Quick Shots - 30/Jan/2017

SMH Gets Cold Feet About Younger Leadership

The editorial at the SMH is always a bit off-putting.  This might be because the editorial team at the Herald are decidedly not on the ball and seem to focus on the stupid problems of the world. Take this one here.

It started in 2011 as the O'Farrell-Baird show. Mike Baird as treasurer did a good job and built enough of a profile that when he rose to Premier it was basically a one-man band. His transport minister then treasurer Gladys Berejiklian did well too, although her public profile was subdued. 

Now the state's voters have an even more mysterious double act: Ms Berejiklian as leader alongside right-wing quid pro quo Liberal deputy Dominic Perrottet. 

While the Herald supported the factional deal that elevated Mr Perrottet at age 33, the economist-lawyer is hardly known outside his party. Having toiled away in the backrooms of Finance for a few years, he has served his apprenticeship and will be the face of the NSW economy as Treasurer from Monday. 

But add in the relatively unknown freshman Nationals leader, Deputy Premier and Regional Minister John Barilaro, and it's a Neville Nobody leadership trio to most NSW voters. 

Throw in the absence of old guarders there since 2011 – Mr Baird, Jillian Skinner, Duncan Gay and especially the much-respected Adrian Piccoli – and the nation's key state suddenly has a second-term government on trainer wheels.

Got that? The editorial thinks they were okay with Mr. Perrottet until they realised he was 33 and therefore not even Gen-X, he's a Gen-Y/Millennial. Surprise! We're all getting old here.

Frankly, the problem with these people - Berejiklian, Perrottet and Barilaro isn't their age. It's their political orientation and ideology - but let's leave that for the moment. If we're going to play demographics, then it's worth looking at these people a bit more through the prism of a more contemporary Australia. 

It's kind of nice that both Berejiklian  and Barilaro are second generation Australians with migrant parents, even though they come form the conservative wing of politics. It's also nice that they're not Baby Boomers trying to preserve some imaginary status quo from the 1950s and 1960s. Imagine Perrottet to be the kind of Liberal that make you want to throw up - sort of like Tony Abbott - but to be honest I don't know anything about him except he's from the Right faction which generally means, anti-science, anti-progress, anti-intellectual, pro-stupid-development, pro-fossil-fuels, pro-stupid, in the pockets of Mac Bank and likely a career plutocrat. And that's a problem. The fact that he's 33years old, seems much, much less of a problem than the ossified neo-liberal econo-babble he's going to bring to the table in a bid to privatise everything that isn't nailed down; but the SMH editorial is worried about his relative youth. *Ugh*. 

Go figure.

What No Quid Pro Quo Looks Like

This TPP business is kind of strange. You wouldn't want it the way it was phrased, and based on what was leaked via Wikileaks, you really wouldn't want a bar of it if you're a sovereign state. There must have been a huge carrot in it for the non-USA countries that signed on for it, but alas Donald Trump has put the big kibosh on the thing and it's dead; dead in Washington DC, dead in Tokyo, and dead in the water in the middle of the Pacific as a result. 

The Japanese government had even gone to the trouble ratifying it, which is more than can be said of Australia; they had to talk down to their own big agricultural lobby in order to get it through, which is a bit like the National Party whacking the interests of the Australian farmers in order to get it through in Australia. It's hard to imagine, but that's kind of what it took. 

Anyway, Malcolm Turnbull floated the option of keeping the TPP thing going, even without the USA and it got showdown by Shinzo Abe. 

Mr Turnbull on Tuesday said he had spoken to the leaders of Japan, New Zealand and Singapore about how their nations could "maintain this momentum towards open markets and free trade". 

But in a swift rebuff, Japan indicated it was not considering any further action on the TPP, repeating Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's declaration that the deal was "meaningless" without Washington."The fundamental balance of interests is lost without the US."

Japan was "not thinking about an action with 11 countries" at the present time, Mr Hagiuda reportedly said at a press conference.

It's hard to see what was in the TPP that made it viable only if the USA was in it, but apparently that is the case from Tokyo's perspective. Of course, the first thing that came to my mind was how Turnbull's government absolutely shafted Abe's government over the submarine thing, and it was just a sitter to swing at the dead TPP's head and kill it, if Turnbull asked to keep it. In other words, "how are them French subs working out for you Malcolm?"

Malcolm Turnbull's not going to get any favours out of Shinzo Abe, and Abe's popular enough to outlast Turnbull. Turnbull might want to avoid talking to Abe at the next G-20, and that's if he lasts that long.

More On That Intellectual Bankruptcy

Here's An Example!

Right on cue, here's an article by Tom Switzer that illustrates my point.

It should be obvious to even primary school students that a war criminal is someone who has actually committed a war crime. More to the point, to equate a democratic leader who supported the toppling of a brutal dictatorship with the likes of the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge is a cheapening of moral language. 

One could oppose the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and still believe that Howard, like Tony Blair and George W. Bush, was motivated by good intentions. Saddam Hussein, after all, was a murderous despot who had invaded Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990 and subsequently defied about 17 United Nations resolutions. He also used chemical weapons in the murder of tens of thousands of Kurds in the north and the Shiites of southern Iraq.

Where do you start? Let's do this in order.
When the so-called 'Coalition of the Willing' invaded Iraq in 2003, it did so without a sign off from the UN Security Council. You might recall Collin Powell getting up and showing aerial reconnaissance photographs which purported showing Iraqis shuttling trucks loaded with Weapons of Mass Destruction. The UN did not say, "sure go ahead", they said, "no".

The point is, the 'Coalition of the Willing' invaded Iraq unilaterally, and for that John Howard has to wear the responsibility of co-authoring that disastrous move - a move so disastrous we're still reaping the poisoned fruits of those labours. This side of 1945, we do have an understanding that world leaders who unilaterally invade countries (no matter the goodness of intentions) are up for war crimes.

And as stupid as it is to repeat this here, this is why there is a legitimate argument to be made that George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard are war criminals by the very same ruler we use to measure such diverse people as Herman Goering, Hideki Tojo, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, and whoever else tinpot dictators in Africa we don't like. This accusation is expressly not, "cheapening of moral language" as Switzer argues; merely a logical ramification of the legal logic cast upon these other people like Herman Goering, Hideki Tojo, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic et al. To argue otherwise is an attempt to create one set of rules for the people in history we dislike, and another set of rules for leaders of English speaking nations to suit Tom Switzer's bit of sophistry.

As of the findings of the Chilcott Report earlier this year, it is no longer tenable to give the benefit of the doubt to GeorgeW. Bush and Tony Blair for their so-called "good intentions". To argue that Saddam Hussein had it coming - sans proper trial at the Hague which he did not get - and therefore his misdeeds justified the Iraq War, flies in the face of the principle of having War Criminals. If you think Saddam being Saddam justified the 2003 invasion, you're arguing that any nation can go invade another if it can form its own coalition of willing countries to participate because might and majority make their own right.

Clearly we in the Western World do not go by this thinking, and this is also why the world has such an elaborate institution as the United Nations with its Security Council to forestall such free-for-alls. You just can't have it both ways where Saddam is a War Criminal and George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard are not War Criminals, if you believe in the moral language of having war criminals in the first place. That leaves the legal defence of John Howard to the possibility that he was not part of the criminal conspiracy perpetrated by Bush and Blair, but merely a tag-along. That would make him a dangerous adventurer, which is no more admirable than a "War Criminal".

The thing that gets me is that all of this is simply logic. It's not a philosophical issue at all.It's simply the logic constructed by the types of conservatives in the past - like Winston Churchill - thought up with all this legal logic. The history altering event of 2003 was that the self-appointed leaders of the free world would throw reason together with caution to the wind and go rampaging into Iraq. To pretend otherwise is so intellectually deficient and dishonest it makes you wonder how the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald doesn't balk at it (yes you Darren Goodsir).

Anyway... Switzer decides to give himself a pat on the back - a bit unseemly but what the heck - and then goes on to say:

What Howard failed to recognise, however, was the adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Toppling Saddam, as many conservative realists (such as this writer and my friends Owen Harries and John Mearsheimer) warned at the time, was also fraught with the danger of unintended consequences.

Good God. Conservative realists? Really? As opposed to ordinary realists who opposed the war on principle, the Conservative realists who opposed it on the basis of the difficulty of fulfilling the rest of the mission, once begun? If you are going to bang on the morality of language to begin with, you'd think you would argue things on the principle of it, but no. Tom Switzer wants to argue a technicality that the mission itself was difficult, and that's why it was wrong. Switzer is saying if the Iraq War worked out much cleaner, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
He's dead wrong.

On top of which, if that were the case, then he is once again arguing that Saddam had it coming, and that's good enough for him - but heaven forbid those who would argue on principle that the invasion of Iraq was a war crime. That's the height of hypocrisy.

Then there's this bit...

The objectors to the honorary doctorate also claim Howard was a racist. Never mind his post-Tampa asylum-seeker standoff policies boosted public confidence in our immigration and humanitarian refugee agenda. So much so that the rate of legal, non-discriminatory migration from four corners of the world, including Africa, doubled from 2002 to 2007. When Malcolm Turnbull praises Australia as the global role model for border protection, he is paying tribute to Howard (and his successor Tony Abbott).

Look, John Howard landed himself in much trouble in the 1987 Federal election campaign when he said there were too many asian migrants. It took him a long time to rehabilitate his image, but those words were uttered and even in 1987, it was obvious that he was playing race politics to get ahead. That would make John Howard a racialist politician. If he is not one today, it may be because he's grown to be a better man since, but the John Howard of 1987 was rightfully spotted as a racist - and proud of it. These things are not going to get forgotten. If John Howard never wanted to wear the epithet, he should have had the good sense not to stoke those fires for a few votes more. Most famous people who are not racists, never get hung with the epithet. The fact that it landed on Howard speaks volumes.

