A column about quokkas

Wikipedia tells me that the quokka (Setonix brachyurus), the only member of the genus Setonix, is a small macropod about the size of a large domestic cat. And the only reason I know this is because the poor animal became this week the latest twist in the strange saga of Troy Buswell.

No situation better illustrates the terrible plight in which the Liberal Party finds itself in 2008 than the hapless WA Opposition Leade,. On taking office earlier this year, he was forced to admit to snapping the bra strap of a Labor staffer during a drunken party in Parliament House. Last month, he confessed to having sniffed the chair of a Liberal staffer. This led to a leadership spill, and, in what can only be seen as an indictment on every other MP in his Party, he survived.

How does this lead to the quokka? Well, he was accused of drunkenly playing ‘quokkaball’ along with a bunch of his fellow MPs. It turned out to be a hoax started by a blogger, which was good news for the poor animals, which were endangered enough as it was. And I’d argue that it speaks poorly of Buswell’s reputation, rather than of the journalistic standards of Australian newspapers, that the allegations were printed.

And yet despite all this, Buswell’s approval rating remains higher than Brendan Nelson’s. Really, Nelson must be tearing his hair out in frustration. And that’s probably a good thing – it would only improve it.

There is effectively no political competition anywhere in Australia at the moment. So politics junkies must turn their interest to America, which has conveniently turned on a compelling contest. Sure, it’s about time the campaign shifted gears to being a competition between the two parties that will actually contest the election, instead of between the two leading Democrats. But reflecting on the Obama-Clinton epic has made me reflect on something Troy Buswell would do well to learn. In politics, there is one important principle that virtually no-one gets right. And that is that it’s crucial to know when to leave.

John Howard, the most successful politician of his generation, made a hash of it. He won four elections, and dominated the country for eleven years. But he failed to realise that the tide of public opinion was finally turning irrevocably against him. Much as Troy Buswell has failed to realise that there is no way the voters of Western Australia want to be led by a person for whom a recently-vacated chair represents an irresistible sexual opportunity. There was no way back for Howard, and there’s no way back for Buswell. When you’re gone, you’re gone. And if I may be so bold as to offer a tip to those readers who may be considering a political career, the day you issue a press release denying improperly interfering with a quokka is the day you should be issuing a press release announcing your retirement, effective immediately.

So too, Hillary Clinton is rapidly eroding what little goodwill remains towards her in American politics by refusing to abandon her campaign to tarnish Obama’s reputation. There is now practically no way she can defeat him for the nomination, yet still she refuses to depart gracefully. There was a time when she had a genuine chance of sealing the Vice-Presidency to form the much-vaunted “dream team”, although of course her dreams had the ticket in a somewhat different order. But now even if she gets it, she is guaranteed an icy relationship with her boss. As another strong woman, Gretel Killeen, once said, it’s time to go, Hillary. It’s been great. Actually, it hasn’t. But in any event, vacate the house immediately or we’ll send in the security guards.

There is only one situation in politics when the writing is on the wall, and yet retirement is not the right option. And that is Brendan Nelson’s. Clearly, he will never be Prime Minister. But he can serve as Kevin Rudd’s punching bag for a few years yet, perhaps even through an election, until the next Liberal with any credibility as an alternative Prime Minister emerges. Kevin Rudd needed a Kim Beazley to soak up the blows, and while Nelson won’t win an election on popular vote the way Beazley did in 1998, it’s not yet time for him to leave. Brendan Nelson’s party needs him in the job, and the rest of us do as well. Because while he is Opposition Leader, there is no technical way that Tony Abbott can become Prime Minister. And for that reason alone, he must stay.

A column about this land Australia

I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains and all that. And I’m often heard banging on about how much I miss the Aussie bush when I’m trying to impress foreign women in an overseas bar. But the truth is that like most of the readers of this newspaper, I’d wager, it’s not often I’m willing to leave the comforts of inner-city Sydney.

Sure, I regularly travel to Melbourne – which, like most Sydneysiders, I view a kind of younger brother who’s a bit trendier than me, but ultimately not as important. But that hardly counts. The truth is that there’s a whole country out there that people like us never go to.

Well, this year, all that has changed for me. Because my colleagues from The Chaser and I have travelling to most of Australia’s biggest towns to perform a stage show. Already, we’ve been to North Queensland, Canberra, WA, Ballarat and the Top End, and I’m writing this from Tassie. So, what is the real, outback Australia, the part we city-slicker types never go to, actually like?

I’ve got no idea.

Oh, I thought I’d be donning an Akubra and sifting red earth through my hands as I stared out across the vast expanse that is the Aussie outback. But what I’ve actually been doing is staying in identical hotels in identical towns. Unfortunately, Australia’s smaller cities and bigger towns tend to blur into one, right down to the slightly sad-looking paved, red-brick malls they all built in the centre of town in around 1987.

But I have learned a thing or two out there on the road. Not about how to wrestle crocodiles or anything. But I’ve spoken to some real Australians in the past couple of months, and the first thing I learned is that they are generally bloody friendly. Walk into a café in Newtown or Glebe, and you’ll generally feel that the waiters wish you’d hurry up and vacate your table for someone who’s a bit more trendily dressed. Whereas out of Sydney, I’ve found people incredibly chatty and helpful. One guy in Townsville even ran me and a few friends down to the ferry wharf in his 4WD so we wouldn’t miss the boat to Magnetic Island. He probably would have been doing us a favour if we had missed it, but still, it was a lovely gesture.

I’ve been expected to be treated like the snooty yuppie I am, but instead I’ve been met only with genuine friendliness. Which I’ve reciprocated in kind. For instance, in most of the cafes I’ve visited, I’ve quietly drunk their coffee without explaining the proper way to make a flat white.

Perhaps the most welcome discovery, though, has been that the food really is good everywhere. We like to pride ourselves on the amazing diversity and quality of our inner-city food options, and we should. But we’ve found it’s almost impossible to get a bad meal anywhere. We’ve had plenty of great Indian and Thai meals, and although you’d struggle to get, say, quality yum cha in the Top End, I had one of the best fusion Asian meals I’ve ever had in Darwin. So while some parts of the country still need to work on their racial tolerance, judging from the friendly cabbie in Townsville who told me to beware of “the local indigenous population, especially the ones who come asking for money”, there’s lots of good ethnic eating options out there.

The last lesson I’ve learned is that all Aussies love drinking. This isn’t a huge surprise, of course – like being unimpressed Brendan Nelson, it truly unites all Australians. But I didn’t know just how much some Aussies loved drinking until I’d been to country towns where, after the sun goes down, it’s literally all there is to do. When we spent a Sunday night in Darwin, the entire town shut down by about 9.30. Except for the bars, which raged until 4.30am. I went wandering the streets at night for some food, or a bottle of water from a convenience store, or in fact anything that was open. But the people I asked just laughed. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised in a town that serves its beers in two litre ‘Darwin stubbies’.

This week, we’re back home, at the Enmore Theatre. And I’m really looking forward to it. Because the main thing I’ve learned on our travels is while regional Australia is a lot of fun to visit, I’m bloody glad I live in Sydney.

A column about the 2020 summit

It’s late on Friday afternoon, and my phone is still mysteriously silent. I never thought it’d come to this, but I’m beginning to suspect it’s really true. Apparently Kevin Rudd really is intending to hold his 2020 Summit without any input from me. Which means that, at least in the view of those advising our tireless new Prime Minister, I don’t count as one of the 1000 top minds in the country.

Of course, I don’t need to tell any long-term readers of this column how ridiculous that proposition is. Especially when the list of those who made the cut includes Miranda Devine, for goodness’ sake. Fortunately, I’m not petty enough to hold this outrageous snub against the organisers. (Although next time Kevin Rudd calls asking my advice on how to solve a diplomatic imbroglio involving the Japanese Government, I may make him stew a little before obliging.) No, that’s fine – I’ll quietly tell the operators of the Glebe company LearJet that I won’t be requiring transport to Canberra this weekend – instead, they can take me to Cancun, as usual. And I will instead choose circulate my ideas for 2020 via the pages of this newspaper. Which means that there’s far more a chance they’ll survive into the next decade than if they were printed up in the proceedings of some crummy summit that everyone will have forgotten within days of its conclusion.

In fact, I’ve long had reason to suspect that Rudd’s policy mavens have been shamelessly harvesting the gems I contribute to this newspaper. That whole apology idea? Mine – but who’s counting. And while my innovative concepts are distributed for free to anyone lucky enough to live in The Glebe’s catchment area, that doesn’t make them any less priceless.

So, without any further ado, here are four ideas for Australia in the year 2020. And Kevin, there’s a lot more where they came from if you invite me next time.

1) A viable second political party. A few decades ago, the conservative side of politics was in disarray, so Robert Menzies pulled them all together and founded the Liberal Party. As scholars of Australian political history will know, it worked all too well. But now, the party is saddled with a fate worse than extinction – being led by Brendan Nelson. When the most senior Liberal leader left in the country is the Lord Mayor of Brisbane, it’s time to put your out of its misery. The ALP has remade itself into the mainstream conservative party, so it’s time we had an alternative party from the left – one that’s a bit less impractical and hippie-resistant than the Greens. I might found it myself and become Prime Minister, if I am prepared to give up my present columnist position for one involving somewhat less national influence.

2) The eradication of reality TV. It’s perhaps the most heinous threat confronting our nation. And anyone knows that to rid yourself of a pest, containment is necessary. That massive rabbit-proof fence wasn’t just built so Phillip Noyce could win awards, you know. Currently, they’re blooming across our television networks like blue-green algae, so the first step must be to contain them to their own specific network, so they can’t crop up where they’re not wanted – which is to say, everywhere. Next, the CSIRO must develop some form of myxomatosis-like disease that will eradicate all those involved in producing reality TV shows. There will be many casualties, and they will include Kyle Sandilands, which fact alone is reason enough to do it.

