Though he is reasonably sympathetic to Howard’s argument that social conservatism was a necessary corollary to economic liberalisation in a fraying world, he is scathing about the fairly half-hearted way in which Howard went about this, the lack of real change he made in areas he purportedly wanted to transform, such as the ABC and education. Yet his overwhelming sympathy for Howard’s “suburban patriotism” also has him veering from description into prescription where it suits. Howard is chastised severely for his failure to stand-up to Pauline Hanson, and denounce her politics, while others in the party — most audibly Peter Costello and Jeff Kennett — were gnashing their teeth. Yet of course Howard’s refusal to condemn Hanson was absolutely vital to his politics, which was to have nothing significant to the Right of him. One can talk about “social conservatism” all one likes, but Howard’s appeal was to a reactionary strand within areas of the electorate, and the withering of the One Nation movement (quite aside from its own corruption) is part-proof of that. Prior to the crazy period of the Tampa Pauline Hanson had suggested that a policy for boat arrivals be to “give them food and water and tow them out to sea”. By 2001, given Hanson’s insistence on food and water, that policy was to the left of where the government was at. That The March of Patriots doesn’t encompass that is partly because Kelly wants to preserve notions of Howard as a statesman rather than a populist. In a mirror-image of the alleged “Howard haters”, he sets up an idealised Howard, the principled mainstream conservative he’d like to see. When the real Howard departs from that, in the process of being the real Howard, Kelly then judges it as a falling short. It’s a bit like judging a high jumper by the standards of a long jumper — well he may have got over that bar thing, but he didn’t get very far did he? Kelly is utterly blithe to the simpler and more direct explanation — that Howard politically is far more of a Nixonian schemer than he is a steady as-she-goes Tory, his core principles long ago dissolved by the nihilism of everyday politics. Culturally, though no redneck, Howard is a mild racial chauvinist, of a sort of Edna Everage style, a xenophobe and a nostalgist. These two tendencies, mild in themselves, become noxious when combined, as they did in the Tampa period, producing an utter indifference and disdain for people of a different race. Howard didn’t go soft on Hanson out of a failure of political calculus — he went soft on her because he agreed with the thrust of a lot of her comments, and it was politically advantageous to do so. It was a win-win for Howard. Kelly’s account is thus marred by the fantasy he projects on to Howard — but it’s also a victim of the author’s focus on mandarin history, who said what to whom in which corridor. Kelly could not be expected to undertake a social-political history of Australia in one volume, but there are moments when some mention of the social context is simply essential, and the absence of such constitutes omission. You can’t really give the full flavour of the waterfront dispute or the Tampa crisis, without summoning up debate in the media or movement on the streets. But Kelly will not consider this because of the great flaw that runs through his work — an almost visceral dislike of some amorphous group, variously known as “progressives”, “the Left” etc. People from this group are rarely, if ever, quoted — they’re an amorphous chorus of noises off, for much of this book, and much of Kelly’s journalism. About 300 pages in, even Kelly realises he is a little light on evidence. “Countless examples could serve,” he notes of the sins of the demon progressives before quoting … a Leunig cartoon. And Gideon Haigh denouncing “effete cosmopolitanism”. Leaving aside the question of who a speccie flyweight scribbler is calling “effete”, the reliance on a cartoon is obviously weak. Cartoonists, satirists deploy whatever rhetoric they can, for an effect. If Kelly wanted to really examine the way in which progressive opinion was interacting with the Howard mainstream, it would have been better to consider someone like David Marr’s writings in the SMH, or shock horror Julian Burnside, or a dozen other equally formidable types. Yes much was said that was silly and irritating, but something else was happening, that becomes of much greater importance for the second volume of the Howard era, if Kelly writes it. That is, that the social movements would transform the relationship of politics to policy quite substantially over a few short years such that Howard’s last throw of the dice would be not a hip-pocket nerve bribe, but an initiative on Aboriginal Australia, that the union movement would put a stake through the heart of WorkChoices, and that refugee politics would become a blame game over who locked up children first. What has come to the centre of Australian political life is the politics of shame, and moral obligation, and it began in the years described in The March of Patriots. Kelly can’t see it, which is why he remains badly behind the game today. He ends with an approving quote of the equally sour Les Carlyon, scathing about people who were concerned only about: “…how can I say to my children what Howard did to the [tick box] Aborigines/republicans/refugees/the long-faced potoroo…” Yeah. Land rights for gay whales man. Leaving aside the republic — the leader of whose movement now leads Howard’s party — these became central issues, on which Howard not only lost his government , but his seat, to a female ABC journalist. Carlyon returns the favour by giving Kelly a blurb quote praising his “gift for distillation” which is fair enough and his “cut glass prose” which is ridiculous. The over-valuation of Kelly makes the man looks exposed. Every week they throw to him on Insiders as if the Oracle was on the line from Delphi — and we get a political analysis that any competent cadet political rounder could be expected to give. Kelly’s skills should not be undervalued. Not everyone could write this sort of book. But it’s increasingly embarrassing to put a merely dogged and efficient writer in a position where his utter lack of imagination and depth of perception is put on weekly display. The intended effect of Carlyon’s blurb is that of elder statesmen, but they sound more like two old Muppets in the balcony, railing at the show beneath. Kelly gets away with a conventional political account of the late 90s — just — but he is going to need to expand his thinking radically if he is going to understand what happened to the country after 2001. |
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32 Comments
Paul Kelly reminds me of one of those western movie sets, where you open the door and there is nothing beyond it but dust and a couple of tumbleweeds. A shame when one remembers that he once wrote perceptively on the 1975 dismissal. Pomposity and laziness have taken over. His contributions to the Insiders are cringe-making indeed. The comment on Haigh is perceptive, too. I just read his piece in the Griffith Review on the GFC and wondered what it said behind the elegant prose. Not much.