As it is, his tacit non-condemntion of One Nation in 1996 only entrenched the view that he was still a racist, even after his alleged detente with the Chinese community. There is no way known you could argue John Howard was not a racist politician. Malcolm Turnbull can praise Howard for a multi-cultural Australia all he likes, but he'd be dead wrong too - it simply wasn't the way that historic discussion went. Once again, it is intellectually dishonest for Tom Switzer to present John Howard as this amazing champion of multiculturalism in Australia. He can try it on, but it's called lying.

And this is what we have as conservative commentary. Two bits of sophistry combined with moral outrage about the "moral language" ("egadz!") and an outright attempt to rewrite the track record of a man who was an unpleasant racialist politician, if not an outright racist individual.

John Howard richly deserves the opprobrium heaped upon him. That the University of Sydney with its crappy regressive culture would want to honour John Howard with an honorary doctorate is their business. In my books, nothing is beneath them. If Switzer thinks John Howard is so deserving of this honour, that's also his business. However, complaining about those who would object to this conferring of social capital is a bit rich. The public record is what it is; John Howard knows what he did; Switzer knows what he did; we all know what Howard did. Let's not pretend for a moment that it's not contentious to hand this man an honorary doctorate and praise him. It's this kind of game-playing sophistry and hypocrisy that makes the conservatives look so intellectually vacant in this country. If Tom Switzer is the leading light of these conservative thinkers, then they've really got a problem.

Just saying.

It's A New World Of Cinema

Australian Film On The Comeback Trail

It's taken 10years since the pit of despair leading up to the GFC, but the Australian Film industry seems to have turned around this year. I remember that pit, and long time readers would remember just how bad things got. Since then, the direct investment into film by the government has been rolled back substantially, while the high dollar knocked out the service industry side of the Australian Film Industry, but just as some flowers bloom in the desert at some point, Australian films had a bumper crop this year.

This has been a record year for Australian movies, which have collectively taken $84 million at the local box office, or 7.7 per cent of the total. That's the biggest result ever in raw dollar terms, and the best share since 2001.

What makes it truly remarkable is that just a year ago the local industry looked to be in terminal decline. 

In 2014, Australian movies accounted for just 2.4 per cent of the total Australian box office. Only once since 1977, which is as far back as the Screen Australia database goes, has it been lower; the 1.3 per cent share in 2004 makes that Australian cinema's annus horribilis. 

What's more, last year's result ($26.2 million) came on the back of a poor 2013 as well ($38.5 million, 3.5 per cent share). Had it not been for The Great Gatsby ($27.4 million), 2013 would have been a complete disaster.

You have to give credit where it's due, though it's hard to say just where it goes exactly. 

One of the reasons some of last year's Australian movies failed at the cinema was that people were given scant opportunity to see them. A week or two on a dozen or so screens with scant marketing barely counts as a release strategy when you're up against Hollywood movies on 500 screens with saturation advertising. But that's the fate of many an Australian movie. 

Those that cut through this year, though, tended to benefit from a wide release and hefty promotional spend. The Water Diviner went out on 299 screens, Oddball 289, The Dressmaker 384 and Mad Max: Fury Road a Hollywood-sized 542 screens. 

A wide release means a distributor can target their campaign around a narrow window of time, maximising bang for buck. Shane Jacobson did such a sterling job talking up Oddball it's doubtful anyone in Australia didn't know at least a little about the film by the time it hit cinemas.

But it takes a certain kind of product for distributors to have the confidence to go wide: an appealing story, star talent, good production values. This year's batch ticked those boxes, "but you can't reverse engineer it", says Screen Australia chief Graeme Mason. "If the distributors are spending millions of dollars – literally – putting it out there, they're not going to do that unless they see something commercially appealing in it."

So maybe it wasn't necessarily the quality, it was the marketing spend that backed a more palatable crop of films. In any case, you take any sign you can grab. Maybe there is a case to be made that Australian Cinema is at long last on the comeback trail. 

Paul Byrnes Still Sucks (Sun Still Rises In The East)

I find Paul Byrnes a terribly condescending moralist, mostly because his film cries in the SMH are more moral analyses than actual film crits. And so, he made a moral judgment about Sylvester Stallone and his films years ago, but for some reason he was moved to admit he was wrong about Stallone.

Stallone turns 70 next year and maybe this is a good time for me to apologise to him. For a long time, I thought he was just a meathead, like some of the characters he invented.
When I started writing about movies in 1984, he had become a poster boy for the American right. Ronald Reagan himself declared that Rocky was a Republican. Stallone had already made Rockys II and III, and he had done the first Rambo film, First Blood – which was actually pretty good. In 1984 he was paired with Dolly Parton in a country musical, Rhinestone Cowboy. Some wit declared it the meeting of the two greatest racks in show business. He was becoming a joke, but a very successful one. 

I think now that I was wrong. It's not just the phenomenal box office of his combined films, although that is a lump (more than $4 billion in grosses, adjusted for inflation). Stallone has had a major impact on the way movies are made now – in the way action montages are put together, the speed of the editing, the use of music. He has had an impact on how Americans see themselves, reaffirming their sense of right and might; he has redrawn the Hollywood map in terms of longevity, although he has had plenty of helpers there – from Eastwood and Schwarzenegger and all the other action has-beens who won't die, most of whom turn up in Stallone's Expendables franchise, another phenomenally successful Stallone idea that defies all notions of good filmmaking.

Ugh. Did you see what he did there? He's apologising for being wrong but still puts the boot in. You sort of wonder on what grounds the film critic has been endowed or earned such moral disdain for the practitioner - any practitioner - let alone Sylvester Stallone. I'm not a big fan of Stallone, but I've never held him in contempt or this low in a moral judgment sense. More so, I just don't get the impetus to give this mea culpa just because 'Creed' shows Stallone is still a decent actor given the chance. We knew that long ago, all the way back when the the original 'Rocky' came out. It's not some new discovery or revelation. 

If he's been dissing Stallone all these years even though he knew Stallone was a perfectly fine leading actor all this time, it strikes me as the height of intellectual dishonesty to mount such an apology. Paul Byrnes finally saw a movie with Stallone in it that he actually liked - and felt embarrassed enough to write an apology. It's truly pathetic. 

View From The Couch - 03/Dec/2015

The Shambolic 729 Days Of Abbott

Some time earlier this year, I simply gave up with Tony Abbott. He was doing and saying crazy stuff, and you could only really chalk it up to stupidity day after day. If you search this blog for 'stupidity' you will find it coupled with Tony Abbott at an ever increasing rate during his tenure as Prime Minister. You were left shaking your head most days and then you noticed your neck muscles were getting well toned because thanks to the Prime Minister, you were shaking your head so much. Now that he's gone, it seems redundant to be jumping all over his tawdry miserable execrable record, but Peter Hartcher is doing a five part series over at the SMH.

I was going to leave it until he was done before I wrote anything about it, but each day has brought fresh misery with its revelations. Here is today's revelation:

Malcolm Turnbull was nothing if not forthright in telling Tony Abbott his shortcomings. On one occasion, Turnbull found himself in an Adelaide pub drinking beer with a group of workers from the Australian Submarine Corporation.

Abbott, the workers told him, was an idiot. 

Of course he isn't, Turnbull replied. The man is a Rhodes Scholar with a degree in economics from Oxford University. He's actually very bright. 

The argument went back and forth for a bit till one of the ASC crew delivered the line that ended the argument: "If he's not stupid, why does he keep doing stupid things?"
Other ministers might have kept such an exchange discreetly to themselves. But Turnbull took it straight to the prime minister. 

The communications minister related the anecdote. He told his leader that it was important to explain things to the people, not be limited to slogans.
Yeah, yeah mate, was Abbott's response. If he was annoyed, he didn't show it. He certainly didn't heed the advice.

There are some disturbing points in that exchange that do need remarking. It is of course a universally accepted point that Tony Abbott did stupid things. The onus was on Malcolm Turnbull to explain how such stupid things weren't actually stupid - a feat he would not attempt - or the appearance of stupid things in fact obscured deep thought. He clearly could do neither because on some level, stupid is as stupid does, and just as a rose is a rose is a rose, stupid is stupid is stupid.

So Turnbull had to go back and tell Tony Abbott that anecdote; which is striking in its boldness, but also tinged with a surprise, a Eureka moment. Amazingly, we're told Abbott for his part was dismissive - "yeah yeah mate" - but also incapable of seeing how he looked to the world. Either he was dismissive because it came from a political rival and therefore he waived the message, or his narcissism was so strong that the anecdote simply did not register as a problem.

The other disturbing thing is Turnbull's defence of Abbott's intelligence rests upon his credentials. That surely a Rhodes Scholar with a degree in economics could not be stupid. Surely somebody with such credentials was actually very bright. We understand that Turnbull is very bright, and has been known to the world as being bright for a very long time, and he too is a Rhodes Scholar so he probably drew some kind of equivalence and assumed Abbott had to be bright. Maybe not as bright as the great Malcolm Turnbull, but certainly bright enough to be at the same table talking politics.

Today, we know that Abbott's Rhodes Scholarship had much more to do with political and ideological inclination than actual academic merit, so it would actually destroy the argument mounted by Turnbull that somehow the credential of having been a Rhodes Scholar was proof positive that Abbott was "very bright".