3) Call centres in prison. We must arrest our slow slide into a world where all services are delivered by ineffective computer voice recognition systems, or worse still, offshore call centres. Instead, we should route all support calls into our prisons, where convicts would be made responsible for resolving customer difficulties. This would enable them to put something back into the community by helping others instead of spending all their time working out and designing shivs. Personally, I’d rather talk to a convicted killer than your average hopeless customer support dweeb – at least they know how to get something done. Furthermore, if our prisoners can deal with, say, angry rural Telstra customers without becoming violently enraged themselves, they will have more than proven that they are ready to rejoin society.

4) The Glebe to go daily, and national. I’m just putting it out there. Global distribution along the lines of the Herald-Tribune might be an idea as well. Not just for my ego, you understand. There is a genuine need for people everywhere to read this column.

It's always good to subtract maths

A national alarm resounded across our great land this week. Our Deputy PM and Minister Pretty Much Everything, Julia Gillard, hit the airwaves to talk about a crisis which could threaten Australia's very future. Not interest rates, for a change, but the rate of interest in maths. Our fair nation isn't producing enough highly trained mathematicians, apparently, and as a result, important numbers are apparently remaining uncrunched. The crisis is so bad that I couldn't even find reliable stats on the rate of participation in advanced maths. So Ms Gillard is springing into action, announcing plans to push kids into the dark numerical arts by means of reducing HECS payments for maths students and issuing free pocket protectors for all.

But the growing dearth of mathematicians is not a cause for concern. Rather, we should be popping champagne corks, and not bothering to calculate their trajectory. Because the maths industry is nothing more than a cruel conspiracy by science graduates to give themselves jobs. And so, just so some dork without the social skills to earn a respectable living can put food on the table, Australian kids are forced to endure the misery of mathematics year after year. Forget Abu Ghraib, it's Alge Bra that is the most heinous violation of human rights in our time.

And while that was an absolutely appalling joke, the mere fact I could make it in the first place is because I studied something genuinely useful - the humanities.

This trend brings joy to my heart, because it indicates that my mortal enemy is in decline. It's the greatest news I've heard since that wonderful day in 1993 when my high school told me I didn't have to take maths for the HSC. They still made me suffer through the first part of the 2-Unit course in Year 11 for no discernible reason other than sadism, but, like any victim of post-traumatic stress disorder who has finally learned to let go of the past, I've now succeeded in purging my brain of all that pointless trigonometry.

I'm not opposed to the acquisition of basic mathematical skills. A little numeracy is important. I still use mental arithmetic and my times tables constantly. Weights and measures are pretty useful as well. But once you've left primary school, there's nothing further that mathematics can offer the average person. In the 15 years since I stopped studying maths, I have drawn on the stuff I learned in high school a grand total of zero times. Plus, for anything that's in the least bit complex involving numbers, there's always Microsoft Excel. We should have been able to use it in our school exams, because for the rest of my life, whenever I need to do something with numbers, I'm hardly going to whip out an exercise book and a protractor.

Sure, okay, so there are some people who need to know mathematics. I'm a fan of the people who design buildings I'm likely to enter knowing how to calculate whether it's going to fall over. But it should be a highly specialised trade. We need fewer people studying mathematics, not more, so that the rest of us don't have to burden ourselves with something so boring. What on earth did we bother to invent computers for, if not to outsource the whole of maths to them?

We'd all have been much better off studying economics, which addresses the complex ways that far simpler kinds of numbers can impact on our everyday lives. The addition of 0.25% to interest rates by the Reserve Bank couldn't be simpler mathematically, but the results of that number for our everyday lives is of huge importance.

Mathematicians, as far as I'm concerned, your days are numbered. And no, I don't want to know how they're numbered. I'm just delighted to hear that, as time progresses, the number of you is inching ever closer to zero.

A column about drugs in sport

Drugs and elite sporting heroes, it seems, go together like nitro and glycerine. First there was the revelation that the great Andrew ‘Joey’ Johns, dubbed by many the greatest rugby league player of all time, had regularly taken drugs throughout his career. It was astonishing to read that he had so successfully juggled recreational drug abuse with performing at the top level. How good would he have been, one wonders, if he’d lived an abstemptious life like Guy Sebastian’s?

This week his AFL equivalent, Wayne ‘The King’ Carey, has been in the harsh glow of media scrutiny again for the revelation that he regularly used cocaine throughout his playing days. So humiliating has been this latest downfall that the period when he was merely involved in a salacious sex scandal probably count for him as the “good old days.” It’s a sad tale, but just as we’ve seen with the likes of Britney Spears in the entertainment world, an increasingly common one.

Above The King, of course, there is only God – or, at least in AFL nickname terms, Gary Ablett, whose struggle with substance abuse has been well documented. And countless other footballers have been busted as well, Wendell Sailor being one particularly prominent example. It almost beggars belief that athletes who are paid so much to be in peak physical condition could risk everything in a quest for a short-term high. (Or, in Carey’s case, a series of short-term highs for the extremely long term.)The tendency of top footballers to get busted with recreational drugs is so pronounced that there must be more to it than mere coincidence. It’s almost as if team doctors are racking up lines of coke along with the vitamin supplements.

When they bare all in exclusive interviews on Enough Rope in an attempt to patch up their tarnished reputations, our sporting heroes most commonly blame the adulation and the pressure. So much is expected of these amazing athletes who can single-handedly transform a game that they simply can’t hack it, apparently, and have to artificially augment their moods.

I’m not so sure that it just comes down to pressure. The players in soccer’s English Premier League enjoy some of the highest wages in the world, fans that are far more rabid than even the most one-eyed AFL tragic, and the pressure of a game where winning and losing can cost teams hundreds of millions of dollars, and very few of them go off the rails these days. The Perhaps it’s the higher frequency of games, perhaps their schedules are far more demanding – or perhaps there’s simply more professionalism. Perhaps, being cultured Europeans, they indulge in refined moderation?

Well, there’s an easy solution to the problem of footballers’ extremely broad shoulders being unable to cope with carrying the hopes and dreams of a nation. It’s called indifference. I can honestly say, with my hand firmly on my heart, that I have always been entirely oblivious to the footballing achievements of Wayne Carey. Until that unfortunate incident with his vice-captain’s wife, I’d barely heard of the guy. So, when he complains about the pressure he experienced during his playing days, my conscience is magnificently clear. To me, Wayne Carey is not a disgraced footy legend, he’s a disgraced guy who used to do something I don’t really understand. And though it’s true that I have always looked up to him, it’s only because I’m shorter.

I will confess that during past Origin matches I often found myself screaming at the Blues to throw the ball to Joey, since it seemed to be the only tactic that ever actually produced anything resembling tries. And yet, outside those three crucial games, his actions held minimal interest for me. I vaguely remember him once winning a premiership with the Knights, but really, that’s about it. Still, if the poor overpaid poppets are really feeling the heat of our expectations, then really, there’s no harm in lowering them.

The real problem, I suspect, is that the football codes are turning a blind eye to their elite players as long as they keep producing the results when the big games roll around. Teams build these players up into stars to sell tickets and replica jerseys, so it’s their responsibility to look after their psychological conditions.

The problems with Johns and Carey will hopefully have ended this forever. And that can only be a good thing. Let’s hope that for the next generation of hero footballers, the only devastation they wreak will be on-field, not in other people’s lives – and, so often, their own.

A column about Easter

I am not one to look a gift public holiday in the mouth, especially one where you get two bonus days off. But Easter has always had several black marks against it in my book. Perhaps the biggest of these is that it is the time when one of the greatest scams ever perpetrated against families takes place – the Easter Show. It may once have been a charming slice of country life in the city, but now it’s an overpriced bulk marketing exercise located atop a former toxic waste dump in Homebush. The whole event is entirely light on actual fun, but without a doubt the worst aspect is showbags. How ASIC’s fraud division even cleared their sale is beyond me.

I remember realizing that the entire event was a cynical exercise in exploitation even as a small boy – but I went ahead and bullied my parents into buying the stupid showbags anyway. They are invariably full of rubbish no-name junk food of the sort that’s only generally available at a $2 shop, like non-Coca cola, or Cheeto Balls that aren’t manufactured by the genuine, internationally renowned Cheeto corporation. Which means that as a result the luminous orange slime on your fingers never actually washes off.

Then there are the ‘proper’ bags, which always cost extra. I used to buy the Triple M showbag every year – a radio station I later had the pleasure of working for, incidentally. All us kids got it, and we treasured our backpacks with that old guitar hero dude logo on them, and imagined ourselves rocking out across the airwaves like Doug Mulray or Club Veg. But now I realize that the genius of those showbags was that we actually paid Triple M to market their brand for them! Kids everywhere were promoting their station all over the streets and schoolyard, and their long-suffering parents were paying through the nose for the privilege.

Then again, I’d like to work for them again someday, so parents – carry on.

Most outrageous of all, though, are the sheets they pin up explaining what great “value” it is for parents. All the prices cited would make a 7-Eleven owner blush, and it invariably prices the crappy plastic toys that aren’t the reason you bought the bag and clearly cost 5c from a Chinese sweatshop at about $20. Then they always factors in $50 for vouchers that you would never use, like an offer for adults at children’s prices at Cables Waterski Park at Panthers. Whereas I’d have thought that in the unlikely event that any parents were actually convinced to waste a day of their lives taking their children cable waterskiing, the least the operators could do would be to let them have a go for free.