This pompous Murdoch grovelling twit Kelly should just euthanize his career. He really is an irrelevant, worthless old bastard.
His ludicrous pompous gravitas while he snivels to the conservatives really makes we want to vomit.
We could also talk about his grovelling to Suharto during his Australian editorship…..
Having just turned the last page on the March of Patriots, I wholeheartedly agree with Mr Rundle.
I think the greatest example of the Kelly’s approach and failure to grasp the deeper story is in relation to the Children Overboard incident. Kelly discusses in excruciating detail the events of those few weeks and when Howard knew that both the story and the pictures were false. However, he fails to grasp the relevance of those events to the distillation of Howard government’s moral character.
Kelly recounts the story of the kids overboard comments as being first revealed in public by Philip Ruddock within hours of their supposedly occurring, and then being pursued with vigour first by Reith and then by Howard, but he then details the role of the defence department and their lack of written advice to counter the of dissemination those false statements. He blithely points out that, of course, there was political advantage in the statements being left to stand, but fails to interrogate the moral character of a government and a Prime Minister that would want to believe so much, and be so excited by the prospect, that these desperate refugees were despicable and undesirable.
The only redeeming feature of this aspect of March of Patriots is that Kelly is diligent enough to record enough detail so that any reader could come to their own conclusion about the complete lack of a moral compass in the government at the time.
I am so glad that you wrote this Guy.
Of all people, this bloke makes me angry. It always amazed me that people think that Paul Kelly is this big intellectual - says alot of Australia, while some of his political commentary can be ok - he is certainly no big intellectual - but he obviously thinks that he is - “overly puffed”
I find him a bit of a murdoch press hack - just bags out the left and the right are right - not going into the subtleties of things beyond a label. He wrote how wonderful globalisation was a few years back - and i suspect if someone of the Left had come up to him and said, hey, globalisation is not working for most people because its based on a neoliberal agenda, and best for all if we reset it on social democratic agenda , he would of dismissed this.
I would not mind Kelly crticising a certain type of person of the Left if he balanced it out with the fact that its still the progressive side, and recognising that the fundamentalism is on the Right - and writing about this. He never really looks at the arguments of the Left - like the differences in values beyond that “the Left” is full of cafe latte types. That is superficial stuff.
Oh, the other thing that I really do not like about Paul Kelly tends to try and pretend he is an objective intellectual - but that he is not!!
Thanks for your comments Guy. I can’t stand the bastard either. I read a few of the parts where he obviously grovells to Murdoch and Howard, and just skimmed the remainder with one eye (I was busy making a latte with the other) this morning and come to the same conclusion. It is all rubbish written by a loopy conservative. Not worth a place on the shelf. Should be burned.
I’m getting just a little bit more than a little sick and tired of the Murdochisation of the ABC, begun under Howard’s aegis(bet PK says absolootly nothing about THAT in his book). Every week on Insiders we have at least one News Ltd. journo on the couch, always PK(unless he is in America sucking up and getting his riding instructions from Il Murdoche), and almost always these days, softball interviews of Coalition MPs by Barry Cassidy(who seems to be shadowed by a perpetual guilt ghost from his days working as a Press Sec. for an ALP politician).
Not only that, but we have the tabloidisation of the 7pm ABC News(well, in Sydney, anyway), with each Rudd government story prefaced with a catty tabloidesque headline, a deliberatley mocking tone, a sigh of disgust(barely audible but audible, nonetheless) from the Newsreader; Tony Jones using his show to gloat over the failure of the Rudd government in the Newspoll with Joe Hockey this week, as well as also pitching softballs to the Opposition, on a semi-regular basis, in a barely-disguised position of solidarity with them; Leigh Sales doing her best impression of Miss Prissy when it comes to interviewing anyone from the Rudd government, but relaxed and comfortable with a Coalition interviewee(have ALL ABC journos come from Private Schools these days?); and last, but certainly not least, the over-arching influence on policy and direction that Janet Albrechtsen and Keith Windschuttle have on the ABC Board. Sheesh!