It doesn't exactly reflect all that well on the bright Malcolm Turnbull, that he even mounted the argument because what this tells us is that Malcolm Turnbull sees things in very categorical, broad terms. This is a man for whom the Ruddean 'programmatic specificity' would be an anathema. It also shows Malcolm Turnbull has a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance. That is to say, he can see Tony Abbott doing stupid things, but because he is aware of Tony Abbott's academic credentials, he is willing to pretend the stupid things are not stupid, and somehow there is a political program worth defending. But it takes an ASC worker to point out that stupid is in fact is as stupid does; and when this short-circuits his cognitive dissonance, he can't help but try to place the cognitive dissonance back onto Tony Abbott who is incapable of feeling the very same cognitive dissonance because he's actually politically stupid.

I point this out, not to further dump on Tony Abbott, but to point out the degree to which politicians operate under such cognitive dissonance, and what that might mean for policy. George Orwell's explanation was that through propaganda, politicians can argue white is black, truth is dead, ignorance is strength and so on. Reading the excerpt above, it seems far more likely that politicians argue white is black, truth is dead, and ignorance is strength simply because they are unaware of their own cognitive dissonance. The propaganda is merely a subsequent phenomenon.

Editorialising Failure

"He's Your Mate", Part 1004

God help us all, God help us all.
Darren Goodsir, the idiot editor of the SMH endorsed Tony Abbott on the eve of the 2013 Federal election. This is something I cannot ever let him live down. Any person with a functioning frontal lobe of the brain could see that Tony Abbott was not a fit candidate to be Prime Minister. There were the gaffes, the track record of dubious distinction, the 4 years as opposition leader whereby he provided nothing positive to the political discourse of this nation, let alone a skirt of viable policy. Instead Tony Abbott rode on the sentiment that middle Australia had enough of the ALP because ... well, these things he was screaming at the top of his lungs that had to be stopped - like asylum seekers on boats and instituting an Emissions Trading Scheme.

If you added it all up, there was no picture whereby you could deem Tony Abbott had any idea what or how he was going to go about actually governing. And Darren Goodsir, as editor of the Sydney Morning Herald no less, backed this man as leader of a party that frankly ignores science or evidence or facts, as a better choice because it would provide stability.

That's right, stability!

Thus it is my job here to point at at every turn that the SMH editorial complains about Tony Abbott's prime ministership, that I point out that the editor of the SMH was the one who thought this was going to be such a winning idea. As in, "Darren, he's your mate." 18months into this debacle of a government led by one of the most disastrously accident prone Prime Ministers in Tony Abbott, it occurs to Darren Goodsir that perhaps this is a "government by shambles". His words, not mine. You think so, Darren?

And the truly pathetic part is that anybody with half a brain would have told you that Tony Abbott as Prime Minister was going to be a spectacular failure. I wish I could say,to each their own poison, but in this instance I cannot, for Tony Abbott is ruining my day as surely he is ruining Darren Goodsir's day.

A Laughable Editorial

You Wanted People To Vote Them In, Darren Goodsir

Defence Minister David Johnston is in a spot of bother this week - amidst all the other crappy developments for the Abbott Government, like FOFA and dropping the $7 co-payment - for having described the Australian Submarine Corporation as being incapable to even build a canoe. That might even be true, if coming from a legitimate standpoint of cost and process. After all, we can always point to the crown jewel of the ASC, the Collins class submarine.

All the same, Johnston is in a spot of bother because basically it indicates the Abbott government won't seriously consider the ASC as an option for developing the next generation submarines. Of course nothing this government does smacks of anything remotely like impartial, so it's not like Johnston is a singular fuck-up of a minister in a lineup of otherwise excellent ministers. He is merely a minor gaffe-making minister in a lineup of ideological idiots who are way in above their shrunken heads.

Still, the Sydney Morning Herald editor wants to take him to task!

Defence Minister David Johnston is hardly displaying the qualities needed to oversee the subs decision, let alone his department. 

Senator Johnston has embarrassed Australia's defence forces, potentially undermined national security and lost the confidence of South Australians by saying he didn't trust the government-owned ASC - formerly the Australian Submarine Corporation - to build a canoe. 

ASC is involved in building three air warfare destroyers for the navy and maintains the Collins class submarines. 

Perhaps such a "rhetorical flourish" - his words and those of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, not ours - could be excused if it were an isolated embarrassment.
But the minister's performance has been substandard. 

Mr Abbott eventually will reshuffle cabinet, when he tires of defending the indefensible.
For the sake of appearing strong and stable, a sense of arrogance lingers around this government. This week the Prime Minister repeatedly refused to admit he made a statement promising no cuts to the ABC and SBS.

Note, the interesting tone of discovery in the excerpt there. It is as if it comes to the editor Mr. Goodsir as a tremendous surprise that there should be a sense of arrogance lingering around this government. I mean, really Mr Goodsir, you noticed this now, and not when they were in opposition and dared to go through an entire election campaign without offering up red of their policy? Perhaps Mr. Goodsir didn't find this arrogant but merely strategic (or politic), but most sensible people knew full well then that arrogance would be the hallmark signature of an Abbott Government.

What really hurts, given that Mr. Abbott went on to win that 2013 election, is that the Sydney Morning Herald openly supported a change of government to this pack of arrogant imbeciles. Why? Because a change was better than more of the same. It was as if the editor did not consider the possibility of a change for the worse - which alas has come to pass. Were we Hobbits, we'd cast Mr. Goodsir into the open maws of Mt. Doom, but no. We're here in Australia, governed by people with the sensibility of Orcs.

So it gives me great pleasure writing once more, you wanted this mob Darren Goodsir. You can't be complaining about their performance this early in the piece, especially over some throwaway line. It's only been 14 months. There is much, much more of this arrogance and recklessness and contempt of the public as well as their ideological opponents, still to come. This whole shmozzle of 14months in power is merely the entrée, the aperitif if you will, of this lousy government - a government you wholeheartedly asked Australians to vote in. Why, these people can't even craft a budget that gets through the Senate, 6 months since Budget Night. Thank you of the fine recommendation. The pity is that I didn't follow such crap advice and still somehow ended up with this unhappiness-making government.

Behold the emptiness of media persuasion. I blame stupidity.

Apologia

I bagged out the teachers of Tony Abbott in my previous entry. It was a bit rough on my part. Those teachers - whatever their degree or depth of their faith - didn't exactly set about to shape the youth that turned into "Prime Minister Tony Abbott" in the manner that he turned out. Doubtless those fine men and women are shocked at how misshapen their product is, and just how much harm he is doing to their reputation as educators. For that I offer my sincere apologies for my offence and my condolences for their sorrow and regret.

Sydney Morning Jokers

Comic Sans, Furious Backlash

It's only a font. But it is a seriously loaded-with-meaning font. After it made an appearance on the front pages of the Sydney Morning Herald, it has turned into internet fodder to mock the Sydney Morning Herald. Let's face it, the SMH has been going down hill for some time, and really did itself no favours by backing Tony Abbott at the last federal Election (yes, that again, but it's hard to forgive).

Since then Darren Goodsir, the editor has come forth defending his choice of font saying he was trying to illustrate how comical the idiotic answers were by the corrupt politicians. That may be true, and it is not for us pretend to understand the motivations of an editor who opts to go with comic sans on the front page. One thing that is abundantly clear is that Darren Goodsir clearly does not take the Sydney Morning Herald with all its history, prestige and standing all that seriously. For years the SMH tried to affect a dignified tone until it ran out of editors of a certain generation who could administer a high style. Through the 90s it gave way to a more vernacular, breezy style - so much so that when you read articles syndicated from the New York Times in the SMH, you're struck by how far down the style hill the Herald staff has allowed themselves to roll.

It's a shame, because the Sydney Morning Herald has already lost its important prestige paper size of being a broadsheet thanks to the decline of newspapers worldwide. In this context Darren Goodsir's choice is understandable but goes to show there really isn't much left at the Sydney Morning Herald that is high-minded or that which takes itself seriously. And if this is the big paper that stands apart from the already-dreadful-and lowbrow Murdoch papers, then the outlook on print media reportage in this country is pretty damn bleak. It's easy to see that Darren Goodsir and his choice to put comic sans on the front page is symptomatic of a wider decline in journalistic standards. It's not just his fault per se. It simply illustrates just how far things have fallen.

It's really quite sad because they used to be the establishment. Now they're pandering.

Body Without Organs Part 2

Thunderous Objections Continue

You know a document has hit some kind of mark if the people against it are lining up to make their views heard. One gets the feeling the journalists covering this document were all pretty aghast at what was being presented, straight-faced and brazen, to a greatly sceptical audience.

Peter Martin slammed it saying the underlying assumption is that the only way Australia can get back to surplus was through cuts while leaving the current tax system untouched, while it even answered questions it was not asked like drastically cutting the minimum wage.

Michael Pascoe was just as pointed describing its approach as "casual brutality". He also pointed out the notion that if the states ought to compete with one another, it would result in putting the states falling behind now in a worse position, not better; and that those states would end up having to pay more. Australia is - last we checked - still a 'commonwealth' and not a 'competition of states'.

Steve Keen was more in a demolition derby mood as he pointed out the fundamental stupidity of Australia worrying about getting back to a surplus now, given the context of the world economy. The fundamental assumptions underlying the very exercise seems to be dodgy, while the preconceptions going in were just as misguided.

I know from Pleiades that the AFR s not happy either calling it 'illogical hostility' and decidedly critical of the notion of abolishing key industry support programs. The AFR is also reporting that customers are taking action, protesting the four major banks for their support of fossil fuel investments. Some of these are major funds looking to allocate funds to companies and projects that are genuinely eco friendly. The Federal Government is flying into a storm with its contrarian position on Climate Change, and its stated desire to shut down all these green initiatives.