But Easter’s no better once you’re an adult. On Good Friday, one of the best nights to go out in the year since you have three whole days to sleep off any lapses in judgement, pubs have to close at 10pm. That’s right, hours before bedtime. What can possibly be the logic of that? It’s not like they’re closed all day – there’d be a mass uprising. So what difference can a few extra hours make?

Of course, we live in a secular society, so one religion’s social values should not be imposed on all of us. Hindus and Muslims manage to put up with the rest of us drinking all year round, so the Christians should stop interfering, frankly. And I can’t imagine even the Archbishops arguing that pubs staying open two extra house until midnight in any way impinges on their religious activities. Probably even a few ministers were prevented last Friday from having a quiet cleansing ale to relax at the end of one of the biggest days of their schedule. Most ridiculously of all, you can’t get takeaways – so drinking quietly at home isn’t even an option.

But even if you are a Christian, the pub closures prevents anyone commemorating Jesus’ life and Death with a good old-fashioned wake. It’s very short-sighted – for those believers who also enjoy the seamier side of our city’s nightlife, what more fitting way to commemorate that fateful day in Jerusalem than by getting slaughtered up the Cross?

Easter was a pagan festival for thousands of years before Jesus’ death, and if you visit the Easter Show or the chocolate aisle at any supermarket, you’ll see that it still is. So the least they could let us do on this ancient festival of excess is enjoy a few moments of Bacchanalia.

Save Our Cahill Expressway

Clover Moore is a woman of enormous vision. Sure, that vision may occasionally verge on the twee, such as when she dubbed Sydney a "City of Villages". Sydneysiders would rather think of themselves as a city among villages, such as, Melbourne and Brisbane. And, her advocacy of sensible drinking laws was a triumph. But now, following in the Gucci loafer-steps of Paul Keating, she's targeted our city's most magnificent artery, the Cahill Expressway. And, even if I need to chain myself to its drab concrete exterior to prevent it, I say that this latest scheme of our Lord Mayor shall not be borne.

So-called aesthetes have long argued that the Cahill Expressway ruins the view of Circular Quay from the city. Perhaps for some. But what about motorists? No road in Australia, and perhaps even the world, offers a better view. Even the Harbour Bridge can't hold a candle to it, both because you can't actually see the water from the bridge deck and because its view includes the Cahill Expressway. But for those all-too-brief seconds atop the Cahill, a magnificent vista opens out to you, and it's one that's enjoyed by 47,000 cars a day. I can't believe more drivers, overwhelmed by the natural beauty of our harbour, swerve wildly into each other.

When I first learned to drive there was no road I enjoyed more than the Cahill's corkscrewing tunnel cut into the rock. It's a rite of passage for every new driver, and I can't abide the suggestion of replacing it with a more sensible road that doesn't require all of those terrifying lane-changes or frustratingly slow peak-hour merging.

Sure, when newcomers to Sydney wander down towards the Harbour, expecting to be dazzled by the Opera House and Bridge, they are instead confronted by a hideous cement monolith. But are we to have no sense of the dramatic? The Cahill serves as a kind of curtain for the beauty behind it. After passing underneath its shabby colonnade, the impact of the Quay confronts you all at once. It's an exhilarating experience. And, like a grub that magically evolves into a butterfly, the very ugliness of the Cahill only highlights the beauty of the harbour, once you eventually get to see it.

Demolishing the Cahill Expressway won't just destroy a roadway. Oh, no. It'll destroy an entire ecosystem built into the plaza beneath. Without the Cahill, there would be no Rossini, the only restaurant in Sydney where you have to serve yourself your meal and still tip waiters for service. But the loss of Rossini, as much as it would break my heart, pales in comparison to the real victim of Clover Moore's dastardly scheme - City Extra. Without that Circular Quay institution, where would students go after their Year 12 Formals? I've spent many an evening there examining their enormous bread rolls for signs of steroid abuse and wondering why they haven't changed their décor or menu since at least 1982.

City Extra is a place that looms large in the personal histories of many Sydneysiders. Sure, it's usually associated with drunken mistakes, but there's a certain romance in that. So many of the old places where people used to behave badly have been lost forever. The old Bourbon & Beefsteak had genuine atmosphere, and was immortalised by Ricky Ponting's fight with the bouncer. Its replacement is prettier, but sterile. We are in danger of ripping out Sydney's soul and replacing it with blonde wood and white leather banquettes.

There are some aspects of Clover's plan that I applaud. Building over the train tracks at Central is a great idea, and no-one will mourn the Entertainment Centre. But there has to be a place in Sydney for ugliness. Even the Mandarin Club on Goulburn St, which has long been my favourite tacky late night watering-hole, is soon to relocate to shiny new premises that won't have anything like the charm of the bizarre mezzanine that's only ever empty or full of families tunelessly singing Canto-pop.

Admittedly, few people will grieve over the Cahill Expressway. Even the family of the late J. J. Cahill will probably be relieved that he'll no longer associated with an eyesore. But I will mourn the destruction of the places I knew growing up, as hideous as they undoubtedly were. The sites of awkward teenage fumblings, and first dates gone by. Destroy them, and they'll only be replaced by the likes of East Circular Quay, which for all its chicness has about as much soul as Chatswood Chase, or a member of the Iemma Government.

So remodel Sydney by all means, Lord Mayor Moore, but tread softly, because you tread on all of our memories. Oh, and by the way - flattening most of Darling Harbour? Awesome idea, and do let me know if you need help swinging the wrecking ball.

A column about live gigs

It’s expensive to be a music fan these days. I’ve splurged on a whole bunch of concert tickets this summer, and was lucky enough to see Björk at the Opera House and The Police at Sydney’s favorite toxic waste dump-turned-event space out at Homebush the following night. And I write this not to boast – okay, not exclusively to boast, but because I am becoming increasingly disheartened by the expense. It seems that this summer, we’ve had more music options than ever before, but they all seem to want to charge us more than ever before.

Tickets to both gigs cost about $150 – less than the entire day of the Big Day Out, which costs only $120 for 70 acts. Since Björk only deigned to play for just under an hour and a half, and the support band consisted of an annoying American guy brandishing a keytar (I still don’t know what their name was, since neither the advertising nor the organisers bothered to even tell us) it wasn’t exactly value plus. Sure, they couldn’t fit a lot of people into the Opera House forecourt – I think it ended up at 6000 – and they had a whole brass section to feed, and ridiculous outfits to purchase. But still, she could have at least hit the two hour mark.

What really irritated me, though, was that the security people confiscated any liquids as zealously as if we were entering an airport terminal rather than an outdoor venue in the middle of summer. They must have chucked out enough bottles of water to top up Warragamba Dam. It might have been forgivable if the queue to buy drinks wasn’t literally hundreds of people long, leaving us all sitting there parched.

Water is extremely important, a point those tireless moralisers The Police picked up on the following evening, informing us via looping advertisements that they were donating a portion of their tour proceeds to WaterAid. Well, not exactly. The people who were being generous to this important cause weren’t the band, it was us hapless punters who’d paid a fortune to go and hear them in a space with all the intimacy of an Aussie Rules semi-final, and poorer sound quality. So it wasn’t exactly encouraging to learn that they’d gouged a little bit more on top for some trendy cause.

I really am tired of being lectured by billionaire rock stars. Sting owns seven houses, and is a tax exile from the UK, officially residing in Ireland. If he cares so much about water, why not donate the whole of his wage from the Police reunion tour to the cause? It’s not like he needs the enormous amount of dough they raked in. Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers probably do, since they haven’t exactly been able to play any stadia themselves in the twenty-one years since the singer shafted them so he could do his own thing. But honestly, why not chuck some cash in yourself instead of making us do it?

Björk was guilty of political posturing too, dedicating her song “Declare Independence” to indigenous Australians. Which, of course, is just what the Aboriginal community needs – being told what to do by yet another rich white person.

Still, at least The Police had organised a decent support act. Sorry, I mean a famous support act. Personally, I timed my arrival so as not to see Fergie, who I dispute is in any way “Licious”.

Both concerts were absolutely amazing – an experience you can’t possibly replicate with a mere recording. So it isn’t surprising that due to piracy and the general stinginess of recording contracts, artists nowadays make far more out of touring than they do out of selling CDs. And this must be why ticket prices are skyrocketing ever upwards even while the Aussie dollar’s far stronger than usual. In future, they should include downloads of the gig you saw in the ticket price. And what’s more, when you’ve had to shell out the equivalent of five CDs to watch a band play live, it would be understandable (albeit illegal) if you went ahead and downloaded a few of their albums. Because at these prices, you’ve already paid for them.

A column about the apology

Pinch yourselves, folks, because it’s finally going to happen. A mere eleven years after the Bringing Them Home report chronicled the devastation wreaked by the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their families, the Commonwealth Government is going to apologise. Yes, really. On Wednesday, Kevin Rudd will move a motion of apology that will spark off a day of celebrations, with a free concert featuring indigenous artists that promises to be the biggest party in Canberra since Andrew Bartlett’s post-election wake.

It’s astonishing that it was so controversial, really. Despite what were acknowledged to be good intentions, the report found that the practice constituted genocide because it had the effect of wiping out Aboriginal culture. And you’d think that genocide, which is just about the most heinous action a government can take, might at least warrant a little apology. But no, John Howard refused to do it for a decade, citing the most spurious of arguments. And now that this sorry chapter in our history is being closed, it’s worth remembering what they were, because they’ve been restated by many prominent Liberals and talkback commentators as they wheeled out the same old lame excuses for not backing an act which is, quite literally, the least we can do.