However, I despair that anyone in the government will be brave enough to call out the ABC on this obvious bias.
Kit , should have waited a week and found it in the discount bin and on special with howards book. Guy , the Muppets in the balcony is spot on and funny.
At least Frank Devine had the decency to snuff it thus sparing us his writings.
I think its time that Paul Kelly and the other worthless Murdoch glovepuppets give serious consideration to euthanizing their careers.
Such a euthanization could be done lovingly and tenderly, the same way that the writers of Pravda ended their careers.
Kelly is predictably conservative. He represents the boomers on so many levels with a good streak of dinosaur. His ilk would argue you’ve got to have a long tail of experience so I suppose he would claim to be their Oakes or Ramsey old leather furniture. To remind you what is modern. I find him useful as a faithful representative of his cohort. It’s a safe bet the boomers are not cheering Guy Rundle!
The show is called ‘Insiders’, and who else would they have but the ultimate insider? Of course he’s vacuous and self-referential, if he wasn’t he wouldn’t be an insider. It’s the price you pay for all that access to, ah, all that access to, um - well, you don’t need much substance to be an effective counterweight to silly Annabel Crabb, rorty Michael Bowers or autistic Andrew Bolt.
Why hasn’t anyone switched off Kelly’s life-support? The Oracle of the Obvious must have something big on Rupert.
His chafed lips are still raw. A legacy of all those years with Suharto.
While we’re on the subject of capping bores, ex-ALP Sen. Loosely keeps leaking into the loungeroom…
Great comments. Had to weigh in though on Tom McLoughlin’s barb about boomers not cheering Guy Rundle. My boom may be bust/but Rundle’s a must. He’s up there with Hunter S Thompson and some others whose names I can’t remember (I’d love to say this is due to boomer era substance taking but actually due to decrepitude). David Stephens (born 1949).
This is fine review of Kelly’s book and his more general predicament as an elder statesman of Australian political analysis. I think Kelly’s career arc is as much a reflection of the trend in political reporting generally across the evolution of the 24-7 mass media cycle as anything else, now culminating in its logical end-point with the explosion in online instant analysis. Generally, wider discussion of politics has become progressively more captive to the banal daily imperatives of the media prism through which it’s filtered. You don’t have to subscribe to the loopier views about ‘meeja control’ of debate - whether it’s evil Rupie, or Zionist conspiracy, or Leftist cabals, or whoever, pulling the strings in the smoky back rooms - to recognise the enormously disproportionate impact individual, unremarkable, observers now bring to bear on, well, everything. In a way it’s a far more espistemologically problematic matter for us all to grapple with than any of those extreme cases, that a single filtering voice like Kelly’s is manifestly intelligent, decent, considered and I imagine only too aware himself of how much influence a fairly pedestrian platform like those five weekly minutes on Insiders affords him over the political cycle. His book reads to some extent like a vaguely-nonplussed, perhaps even slightly-abashed, attempt to ameliorate - probably ‘dissipate in retrospect’ is a better phrase - the day-by-day extent and impact of his own mundanely-central position over those years, by way of trying to put it all into a ‘grand narrative’ context whose politico-philosophical strategic loftiness might somehow preserve, to one side, a bit of ‘disinterested’ space still in which he can implicitly claim for himself some semblance of the journalistic ‘ideal’ - (but is it really?) - of ‘detachment’. Those who take the plunge and commit themselves to a concrete political expression of their worldview in some form or other, for better and worse - whether it’s a Maxine McKew or a Tom Switzer, seeking to join a ‘mainstream’ political party, or even just a Margo Kingston or Tim Blair, who choose to ‘solid up’ the personal journalistic byline from which they write about Australia with an unapologetically partisan stance - have been, I think, ahead of the ‘mainstream’ pack in their recognition of the increasing hollowness, and thus democratic effeteness, of that always dubious holy grail of hackdom-past, ‘balance’. You don’t have to agree with a single ‘unbalanced’ thing the latter two in particular write (or wrote) - no jokes, please, Margo’s a mate, and Blair, while an Evil Journalistic Beelelzebub of the First Order and a very rude chap (curse you, fiend!) is as sane, lucid and (crucially) honest a writer on Australian politics as anyone (if you like that sort of thing) - to feel a lot less uneasily ‘untethered’ reading their stuff than you do trying to find solid ground in a grandiloquently-bloated puff piece (for himself, really) like Kelly’s. The same applies - for all the ”mainstream’ cheap shooting to be had - to the opinion(ized) journalism of Devine and Deveney, Pearson and Pilger, Quadrant and Arena, in comparison to the more consciously ‘even-handed’ ‘analytical’ pap choofed out, like bloody spam, by most Gallery and Op Ed space-hogs.
