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Naked Eye #4

My final Sun-Herald column about Sarah Palin's TV job and Prince William's visit, among other things.

FOX News now Sarah and Balanced

The news that Sarah Palin would join FOX News as an analyst sounded like a (non-gay) marriage made in Republican heaven. She needed a job, having abandoned her state midway through her second term, and Fox needed high-profile Obama opponents. But her first appearance didn't exactly contradict MSNBC's Chris Matthews, who asked how she could be a pundit when "she doesn't know anything". She quickly got befuddled when asked by Bill O'Reilly how a McCain-Palin administration would have responded to the Iranian nuclear threat, and her answer to how she'd combat the rise in unemployment was that the Government should get out of the way of the private sector – the very approach which caused the financial crisis in the first place. Most damagingly, she admitted she thought Saddam Hussein might have been responsible for 9/11 before her Vice-Presidential debate in 2008. Still, at least there is now a clear heir to the Bush legacy.

Where there's a Wills

Understandably, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has cancelled her visit to Australia because of the disastrous earthquake in Haiti. But fortunately no crisis has prevented Prince William from visiting Sydney for a whole two days next week, in what is only his second visit ever despite being our future King. The Premier is taking time out from fixing our crumbling State to meet his plane, and then Wills will be attending a garden-party. It hardly seems worth the fuss, nor the substantial security bill. If he must come here, perhaps he could emulate some of our other young English visitors, and pull some beers or something?

Google and the Great Wall of Conroy

Google's dramatic announcement that it would stop censoring its search engine in China has been praised as a win for civil liberties in a nation where speech is far from free. Its decision has been applauded by the White House, with spokesperson Robert Gibbs referring to President Obama's speech in Beijing in November in which he advocated the "right of a free internet." And yet that's exactly the right that our own government is now proposing to restrict. So will Google refuse to play ball with our government's attempt to decide what its citizens should see? And will President Obama criticise Stephen Conroy's plan to make internet filtering mandatory in Australia? Labor Senator Kate Lundy expressed reservations about the plan this week, and presumably now risks being consigned to some gulag for expressing dissent.

Who wants to see a millionaire?

A big welcome to AR Rahman, the genius Bollywood composer whose compositions even sound good when they're performed by the Pussycat Dolls. He hopes his free concert for the Sydney Festival will help to build bridges between Australia and India at a time of considerable tension. Let's hope so, because the killings in Melbourne have done enormous damage to our image in the region. Rahman says the attacks are the result of drugs rather than racism, though, which seems about as optimistic as a boy from the Mumbai slums trying to win Who Want To Be A Millionaire.

Abbott’s Army vs Rudd’s Regiment

Tony Abbott has tried to seize the environmental mantle from the left this week, promising to create a 15,000-strong Green Army that will undertake a series of conservationist sorties around the nation. They will confront the urgent environmental challenges facing Australia, except of course climate change. But since Kevin Rudd already announced a Green Jobs Corps back in July, we are faced with the thrilling prospect of the two forces joining battle. And since Rudd promised to recruit 50,000 for his programme, Abbott might want to bump up his numbers before the warring sides take up their pitchforks and hoes.

Whan disaster strikes

Amid the flood of responses to the terrible tragedy in Haiti was a statement from the NSW Labor MP Steve Whan headed "New South Wales rescuers on standby following Haiti tsunami". The media release, which was posted on the NSW Fire Brigade website, suggests that our state's Emergency Services Minister doesn't know the difference between an earthquake and a tsunami. Hint: one involves water.

Naked Eye #3

This third instalment of my Sun-Herald summer political column deals with Kevin Rudd's children's book and the Jennifer Hawkins kerfuffle, among other delights.

Every dog has its Australia Day

This time last year, the tireless Kevin Rudd took a few days leave to dash off a quick 7,000 word essay for The Monthly, blaming the Liberals for the global financial crisis. This summer, with the pesky crisis as good as solved, he’s used his authorial talents to produce something considerably lighter: a children’s book, written with Play School host Rhys Muldoon and illustrator Carla Zapel.

It’s called Jasper + Abby and the Great Australia Day Kerfuffle, and stars the Rudd family pets. Jasper the cat and Abby the dog “end up saving the day on what could have been an Oz day disaster at the Lodge”, according to the PM. The book, which will raise money for children’s charities, is out later this month. No word yet on whether the villains responsible for this latest crisis are once again from the Liberal Party.