Basically there has been a loud chorus of boos from the press gallery, which probably doesn't mean much to the man in the high office.  But it's interesting to note some of this is spreading out to the world and will have consequences for Australia's economy. If you look at the document it appears it is not that different to the sort of position statement that might come from the US Tea Party, and it would certainly be interesting to see how this document looks when lined up with the Tea Party's position statement. After all, as Michael Pascoe points out, it appears Tony Abbott really wants to turn Australia in to a facsimile of America.

Gen-X Will Retire At 70

In amidst all the brouhaha about the Commission of Audit and its audaciously hostile report, was the gem that Joe Hockey announced that the pension eligibility will be raised to 70.

The line he drew in the sand?People born after 1965. That's pretty much saying Gen-X onwards. I was going to lambast him for being born in 1964, but it turns out he was born 1965. So if you're an old school mate of Joe's you can thank him for that gift. He'll be drawing on his generous Parliamentarian superannuation as soon as he leaves Parliament while some of his mates might never reach the age of drawing a pension. If there is such a thing as poetic injustice, it might just be in there somewhere.

If you thought demographics was crap, and that distinctions like Baby Boomers and Generation X and Generation Y and Millennials were just marketing brackets then the line in the sand drawn by the Treasurer might just give you pause. I've pointed out before that Generation-X were the first to get hit with HECS after the Baby Boomer generation went by on free Tertiary Education. It's really no mistake that the boom is falling on the queue just in front of Generation X, because the Baby Boomers are fitting up the social cost of their lives and their education and their retirement on to Generation X.

I don't know if this is going to work. 2035 is 21 years away, and there's a lot of politics to be played out between then and now. It's long enough for another generation to grow into maturity and look at all the social costs being passed on to the latter generations and tip the balance the other way. I've pointed this out before but the ALP is already coming into the next Federal election with a front bench dominated by Generation X, headed up by Bill Shorten. The script might be written, but this movie is far from shot, cut and mixed. :)

Oh, Let's Cut All of It!

One of things that got put on the table for cuts was Screen Australia. Naturally there was an outcry from the usual voices.

"Culturally it would put us back in the stone age," said John L Simpson, producer and founder of the film distribution company Titan View of the Commission of Audit's recommendation. "I thought that Australians had got over the cultural cringe, the idea that the only culture engaging with is the culture imported into this country, but that's what's going to happen. We'll be a cultural backwater if we don't invest."

"It would have a devastating effect on the Australian film industry," said film producer and director Sophie Hyde. "It's already a very underfunded industry. We do so much with the small amount that we get, but I think that would effectively decapitate it."

Robert Connolly, a filmmaker and former board member of Screen Australia described the recommendation as "catastrophic". He said that Screen Australia receives around $100m a year and has funded some of the most successful homegrown television of recent times. On 9 February, he said, "there was the INXS biopic and the Schappelle Corby one and there were almost five million Australians watching drama that Screen Australia had invested in.

You mean it would upset your gravy train perhaps?.

The people most vocal about it are the people who have received the most support from the funding bodies over their careers. Honestly I'd like to see all of it abolished just to see what would happen. I've got no love for film making in Australia any more, so I really don't care if it goes to the dogs. Heck, if I can't have it, let them not have it, is how I feel. Screw the bastards with their mouths firmly attached to the government teat and above all, screw the film bureaucrats. They can go find a job in another industry and work until they're 70.

Yeah, don't cut it in half, cut the whole damn lot.

He's Your Mate

Complaining Now? Wait Until It Gets Worse

Something I don't really like to leave alone here is the fact the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald Darren Goodsir advocated voting for Tony Abbott and the Coalition in the 2013 Federal Election. At the time, it made no sense and the editorial itself hardly had anything to commend for itself logically, let alone anything in the wisdom stakes. Yet, there it was in broad daylight. He was saying, don't vote for Kevin Rudd, vote for Tony Abbott for a change. A change to what? I ask you! To the worse, as it turned out?

What really pisses me off to this day is that when Rupert Murdoch and his bought minions were doing their best to bury Kevin Rudd's government, "fair and balanced" would have been to back the incumbents and not join in with the Murdoch press, like the so many intellectually barren sycophants that came crawling out to hear Tony Abbott's victory speech.

Of course "hindsight is 20-20", but if you're one of the Cassandras that saw this complete schmozzle we call the Abbott Government coming the only remaining delight we have is the delight we take in punishing Darren Goodsir for backing this dud government. Thus it is with great Schadenfreude that I present yet another instance of the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald having a whinge about the Abbott Government - yes, the Government they recommended because it would make a nice change.

 Let there be no bones about it. A levy, temporary or otherwise, is a tax, and if the Abbott government goes ahead with such a measure on middle- and high-income earners, it will be a shoddy way of trying to repair the budget, and will do little to improve the productivity of our economy.

The political hypocrisy of Prime Minister Tony Abbott contemplating such a tax, after explicit promises of no new taxes and three years of lashing Julia Gillard over her broken carbon tax pledge, is breathtaking. But it is more serious than this.

The Australian Industry Group and other business leaders are already warning that lifting tax rates will slow the economy.

Blah, blah, blah, and so it goes on for another 14 pathetic paragraphs, offering up reasons why raising taxes would be bad. It's totally laughable because we knew before the election that there was no way that the Coalition was going to be able to make their numbers work, especially if they were going to spend on things that they said they would. I would like to write "and hilarity ensued", but quite frankly, this is no laughing matter. If people thought the Rudd-Gillard government was dysfunctional, they haven't quite swallowed the fact that this is a mendacious, malicious and incompetent government.

The biggest irony of all is how the editor-in-chief of the Sydney Morning Herald no less thought that these people were fine upstanding people who would be able to make adult decisions and behave like adults. So tell us how all that has worked out for you Mr. Goodsir?

 

Didn't See It Coming?

I Told You They're Dumb

I love mentioning the fact the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald editorialised in favour of Tony Abbott's Coalition on the eve of the last election. In fact, the upper end of Fairfax management seemed fairly determined to see the ALP government get kicked out, so the actual editorial at the time seemed like Fairfax 'policy'. In that sense they were no better than Rupert Murdoch who was openly campaigning for Tony Abbott. I don't know which bit is the most galling - that the editorial argued for the Coalition or that they argued that line based on some imagined principle that political stability - no matter what the ideological framework in practice - was a better government than one riven with internal stress.

One month in we find the same editors bleating about the Tony Abbott-led Coalition government. Good god.

Then there is the ultimate excuse: ''It's a grey area.'' That is a surprise to voters who thought this problem had been settled and acceptable standards made clear. When there is doubt, surely taxpayer interest beats the personal one.

The Prime Minister's advice to MPs on Monday to ''err on the side of caution'' comes far too late. The only way to remove surprises and the need for excuses is to have an independent oversight of rewritten expenses rules that are not based on an honour system.

The Herald has put forward the Greens' national integrity commission proposal of last year as a template to clean up sports and racing; now is the time to revisit its aims to detect and investigate rorts among federal agencies, ministers and MPs.

Remember that the Coalition came to power because voters were sick of Labor governments betraying their trust through corruption, faceless men and broken promises. Abbott even promised to lead ''a government that accepts that it will be judged more by its deeds than by its mere words''.

Does this strike you as a bit much? It strains incredulity that somehow the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald did not exercise the same sort of parsing acumen in dissecting Tony Abbott's position, and so did not see that an Abbott-led Coalition government would in fact be a worse government than the ALP. If it wasn't stupid enough that they thought stability was a good enough reason to change, it appears they were too stupid to see that there was no way on God's earth that Tony Abbott was going to be able to do anything resembling what he promised. It's taken less than a month for us to find out that no, he didn't quite mean what he said about towing back boats, and no, the Federal Government won't be back in surplus any time sooner than the ALP government had projected a return to surplus.

Broken promises anybody? Do I hear a resounding chorus of complaint that used to greet every Gillard announcement? No. Quite simply, the Coalition were promising bullshit right through their run up to the election and clearly the newspapers did not stick it back in their faces, taking them to task. Couldn't they see that the Tony Abbott-led Coalition was a thought-free zone? An Anti-intellectual's party? A gathering of tiny minds fixed in aspic?

We knew that out here in voter land; and so would the editor of the SMH had he been reading the news - his own freaking newspaper - but somehow the editor seems to have not read their own bloody newspaper, or somehow managed to draw all the wrong conclusions. This is staggering when you stop to think about it, because I don't think I can ever remember a time when the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald  got it so laughably wrong as they have with their endorsement of Tony Abbott. It's positively comical that they're now complaining about the very government they endorsed after only one month!

It truly is pathetic what you read in the papers these days. :)

Paul Byrnes, You Suck - Part 1,001

The Worst Reviewer In Australia - Maybe Even The Whole Universe

From time to time I read Paul Byrnes reviews just to see how much I disagree with them. Sometimes I read them even before seeing a film, just to see what pisses him off. With the new Batman movie, it seems quite a lot.

I was going to wait until I saw the actual movie before I took a shot at this this execrable review, but the last bit reads thus:

I agree that Nolan's Batman is the best yet: more dramatic, more soulful, more realistic. Nolan is a much better director than the character has had before, and the trilogy fits together as a whole, but this final instalment is flabby, and some might wonder at the sensitivity of its metaphors. Comic book superheroes and baddies do not explain the attacks of September 11, nor the Wall Street crisis. The Batman did not save those people, and conflating his fictional power with real-world tragedies is a dangerous game.