Contrast the epistemological concreteness of the ‘culture war’ protagonists’ cheerful partisanship with the hopelessly wafty, shifting thin air of Kelly and the ‘mainstream’ press, tail-chasing the chimera of ‘balance’ to the absurd point where to be a ‘responsible’ journo these days you need, apparently, to get an eloquent quote from the Devil to the effect that there’s a strong view among some sections of the Australian Peeble that black is, in fact, white, blah blah… on every contentious ‘political ishoo’ of the moment- like, there’s another kind, is there? - no matter what. Manifest in individuals like Kelly, what you end up with a entire career that can be summed up in a single phrase: sustained professional equivocation. I think it’s a matter of mundance writerly insecurity as much as anything else, frankly: the sheer careerist terror, on the part of the lifelong jobbing opinion-giver (in a desperately insecure and competitive workplace), of ever being shown, by history - by life! - to have been wrong.
This isn’t - this can’t be - how any sane epistemological can work, can hold together. (Anyway, it’s a fear wholly misplaced. Janet A is wrong every other day, and last I looked her career’s going gangbusters.) Yet the workaday agencies of our daily discourse - the ‘mainstream’, ‘grown-up’, ‘serious’ media filters as defined and trickle-down-decreed by pundits like Kelly - are now built upon just such a dismal, but surely now doomed, dogma: O dear Lord of Slick Prose, grant me the eloquent power to write about the concrete world I see in such a goddamned, pissant mode that I, my saleable byline, shall never, no matter what, have to concede analytical error. Not exactly a heart-stirringly ferocious self-admonition for a young ambitous gunslinger to sticky-tape above their Canberra cubbyhole PC, huh? And what is really a tad heart-stirring just now, touchingly so (because we all of us want juice from our political writers, we want to watch them ignite on the page, like a Rundle, even, if they’ve got it in them at all), is the impulse to sympathise deeply with the plight of very well-meaning journalists trying to re-set their professional gyro’s in a riotously toppling moment; their ever more (I think) contorted attempts to simultaneously build their careers, gain contacts, break stories, do their jobs well on a day-to-day basis - just the facts, ma’am - and try to hang onto the journalistic ideals of a past, less media-saturated era…while trying like hell to ignore the epistemological elephant in the cyber-room, which is that those facts are increasingly of their own making, merely in the reporting of them.
How to grapple with this in the longer term in a ‘post-institutional authority’ era, I know not either, Tonto. But as a post-Boomer, like, completely ecked-off after four decades of samey, too-earnest drone, it’s sure fun - sort of - watching erstwhile imperious page-lofties like Paul Kelly flap about the po-mo breeze, looking just a little bit lost. No matter how fat and weighty the Stately One’s latest mighty tome…you just know it ain’t gunna be heavy enough to hold the poor bugger in place, there in that thrillingly unholding centre. My advice - as a certified Howard-hating loony and serial, very long-winded internet cuckoo-trollumist, is to arc up a blogsite like all us young ‘uns, Paul, start flapping your prosy wings like the goggle-eyed political maddie we all know is itchin’ to burst free, in there….O, and fly, my little pretty, fly, FLY!
Terrific! Your diagnosis is spot-on. It is cathartic to see the complacency of Kelly exposed with such pith and penetration. “Oracle of the Obvious”: (v. Campbell, comment above) that is brilliant. There are no riddles, no tragic presentiments, emerging from the tepid cogitations of this Oracle. And, in any case, does not the power of an Oracle depend on his being hieratically remote and aloof? Kelly’s studied remoteness from the politicians is just a pose; he knows, they know and we are meant to know, that he is firmly one of them. In fact his chumminess is, I think, more of a disability than an advantage in a practioner of the “higher journalism”. I can never identify in his writing any sense that he recognises intellectual standards which are not shared by those whose policies and actions he purports to be interpreting. In fact, whether he is writing on either of the ostensibly opposed parties, he betrays an identification with the basic presuppositions which both parties share. While his writing is partly valuable as a sort of insider’s commentary, it is bereft of the principled impartiality which you’d expect from someone who is credited with realising an ambition to provide a comprehensive analysis of our political life.
Impartiality in journalism dies very easily, it seems. As Victoria comments above, its decedence is observable even at the ABC (though even that “even” betrays an expectation no longer presumptively warrantable). Leigh Sales is one of the worst offenders; her chumminess is infuriating. Tony Jones’ efforts on “Q&A” to pursue expert political commentary while deferring to a democratic pseudo-populism is disqualifyingly middle-brow and for the most part inconsequential. And as for culture, Jennifer Byrne’s “First Tuesday Bookclub” is a portent, or perhaps more alarmingly a confirmation, of the Oprahfication of literary criticism. Its cosy inclusiveness demands the substitution for real literary discussion of the merely subjective exchange of impressionistic vanities: I like, I like, I like, I think, I think, I think … chuckle, chuckle, chuckle.
