Oh please!!! At least this comment allowed me to bypass your copious comments here. Anyone who fails to see the conservative grip that has dominated globally for at least the last 25 years or so lacks credibility in any damn thing he/she says!

It is absurd to see Rudd/Keating/ or even Hawke as on the political Left. What utter tosh! Ye Gods! Hawke and Keating made an art form of lying on their political backs for the big end of town. Rudd simply embraces the New Labour format-conservative.

Peter
I understand your frustration since Maggie and Ron buried the corpse of the left we now have politics by management of which Rudd is the ultimate…
but i still long for ideas and it was in this context that I made my comment….

Howard’s method of sending a tough message to the people smugglers was to lock people up for extended periods of time, often in remote locations.

James has spoken eloquently about how this is a violation of human rights - locking up one group of people to send a message to another group.

A friend of mine who has read this thread said “My solution to stop boats entering Australian waters is to play KRudd’s 7000 word essay, “The Global Financial Crisis”, 24/7 over loud halers.” I am confident that if we were to do that on the Oceanic Viking, the people there would gladly go elsewhere.

However, we have seen nothing, as yet, about the huge numbers of people who are going to come to this country. It is inescapable. The world has almost run out of space. Deserts need to be brought back to life. Rivers need to be brought back from the edge of extinction (MDB anyone). Birth rates have to be brought down to two children per couple. Religion needs to be replaced by something other than football. It is the nature of mankind to wish to believe in something. Religions have set people against people since the dawn of time. Something else needs to be thought of. Something to inspire awe, rather than “Joe the blow has just kicked a goal for the doggies!”

For all these tasks Australia needs thinkers, not tired old wankers looking to the past. I did have great hopes for Kevin Rudd who, despite being a god-botherer, seem to be a highly intelligent man.

It seems my hopes were born to be dashed.

Meanwhile, Bernard, and others, have come up with some fine suggestions re the refugee problem. I think we need to ram home Bernard’s suggestion, so hard that even Kevin Rudd will get the message.

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.

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 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.

And so, following a long thread which was discussing realistic solutions, suddenly the thread is bogged down in the same question yet again. Exactly as THETROLLHONKS intended.

Don’t get me wrong — excellent replies from others, especially the latest from Ben Aveling. (Ben, if someone half as smart and reasonable as you ever stands for PM, I’ll vote for him and then stand back confidently and wait for the next election.)

Still, it’s easy to forget — as THETROLLHONKS intended — that we had already acknowledged that the xenophobes, the hawks, the rednecks, are not going to go away, and we were already in the process of discussing politically and ethically workable solutions.

TROLL, read the article and the thread before you disrupt discussions again. We have already acknowledged the intractability of those who think like you. We are several steps ahead of you, already trying to find a humane way of achieving what you want. I’ve already recommended a website for you: therealists.com.au. I’m serious, I think you will be among kindred spirits there.

Peter Hatch, the question of whether intensive resources should be devoted to discouraging boat people has already been settled — in my view, the good guys lost and irrational paranoia won, but that’s how it is.

What we were discussing before the troll came, was how far do we go in order to effect that discouragement? Where do you reach a point that the ends no longer justifies the means?

For comparison, how far do we go in discouraging crime? Do we lock up every suspect, every person that the police know is really guilty, even if they got smart lawyers, every person with a demographic likelihood of being criminal? No, we don’t, for a good reason known as the rule of law.

For the most part, we don’t. NT and WA tried recently to do just that, using mandatory sentencing laws for juvenile offenders which were aimed at the Aboriginal populations. A case of the ends justifying the means. The Australian community have reasserted the principle that, as much as we want to discourage crime, we don’t throw away civil liberties in the pursuit of that goal.

The same must apply in the boat people context. Discourage them if you must — if you really think, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that it will make any difference whatsoever to the quality and quantity of our migration intake. But don’t throw away the rule of law and the concept of civil liberties to do so.

Otherwise we are no better than the bolshevik nanny-state fix-everything type of government that we were having a go at on Friday night.

The reason you couldn’t find me under comments, despite having received an email is because I am watched, like a peregrine falcon hovering in the sky, by the editor and sometimes I have to wait an entire day for it to actually appear. The reason being I can loose off the odd ad hominem remark.

PETER HATCH: I’ve always thought of communism as another form of religion. Same mind-set. Destroy the individual so that the gullible can have unfettered belief of god/the state.

JAMES McDONALD: God you can be a shocker! V funny but that last pot-shot at TTH!

BERNARDK: Terrific article, great suggestion! If nothing else emerges from the article and the comments which followed it, is the amount of dissatisfaction with
Kevin Rudd’s non-performance. Instead of going to church every Sunday he should take a course in daring to be bold and how to make unpopular decisions.

Thanks for a wonderful post.