NSW’s job ad nauseam

Finally some good news from Kristina Keneally, who claimed this week that NSW was leading Australia’s economic recovery. The Premier cited big increases in job ads in November and December to show that the state’s economic motor is powering forwards. Three cheers for Kristina!

But wait – this is NSW Labor we’re talking about. So I did a bit more digging, and discovered that while Nathan Rees had announced a hiring freeze in the middle of the year, as of late December the State Government subsequently ignored it to advertise at least 180 senior public service positions in the past few months, splurging over $20 million in wages. About time we placed an ad for another new Premier, isn’t it?

Rolling out the Barry

Speaking of new Premiers, I heard a great rumour this week. Apparently there’s been a move on for a while now to replace the one leader in the country who only needs to turn up to the next election to win it comfortably – NSW Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell. And while it would be fair to say that the State hasn’t exactly been electrified by his charisma, he does possess the one attribute that voters are looking for: he’s not a member of the ALP. The idea is to promote a fresh, young face, but surely the Libs should proceed with caution. The last time they went for someone fresh and young, they gave us Peter Debnam.

Rudd and Abbott in the pink

Jane McGrath day at the SCG was a wonderful success again this year, raising funds to help the McGrath Foundation provide breast cancer nurses. Everyone found a different way of getting involved and having some fun – Michael Slater donned a lurid pink suit that would later be auctioned for the charity, while Mark Taylor inappropriately quipped that Slats should take his suit down to Oxford St. Kevin Rudd dropped by the ground to cook snags on the barbie for the kids, while Tony Abbott joined the Pink Lads in Lane Cove for a 16km run to the SCG. While it’s great to see both leaders helping to tackle breast cancer, it’s clear which man is best placed to combat the youth obesity crisis.

Hawking Hawkins

Congratulations to Marie Claire for its groundbreaking decision to run an unretouched photo on its cover. Admittedly since it was of Jennifer Hawkins, it didn’t actually need any Photoshopping, but hey – baby steps. The use of unnaturally perfect, digitally manipulated images of women has become so commonplace that the French proposal for all retouched images to be labelled is looking increasingly sensible. Otherwise, there’s a genuine risk that girls will grow up thinking that the ideal body is shaped like one of those willowy aliens from Avatar.

Still, Marie Claire’s cover was a huge success – not with helping women develop confidence in their own bodies, as they claimed; surely nothing could be less helpful for that than printing nude pics of Miss Universe. But it won a heap of publicity for the magazine in a slow news week, and no doubt helped Marie Claire to sell thousands of copies to a whole new readership segment – teenage boys.

Naked Eye #2

The second instalment of my summer political column for the Sun-Herald. Barnaby Joyce and Stephen Fielding feature in this special wacky Senator edition.

Rudd Scores at the MCG

Unlike his predecessor, Kevin Rudd must dread his visit to the cricket commentary box each summer. Being relaxed and blokey simply isn’t the Prime Minister’s style – he probably had to bite his tongue to avoid suggesting that Ricky Ponting hire consultants from McKinsey’s to produce a report on the best way of defeating Pakistan.

The PM used his recent visit to the MCG to launch an anti-binge drinking campaign, a worthy cause in the Australian summer. But I was surprised the ads were fronted by Richie Benaud and Tony Greig. Surely the “Know When To Declare” message would have been more heartfelt coming from Rudd? Although his preferred social occasion is a working party, alcohol has been known to turn the PM into a wild man, at least relatively. I’d like to see an ad where Rudd warns punters to “declare” they’ve had too much to drink before ending up at a strip club with New York Post editor Col Allan.

A very Family First Christmas

Catching up with endless hordes of family members on Christmas Day can be a bit daunting, but spare a thought for Steve Fielding, who spent the day lunching with 15 brothers and sisters and their families. Being one of 16 kids might explain the senator’s need to stand out from the crowd with wacky publicity stunts, like dressing up as a beer bottle to promote a recycling scheme or marching shirtless through Melbourne with protesting pensioners. There was no word, though, on whether he wore his tree outfit to the lunch, perhaps bedecked with tinsel.

Having to deal with such a huge clan would put almost anyone’s family values to the test, but the Family First leader’s remain beyond reproach. Earlier this year, he warned the nation of the environmental threat posed by divorce, which apparently contributes to climate change by creating unnecessary extra households. These days, of course, Fielding is a climate change sceptic, which presumably means unhappy couples can now divorce without fretting about their carbon footprint.