Firstly, there was the legal mumbo jumbo about becoming liable for damages. Personally, I think damages are wholly appropriate, given the indisputable psychological damage that a government policy wreaked on children. If it were me in The Lodge, I’d be whipping out the chequebook, frankly. Or at least sending out a whole lot of bunches of flowers. But even Rudd seems to blanch at the prospect of compensation, the wuss.

Still, an apology has been enacted by every State and Territory Parliament without a single cent being paid out, so I’m not sure what was supposed to be so different this time. But more to the point, let’s remember how the legal system works, shall we. If the victims of a harmful act want to sue the perpetrator, it doesn’t matter whether or not there’s been an apology. Sure, it makes it easier to establish that the event occurred, but that’s hardly in doubt here. Civil cases don’t only become possible where the individuals, or state, have admitted their guilt. If anything, apologies show contrition, which tends to reduce damages. The argument’s mean-spirited and ridiculous.

Then there’s the intergenerational point that it’s inappropriate because it wasn’t us, it was our forefathers. This is a point of almost moronic obviousness. No-one thinks Kevin Rudd took Aboriginal children from their parents, but the institution he now heads did, and as the direct successor, he’s the one who needs to make the gesture. This whole issue will apparently be addressed in the wording in any case, but those like Nelson who make this caveat fail to understand the symbolism of governments apologising for their own past actions. The “comfort women” forced into prostitution in WWII sought an apology not because they thought the Japanese Government were involved, but because they wanted the record to be corrected. Both our country and theirs has often wilfully obscured the darker corners of its history, and a formal apology ensures that for the rest of time, the mistakes and misjudgements have been acknowledged by the body responsible.

The most rhetorically tricky argument is the one that it might be a distraction from actually solving the problems faced by Aborigines. This is the same approach Howard referred to as “practical reconciliation”. But if you want to help a sector of the population, you should start by listening to what they say they need. And Aboriginal leaders have sought an apology for a long time. If we are to encourage positively with their community, and develop a partnership that can actually address their standard of living, there can be no better way than an incoming government making a symbolic gesture that says we’re on board.

Besides, a stubborn government that refuses to make gestures of goodwill that cost it nothing is unlikely to get the substance right either, and so we saw with the Howard Government. There was plenty of symbolism on offer from the Coalition when there was mateship to be celebrated, or cricket to be played, but when it came to righting historical wrongs, John Howard was nowhere to be seen. The guy wouldn’t even take a stroll across the bridge for reconciliation, and we know how much he liked walking around Kirribilli.

On February 13, one of the darker chapters in our history will be formally closed. It won’t increase Aboriginal life expectancy, but for those who suffered so many years of inhumane treatment at its hands, it’ll be a welcome change for the Australian government to finally give them one measly day that might make them feel good.

Stubborn to the last as the nation consigns one of his most infamous policies to dust, John Howard has refused to honour Malcolm Fraser’s call for all previous PMs to attend the ceremony. On Wednesday, I’ll be donning a black armband just to spite him.

A column about binge drinking

I’m delighted to see that Kevin Rudd is clamping down on alcohol abuse. The demon drink has always played an uncomfortably large role in Australian social life, and its abuse should be actively discouraged, because the effects are unquestionably appalling. Binge drinking by youths is heavily linked to violence. And it’s also heavily linked to annoying teenagers in yellow plastic sunglasses becoming international celebrities.

Our Prime Minister knows all too well the folly of binge drinking. A few cheeky sherries when ‘on tour’ in New York, and next thing you know you’re in some kind of ne’er-do-well establishment where – surely your eyes deceive you – ladies to whom you do not recall saying vows of sacred marriage seem to be taking their clothes off. What can be possibly happening? Best to make sure you don’t remember any of it, and confess to Therese that you’ve been a bit of a dill.

Even more embarrassingly for an aspiring Labor leader, your night on the turps at NYC’s finest strip club was spent in the company of Col Allan, who is one of Rupert Murdoch’s trusted lieutenants. When people find out about it, as surely they must, it will make your ambition appear even more naked than those up on stage. Or dinner plans with Brian Burke.

I must confess that like our Prime Minister, I once visited Scores NYC when curiosity got the best of me at the end of a boozy dinner – it was suggested by a woman, although I don’t think that’ll exactly leave my feminist credibility intact – and all I can say is that it definitely isn’t a mistake one would make sober. Admittedly, I wasn’t officially representing Australia the UN, and this was in the days before I represented The Glebe as well, a responsibility that I’m sure you know I take just as seriously as Rudd takes himself. But still, I regret it.

All I can recall is a distinct impression that breast implants really aren’t worth the money, and that at those prices, I wasn’t entirely sure who was exploiting who. In hindsight, I would gladly have been prevented from getting into a condition where Scores seemed like a good idea by some manner of Rudd binge drinking ban. I have every confidence that if the human race stopped drinking to excess, strip clubs would no longer exist.

So if even those as morally incorruptible as Kevin Rudd and myself can fall victim to the demon drink, what hope do ordinary mortals have? One report last week said that 80% of police work is now alcohol-related, which is an appalling figure. So something must be done. But the problem is – what?

Stephen Fielding, the Family First Senator, introduced a Private Member’s Bill last year proposing a initiatives to reduce drinking. First, he wanted warning labels. I understand they’ve worked on tobacco, but I’m really not sure that they’d help on alcohol, because unlike cigarettes, a few drinks would make you laugh uproariously at the warning labels.

Then he’d restrict advertising except between 9pm and 5am, which seems sensible unless you actually have 14- and 15-year-old children, who don’t go to sleep until considerably later. Still, it can’t hurt.

Finally, he’d limit ads that link alcohol consumption to success. Which would spell the death knell for the Bundy bear, I suspect. Because if the bear isn’t helping the lads score some chicks or something, then all you’ve got is a polar bear turning up in a completely inappropriate climate – which is more a case for the RSPCA than a source of entertainment, really.

I don’t know whether advertising is linked to binge drinking, or whether more subtle lifestyle factors are at play. I suspect having VB as a sponsor of the cricket isn’t exactly helping, and nor is fiendishly brilliant promotions like the Talking Boonie/Warnie, which every teenager would want.

If research shows that ads are to blame, then by all means limit them. But even restricting alcohol to 21 in many states of America hasn’t stopped teenage binging. So the real solution is responsible parenting and education. Parents need to introduce their kids to alcohol with an emphasis on moderation, and make sure they know the dangers. Perhaps if instead of claiming not to remember, Kevin Rudd could tell a cautionary tale of the horrors to be seen at Scores. I know I’ll think twice next time I have a few drinks on a trip to New York.

It's time to lose Facebook

Photo: AP
I'm over Facebook. Maybe I'm growing out of it, maybe my standards for ways of wasting time are becoming more discerning, or maybe Kevin Rudd just ruined it for everyone, but I'm officially done with clicking onto the world's trendiest social networking website every hour I'm at my desk. As of today, I'm trying to go cold turkey. So I'm not going to look at it more than once a day, and if I somehow muster a hitherto unforeseen amount of willpower, I may even get it down to once a week.

At first, it was a welcome novelty to catch up with obscure friends from yesteryear. I work by myself quite a lot, so it was almost like having, you know, actual friends there. I found old schoolfriends, uni friends, girls I once had crushes on and people I don't even necessarily like all that much - they're all to be found in the various dark corners of my friend list. Sure, things didn't exactly extend to meaningful conversation - there's only so much quality catching up that can be achieved via a wall post saying "Hey how are you?" - but it was still nice to feel back in touch.

At first it was enthralling to see how everyone had changed, like a school reunion that passed at an extremely slow pace. I enjoyed gawking fascinatedly at photos of people I hadn't seen since the age of 11. Some were married, some divorced. Some had come out, some had babies. I've even been in touch with one or two of the few students from my old primary school in London who didn't beat me up.

But the initial flood of friend requests has now stemmed to a trickle, and I'm lucky these days if I get one new friend a fortnight. (Just to clarify in the wake of the Valentine's blog debacle, this isn't an attempt to solicit a flood of new friend requests - like most people, I only add people I actually know in person. Well, OK, unless their messages are hi-la-rious.) But I'm now at the point at which I can pretty confidently say that more or less everyone I've ever known is in my friend list. So there's nowhere else to go from here but down.

At the same time as the friend requests have dried up, the requests from those irritating applications have swelled into a tsunami. (Compare People, and Texas Hold 'Em Poker, I'm looking at you.) I figured out early on that you can block all requests from those stupid zombies, vampires, pirates and ninjas, which are so annoying that I've seriously considered going and biting a few people to see if they actually do turn into members of the undead, but there are thousands of newer offenders.

Most of the spam backfires and makes me vow never to install it, like when the Sparx application attempted to entice me to sign up by telling me that if I installed it, I could find out the identities of the 0 out of 19 of my friends who found me attractive. Thanks, but uh, no thanks.

The only worthwhile application is Scrabulous, and that's apparently going to be shut down because of the whole violating intellectual property thing. But even that was spoiled because people started cheating - there are sites where you can type in what letters you have, and it will supply the highest scoring word. So my interest in online Scrabble has almost XREIPED - which is worth 100 points at the start of the game, by the way. Oh, and Bingo.
Which leaves me with the built-in features. And without wanting to completely diss the Facebook friends I have, I've also noticed that on the whole there's an inverse proportion between the frequency with which people update their status, and how interesting their lives actually seem to be. And yes, I do update my status too often, and yes, I realise the equation holds true for me.