Kelly and Sheridan are both a waste of space in the Australian and Paul Maley is following in their ignorant tracks.
Forget Paul Kelly, there’s another lightweight journo with an obvious right wing bias and she works for the ABC - you want soft coalition interviews, check out Leigh Sales. She’s not as popular as Paul Kelly yet because she hasn’t learned to speak opinion as if it is incontrovertible fact the way Kelly does. But give her time….
Paul Kelly is an irrelevant typical Murdoch grovelling glove puppet.
Its really satisfying to see that filthy, malignant piece of murdoch cancer, The Australian, die a slow death, hopefully one as long and prolonged as the much unlamented Frank Devine, and just the sort of long painful cancer ridden death we all hope Rupert will have to finish the bastard off once and for all, as well as his grovelling pig-animal ‘journalists’.
John2066, that’s an offensive and odious piece of abuse and if I were not such a naive fellow - and hadn’t spent so much time among Murdoch-bashers (including at times being one myself) - I might even suspect you were an agent provocateur. You ought to withdraw it, or, IMHO, someone at Crikey should delete it. It’s not my site and I can hardly claim to be a model commenter either, but even a loud-mouthed long-winded pain-in-the-arse serial thread gazzumper can recognize the outright repulsive gratuity of your muck. It demeans a terrific and very measured review of a book that commands serious consideration if nothing else, and whatever Crikey’s comments policy may be, if it doesn’t exclude b/s rejoicing in Devine’s still-recent death, it needs a rethink. Again, just IMHO, FWIW.
Jack Robertson
Ah yes, Leigh Sales, however did she sneak onto the ABC one must ask oneself.
Jack, mate good to see you writing something lucid about the old evil hawk himself.
Hiya, Marilyn, fancy meeting you in the high-falutin’ hereabouts. S’pose we better mind our p’s and q’s a bit, girl. Two ranting ‘Diary Old Boys on the one Crikey thread may well get the Beech’s fine, stout heart all a-pitter-patter.
Hope all’s well, and you’re not too miffed with The Kev. ‘Xpect you are, but. Cheers, mate.
“The complexity of political and social forces unleashed by the refugee crisis in the Howard years had come around in an entirely different direction — in part as a reaction to those years. It caught Kelly napping and a lot more people besides.”
And what on earth, you just have to wonder, is poor Mr Kelly ever going to make of Mr Howard’s flameful and narcissistic re-entry into the refugee debate? (Geez, that man must really hate the Liberal Party of Australia. And especially Malcolm Turnbull.) So will we perhaps, finally, see the Imperious Influencer grit his journalistic teeth, chomp down on some steely bullet prose, and send a liberating rush clean through the entire Gallery apparati…say, by deploying the splendiferous Mungo McCallum’s eternal gem ‘unflushable turd’? O, dearest, dear Lord of Eloquent Mainstream Prose, let it be so. Let it be just thus.
Tic toc, time to choose, Paul Kelly. Time to decide where you stand, as a man. Deep breath now - the first real time choice is always the hardest. And then where-ever it may be, absolutely everything about discharging the weighty obligations of professional reportage and analysis becomes clearer and cleaner, and the subsequent pen-fruits more useful to a wider, vigorous democratic debate. Even - especially - in these most complex, two-sided issues of practical political choosing.
So anyhoo, here’s how Paul ’ Moi, influential?’ - Kelly spun it this morning. And it’s worth a bit of an old school Fisk - ah, memories, memories - to see just how hard the fellow is trying to keep himself snuggled away in that ‘disinterested’ Swiss-box. Bear in mind that this morning - just like every Sunday morning for the last half decade - every single political parliamentarian, pundit, press hack, party flak, policy advisor and otherwise mainstream-media conduit to the Great Australian Peeble would have been watching, most (though they’d never admit it) with quivering spin-pens-to-cometh metaphorically poised, a-dippin’ an’ a-duckin’ at every inflection and nuance, lest they miss The Oracle’s hints ‘ponst The Way T’will Best Play This Week (Kelly’s, italicised):
It’s not his fault. Shakespeare couldn’t f**king get it all in a ‘balanced’ way in those 45 seconds of live TV, either. It’s not Kelly’s fault that we have all knowingly colluded in the reduction of the way we talk about difficult matters in the Town Square…to this pointless, but incalculably damaging (for us all) exercise in electron wastage. It’s not Kelly’s fault…but it’s surely his obligation - he has one of the few chairs on the podium at all, and his is as lofty as they come - to do something about it. To make public discourse more concrete and specific again. To lead the way through this fog.