Even in literary terms, Batman is not Lear, nor even Sydney Carton heading to the guillotine, no matter how seriously Nolan treats him. He's a 1930s-era response to the Depression, with a cape and a nice car. His retirement was overdue.

I find that thoroughly idiotic, myopic and willfully obtuse. The notion that Batman the character is not as important as Lear belies the fact that in the Big Now, people are more interested in the latest Batman movie than some production of King Lear somewhere on the planet. I don't say that arguing '5,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong', but rather, in light of the Big Now that has unfolded since 1970, where the sum total life experience of humanity is more with the living than the dead, surely a character like Batman is easily the equal of King Lear; and that this is the marvel of our contemporary world.

Yes, there have been countless productions of 'King Lear' through history seen by many eyes, and read in schools by even more; but it is likely that an even great number of eyes have been graced with Batman in its multitudes of incarnations. Going forwards, it may be the case that the fictional legacy of comic book characters will far outweigh the legacy of even Hamlet, the most important of Shakespeare's characters.

So, no Mr Byrnes, Batman is not merely the 1930s-era response to the Depression with a cape and a nice car. Batman is so much more than that. Just his 'nice car' is more than that.

The problem is that Paul Byrnes wants to leap to his conclusion so he's willing to totally ignore what's actually going on in the world, just so he can write that utterly incorrect last paragraph. I can only surmise from the manner in which he reaches his pre-designated conclusion, that he does so out of a desire to re-assert the hierarchical value system of entertainment and themes that stem from earlier prejudices. And the problem is that they are just that - prejudices on Paul Byrnes' part. Paul Byrnes still wants to believe in a hierarchy that asserts that literature is better than comic books and therefore movies sourced from Shakespeare are better movies than movies sourced from comic books. I'm sorry, but that's an antiquated view on what culture is, and where it now lives.

It's like post-modernism just flew right by him and he didn't notice. Or he only saw the blur of pastel blue and pink and thought it was a fad.

If Paul Byrnes thinks for a moment that the Batman movies don't offer any insight into the post 9/11 world and the various discussions about power and justice, wealth and the un-egalitarian economy, then he is clearly not watching properly. If it were any other person, I wouldn't be bothered in the least bit that they saw 3 movies and didn't get what was being discussed; but Paul Byrnes is the reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald! He gets paid to watch, and yet he does not see. If I had Gina Rinehart's money, the first person I'd sack at the SMH would not be the political editor but Paul Byrnes.

UPDATE: The tragic events in Colorado since the publication of the Paul Byrnes review and this rebuke of Paul Byrnes' review have rendered all this a bit moot. I think it is manifestly clear that the character Batman has cultural significance even today, when somebody like James Holmes carries out his elaborate massacre and then claims to be The Joker. The fact that a deranged mind out there is living the fantasy of The Joker and by extension Batman - and the fact that this is the prism through which we must understand his actions - leads us to conclude that the cultural relevance of Batman is far from over. I don't think it's surprising then that the Paul Byrnes review has been buried and hidden away deep in the SMH site.

News That's Fit To Punt - 30/May/2012

Julian Assange Loses Appeal

Here it is, fresh off the press. Julian Assange is going to be extradited to Sweden.

But his lawyer Dinah Rose, QC, asked the UK Supreme Court court for two weeks in which to consider the judgement and possibly to request that proceedings be re-opened as she believed part of the judgement was based on a legal question that had not been raised during the hearing and which she had not had a chance to argue on. She said this related to the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

The court gave Mr Assange a stay of 14 days on the extradition order so that Ms Rose could make the application. Mr Assange did not appear in court.
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n a majority decision of five to two, the judges decided that the European Arrest Warrant issued by Sweden asking for Mr Assange's extradition was legal and should be enforced.

If the court does not allow its proceedings to be re-opened, Mr Assange's only other legal avenue would be the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. If that court should agree to take his case, he would be allowed to remain in the UK until the hearing.

The scarier thing for Julian Assange of course is the likelihood that he is then swept to the USA where a Grand Jury indictment awaits him.

Mr Assange's legal advisers are believed to fear that if he goes to Sweden he could then be extradited to the United States, where authorities are considering a range of charges against him over Wikileaks including espionage and conspiracy.

American authorities link him to the case of US Army Private Bradley Manning, who faces court martial over 22 alleged offences, including "aiding the enemy" by leaking classified government documents to Wikileaks.

UA prosecutors reportedly believe that Private Manning dealt directly with Mr Assange and "data-mined" secret databases "guided by Wikileaks list of 'Most Wanted' leaks.

Nothing there we don't already know. Anyway, we should mark the moment where Julian Assange lost his appeal to be extradited to Sweden.

The End Of The SMH As We Know It?

Who'd a thunk the Kiwis were scabs?

Fairfax staff walked out at 5.30pm.

The move came as hundreds of journalists from publishers Fairfax and News Limited met with union officials at stopwork meetings today over ongoing concerns about jobs in the industry.

Fairfax plans to move the mostly sub-editing jobs from newspapers in Newcastle and Wollongong to Fairfax Editorial Services in New Zealand.

At 7pm, the company issued a statement saying it would continue to publish as usual and was disappointed at the decision to strike.

Well, that's dramatic. Of course it kind of makes sense in the way that all jobs can be out-sourced on some level. If I may, I would  submit that this is a bad decision. The moment you out-source a part of your business, it's a commitment towards a shorter corporate memory and opening the door to a potential nightmare in prcocess failure. A simple example might be Foxconn who, at arms length from Apple managed to do considerable harm to the Apple brand.

On the other hand, it is entirely reasonable to think that Kiwis can provide the same service as sub-editors in Australia with a much lower cost. If Fairfax thinks these are totally fungible processes, then you can understand how this is happening. Perhaps we as the public should be grateful they didn't send it to India or the Phillippines like the Telcos do it.

Hypocrisy Truly Knows No Bounds

...or rather, Hypocrisy they name is Abbott.

The government moved to gag the debate and Mr Thomson, who has always voted with Labor since being exiled a month ago, instead joined the other crossbenchers who, on principle, never support a gag motion.

The Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, and the manager of opposition business, Christopher Pyne, made for the doors but Mr Abbott was ordered back by the Speaker, Anna Burke, because it was too late to leave. His vote was counted.

Which is totally motivated by this little bit here:

The opposition does not want to ever accept Mr Thomson's vote, fearing it could create a precedent in which it may have to grant him a pair in case he takes extended leave from the Parliament, thus negating any numerical advantage it would achieve from his absence.

Mr Abbott has also been demanding the government never accept Mr Thomson's vote, claiming it is tainted.
Sitting in his office while the numbers were being counted,

Mr Abbott told the National Times Labor should refuse to accept Mr Thomson's vote just as John Howard used to refuse the turncoat senator Mal Colston's vote by having a Coalition senator abstain.

He said the Coalition would never be trapped into having to grant Mr Thomson a pair.

Kind of self explanatory.

This Craig Thompson affair has been pretty awful for the last 2years. it won't go away because the Coalition - in their retarded bully minds - think that if they can get Craig Thompson to quit, then there would be a by-election and hey presto, they get that seat and with it the government. What they don't seem to get is that the destruction of Craig Thompson's life through trial by media, as engineered by the Coalition, is going so far into questionable territory that it would taint an in-coming Coalition government for a long time. If Tony Abbott is  willing to do all this to an individual to get his way, then how safe can any citizen feel in this country?

It is true that the allegations against Mr. Thompson are pretty vulgar and scandalous (if you have that turn of mind) but so far charges have not been laid. Yet it is also true that Mr. Abbott is trying to turn Parliament into a kangaroo court and the execution room where death by public opinion is the sought means. His position goes from total disapproval of Fair Work Australia because it favours the unions, but a 100% acceptance of its findings against Thompson after a four year inquiry, during which while it was going on, he used the ongoing investigation as an example for how bad Fair Work Australia was.

You can't make this stuff up.

Same Shit, Different Day

More On Property Prices

As if on cue, there are two articles today in the SMH as if to soothe the mounting anxiety about property prices. Here's Ian Verrender trying to say that it's not going to crash dramatically, it's just going to go down slowly.

Among the biggest surprises was that Brisbane, one of the beneficiaries of the resources boom, led the housing market price declines with a 6.7 per cent drop in the year to the end of December.
Adelaide and Melbourne were next in line. But the biggest surprise was the pullback in Perth residential real estate, shedding a whisker under 5 per cent.
Unlikely as it may seem, Sydney was the best performer of all with a decline of just 2.7 per cent over the year. (OK, Canberra outdid Sydney with a 2.6 per cent drop but no one ever pretended it was a normal city.)

He then goes on to argue that these incremental slides down does not amount to a crash.The property market is deflating in an orderly fashion (a bit like the Greek default). But if I were in Brisbane, say and property went down 6.7 % 3 years in a row, that would be close to a 20% drop and I think that would be a massive correction downward that I would feel was a crash. Not to mention these figures are not adjusted for inflation. So... I guess it depends on what people mean by *crash*.

Leith Van Onselen (The name sure sounds like On-Selling to me) has this article here explaining why there's going to be a slow melt in the coming years.

Given that the NSW stamp duty concession expired on 31 December 2011, there is a high likelihood that demand from NSW first-home buyers will recede over the first quarter of 2012, creating headwinds for Sydney home prices and, by extension, national prices as well.

