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Masochists the winners at Tony’s secret launch
Volume 28 #12
August 27, 2013
Tamer and dumber Apart from the major diversion of Crazy Tony’s Indonesian Boat Sales, another interesting news item on ABC TV last week looked at whether or not the endangered Tasmanian devil is getting dumber in captivity. According to the appropriately-named Marissa Parrott of Zoos Victoria, many animals become less intelligent when bred in captivity, owing to ‘a brain size reduction’ of up to a third, as shown in pigs and horses. Apparently this could be due to the absence of a need to colonise environments and forage for food. Captivity. Civilisation. Similarities? While we are taught to see ourselves as distinct from animals, there is no reason to assume that a secure environment and food virtually on tap will not makes us dumber. (I’m talking first world, Facebook-enhanced civilisations like ours, not those benighted communities where life is still a battle of wits and where a lack of 24-hour vigilance results in being killed.) Once dumber, we become easier to tame. We establish boundaries across which the tame may not pass. Let’s call them heresy, treason and non-conformity. Religions built upon the words of leaders who may or may not have had temporal lobe epilepsy or schizophrenia – leading to vivid ecstatic visions – threaten the tame with expulsion from not only their society but also one in a putative afterlife. Nation states trash the rights of the ordinary citizen through the charge of treason when he or she – both pronouns appropriate in Bradley Manning’s case – threatens the higher-order status quo, for example, the ability to shoot unarmed civilians from an attack helicopter without retribution. Major corporations, having tamed us with sugar drinks and ‘reality’ TV, point out how dull life will be if we do not conform by buying more things we do not need. Non-conformity is converted in the hive mind to a ‘kookiness’ to be exploited by advertising agencies. But fear not. Climate change catastrophe is coming, possibly followed by another ice age. What doesn’t kill us will make us stronger – or at least a little smarter. Michael McDonald
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aunches aren’t what they used to be. In the old days the leaders launched their campaigns, as the word suggests, at the beginning, and they held big public meetings open to one and all in which interjections were welcomed, even encouraged. If there wasn’t a lot of movement, colour and noise and even the occasional punch-up, the occasion was adjudged a failure. And the launches were about something: the politicians were expected, nay compelled, to reveal a detailed policy covering all the important points they would take to the election. Such policies were often hard to cost accurately, and in any case in the times before deficits became anathema and surpluses sacrosanct, precise numbers were not considered vital: in all his years as prime minister Sir Robert Menzies never delivered a surplus and you don’t hear Tony Abbott excoriating the founder of his party for this appalling dereliction. Nowadays, of course, all the important policies were declared long ago, and, in Abbott’s case at least, the costings have been fudged or concealed and are likely to stay that way. The major launches used to take place within a day or so of each other, giving the voters and the commentators a chance to dissect and compare them before the real argy-bargy of the campaign got under way. And they were big news: all the radio and later the television stations covered them as a matter of course. But how the times have changed. These days the campaign launch is just another painfully staged event on the way to the polls – something of an inconvenience, actually, as it keeps
the leaders away from more telegenic venues and they are not allowed wear funny hats or molest babies for the hour or two that it takes. Any form of spontaneity is of course a no-no – the whole thing takes place in a hermetically sealed bubble, under the kind of security you would expect at a high-tech weapons laboratory. The exact time and place of Tony Abbott’s launch last Sunday was a closely guarded secret until the end: I could find no reference to it on television, or even Google, until Saturday night and even then all
These days the campaign launch is just another painfully staged event on the way to the polls – something of an inconvenience, actually by Mungo MacCallum we were told was that it would be somewhere in Brisbane. Presumably the stringently vetted invited guests, the ones to be patted down by a goon squad after passing through the metal detectors, were given a little more notice, but alas, my own invitation must have got lost in the mail; so I sat down in front of the TV to make what I could out of this pseudo-happening. Frankly, I would have rather been at the beach, or even at the dentist; but political journalism can be a cruel game. And it turned out to be all a bit déjà vu – much like Abbott’s launch in 2010. First we had Campbell Newman to tell us how wonderful he is and how Tony Abbott isn’t bad either; then Julie Bishop, who was actually quite funny about Rudd (she even told a mildly blue joke) before waxing lyri-
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10 August 27, 2013 The Byron Shire Echo
cal about Abbott; then Warren Truss, proving once again why Barnaby Joyce reckons he will have no trouble taking over the leadership of the National Party. And then a surprise, albeit one stolen from a previous campaign: as Mark Latham’s wholesome wife Janine was trotted out in 2004 to assure us that her man was really nice and kind after all, Abbott’s wholesome daughters Bridget and Frances wafted on stage to go all mawkish about their dad. Well, it was a relief after Warren Truss. And then finally the main
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event: the royal couple, Tony and Margie, smooched their away through the cheering crowds to deposit the dear leader on stage: where he spent just over half an hour telling us very little about anything. There is a story that the veteran radio commentator Eric Baume once concluded one of his diatribes by asking his producer what he thought. Well, replied the candid functionary, it was all bullshit. ‘Ah, yes,’ replied Baume, no whit abashed, ‘but it was good bullshit.’ And the same could be said for Abbott’s feel-good harangue, up to a point. That point was reached when, after the usual condemnation of debt, deficit, budget crisis and reckless spending he still did not have a word to say about his own gaping accounting hole, despite having added a lazy half billion or so to it
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in the course of his speech. At the time this did not matter much; he was among friends. The Channel Seven worm also showed general adulation, as did the station’s vox pop, which gave him seven out of ten. But on reflection, it would want to: surely no-one except supporters and masochists would have been watching. Even at this late stage, Abbott was still asking the voters to take him purely on trust – to give him a go, to try something different, change for the sake of change. The only real reason he was giving for the election of a coalition government was that it couldn’t be worse than the last lot. And the polls show that while this will almost certainly be enough, there are still lingering doubts; next day’s Newspoll showed a slight but perceptible swing back to Labor. An aberration, probably. But on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s great ‘I have a dream’ speech, surely we were entitled to more than just another wafflethon. Kevin Rudd, we are told (well, actually I happened to overhear it) is not planning his own launch until next weekend – with just a week to polling and, if history is anything to go by, the election well and truly won and lost. It is likely to be more like a wake than a call to battle. But perhaps that’s how politics is in 2013: lamentations for what might have been are to be preferred to the risks involved in vision and spontaneity. One of Abbott’s own themes was not to expect miracles. We don’t and we won’t. Like I say, it’s not like the old days. Q See Mungo’s video at
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Closing date for applications 4.30 pm Tuesday 24th September 2013 Byron Shire Echo archives: www.echo.net.au