I happen to think - have long thought, yes, it’s a dull, boorish and oft-aired obsession, across a decade online now - that even as a reporter, the only real way to do that - to fill throwaway words with weighty meaning again - is to shackle your fleshy personage - your views, your stance, as a human, a voter, a citizen, as an amateur literate person - anchoringly to the carefully crafted words you produce and release into the public realm, as a professional one - whatever your role, whatever your views may be. Democratic transparency, journalistic precision, genuine impartial disinterest, real civic inclusion, true public debate generally on this and all equally-thorny and complex matters - not to mention human decency and especially dignity (the Kantian, Christian dignity of human specificity) , wherever you stand - would have been served 10,000,000 times better, had Kelly started that snippet this morning with ‘Just so listeners know, I happen to think we should…’ followed by a twenty-words-or-less hard verb soundbite of where he stood ‘as one of the rest of us’, even if - just like a lot of the rest of us, maybe - it was a simple ‘I’m f**ked for ideas, too, mate’.
Hey, if nothing else, he’d get a taste of what ‘the rest of us’ have to put up with nowadays - if we’re lucky, a five second TV window to explain in words of less than three syllables how to make the bloody world perfect, right now, all the time. As counter-intuitive as this notion may feel to our senior, entrenched Boomer media leaders - the Kelly’s, the Oakeses, the Grattans, the O’Briens - this now IMHO the only viable way forward, if journalism is to have any real contextualising, much less watchdogging, future as a democratic fourth estate.
Thanks for your tolerance, Crikey (and Guy). I know this is idiotically lengthy and tedious and banal…but this - Kelly, this morning - is exactly the…well, lengthy and tedious and banal way it works in the first place, huh. It’s not Rupes we need to call b/s on, or ‘the meeja’, and then, not strategically; it’s individual influential bylines. Story by story. Phrase by phrase. Word by word if need be. And we So anyhoo, here’s how Paul ’ Moi, influential?’ - Kelly spun it this morning. And it’s worth a bit of an old school Fisk - ah, memories, memories - to see just how hard the fellow is trying to keep himself snuggled away in that ‘disinterested’ Swiss-box. Bear in mind that this morning - just like every Sunday morning for the last half decade - every single political parliamentarian, pundit, press hack, party flak, policy advisor and otherwise mainstream-media conduit to the Great Australian Peeble would have been watching, most (though they’d never admit it) with quivering spin-pens-to-cometh metaphorically poised, a-dippin’ an’ a-duckin’ at every inflection and nuance, lest they miss The Oracle’s hints ‘ponst The Way T’will Best Play This Week (Kelly’s, italicised):
PAUL KELLY, POLITICAL ANALYST: The problem Kevin Rudd has got Barrie - sure, maybe if you spake it such in passing, O Oracle, maybe if you annoint it just so - is that the policy is not working. - O, but whereth be Thy benchmark, O Oracle? ‘Gainst what Yonder Mythic Measure doest Thee plumb thy annointing mark, this cursed ‘failure’ of which you portend? How parseth Thee the multiple causal factors in boaty movements, and all that, like, nuanced jazz? - We’ve still got - we, we, who is this ‘we’ to be? - the 78 Sri Lankans on the Oceanic Viking off Indonesia. That’s his difficulty. - Ah, so ‘we’ is ‘he’ (and ‘one’ is ‘me’, and I’m stuck in a Beatles melody…- And the effect of the media blitz that he engaged in this week was to highlight his own difficulty, short of any solution. - mu-mu-mu-mu-mime-not-talking-I’m not-talking not me, not me, not me, not me, I’m not here, I’m not implicated in this blitz or its purported effect, not me, not me-mu-mu-mu, read my next book in 2020, it’ll be even bigger and fatter and more Impeccably Balanced&Impartial than Patriots - So if public opinion is shifting on the issue of asylum seekers - me, you all cry, a Shifter-in-chief, moi? Who are youse callin’ a Murdochian tool, fellah? - I don’t see how the Prime Minister’s efforts this week helped at all. O Oracle, you simpering, well-meaning Dixieland tootler, you; get with the goddamned Information Age and its wildly intra-tumbling be-bop spirals and sustained feedback loops, willya? - Meanwhile they’ve - righto, so it’s ‘they’ now - got Australian officials trying to persuade the Sri Lankans to get off the boat. There were reports this week of a generous offer being made to them. - buckets of ‘em, mate, from oodles of us (at least half now, shorely; check out Bernard Keane’s mighty sonnet just next door, for starters; what the hell, give those generous ‘uns a friendly spruik for a change even, whydon’tcha? ‘Balance’, dude, and all that…- But the signs - O Oracle, unmystify us those signs - at this stage seem to be that the Sri Lankans are determined to hold the line. They calculate that they can crack Kevin Rudd, persuade him to back down and bring the boat to Christmas Island. - And…WHAMMO!!…‘crack’, ‘back down’…there’s your story right there, Gallery youngsters, have at it; don’t you call yourself an ‘Enlightenment progressive’, Mr Paul Kelly, not even a socially conservative one, in the great and decent traditions of muscular Christianity, or Kant, or Burke, or even bloody Voltaire. Watery weasel word choices, weak Ruddian all-things-phrasing, passive voice instincts…until those lazy, killer, mass media imperative shorthands, likely unknowing, totally debate-framing. Thus does trickle-down ‘public opinion’ ebb and sway, mate. Thus, does it ooze down.