Tuesday's release of the Reserve Bank of Australia's (RBA) credit aggregates data also signaled more headwinds for the Australian housing market. Despite the recent 0.5 per cent cut in mortgage interest rates, Australian housing credit growth slumped to fresh 34-year lows, suggesting that households are becoming increasingly averse to mortgage debt

That sort of dovetails with the Professor Steven Keene analysis about credit deceleration. Even with lowered interest rates, it's hard to imagine there will be more people trying to get in than get out. Plus, when the Greeks finally face reality and admit they're defaulting and when China finally admits it is in financial trouble, one wonders how all this high pricing is going to stay afloat.

That being said, momentum in a market is an amazing thing. It can be very slow to respond to changing circumstances in reality. It's a little like the Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons that keeps leaping off the ledge, then looks down to find he has a long way to fall. Somehow momentum keeps carrying the coyote into gravity-defying moments.

Today's Funny Quote

Following on from yesterday's kerfuffle with Gina Rinehart trying to do to our democracy what private equity firms do to perfectly fine companies, here's this remark by an unidentified Fairfax executive:

''Anyone that wanted WA to secede, thought [of] using a nuclear bomb to develop better harbour facilities, does not believe in the science of climate change, thinks the mining resources tax was unfair, wants to import cheap Asian labour to help her make even more money and, most importantly, has no time for any views other than her own is not the ideal person to influence media in this country.''

That just about sums it all up, doesn't it?

News That's Fit To Punt - 01/Feb/2012

Citizen Rinehart

The richest woman in Australia, Gina Rinehart has set her mind on buying into Fairfax, the company that owns the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Age, amongst other mastheads. The response coming out of the Fairfax stables has been interesting.

Here's Michael West:

The Murdoch press is already favourably disposed to the Minerals Council view of the world while Rinehart's politics are said to be strenuously ideological in the fashion of her late father Lang Hancock. Rinehart control of the Fairfax mastheads could have a dramatic influence on politics in this country.
Any tussle, then, for the venerable Fairfax mastheads would entail not just economic considerations, but community and political issues too. These issues would play into the hands of the institutional shareholders who would no doubt demand recompense for parting with the major mastheads and the effect this could have on the attendant Fairfax transactional businesses, which feed off the enormous online traffic.

Apart from matters of price, then, there would be much focus on the likely direction of Fairfax editorial. And some ideas from Lang Hancock in his book, Wake Up Australia, provide some hints, such as how "we can change the situation so as to limit the power of government".

"It could be broken by obtaining control of the media and then educating the public," he wrote.

There were several ideas on how to gain control of the press. One was for Australian retailers to refuse "to give advertisements to any paper which did not support a change in the constitution to reduce government to an absolute minimum".

"Control of the press could also be obtained by several of the big mining groups banding together with a view to taking over one or more of the present giant newspaper chains which control the TV and radio channels, and converting them to the path of 'free enterprise'," he said.

That's pretty sobering. the SMH might be transformed into a broadsheet with even sillier, shallower, more fascist tendencies than a Murdoch rag. I think it would be the end of public discourse in Sydney.

Here's a link to what politicians think:

Political reaction to the news of mining billionaire Gina Rinehart's increased stake in Fairfax Media has been mixed with Opposition treasury spokesman Joe Hockey saying he is "comfortable" with the move.

But the Australian Greens have described the trend towards a handful of individuals owning swathes of the media as "dangerous".

Communications spokesman Scott Ludlam says concentrated media ownership by individuals means Australia is unhealthy for democracy.

Senator Ludlam says the national laws against concentration of ownership in the media are now far too weak after being "gutted by the Howard government".

The Greens Senator claimed Ms Rinehart has "indicated a desire to have more influence over national affairs" and that she had "campaigned against Labor's mining tax to protect her own commercial interests."

Interesting how Joe Hockey is merely comfortable. You'd think he'd jump up and down with joy at the thought that a right wing nutjob is trying to seize editorial control of the SMH.

For the record, this is Gina Rinehart's view on several subjects:

Mining tax:
"[The Minerals Resource Rent tax] damages investor confidence and renders formally attractive and value-adding projects less viable".
"One of the issues that needs to be tackled is the cost, risk and time lost on approvals, permits and licences before revenue can be earned, [which] has very greatly increased in Australia, making it almost impossible for small companies to carry and comply with such burdens," Mrs Rinehart said.
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"If our costs get out of kilter through excessive taxation or excessive regulation on top of our other high costs we already have, this is just making it more difficult."
Carbon tax:
"We must drop these taxes or we risk the bureaucracy becoming the only growth industry in Australia."
"After this unnecessary shock to investment and exploration the carbon tax (and MRRT) is causing, we should also demand from our politicians that they introduce legislation that requires a majority by referendum before they can introduce any new taxes or tax increases."

God help us all from this woman's political views.

Anyway, I note all this because it was interesting how the SMH kept spitting out bits and pieces about Rinehart today as the story unfolded. It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings and at the moment she's busy buying up shares.

Between An Angry Devil And A Poison Deep Blue Sea

It just gets worse and worse over in Greece and by extension, Europe.

All leaders of the euro zone are insisting that forcing private creditors to take a hit on Greek bonds constitutes a “unique” event, for fear of causing contagion. But spreads on Portuguese bonds are rising to alarming levels, and the outlook for Italy and Spain is still wobbly.

“An inability to tackle a problem the size of Greece inspires little confidence in the ability of the EU to tackle Italy and Spain,” says Sony Kapoor, head of Re-Define, a financial think-tank in Brussels.

Germany parried demands, from Mr Monti and others, to enlarge the firewall by merging the existing temporary European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and the permanent new European Stability Mechanism (ESM). This would enlarge the fund from €500 billion ($659 billion) to €750 billion. Mrs Merkel said the matter should be discussed in March, as decided in last December’s summit.

March, says Angela Merkel. The Economist suggests the investors should take more losses.

What is the best way out of this mess? Step one is to force private bondholders to take more losses. They have been treated with kid gloves so far because European governments insist the debt deal must be voluntary, thanks in part to a misplaced fear of triggering credit-default swaps. That must change. Discard the veneer of voluntarism and Greece can be tougher on its creditors. It should pass a law that retroactively introduces collective-action clauses into all domestic-debt contracts (making it easier to impose debt deals on recalcitrant bondholders). If it does this now there is still, just, enough time to organise a big, coercive, but orderly, restructuring of Greek bonds by March 20th.

So mark that date down as the date hell will break loose on the markets again. 20th March.

While I'm at it I think it's worth linking to this little thing from Boris Johnson.

Now in the old days, before the euro, there was a simple solution that allowed the Italians to keep producing cars of the same quality and to keep unit costs down. It was devaluation, and if you look at the postwar career of the lira (and just about every European currency) against the Deutschmark, you can see how it worked. As the mark appreciated, it was more expensive for Italians to buy a German car; and as the Italian currency fell, Italian cars remained a good buy in Germany. The tragedy now is that this option is closed off for the euro-zone members - and look at the Italian car industry.

Manufacturers can no longer use the lira to compete on price, and they are being utterly stuffed. Italian car sales fell 15.3 per cent in December, while sales of German cars grew 8.8 per cent. The Italians now produce fewer cars than the British do, and their markets are being relentlessly gobbled by Audis and Beemers and other beautifully engineered machines from Germany.

It is worth pointing out again that the Germans get a great deal out of the Euro for being the Euro in that it lowers the prices of their exports significantly; which is exactly why Angela Merkel is running around trying to save the Euro because the Germans stand to lose a lot if and when the Euro breaks up and they have to reissue the Deutsche Mark, and it appreciates like the Yen and suddenly nobody on the planet can afford German products except "the 1%". It might be cheaper to buy all of Greece than to keep haggling over its debt.

Property Bubble Babble

I know this blog has gone in weird directions at time in pursuit of interesting tidbits to do with the GFC, and I have to say one of the weirder aspects of the GFC has been the sustained property bubble in Australia. It's so weird, people are used to this bubble but as I pointed out yesterday, there's no real reason for Australia's real estate to be so much more pricier than other parts of the world. yes, it's really nice here in parts, but so are Greek Island Villas that come in cheaper than some flats in long-established suburbs in Sydney.

Anyway, I got this link from Skarp today which points out 4 reasons why there is a bubble going on, tangential to what the other fellow Professor Steve Keene says. Embedded in it is this link here, which is sort of prequel to the other link. The take away message is that it wasn't the non-recourse lending in America that led to the subprime problem, it was the extreme lending. Housing prices don't always go up, and in the long view of history, any tie that it does is an anomaly. There is no housing shortage as claimed by the peak bodies, and Australian banks have not lent conservatively as claimed, which feeds back into the recourse lending argument.

I do want  to point to this bit:

Rational discussion about the state of the property market is fraught. Many outspoken bubble deniers are conflicted by their interests in industry and government. Many – not all – are employed by, consult for, manage, and/or own organisations with a direct interest in maintaining the status quo of an overvalued property (land) market. These institutions are primarily commercial lenders, investment banks, real estate intelligence firms, insurance, real estate agents, Treasury, the RBA, vote-seeking politicians, and the mass media.

Skilled and intelligent specialists, trained in neoclassical economics in leading US institutions, did not see their enormous housing bubble until it burst in front of them with horrendous consequences. What makes Australia’s “experts” any more competent?

As investor Jeremy Grantham has noted: “Bubbles have quite a few things in common but housing bubbles have a spectacular thing in common, and that is every one of them is considered unique and different."

All this is to say it's worth looking at the Australian housing market with a good deal of scepticism. Even if prices don't collapse, it's hard to make a case that it's going to keep going up. If I were an investor, I'd be looking at another asset class.

The World Is A Con(spiracy)

Try This On For Size

Alan Greenspan was the consummate Reaganomic Federal Reserve bank chief of our time. What if he was secretly an un-reconstructed acolyte of Ayn Rand? That's exactly what Peter Hartcher is postulating in the SMH today.