Sorry, just a sec, I need to update my status - Dominic Knight is henceforth to be regarded as over Facebook. There, that's told 'em.

There are a few things for which I will continue using the site. It's brilliant for organising social events, sharing photos and (I am reliably informed, though rubbish at it personally) flirting. Although even flirting is no longer that easy, because everyone's stopped saying in their status whether they're single, unhelpfully. I think that's because those little broken heart graphics are too embarrassing - it really is tragic in every sense when people announce their break-ups online. And hell, we've even stopped being amused by the Australian meaning of the word "poke". So folks, the show really is over.

I hope the site survives in some form, because it is a great way around the infuriating problem of everyone's email addresses constantly changing. But, really, the site just isn't fun any more. Which leaves me desperate for a new way of filling the enormous amounts of time when I'm supposed to be working. I absolutely despise Facebook's business-oriented competitor, LinkedIn.

So, um, is MySpace somehow retro-cool yet?

Finally, an International Premier League

The Indian Premier League has been putting a lot of traditionalists' noses out of joint. Money is being slung around at a rate unseen since Kerry Packer paid the original World Series cricketers a small fortune to wear those ill-fitting pyjamas. But as the first top-grade cricket competition to remove the increasingly thorny issues of nationality and race from the occasion, the IPL should be welcomed. As with WSC, an avaricious hunt for television dollars may end up benefiting the game immeasurably.

Cricket likes to view itself as being above such tawdry, déclassé concerns as money, of course. Its heritage, supposedly, is of a game played by gentlemen whose only material concern is whether their cups of Earl Grey tea are accompanied by cucumber sandwiches. But we saw in the aftermath of the Sydney Test where the Indian team put enormous pressure on the game's judicial processes to ransom by threatening to return home, those days are finished.
Cricket is the only team sport I can think of where the top players primarily compete at international level. In the likes of football, basketball and baseball, club teams are the day-to-day focus, with occasional breaks for World Cups and other representative contests. But if you're lucky enough to make a Test XI, you'll play pretty much all of your cricket for your country, taking breaks to play for your old club or state team only once in a blue moon. So the contests that matter most are between nations, and given the genuine ethnic diversity of cricket, and the mixed blessings of British colonial heritage, that's a recipe for tensions. Darrell Hair's story shows how easily perceptions of racism can explode in cricket nowadays - it's often forgotten that in the infamous abandoned England-Pakistan Test, the other umpire was West Indian.
And the problem was all too evident in the furious reaction by India to Australia's allegations of racism. The level of anger surely had its antecedents in the days of the Raj, which left Indians with the entirely correct perception that when it comes to racism, they were more sinned against than sinning. And it was not a huge surprise that Australia's holier-than-thou attitude caused so much irritation when it is the major exponent of sledging - sorry, "mental disintegration" in the world game.
But if all goes well, the IPL will deliver, for the first time, cricket that is mercifully free of the lingering resentments created by colonialism. Instead, superstars from different countries will play alongside each other - and harmoniously so, we can only hope. The closest analogy is the European Champions League, a hugely wealthy competition featuring most of the world's best clubs and players. All major European football teams now field teams whose players come from all over the world, and the London club Arsenal regularly fields teams with no English players whatsoever. This leads to criticism from some quarters, but the resulting quality on the field cannot be argued with. If cricket became more of a club-based competition, genuine fans of the game might finally be able to enjoy high-level contests free from the uncomfortable taint of racism and nationalism, and free from the suspicion and resentment that seems to so easily come to head in the modern game.
We've occasionally seen this at club level already, when overseas stars have come to play in first class teams. Warney's exploits in Hampshire are legend, both on and off the field, and Imran Khan played for NSW in 1984/5. But imagine if this was commonplace, and the NSW Blues were full of international stars, and regularly played teams from other countries, each with their own assortment of players from around the world. Australian fans would get a chance to have brilliant players like Sachin Tendulkar playing for their team, rather than always against them. You'd occasionally regroup as nations to play World Cups and Tests, sure, but most cricket would be genuinely free from the baggage of nationality and race. Since Test cricket audiences are dying in much of the world, the longer form of the game could use the excitement of club competition between stars, and this would also solve the huge imbalance of skill between countries like Australia and Zimbabwe. Plus, if cricket became primarily club-based, we'd see a lot less of the Barmy Army, and this alone would make it worth it.
The IPL hasn't even started, and already we've seen the best repudiation of the Andrew Symonds race saga you could hope for. We will probably never know whether Harbhajan actually called him a monkey, or some other unsavoury term in Punjabi. But we do know that the Indian cricket community think he's worth $1.4 million, showing him the respect that ought to be commanded by such an exciting player.
The sheer scale of demographics and an economic boom all point to one thing: the future of cricket lies primarily in India. And the IPL is just an early stage in this. There's potential for conflict with the existing international setup, and scheduling will be an ongoing challenge. But if the BCCI can help to heal cricket by making customary adversaries into teammates, and produce a competition free of the lingering racial tensions that have so harmed the game recently, we should all be thankful.

A day for couples who love lording it over singles

Some couples say they don't buy into Valentine's Day. They announce they're not doing anything special, because they're way too smart to fall for that whole cynical marketing device - and besides, every day should be Valentine's Day, right? They're not gonna give their hard-earned cash to The Man and his Hallmark Cards conspiracy just because they happen to be in love. But they're quite wrong. Because Valentine's Day is not a marketing ploy cynically manufactured by evil greeting card companies. It was cynically manufactured by couples, to give them one special day of the year to lord it over us single people.

The day isn't supposed to be for lovers to do something special that they nauseatingly boast to the rest of us about. That's only come about because they have hijacked it to seek the validation of their single friends' jealousy. It's meant to be a day for surprise declarations of love – for sending a card to someone you admire. And the US Postal Service estimates that a billion love cards are distributed worldwide - and since 85 per cent are purchased by women, we can assume that approximately half of these are directed to Brad Pitt.

But sending cards isn't the Australian way. I've never heard of a couple getting together because one of them declared their feelings on the 14th of February. If anything, getting a card from an unknown, possibly obsessive admirer might feel a little freaky in this day and age, especially as it proves that they know where you live. There is only one approved Australian method for making a declaration of love, and that's getting so maggoted at the pub that you disappear with your paramour for a sneaky pash.

The system has been developed because it preserves total deniability. None of us are ever willing to lay anything on the line, so having the defence of not being fully aware of what you were doing is necessary in case things don't work out. Bold declarations of undying love, sending a dozen red roses, and dispatching a string quartet to serenade your beloved simply aren't done in Sydney in 2008. Your only options, I'm afraid, are drinking, a life of enduring singleness, or worst of all, internet dating.

So in effect, the traditions of Valentine's Day itself are un-Australian. And because no one's sending anonymous cards (I have never received one, and am extraordinarily attractive – therefore, I can logically conclude that no-one must ever have received one), that's left a huge gap for couples to fill with their infuriating smugness.
It's not about the romantic activity itself. Of course not. Why would a dinner with the person you love at a fancy restaurant be any better on Valentine's Day than any other day? It's the same company and the same food – the only difference is that today, they jack up the price with a special menu. No – it's a competition to see who has the best Valentine's event, and therefore has the best relationship.

Just listen for these conversations tomorrow. How many roses, and what colour? Where did you go for dinner? Were there candles? Did a charming Latin man strum an acoustic guitar? Did you sing sweet karaoke duets together? What, you didn't sing Islands In The Stream? We did, therefore we're happier than you.

Even worse are the couples that celebrate ironically. They're just as guilty of one-upmanship (or perhaps the term "two-upmanship" might be more appropriate) as the more genuine couples – they just want to gain additional credit for their hilarious cynicism. So they'll buy each other the most over-the-top awful card they can find, or give one another a giant pink teddy bear that no one over the age of three could possibly like, or send a singing telegram to their partner's workplace to embarrass the hell out of them. Thus rubbing it in to the rest of us even more vigorously, because the two of them have such amazing senses of humour that are just so incredibly in sync.

So couples, I beg you – spare us. By all means, use the day as a pretext for an awesome romantic evening. Just don't tell us what you do. Even if we singles ask, it's out of politeness – we don't actually want to know. Say something like "oh, not much, just a quiet bite to eat", rather than enthralling us with the story about how your boyfriend jumped on the table and performed a spontaneous a capella version of Unchained Melody while the entire restaurant applauded, and unanimously agreed that you have the most wonderful boyfriend in recorded history.

We're happy for you, honestly. Just not today.

Time we had some primaries of our own

As Peter Hartcher wrote in today's Herald, the US primaries are wonderfully entertaining. I had friends round to watch Super Tuesday, and we sat on the couch eating Cheetos. We treated it like it was a blockbuster helmed by a particularly uncharismatic star in the bumbling form of CNN's Wolf Blitzer - never before has such a dull man had such an inappropriately exciting name. The bad guy was vanquished (Romney), and the good guys triumphed (anyone but Romney). And the spectacle made me wonder whether Australians would benefit from some primary pageantry of our own.