Finally, to bed it in and tie it down and, like, totally wash his personal wordsmithing hands, we get the ‘Peter Harvey, Canberra’ summation&sign-off, complete with sterile, distancing, abstracting but thoroughly-loaded intro-clause (pure John Howard): - In a situation of course where asylum seekers don’t have the right to self select their country of residence… - followed by a pre-emptive, vaguely-flagpoled threat disguised as pompous, mock-chin-stroking ‘a wise-man-would-do-thus’ Lofty Punditry (pure Rupert bloomin’ Murdoch) - if Rudd backs down, then he’ll need a genuine media blitz to explain that decision and how it equates with tough border protection.
It’s not his fault. Shakespeare couldn’t f**king get it all in a ‘balanced’ way in those 150 seconds of live TV, either. It’s not Kelly’s fault that we have all knowingly colluded in the reduction of the way we talk about difficult matters in the Town Square…to this pointless, but incalculably damaging (for us all) exercise in word and electron wastage. It’s not Kelly’s fault…but it’s surely his obligation - he has one of the few chairs on the podium at all, and his is as lofty as they come - to do something about it. To help make public discourse more concrete and specific again. To help lead the way through the epistemological fog.
I happen to think - have long thought, yes, it’s a dull, boorish and oft-aired obsession, across a decade online now - that even as a detached reporter, the only real way to do that - to fill throwaway words with weighty meaning again - is to shackle your fleshy concrete world personage - your views, your stance, as a human, a voter, a citizen, as an amateur literate person - anchoringly to the carefully crafted words you produce and release into the abstract public realms, as a professional one - whatever your role, whatever your views may be. Democratic transparency, journalistic and literary precision, genuine impartial disinterest, real civic inclusion, public debate generally on this and all equally-thorny and complex matters - not to mention human decency and especially dignity (the Kantian, Christian dignity of human specificity) , wherever you stand - would have been served 10,000,000 times better, had Kelly started that snippet this morning with ‘Just so listeners know, I happen to think we should…’ followed by a twenty-words-or-less hard verb soundbite of where he stood ‘as one of the rest of us’, even if - just like a lot of the rest of us, maybe - it was a simple ‘I’m f**ked for ideas, too, mate’.
Hey, if nothing else, he’d get a taste of what ‘the rest of us’ have to put up with nowadays - if we’re lucky, a five second TV window to explain in words of less than three syllables how to make the bloody world perfect, right now, all the time. As counter-intuitive as this notion may feel to our senior, entrenched Boomer media leaders - the Kelly’s, the Oakeses, the Grattans, the O’Briens - this now IMHO the only viable way forward, if journalism is to have any real contextualising, much less watchdogging, future as a democratic fourth estate.
Thanks for your tolerance, Crikey (and Guy). I know this is lengthy and tedious and banal…but this - Kelly, this morning - is exactly the…well, lengthy and tedious and banal way shitty wordsmithery tends to work its black satanic magickes on tender human flesh in the first place, huh. It’s not Rupes we need to call b/s on, or ‘the meeja’, and then, not strategically; it’s individual influential bylines. Story by story. Phrase by phrase. Word by word if need be. (‘Crack’. ‘Back down’. Sprung, Mr Kelly, sir. With respect, there are many different ways to define other, related words - like ‘resolve’, and ‘toughness’, and ‘strength’ - than you seem to be impying…)
Anyway, we can do it now. Is the point. Of this here intertubemagizmonator. And so…well, I think we should. Until they figure it out. And factor it in. Was all.
Jesus, well there’s a colossal screw-up, joke’s on me. If some very kindly moderator can ditch the duplicate first lump and put me out of my naked abject misery, that would be most gracious.
Alternatively, maybe as overdue penance, by all means simply ditch the bloody lot if preferred. In defence, my intentions were pure - even if my execution was farcical.
Refugees do have the right to determine where they apply for asylum though, they are called countries who are signatory to the refugee convention and I do get tired of all the pathetic old hacks not understanding that simple point.
They discover to their great cost in places like Malaysia or Indonesia where we try and deflect them into our rat hole prisons that they can surely apply for refugee status, but they do not get protection.