Oh please!!! At least this comment allowed me to bypass your copious comments here. Anyone who fails to see the conservative grip that has dominated globally for at least the last 25 years or so lacks credibility in any damn thing he/she says!

It is absurd to see Rudd/Keating/ or even Hawke as on the political Left. What utter tosh! Ye Gods! Hawke and Keating made an art form of lying on their political backs for the big end of town. Rudd simply embraces the New Labour format-conservative.

Australia has a lamentable record in its attitude and treatment of so-called ‘illegals’. It is globally embarrassing.

And boy! are we sensitive over any suggestion that we are racist or more accurately extremely xenophobic.

We bloody well are! ‘Put a hole in their boat’. ‘Clap them in irons’!! Sheesh! How constructive.
____________________

And of course those who don’t ‘go with the flow’ are labelled as trolls! Come now, don’t be coy? You simply can’t have others joining your private party and making it a tad harder for you to converse as one. Silly!

There’s a sane and decent path beyond this bleak, decade+ long impasse, and - please God - you can’t help but think it’s finally, creakingly, showing itself.

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.

The university’s difficulty is that its graduate entry programs are modelled not on Bologna but on elite US universities which fill their mostly much smaller intakes by recruiting nationally from a country of 200 million, while the University of Melbourne recruits not even nationally from a country of 20 million, but from a city of 4 million.

This experiment needs a decade to run to see whether it will succeed. I expect the University of Melbourne will retain its graduate entry programs long term but sufficiently modified to assure parents that their expenditure of 6 years of fees at elite private schools isn’t ‘wasted’ on getting their children entry to a general undergraduate program with only a chance of admission to a desirable professional program.

Well it is wrong.

It’s like if you had someone ringing you from their phone 2 blocks away saying they had just been shot and are losing massive amounts of blood. Then the next minute you get a bloke knock on your door saying “gee i got a little scratch on my knee, gee it really really hurts, can you take me in and look after me”.

So you turn the blinkers on, forget about the more important person down the road who is bleeding to death to help someone who is exagerating their claims and only reason you are even paying attention to them is because they are on your doorstep.

I think thats wrong.

Nov 11 & 12 & 13 & 27 Melbourne, Australia Melbourne Rod Laver Arena.

Britney Spears Circus Concerts Nov 6 & 7.
Some of the largest crowds ever at the Perth Burswood Done venue.

If your look at any of Britney’s Concert photos, you will notice she is wearing a microphone. Britney has had a microphone for all her concert including the two previous North American circuits, including the first one that was the biggest box office concert of North America this year. Britney has also worn a microphone for the Circus concerts for England and Europe including Russia this year. All without any of the sort of unfair reporting such as that.

Those making the false reports about people who complained who didn’t see the concert or those who reported Britney didn’t cause a “frenzy”? Britney doesn’t have to be a concert to cause a frenzy.

If the government of Victoria or anyone else was concerned about consumer protection, perhaps they should do something about newspapers and reporters who locally reported false and unfair reports in a effort to cause hate and deliberately harm innocent people and legitimate business.

Maybe the people of Victoria should consider what to do with elected politician who want to be puppets for repeating the words of criminal and dishonest conduct in a fained effort to appear to be concerned about the people of Australia while such false and unfair reporting.

To give you some idea just how far out those involved in such efforts to harm were, they neglected to mention that this is nearly a two performance involving many performers. A concert and a circus that has thrilled and brought joy to people all over the world. And now, here is some reporter who couldn’t tell about all the wonderful attractions. These include many dance and other routines that require great physical effort. This makes maintaining studio quality digital singing while involved in physical performances difficult.

This is why many movies and TV programs use prerecorded singing for many out of studio action scenes. If anyone is going to start being concerned about what entertainment tracks were prerecorded or recorded at the time, you would have to put such warnings on many movie and TV programs. Since most concert include recorded music, and the sort of unfair discrimination shown against Britney here, those involved should expect to face charges. Since that is what anyone deserves who would deliberately try to harm an innocent performer such as Britney Spears. Britney Spears, a wonderful mother. Someone who has brought great joy, happiness and excitement to the people of Australia.

True, but these people are also easily identified(must have passport to get to Australia) and therefore it is easy to verify their name, place of birth and country of origin. It is also a snap to send them back on a plane from whence they came.

We don’t have this priveledge for boatpeople. First off, after they sink their boat in Australian waters it’s near impossible to send them back to Indonesia. They KNOW this, that is why they do it. It’s also very difficult to identify someones claims when they have a made up name, no passport or ID papers and you aren’t even sure of their country of origin.

Therefore the people that CLAIM Asylum at Australian airports(a majority that come by air have already been processed offshore and pre-selected by Australia to come here as refugee’s at OUR invitation) have a lower chance of success of being deemed refugee’s.

What you don’t want to do is encourage people to come by boat because they think they have a better chance of getting in, which is exactly what is happening at the moment.