I'm not talking about reforming our entire political system to function along American presidential lines, mind you, although there are arguments in favour of that. I'm talking about introducing the system that (don't laugh) the Australian Democrats already have. OK, had.
Few would remember the process, and I do only because I gatecrashed it while filming a Chaser stunt. In the Democrats, leaders are elected by the party's members. Candidates among the existing senators travelled around the country for debates attended by the party faithful (literally a handful at the event I visited in Redfern), and the supporters decide who best reflects their position. They ultimately chose Andrew Bartlett as the leader, which wasn't exactly a brilliant decision. But the important thing is that at that time the party was riven by internal disputes between the left and right wings of the Dems, just as is happening in the Liberal Party today at both federal and state level. And if the members don't decide who gets to set the direction, it's resolved merely by backstabbing.
Imagine if the choice between Malcolm Turnbull and Brendan Nelson had been made by Liberal Party supporters (not members, because that sets the bar too high and implies financial contributions and ongoing involvement - merely those who registered with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) as supporting one party or an independent, as in the US system.) It's increasingly clear that Nelson was a compromise candidate, selected merely because he wasn't Turnbull. And it's hurting the Liberals, because they are unable to move forward from the Howard legacy.
We've already had the ridiculous uncertainty over the apology, followed by an embarrassing capitulation, and now we have the preposterous suggestion that the Coalition use its control of the Senate (until July) to retain AWAs, when everyone agrees that WorkChoices was the biggest reason for the party's defeat. When Wilson Tuckey feels he's getting input into policy, you've got a leader who's unlikely to win the support of a majority of Australian voters. This is not a party positioning itself to win back government, and Nelson's leadership already seems fatally hobbled.
Turnbull was the obvious candidate to lead the party into a new era. He's considerably to the left of Howard, which means he's more in sympathy with where the electorate is in 2008. His positions on climate change and the apology, for instance, reflect a growing consensus. There's no point in the resentful Howardites trying to cling to their fallen leader's platform - it was comprehensively rejected. Turnbull was the overwhelming favourite before the ballot, and there can be little doubt that if he'd been elected, his party would have a considerably more coherent platform today, and be doing a substantially better job in Opposition. His merit was overwhelming enough for Nelson to appoint him shadow treasurer even though he was an on-going threat.
And if a primary process had been undertaken, with votes in each state on different days over the course of, say, a month, the whole party would have benefited enormously, because the new leader's positions would be well known to the public by the time they took over, and their profile would already be higher. Mark Latham was largely an unknown quantity when he was elected, a problem which hampered his campaign until the end (among other problems such as, for instance, his personality and policies). But if Latham had toured the country trying to convince Labor supporters his ideas were better, he'd have been road-tested before he got to lead the party to an election. The ALP would have had far more success in finding a candidate with half a chance of unseating Howard in 2004.
Who knows, a primary process may even have saved us the disastrous leaderships of Simon Crean, Kim Beazley (the second time), and most spectacularly unsuccessful of all, Alexander Downer.
By contrast, the folly of the current system of the party room appointing leaders was aptly illustrated by the disastrous performance of the NSW state Liberal Party last year. Because the state party was then controlled by conservatives, whose positions on issues like immigration were far to the right of the electorate, they chose a terrible leader in Peter Debnam instead of the far more competent Barry O'Farrell. And they were trounced by a man whose government should have been in terrible trouble then, and is still performing disastrously today.
In fact, Morris Iemma is an even better argument for primaries to choose leaders. No one comes to mind, but there must be someone better in the NSW ALP, surely? Primaries would be a wonderful way to expose dour machine men before they make a mess of governing. And what's more, if they'd had primaries attracting substantial media coverage, the party wouldn't have had to broadcast ads explaining how to pronounce the new premier's name.
The point about primaries is they let the public, not politicians, decide who gets to become leader. If the Democrats had been able to simply appoint their presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton would have romped in - but it seems Barack Obama is better at appealing to uncommitted voters. That means he may be a more attractive candidate in a presidential election, even though he isn't Democratic Party royalty like his opponent. And as politics becomes ever more driven by the personalities of leaders, it becomes all the more important to appoint the right person. Primary voters don't always choose the right candidate (John Kerry, anyone?), but the process gives candidates the chance to road test their ideas and popular appeal on their supporters before they face a general election. It's a way of calibrating parties so that they appeal to the public, so that they don't disappear into irrelevance the way the Liberals have in NSW.
I can't promise that Australian primaries would be as entertaining as the American ones, because there's so much less at stake. Being leader of the free world is somewhat more attractive a prize than getting to pick the Prime Minister's XI. But if we introduced them, we would get considerably better leaders. The Liberal Party is going to dump Brendan Nelson for Malcolm Turnbull at some point during the next three years. We could have saved them the trouble.

When it comes to Britney, gimme less

Much like her music, Britney Spears' life seems to be going from bad to worse. Just about every day, the media breathlessly reports yet another step towards rock bottom. Her career's in enormous trouble, her laughing-stock marriage is in tatters, she's lost custody of her children, and now she's incarcerated in a mental institution. Every day, it seems she climbs further down that ladder, and at this point, there are precious few rungs left.

And I really don't know about this idea of appointing her father to temporarily manage her finances. Having her parents run her life wasn't exactly a humdinger of an idea when Brit was younger.
Today, we have a wacky story about Britney's manager controlling her life, drugging her and running the paparazzi like a general. I don't know whether Sam Lufti is guilty of these terrible allegations, or the strain is making Lynne Spears bizarrely paranoid (and really, who could blame her?) but it's just another in a long, long series of faintly amusing, but mainly depressing Britney stories. We're now at a point where the period when she was only getting wasted with Paris Hilton and being photographed without underwear counts as "the good old days".
Then there's Jamie Lynn. I know it's common for younger sisters to want to emulate their famous siblings - Dannii Minogue, anyone? - but surely anyone observing the Britney train wreck up close would have realised the folly of falling pregnant too early, and to the wrong man. But at the age of 16, to either an irresponsible boyfriend or a rapacious older television executive, depending on which gossip mag you read. It makes the Britney-K.Fed union look downright successful. It's no wonder her mother was forced to pulp her parenting book.
But we are all complicit in Britney's downfall, because we have all contributed to the unrelenting pressure that's driven her over the edge. And it's time we took collective responsibility for her plight. Like every single squad car in LA, apparently, which tagged along as she was taken to hospital in a positively Coreyesque instance of overpolicing, we need to get involved. Not like Dr Phil, who smelled a primetime television special, mounted an intervention and appalled his fans - whose standards, let's face it, were never that high. If something doesn't give, she may end up irreparably harmed.
What we need to do is leave her in peace, before we leave her in pieces. Fortunately, it's not that hard, because when it comes down to it, when we're really honest with ourselves, she just isn't that interesting. So it should be easy to ignore her, really. There are other starlets whose shenanigans can amuse - Lindsay Lohan's been delivering lately - but for the time being, we need to impose a total Britney blackout.
Because, we're the ones who built her up higher than her talent deserved and her personality could deal with. It's to feed our endless appetite for another humiliating image that she's constantly stalked by paparazzi. We should have known something was wrong when she shaved her head that time, but instead we just bayed for more. And now enough is enough.
Don't get me wrong - it's been a hilarious ride, and I for one particularly enjoyed Kevin Federline's 15 minutes of fame. Thinking back on his ridiculous rap career reminds me of a more innocent time, when laughing at Britney was almost as entertaining as laughing at her gal pal Paris. But, like a World Cup qualifier against American Samoa, the game of Britney v The Rest just isn't fun anymore. Now we're just kicking her when she's down. It's not funny anymore. It's just ugly and sad.
So today, just like she's doing in the hospital, I'm going cold turkey. And we all need to. I vow that I will avoid reading every new "Britney hits rock bottom" story that comes down the line. I will deny myself the perverse satisfaction we all get from seeing someone rich and famous behaving like she's at a Year 10 formal. Until she's genuinely better, and successful enough that her mishaps are embarrassing rather than the source of real pathos and genuine concern, I'll be limiting my attention to the exploits of considerably less unbalanced celebrities. Oh, and also Tom Cruise.
The rate at which media attention is genuinely destroying celebrities is starting to become a real concern. Nutty conspiracy theories aside, Princess Diana's death probably wouldn't have happened if the paparazzi had given her a break. And there is a sense in which we all made Heath Ledger's life harder than it should have been, for example. He didn't ask for the celebrity, just for the acting gigs. And though the two go irrevocably together, they shouldn't have to.
It used to be a fair deal. Our stars get to be fabulously rich and famous, and when they used to complain, I felt they were just being spoilt. But now I'm beginning to think I wouldn't wish the sort of life-in-a-bubble we force onto sports stars, actors and musicians on anyone - even someone I genuinely dislike, like Celine Dion.
In the age of 24-hour news channels, in a world where anyone can shoot mobile phone video and upload it to YouTube in moments, our interest has magnified to become completely unrelenting. Paranoia because everyone is watching you all the time is a common symptom of mental illness. But for many celebrities, it's just true. Britney is surely near breaking point, and if she doesn't make it to a tacky comeback tour, we'll all be to blame.

It's time whaling became extinct

I am a huge fan of Japan, and have travelled there many times. I eat sashimi, I watch sumo, and I'm regularly mocked by my friends for pronouncing "karaoke" correctly. But there is one element of Japanese culture that leaves a sour taste in my mouth, and that's whaling. I have to admit, I've never tried whale meat – sorry, I mean, never conducted valuable primary whale research – so I don't know what I'm missing. But then again, I've never eaten human either, for similar moral reasons.