The meeja in this country is as pathetic as ever Robbo, not a brain to bless themselves with the dear old soaks.
http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/sinodisp/au/cases/cth/FCA/2002/1009.html?query=al%20masri
“60 In any event, while it is literally correct to describe the applicant as an “unlawful” entrant and an “unlawful non-citizen” that is not a complete description of his position. The nomenclature adopted under the Act provides for the description of persons as “unlawful non-citizens” because they arrived in Australia without a visa. This does not fully explain their status in Australian law as such persons are on-shore applicants for protection visas on the basis that they are refugees under the Refugees Convention.
61 The Refugees Convention is a part of conventional international law that has been given legislative effect in Australia: see ss 36 and 65 of the Act. It has always been fundamental to the operation of the Refugees Convention that many applicants for refugee status will, of necessity, have left their countries of nationality unlawfully and therefore, of necessity, will have entered the country in which they seek asylum unlawfully. Jews seeking refuge from war-torn Europe, Tutsis seeking refuge from Rwanda, Kurds seeking refuge from Iraq, Hazaras seeking refuge from the Taliban in Afghanistan and many others, may also be called “unlawful non-citizens” in the countries in which they seek asylum. Such a description, however, conceals, rather than reveals, their lawful entitlement under conventional international law since the early 1950’s (which has been enacted into Australian law) to claim refugee status as persons who are “unlawfully” in the country in which the asylum application is made.
62 The Refugees Convention implicitly requires that, generally, the signatory countries process applications for refugee status of on-shore applicants irrespective of the legality of their arrival, or continued presence, in that country: see Art 31. That right is not only conferred upon them under international law but is also recognised by the Act (see s 36) and the Migration Regulations 1994 (Cth) which do not require lawful arrival or presence as a criterion for a protection visa. If the position were otherwise many of the protection obligations undertaken by signatories to the Refugees Convention, including Australia, would be undermined and ultimately rendered nugatory.
63 Notwithstanding that the applicant is an “unlawful non-citizen” under the Act who entered Australia unlawfully and has had his application for a protection visa refused, in making that application he was exercising a “right” conferred upon him under Australian law.”
Now those four paragraphs make the law pretty clear and that was upheld by three more judges in the Full Court of the Federal court in April 2003 after Akram had been deported.
Nah, there’s plenty of brains, MS, and far more decency and idealism than ranty old net grumps like….um, I was gunna say ‘you and me’ ever concede, but that would be unchivalrous and presumptuous, so I’ll leave it at just ‘me’. Twisting humiliatingly in the wind of my own typically narcissistic over-reach, as I am…you know those times on a thread where you’ve pushed your luck, and pushed your luck, and jolly well had your say, and blathered on, and on, and on…and finally reckon it’s time to cut your losses and withdraw into prudent silence?
Nah. Me neither.
It was risky being an oracle, in Greece or anywhere else. You could pay with your life for boldness, like “invade Sparta after lunch”. Oracles had a fine sense of self-preservation, so they had two options: to Kelly their supplicants or to bamboozle them with Gnomic incomprehensibility. Kellying is inverted oracularity : the trick is to divine the received wisdom, then magisterially repeat it. But always have two bob each way. Qualification saved many a neck.
Jack Robertson I’m keen to try and help there, but buggered if i can see the actual join … kind of enjoy your flow anyway
Hail fellow, well met, Ed, much appreciate your time. In the process of getting the v. tricky html coding ‘just so’ in that 3.37 pm behemoth - a good poetic Fisking needs the italic differentiation b/w the original content and the heckling, one feels - I managed like a newby clot to ‘double-paste’ my entire comment. In essence the thing is end-on-end duplicated. There are minor differences; the latter duplication is the keeper.
JG, be grateful if you could see your way to deleting the first lot: from the opening ‘So anyhoo…’ all the way to par 6, line 4, where you see the comment finish with ‘if need be. And we’, then loop back to begin again: ‘So anyhoo, here’s how…’ and so on. From that second ‘So anyhoo’ on to the end, to stay. (The hyperlink hot text of the second ‘here’s how’ is a handy visual clue to honing in on the actual join.)
Mate, you’re a generous editor and I’m much obliged. This is a long bit of muck, and I mucked it up. But I think this kind of close-read ‘deconstruction’ - *spews, but fondly* - is still worth doing from time to time, in real time, and not entirely inappropriate for this thread, given the nature of Guy’s article - reviewing the reffo issue reviewer, as it were - and the fact that Bernard’s parallel thread (on the issue itself) is where the pacier, less introspective conversational action is going gangbusters. Truly appreciate your tolerance, and if you can manage to tidy me up to boot, I’ll promise to shoosh for a good long bit.
Best regards, JG. That Crikey is going like a house on fire doesn’t need me to tell you. Congrats. Jack Robertson.
I can’t believe so many people are even reading that thing.
And I’ve never had a bl*w-j*b from a bloke because I simply can’t abide that ‘orrible stubble-scritch on me scrote, Mr Goodtrips.
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