So why is Greenspan opposed, as a matter of principle, to any attempt at reform? Four possibilities come to mind. First, he is senile. But although he is 85, his statements were not the product of a wandering mind. Second, he is in the thrall of the big banks that oppose change. But while he has been taking handsome speaking fees from them in recent years, he has never been interested in money, selling his profitable Wall Street business to work at the Fed on a relative pittance.

Third, he is a blind ideologue who will not concede that any regulation could be good regulation. This is entirely possible. But he knows full well the terrible damage he inflicted on his country.

Or fourth, he is not a fool but a fox, playing a double game.

Greenspan's view is so absurd that it tempts us to wonder. In 10 days we will see the premiere of a movie of the Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged. This cult 1957 novel is a warning against government intervention, a sermon on the virtues of laissez faire, and a reminder that Alan Greenspan was once a close acolyte of Rand and her Objectivist movement. Her 1966 book Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal included an essay by Greenspan on the virtue of the gold standard.

The young Greenspan advocated a return to a system where a government could only issue currency backed by a physical hard asset - gold. He wrote that "gold and economic freedom are inseparable". He derided the current system of fiat money, where a dollar is backed by nothing more than a government promise to honour its debts, as "paper reserves".

In Atlas Shrugged, the libertarian heroes smoke cigarettes branded with little gold-coloured dollar signs. It's unsubtle. The cigarette represents freedom of choice over government regulation; the dollar sign is a campaign message for economic freedom in the form of a gold standard.

It has often been observed that it was ironic that Greenspan, a leading critic of the paper money system, went on to become its chief, his signature appearing on every dollar bill.

But maybe it wasn't historical irony. What if Greenspan never did change his view, instead covertly dedicating his life to destroying the system he so despised? Could it be that he remained a secret agent of Ayn Rand all these years?

Talk about wild speculation. Long time readers would know that I've had a high opinion of Mr. Hartcher in the time I've been keeping this blog. He's always struck me as astute and level-headed to the point of boring. It's nice to see that he actually has a wildly imaginative side. This is the stuff of conspiracy theories and spy novels. We may never find out for sure, but if it's true Greenspa might have been a mole for the ideological lunar right all these years. If not true, then we have to face the other 3 possibilities - that he is senile, greedy or caught up in his old ways - none of which seem unreasonable in of themselves. That being said, it's a remarkable bit of connecting the dots. Ayn Rand to Alan Greenspan to Gold Standard vs. Fiat Money and the Fed to Cheap Credit and Low Interest Rates to Global Financial Crisis. The guy in charge was the guy trying to destroy it all. It wasn't the butler, it was the chief banker at the Federal Reserve!

It's all pretty good and makes for a gripping conspiracy theory-in-the-making. I think Mr. Hartcher missed April Fools by 4 days.

The Lady Deserves A Beating

Sexism? I think Not

Kristina Kenneally may not indeed be the most odious Premier of NSW. It is a point I must concede. After all, Robert Askin sounds like he was as crooked as they come, and Bob Carr seems like one of the most insufferable human beings a man could meet. Nick Greiner left such a slimey impression what with his board memberships on so many dodgy PPPs, and Neville Wran was... Neville Wran.

The point being it is entirely possible she has not been the worst human being to grace the position of Premier of NSW. However, this puff piece had me choking.

During Verity Firth's husband's ecstasy scandal last week, Keneally's staff almost fell over laughing when asked if their boss had dabbled with drugs. She similarly fails to grasp sexual innuendo during office banter, they say.

For all these reasons the Premier is likely to recoil, rightly, at the disturbingly sexist view of her that has arisen in focus groups assembled by the Liberal Party.

A senior Liberal source says a theme has emerged, particularly among male voters, that can be boiled down to: Keneally is the one-night stand who was fun at the time but insisted on hanging around the next morning, even though you wanted her to leave.

It's always hard to know if selected snippets of internal polling like this reflect the true results or, more likely, illuminate one element for damaging effect. But there's no argument that opinion polls showed voters had an immediate attraction to Keneally when she took on the job from Nathan Rees in December 2009.

''It was a flirtation, or some sort of infatuation,'' the senior Liberal said. ''She's obviously attractive but it was more than that; it was a novelty to have an American as premier - an American woman as premier.''

Almost everyone is surprised by how hard and fast Keneally fell in the polls when the love affair ended - to the extent that she now lags the Liberals' Barry O'Farrell by 20 percentage points as preferred premier.

If people believe they've somehow been taken in by Keneally, that's their view, fine. But our first female premier deserves better than being objectified because of her gender.

The last bit  is nuts. What she deserves is the line from 'Unforgiven', "deserve's got nothing to do with it." along with the electoral bullet to put her out of her misery.

But before getting to that point, here are at least 2 problems of Kenneally's own links to scandal that this article glosses over. Number 1 is of course just how deep her dealings with Ron Medich (and the whole corrupt dealing aspect of Medich's empire) actually go, and number 2 is the allegation that the Barangaroo contract for car parks benefits her husband Ben directly. So no, it is not true to say she is scandal free herself.

The four women who marched in to replace Nathan Rees with Kristina Kenneally as Premier, if I recall correctly were Verity Firth, Angela D'Amore, Carmel Tebbutt and Virginia Judge. Of these 4 MPs, Verity Firth's in this drug scandal with her husband even if she had nothing to do with the said pill; Angela D'Amore has since been found to have been corrupt and been kicked out of the ALP; Virginia Judge has been accused of handing out grant money to her mates; which leaves Carmel Tebbutt the only one free of scandals.

I think the electorate has actually been highly supportive of the politically correct/anti-sexist line to the extent that when these women engineered the first female premier of NSW - though unelected she may be - the electorate perhaps was willing to give her a go. Okay, it's true, I made a commitment to never vote for her government - one which I will keep - but other people around me have been umm-ing and aah-ing. They've told me they like the reality of having a female mayor of Sydney, a female Premier of NSW, a female Prime Minister and a female Governor General, plus a Queen.

In other words, sexism isn't what's going to kick Kristina Kenneally out. In all realistic appraisal, when Kristina Kenneally's government does get voted out on 26th of March this year, it would be because of the collective shenanigans of all the NSW ALP members and staffers. That she contributed very little to the parade of scandals is not going to persuade people to keep this NSW government. Any argument mounted in favor of Kenneally's government should face up to that daunting, brutal, frank reality.

In that light, the article was one of the dumbest things I've ever read in the SMH in a long time.

Character Assassins 'R' Us

Strange Fortnight From SMH

What has the Hon Prime Minster Kevin Rudd and Socceroo Harry Kewell have in common? Both had scathing things written about them by journalists which, no matter which way you read them you wonder how the writer came to such outrageous conclusions. First off there was David Marr with his long article here.

Marr famously kicked it off with a mention of the phrase 'rat-fucking' and then went on to wind through Kevin Rudd's emotionally challenging childhood to come to the conclusion that what drives the Prime Minister is anger. This bit caught my eye:

"He doesn't trust his advisers to give advice, so they become glorified research assistants. Because everything is on the go at once and he's interrogating the detail of everything, nothing comes out until the last minute. Bringing work to a conclusion was focused around the next media hit. He loves an announcement.

"He is a strange beast behind closed doors. He is so focused on the day-to-day tasks that he loses the social niceties. They are neither here nor there. Staff are interrogated beyond what's reasonable to expect them to know. And if you don't know, the atmosphere changes. Not a blow-up. It becomes very quiet. But he doesn't deliberately push his staff to this point.

"For all the effort, he doesn't come up with particularly interesting solutions to problems. His policy positions aren't breakthroughs, not particularly new or exciting. After all that work, they are dull."

That above could possibly be accurate (or totally inaccurate). The problem is that it is not attributed to anybody, and it's a pretty damning opinion of the man's work at the end. In all honesty, I would hate to b damned by such hearsay, so even if it were true, the lack of attribution is a bit of an issue for me. This next bit of opinion spinning ad hominem stuff had me seriously wondering:

If Australia saw him through Canberra's eyes, he would be done for. Though he has led until now a formidably disciplined first-term government - few leaks, only one minister lost - negotiated the global banking crisis of 2008 with exemplary skill, pulled off the great symbolic coup of the Apology and routed two opposition leaders, the capital is tired of him.

He's seen in that little world of power as a weird guy and a failing prime minister. He puzzles his caucus, frustrates his ministers and irritates the press. A habit of making endless speeches at big public events has earned the man - known at various times in his career as Dr Death, Pixie and Heavy Kevvie - a new nickname: the Castro of the South Pacific.

Colleagues from his time as the key back-room boy in Goss's reforming government have an old joke they trot out whenever they meet to talk about those days of high hopes and disappointment. They don't remember him kindly. The joke: Rudd is a creature from outer space. The proof? Who but an android would say so often, "I am only human."

What's really worrying about this is that none of this concluding section of the account has any substance worth spit. Yet here are three paragraphs that are essentially bagging the guy in the name of reporting on how other people bag the man behind his back. It's hard to tell how this serves as journalism or serves political discourse in this country. David Marr went on to talk about his encounter with Rudd here. Kevin Rudd went ballistic at David Marr, and David Marr took that anger as proof that Kavin Rudd runs on anger.

Kevin Rudd's riposte this week was that it wasn't so much anger but incandescent rage that drives him. And that he has a long memory.