And what's more, the vast majority of Japanese people have never eaten whale either. According to an Asahi Shimbun survey from 2002, 96 per cent of Japanese have never eaten or rarely eat whale. And despite the protestations that it's a vitally important part of their culture, the lack of consumption has resulted in a substantial stockpile. And as a result a lot of the whale meat has started to be used for dog food. The Japanese Government has launched a campaign to try and encourage people to eat it, with a pamphlet series amusingly entitled "Scrumptious Whale Meat!", but it's failing. And no surprise – why bother with boring old whale meat when you now have universal access to the Teriyaki McBurger?
Kazuo Shima, Japan's former delegate to the International Whaling Commission was quoted in the SMH on Saturday as saying that the West had tried to turn the whale into the equivalent of a sacred cow. He's spot on. We want whales to be inviolate because many species are endangered, and the harpooning process is inherently cruel, resulting in a painful death. And we shouldn't apologise for that. There are times when it's important to maintain cultural relativism, and respect different countries' right to devise their own norms, but there are times when, frankly, one particular set of values is purely and simply better – in the case of the death penalty, for instance. Whaling, similarly, is one practice that simply shouldn't be tolerated.
What's more, the cultural argument seems fairly bogus. We aren't talking about a flotilla of small, traditional fishing boats using centuries-old techniques, like the Inuit whalers do. It's a modern, mechanised fleet, hunting thousands of kilometres from Japanese waters with a high-powered, high-tech explosive harpoon that kills more than 1000 whales. So really, the only bit of the cultural practice that is actually alive and well is the killing bit.
Shima accused the West of propagating WWII propaganda in portraying Japan as the villain. And while some uncomfortable memories remain around the region, the bottom line is that people do perceive Japan as the villain here, not because of the history, but because of its present actions. There's no point in arguing really, the simple fact is that whaling tarnishes Japan's reputation, much as nuclear testing tarnished France's in this region, and the only way around that is simply to stop.
Whenever I see footage of the Japanese whaling ships, I'm always amused because, if we're talking about propaganda, Japan's is so transparent. The word "RESEARCH" is painted in massive letters on the side, as if that somehow would reverse our perception that there isn't any scientific justification for slaughtering nearly a thousand minke whales. Honestly, what do you learn about the 935th dead whale that the first 934 didn't tell you?
Besides, scientific advances must always be weighed against ethical considerations. It's perverse to say that to properly research a species, you need to kill large quantities of them year after year. It's not surprising that most people in the West think Japan's whale research is primarily into how delicious they taste when lightly grilled in soy sauce.
Shima admitted that one of Japan's primary motivations was pride. That seems more convincing than the spurious research argument. And that's what needs to change. Of course Japan should be proud of its culture – most of it is wonderful. But Australia and other Western nations will never give ground on this, so it's come to the point where one antiquated practice, which doesn't even cater to modern Japanese culinary tastes, is doing Japan's reputation tremendous damage.
This year's whale hunt, with the now-annual pitched battles between the Japanese vessels and Sea Shepherd has descended into farce. Capturing protesters, the throwing of stink bombs, and the accusation of "terrorist attacks" from the Japanese – it's a whole lot of hassle just for a bunch of whale meat. Which is a brilliant strategy by Sea Shepherd, aboard its amusingly but aptly named ship, the Steve Irwin, which also gets uncomfortably close to its quarry. Personally, I'm probably more comfortable with the less provocative Greenpeace approach, but you have to admire Sea Shepherd's chutzpah. The Japanese have complained today that our Government has given the environmental groups "limousine service". Long may it do so.
Whaling has become purely a matter of principle for Japan, an obsession apparently disproportionate to its importance that even determines Japanese foreign policy, with aid being parcelled out to smaller nations in return for support at the International Whaling Commission. This behaviour, which smacks of bribery, is beneath a nation which is widely respected for its modern-day pacifism in world affairs. What's more, it must be costing Japan a fortune to keep producing this food that virtually no one wants to eat. Is it really worth infuriating the rest of the world and detracting from the reputation of an otherwise magnificent culture just so Japanese dogs can eat leftover whale?
Culture isn't destiny. Just because your country has always done something doesn't mean it needs to keep doing it. The area where I grew up in Sydney, around Neutral Bay, has a rich heritage as a whaling port – in fact, I grew up in Whaling Road. But guess what? We stopped doing it. It isn't that hard. Just as Britain needed to give up its empire, and India needs to continue working towards giving up the caste system, Japan needs to admit it's time it gave up whaling. That way, those like myself who have great affection for Japan need not have our affection so significantly blemished.

We're gonna fight for Corey's right to party

When it comes to news, it's still very much the silly season. Which means that many stories are getting more coverage than they really deserve. And there's no better example of that than the hilarious tale of Corey Delaney, the kid whose party was publicised on MySpace, and got hundreds of gatecrashers, including dozens of police and a helicopter. In a taxi yesterday, I endured some talkback host whingeing about the kid's "uncontrollable" antics for a solid 15 minutes.
But in the midst of the avalanche of words he let loose on poor Corey, he missed perhaps the most important one. And that is "congratulations". Because the wanton destruction, massive police presence, parental fury and massive damage bill tell me one thing. It must have been one heckuva party.

Sure, it was a bit of a naive mistake to put the details on the internet. Especially as the same thing happened only last year, and was reported almost as widely as Coreygate. And you have to ask yourself what kind of loser would turn up to the party of a guy they'd never heard of, just because it was on MySpace. (For one thing, all the cool parties are on Facebook nowadays, don't you know?)
But it's not exactly his fault. The internet is full of things whose importance is amplified by people forwarding them on because they're bored – take those Chuck Norris facts, for instance, whose bizarre popularity was so great that a US presidential candidate tried to cash in on it. Corey's massive social success is just one of those random internet things, like the popularity of Mahir.
So why should the kid have to pay for the police presence, as has been suggested? What are the police for, if not turning up to parties to ruin them? During my university days, which weren't exactly wild, the local constabulary seemed to spend every single Saturday night wandering from terrace to terrace, delighting in spoiling everyone's fun.
It's ridiculous - as far as I'm concerned - that anyone who moves a stone's throw from Sydney University automatically consents to having students playing Cure albums at full volume at 2am. The same applies here. If Corey's neighbours couldn't sleep, for goodness' sake, they should have come and had a warm VB with their neighbours for half an hour or so before they passed out. That way there would have been some adult supervision. And if they really couldn't sleep, I humbly suggest that the police helicopter might have had more to do with it than a bunch of unruly teenagers.
Anyone guilty of vandalism should have to pay to repair the damage, of course. And it should be easy to locate them via their MySpace profiles, shouldn't it? If anyone is going to have to pay for the cops, it should be the people who called them, surely. I don't want to trivialise something that was probably a bit concerning if you lived next door, but for goodness' sake, lighten up. Being irresponsible is what teenagers do.
But if the kid's really going to be left with a bill, then the solution couldn't be simpler. He just needs to sell the movie rights. The story already resembles the plot of a dozen '80s teen comedies. MySpace adds something of a modern twist – well, a 2006 twist to be precise – but otherwise the plot is the same. Kid throws party when he's not allowed to, too many people show up, and he has to try and stop his parents finding out. Of course they do, when it becomes a national media story.
It's like so many ironically wonderful movies – many of them directed by John Hughes, like Sixteen Candles andWeird Science - and the list goes on. And in this real-life situation, so many of the stock characters are there already. There's the cool slacker hero – to cap it off, his name is Corey, for goodness' sake.
Could this story get any more '80s-retro? And Delaney sounds like an invented '80s surname too. What's more, his actual dialogue is already brilliantly reminiscent of Bill and Ted at their finest: "We warned them, we said the party would be finished at like 12(am) and they were like 'sweet, sweet, sweet', but then they called the cops anyway, so we were like 'oh, damn'."
Then we have the long-suffering parents, who pull their hair out and frown a lot. Here's Corey's dad, Steve: "[I] just can't believe what's happened. Our son has gone totally behind our back ... So embarrassed for our neighbourhood. Just can't believe what they must have gone through."
Then you have the killjoy villain, in this case played by Police Commissioner, Christine Nixon: "I have a word [of advice] for young people who are having those kind of parties - don't do it ... It's not a good thing to do at all and it may cost your family or yourself a very substantial amount of money."
I can just hear Commissioner Nixon exasperatedly screaming "FERRIS!".
I don't know exactly what happened at Delaney's place that night. But in keeping from the genre, we can guess a few things. There was a fat guy who took his shirt off, shouted "PARTY!" and downed a beer bong. A hot girl was on the verge of pashing a guy, but at the last minute, spewed all over him instead. There were nerds who weren't supposed to be there, and somehow by the end of the night, one of them made it with a cheerleader. And naturally, the brand new sofa/vase/painting/sports car/entire suburb that Corey's parents specifically told him to look after was smashed at the climax of the party.
Look, we all know that binge drinking is a problem, and can be genuinely dangerous, and I don't want to take away from that in the unlikely event that any impressionable teenager reads this blog and thinks I'm giving them the green light to trash their hood. I just think that, like the dean of any American college campus featured in an '80s comedy, we all need to lighten up. I'm sure Corey won't do it again. At least until the sequel, Corey Goes To Schoolies. And believe me – if I was, let's say, a producer at MTV, I'd be sending along a camera crew. Naturally, I don't condone teenage drinking – in fact, my teenage years were almost entirely free of both alcohol and fun. But, as the creative geniuses behind Weird Science know all too well, they sure can be amusing.

Note - this blog is now closed for comments. Sorry we had to take down the previous ones, thanks to all those who commented.

A column about Singh and Symonds

As we’ve seen from the unprecedented media interest in the piddly first few Presidential primaries, the significance of anything that happens in January is always amplified massively for one simple reason – there just isn’t anything else in the news. And so it is that we’ve all spent an entire week closely following the story of one intemperate cricketer who allegedly said that another intemperate cricketer was a big monkey.

At a time when anyone with any sense is devoting most of their time to relaxing, and even our workaholic new Prime Minister has been chilling out in Kirribilli House (“reading briefing papers” – apparently his idea of a good time), the reaction has been nothing short of extraordinary. Tempers were already frayed by the ridiculous umpiring in the Test, and the Australian cricket team’s tiresomely aggressive approach to the game didn’t exactly salve the wounds Steve Bucknor’s decisions had left. There’s nothing quite like ugly Australian triumphalism to make your average Indian feel like flambéing a photo of Ricky Ponting.