Now, I'm no Kevin Rudd fan. I understand he got voted in because of who he wasn't more than who he was. I preferred Mark Latham as leader of the ALP, and I don't really understand why Mr. Rudd likes making moralistic opinions on art be heard through his office as Prime Minister. The man is a joke when it comes to understanding the transgressive nature of good art. Even so, David Marr's article is as unfair on Rudd as Rudd was unfair on Bill Henson - and maybe that's why Marr did it - but I can't prove it. Whatever the case, it's a very misguided piece.

Then, there was Michael Cockrill is covering the World Cup over in South Africa, and after Australia's dismal loss to Germany, filed this article about Harry Kewell.

On Saturday (midnight, AEST), in Rustenburg, he gets the chance to prove he's got something left to give. At times in his career, Kewell has been a genuine star. And his long, arduous battle to keep his body together remains a tribute to his bravery, and resilience. But he's never been able to accept his diminished circumstances. Instead, he's chosen to deflect the scrutiny with hype. Kewell Inc is on the way up. Kewell, football player, is on the way down. And has been for years.

Now there is nowhere left to hide. If he's got any petrol left in the tank, he's got to show it, against Ghana. Preferably by starting the game, and finishing it. Preferably by providing a point of difference. Preferably by giving glimpses of the Harry of old. Anything less, and there's no more excuses. None.

If the Socceroos lose to the Black Stars, they're out of contention. With a new coach coming on board, there'll be a broom swept through a squad creaking at the joints. Believe it or not, Kewell is likely to be part of the clean out. A few years ago that was unthinkable. But a few years is a long time in football. 'Our Harry' knows that better than anyone.

Again, here's a bunch of statements about a man that has no attribution or evidence.

Now, you all know I hate soccer and Harry Kewell's stardom is neither here nor there for me, but it seems the guy has done more right for the cause of Australian Soccer than he has done wrong (or ill). He's been a stalwart, at the edge of his endurance at times. The characterisation here is that he's a prima donna who doesn't know he's washed up.

Naturally, Harry Kewell reacted with incandescent rage, and called out to Cockerill to show his face. Cockerill responded with this tart and nasty little article.

HERE I am Harry, where I was always going to be and where I'll be for the next few weeks. Covering the World Cup.

Not covering you, exclusively, I must admit. I like to get around. On Wednesday afternoon, when you seemed to be rather upset that I wasn't squeezed among the press pack at Ruimsig, tape recorder in hand, I was actually in Pretoria. Months ago I applied, and received, accreditation to report on South Africa's game against Uruguay. You can check if you like.

Perhaps if I'd known you were going to front the cameras - we're not generally told who Football Federation Australia are ''putting up'' in advance - I would have changed my plans. Come to think of it, no I wouldn't have.

You see, Harry, I spent a lot of years, a lot of energy and a lot of effort chasing you for quotes around the world. I was there when it all began for you in 1996 - in fact, I was there a long time before that - and I'm still here now.

Ninety per cent of that time, you've blanked me. The last time, four years ago in Yokohama, I made a decision there wasn't much point in the charade any more. Something I conveyed, quite clearly, to your manager, Bernie Mandic. So you got on with your life and I got on with mine. That's fair enough. There's plenty of athletes and plenty of journalists who don't get on. Nature of the beast and all that.

Except he wasn't there to take the anger (nay, incandescent rage) from Kewell. And he won't turn up to take his well-deserved beatings from the man. He's just talking tough from behind his keyboard, protected by the reputation of the Sydney morning Herald itself. Kewell's management issued a statement pointing out the actual errors in Cockerill's original article.Here's an example of one of the points rebuked and it's interesting:

Today you wrote that I told you, ''the football media was a joke, utterly irrelevant''. Again you are playing with the truth. Not only is the location of the conversation wrong but you have conveniently left out that I was speaking specifically about Australian newspaper journalists that cover soccer and quoted what Rupert Murdoch said about newspapers in general - ''Only 9 per cent [of the people] describe us as trustworthy, a scant 8 per cent find us useful, and only 4 per cent think we're entertaining (14 May, 2005).''

Yes, one does wonder about journalists, as does Harry's manager Bernard Mandic.

In both instances, one wonders why on earth the editor at the SMH thought either one of these character assassinations were worthy pieces of journalism to print, because in both instances the subsequent discussions have devolved into fierce rebukes and slanging matches. It's this kind of thing that's lowered my opinion of the SMH even more.

David Dale Is My Hero

Staying In Touch (With Trivia, With Style)

Growing up in 80s, the most fun part of the SMH was the backpage of the main section where David Dale held court with his 'Stay in Touch' column. The SiT column covered bizarre news snippets from around the world - the sort of weird-ass news that comes in the AP 'Oddly Enough' wire. It most probably was the AP Oddly Enough wire to which he had access and we were not to know it back then, but all the same, David Dale made the silly parts of the world and its affairs a must-read everyday.

When I reflect on it further, the tone of this blog might find its roots in the tone of SiT columns of the 1980s, in which case David Dale would be my spiritual father of journalism. Sometime during the time I dropped out of Med School, he left the Herald to go edit The Bulletin where he was criticised for bringing his style of whimsy to a 'serious' publication. I never bothered to read The Bulletin under his editor-ship which goes to show any artist or journo performs as a function of his/her context.

Anyway, today I noticed I clicked on 2 articles by the said David Dale and enjoyed them both so I thought I'd link them here.

The first is his observation about Nathan Rees.

In just eight weeks as NSW Premier, he has said two gloriously unpredictable things: that his favourite book is Paradise Lost, published in 1667 by the puritan poet John Milton, and that if you think you are in love, then you are in love (said last week when discussing traffic).

That's two more surprises than Morris Iemma gave us in three years as premier (unless you count his resignation). It is starting to look as if we might have an interesting person running the state and, in my book, that's much better than having a competent one.

If we're honest, we elect politicians to entertain us. Canberra and Macquarie Street are soap operas, sometimes overlapping with crime thrillers and screwball comedies. The public service can do the grunt work. The job of politicians is to engage our emotions and inspire our imaginations.

State politics throws up too few eccentrics. The finest in the past 20 years was the mercurial Jeff Kennett in Victoria, who revealed only after he retired that he suffered from depression.

In NSW, Bob Carr never felt the need to justify his preference for Roman history over football. I ran into him once on a bus that was taking people round Sydney's museums. He said he was late for his official duty of launching the museum tour because he'd been watching a TV documentary that proved it was not Nero who set fire to Rome but Christian terrorists trying to bring down the empire. Carr couldn't stop talking about it.

Nathan Rees's fascination with Milton ranks with that. Paradise Lost tells the story of Lucifer's attempt to organise a revolution by the angels in heaven and overthrow the dictatorship of God. God wins and banishes Lucifer and his freedom fighters to the underworld.

Milton clearly had sympathy for the devil. Lucifer is the most interesting character in the narrative. The illustrator William Blake said Milton was "of the devil's party without knowing it" - which may reveal something about Rees's continuing relationships with some Labor powerbrokers.

Quotes we should expect to hear soon in Rees speeches: "Better to reign in hell than serve in heav'n" and "The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a heav'n of hell, or a hell of heav'n". Sounds a lot like NSW to me.

Eccentricity is underrated as an incentive for voters. Gough Whitlam was the first of the Great Unpredictables, because his brain overflowed with ideas that didn't fit within standard political rhetoric. His divagation on the pronunciation of the word kilometer ("The versifiers among you have always used pentameters and tetrameters, and you've got a pretty fair diameter and perimeter yourself") makes Rees look positively pedestrian.

The bounding joviality in his writing is infectious and it actually threw me back to my teenager revelry just reading it. I don't know what to make of Nathan Rees as of yet, but I'm already positively disposed towards him as a result of reading this article. It may be the case that David Dale has made the unpalatable, palatable; but there is much to be said for a column that can persuade on the strength of its wit, and this is the essence of David Dale - he's one witty bastard.

The second is a regular column of his current column, 'The Tribal Mind'.

Australia's top-selling DVDs (first week of October): 1 Supernatural Season 3; 2 Horton Hears A Who; 3 AFL Premiers 2008 Hawthorn; 4 Two And A Half Men Season 4; 5 Heroes Season 2 Digipack Box Set; 6 Two And A Half Men Season 3; 7 Heroes Season 2 Slimcase; 8 Two And A Half Men Season 1; 9 Beverly Hills 90210 Season 5; 10 Happy Feet.

Only two of the 10 are movies. One is a sports documentary. The rest are TV shows. And therein lies the mystery: why are three of the 10 best sellers based on a TV show which Channel Nine is already showing for five hours a week, two of them from a show Channel Seven is showing for an hour a week and one from a show Channel Ten is showing for an hour a week?

This is my speculation: it's because there is no longer any trust between viewers and TV stations. The fans of Two And A Half Men, Heroes or Supernatural are thinking: "Yes, they may be showing it now, but any minute they'll cancel it, move it to late at night without telling me, play it out of order or interrupt the sequence with old episodes. The only way to be sure of seeing it in the correct order, when I want to, is to buy every possible DVD. And then I'll never need to watch TV again."

Of course, no blockbuster movies were released around the time that chart was compiled. The top 10 a month from now will no doubt include Iron Man, The Dark Knight, Sex And The City, and Indiana Jones And The KIngdom Of The Crystal Skull. But if my thesis about the breakdown of trust is correct, the remaining six next month will still be TV shows.

Interesting how he never pulls punches. One has to admire a guy with much spine and I suspect the one thing about David Dale is that he;s not short of spine. I like that. A couple of years ago, he made the astute observation that not even the top grossing Australian films at the Box Office were making a profit, and promptly got rebukes, but he's been right all along.

Anyway, I thought I'd fly that out there, just because it hit me today, just how much I still get a kick out of reading his columns after all this time.