The problem faced by umpires is not that they make mistakes – that’s inevitable, especially as they get older. It’s unfortunate than an umpire who was as good for as long as Bucknor has had his career tarnished like this. But sadly for the other men in white coats, advances in the coverage of cricket mean that it is now possible to tell with absolute certainly when they’re wrong. Whereas in the past, lbw decisions and snicks remained a matter of opinion even after replays, Hawkeye and Snicko have made them appear like a question of fact. Since the technology’s there, and pretty much impartial, it should be used whenever there’s a doubtful decision. That way umpires like Bucknor won’t be faced with the impossible task of getting every decision ‘right’ when they roll the replay. It’s completely unreasonable of commentators to expect umpires to never make mistakes when, for instance, Bill Lawry hasn’t been right in at least twenty years.

But the stench of racism is rather more enduring than the furore over a few bad decisions. The scandal has engulfed both nations, and made headlines around the world. Flags and effigies have been burnt, and the threat of cancelling the tour still looms in the air. I don’t know whether Harbhajan Singh called Symonds a monkey, and whether it offended him, or how serious it really was. But I do know is that it’s a truly ugly term, which has been the basis of shocking racial abuse in European football, with fans regularly throwing bananas at black players. It must be stamped out, and making an example of Harbhajan – if indeed he is guilty – is appropriate. Of course, it’s the people who throw around hurtful labels like that who are the ones who are actually unevolved.

But unsporting behaviour must be policed no less strenuously. Ricky Ponting’s post-match interview in Sydney was appallingly smug, with not a word of congratulations for an Indian team which had performed heroically and been desperately unlucky. Even the Fanatics must have felt uncomfortable, if they put down their annoying plastic trumpets for long enough to listen. Competitiveness on the field is one thing, but why Ponting has to behave like a petulant toddler off it is baffling. It isn’t exactly appropriate to gloat when you’ve just won your record-equalling 16th Test in a row. For all his love of onfield ‘mental disintegration’, Steve Waugh was always completely professional off the field. It’s a pity Ponting didn’t pay more attention. The current captain would also do well to spend some time helping orphanages in the subcontinent as well – he might make himself slightly less unpopular.

With luck, the whole thing will blow over, and seem in a few months like a storm in a tea-break Gatorade bottle. But someone in Cricket Australia needs to give the current leadership a good talking to. And if it has to be in the only language they apparently understand – sledging – then so be it. Because right now, nobody’s saying come on, Aussie, come on. And I know this because last night, Ricky Ponting’s mum told me so.

A column about 2007

Well, it’s that time of year where we put our feet up and look back at the year that was. We don’t get a lot of time for quiet contemplation during the Australian summer, since there are barbeques to fire up and beers to be drunk. And besides, there’s only a brief window available before we all head to the beach and we become incapable of any meaningful reflection because the cricket’s on.

Only a few days into January of this year, though, cricket set the tone for what has turned out to be a year of transition. Many old campaigners have shuffled off the stage this year, and the simultaneous retirement of Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and Justin Langer was just the first in a series of grand departures – although we can be relieved that Warne has not yet retired from his primary career as a sex scandal participant. John Laws has packed away the golden microphone, Channel Nine is no longer Still The One, and even more remarkably, is no longer owned by the Packers. And I can scarcely believe that Gretel Killeen isn’t hosting Idol, nor that it hasn’t yet been axed. These are strange times indeed.

The biggest change, of course, we made a few weeks ago when we put an end to the Howard Government. I’ve written a lot about Kevin Rudd in these pages recently, and don’t wish to sound like a broken record. Or like Prime Minister Kevin himself, who views the ability to repeat exactly the same phrase over and over again as the most worthy of political virtues. But even though it’s still only days old, the new government is hitting the ‘undo’ button with gusto. We’re no longer global warming pariahs, and before too long we won’t have AWAs, full-fee paying students, nearly as many troops in Iraq or even – in the unlikely event you believe the Rudd hype – surgery queues.

And history was made only the other day, when we had a female Acting Prime Minister briefly, and the sky didn’t fall in. Then again, in recent years that role has regularly been filled by Nationals leaders, so it’s clear that not much can go wrong on a Deputy PM’s watch. We’ll have to wait a while yet before we can genuinely pat ourselves on the back for our progressiveness in having a woman in charge.

But change is in the air, and since the new PM no longer needs to avoid frightening the horses by minimising his differences to John Howard, we might see even genuine reform. Our Federal arrangements leave a lot to be desired, and with Labor in control everywhere, this is a once-in-a-century opportunity to do away with the ridiculousness of seven different health and education departments for a population of twenty-one million. There is a rare chance to remake the foundations of this country, and make it better.

And yet many commentators have suddenly started predicting gloomy days ahead for our economy. Before the election, it seemed we were in fabulous shape, with John Howard campaigning on his supposedly brilliant economic legacy. But suddenly, the doomsayers are warning that necessary tough decisions were ducked by the Howard-Costello dream team, so now inflation has to be urgently curbed, interest rates will continue to rise sharply, and we could be heading for another recession. Some have even suggested that this “was not a good election to win” for Labor. How strange to think that we may one day fondly look back on the Howard era as “the good old days”.

Our former Prime Minister was last seen on the golf course, which I’m sure is very nice for him. But I hope he spares the occasional thought for his “fellow Australians” who don’t have the luxury of a massive Government pension and an unlimited supply of golfing-buddy toadies to tell us what wonderful leaders we were. The rest of us had better strap ourselves in. Because even if the economy doesn’t completely go down the toilet, there is turbulence ahead. The new Government has much to do, and just as importantly, much to undo. It will be fascinating to watch whether Kevin Rudd is up to the job in 2008. But for the time being, let’s do what John Howard would do, and watch the cricket.

A column about Rudd's victory

The jury is very much out on whether Kevin Rudd has the wherewithal to deliver his so-called education revolution, but what we witnessed in Australia on November 24 can deservedly be described as a political one. As revolutions go, it was a particularly bloodless coup, of course, as any coup involving someone as lilywhite as Rudd must surely be.

But it was a coup nevertheless, and it leaves the Liberals with no higher elected official in the country than Campbell Newman, the gormless Lord Mayor of Brisbane, and even he's been tipped to be removed when he goes to the polls next year. Given the extent of the Labor landslide and the baffling choice of Brendan Nelson as leader, Robert Menzies' party seems almost as dead as he is.

It's hard to see them emerging from the wilderness anytime soon, especially since Nelson has come out in his first days as leader saying that he doesn't support an apology for the stolen generation or necessarily rolling back WorkChoices. Which indicates his political antennae are even more defective than we might have imagined – the message from the electorate didn't exactly strike me as ambiguous. I checked the Centrebet odds on any party other than Labor winning the next election, and they're paying $4.60. Given what we've seen so far, I reckon that's even more conservative than the party would be if Tony Abbott had won the leadership. Centrebet didn't offer odds on John Howard coming out of retirement to lead the Libs back to victory after winning the by-election for Peter Costello's old seat of Higgins, but I reckon they'd be about the same.

The enormity of Howard's defeat can’t be exaggerated. He ought to be absolutely devastated, because his party sure is. There is only one way the election could have been worse for the Coalition, and that’s if it had been completely obliterated in the Senate as well. But the balance of power seems likely to be with the Greens, Family First and the SA "No Pokies" maverick Nick Xenophon, which will make every bill’s passage somewhat perilous even after the Senate changes. Pokies are generally regulated by states, so who knows what on earth Xenophon will do in the Senate? We can safely guess, though, that whoever leads the Opposition team in the Upper House will still have at least some work to do – certainly more than Nelson, who may as well put his feet up and clock up the superannuation until the party dumps him for Malcolm Turnbull.

After a result like this, all commentators jostle to say "I told you so". But I feel I must take a bow for having backed the correct result. The polls predicted a Ruddslide all year, but given John Howard's past electoral snake-charming efforts, few in the commentary game were willing to believe things wouldn't change towards the end. Well, I was willing to stick my neck on the line. I backed Labor, and what's more, I said so in print. I make the tough calls, and I make them first.

Now, some may note that I did actually hedge my bets somewhat by predicting a few other results. Well, I view that as entirely sensible. Lesser commentators make one call and stick to it no matter what, an approach whose flaws are probably only just now being realised by Janet Albrechtsen, but admittedly meant that in this last election Alan Ramsey had the satisfaction of getting it right for the first time ever. But really – Albrechtsen and Ramsey, who are they? I mean, other than, respectively, a member of the ABC Board and a press gallery legend?

They could learn a trick or two about the columnist game from me. Being the professional that I am, in various other columns I also predicted a narrow Labor win, a narrow Coalition win, and a narrow Greens win – unlikely I know, but very likely to endear me to the Inner West. (As President Bartlet said, people – see the whole board.) Heck, to cover all theoretically possible bases, I even tipped the Democrats' survival. Admittedly it was in a satirical article, but I knew that if some freak Stephen Bradbury-type event happened and all the other Senate candidates were declared ineligible, I could pull the article out and claim that I knew their support would come flooding back.

So, those of us in the leftie gulag we like to call the Inner West now have a fresh challenge. After years of raging against the Howard Government with our regular marches, angry letters to the editor and literally billions of scathing comments during our dinner parties, it’s finally gone. Friends, we can now look forward now to a bold new era – an era of being disappointed by Labor.