Yet another Bali high

It’s a happy new year for some of the Tamil refugees from the Oceanic Viking who are now being resettled in Australia. And predictably, the fact that all 78 were escaping a civil war and have now been verified by the UNHCR as genuine refugees has been forgotten in the midst of another unpleasant squabble about whether we’re soft on asylum-seekers. Apparently we Aussies only welcome boats on the horizon at the end of the Sydney to Hobart.

But amid all the hype about border protection, we should acknowledge that Australia’s problems with illegal arrivals are hardly one-way. The Indonesians still lock up plenty of unwanted Aussies, like the union official who was arrested this week for allegedly smuggling marijuana into Bali in his sock. What, aren’t the beaches relaxing enough?

The unleashable Barnaby Joyce

Tony Abbott’s recent reshuffle of the Opposition frontbench contained a few surprises. Not only did he defrost Bronwyn Bishop and Philip Ruddock, but he entrusted the usually boring Finance portfolio to Barnaby Joyce, the Nationals Senator who makes Sarah Palin look like a reliable team player.

Joyce celebrated his elevation by calling for a total ban on Chinese investment, which the Opposition Leader immediately repudiated. So, in light of the concerns over whether the Nationals senator could follow the Coalition line, I was amused to discover Joyce writing for the ABC’s Unleashed website. Joyce was giving the “nasty horrid people” in the media a festive spray for their portrayal of him as erratic and naive. “This is a political lesson to all,” he wrote. “Do not say anything that could ever be contrived as a personal opinion, in fact do your very best not to have an opinion, in fact in fact do not have an opinion that you do not have an opinion.”

Fortunately, there’s not much chance of Joyce taking his own advice. Unperturbed by his previous rebuke, he called this week for the Government to prevent a Chinese company buying the nation’s biggest irrigator.

Naked Eye #1

I filled in on the Sun-Herald's political gossip column for four weeks over summer - not an easy thing to do when not much is happening! This one's about the Copenhagen summit and Kevin Rudd's Twitter, among other things.

The Copenhagen summit may have achieved minimal progress on climate change, but it has certainly produced a satisfying number of conspiracy theories. Was it China that derailed proceedings, like an evil Fat Controller? Or can we blame India for everything going horribly wrong, just as like to we do in cricket?

But the week’s best political conspiracy theory has nothing to do with Copenhagen. A YouTube video has been doing the rounds which alleges that Silvio Berlusconi faked his bonk on the nose from a replica of Milan Cathedral. It’s claimed that the scandal-stricken leader was attempting to boost his popularity, perhaps by adding wacky sound effects and featuring the clip on Italy’s Funniest Home Video Show.

If so, it worked – the Italian PM’s popularity has jumped nearly 10%. I’m sceptical, though – surely Silvio wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble to win sympathy from voters? He must have been trying to win sympathy from nurses.

Driving NSW taxpayers crazy

There’s been justifiable outrage this week at the Herald’s story that taxpayers are shelling out $2 million a year to former Premiers, including a chauffeur to shuttle Nathan Rees to and from that backbench of his. This figure will rise to tens of millions if, as I suspect, every single Labor MP is going to get a turn as Premier before the next election.

Now, our former Premiers should get some kind of victim’s compensation after they’re knifed by Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi. There are too many ex-Premiers nowadays for even Macquarie to employ. But what I can’t figure out is why they would even want a free driver in the first place. Surely they’d rather enjoy the fruits of their custodianship of NSW with unlimited free travel on our trains and buses?

Detailed programmatic Twittericity

Kevin Rudd’s always boasted had a commanding lead in opinion polls, but it’s amongst his fellow nerds on Twitter that his popularity is truly extraordinary. KevinRuddPM now has 844,724 followers who tune in for updates on his exciting excursions to watch Zombieland with his son and buy a birthday cake for “Swanny”. His former opponent TurnbullMalcolm is well behind with 18,683, while TonyAbbottMHR has a paltry 2527.

As usual, our State pollies are of considerably less interest. The official PremierofNSW account, which changes identity more frequently than Doctor Who, has only 2871, a mere 0.3% of Rudd’s tally. The only shock is that Twitter is the one place where Kristina Keneally is more popular than BarryOFarrell, who has 1671.

The Great Wall of Conroy

Despite widespread opposition, the Government is persisting with its plan to adopt the Chinese approach to internet regulation. And honestly, if the thing worked flawlessly, few would probably object. But in the real world blacklisting is riven with problems.

For instance, I’d like to ban Miley Cyrus’ website. As with many of the sites on the Conroy blacklist, it features a young girl alongside an older guy who’s genuinely disturbing, as anyone who remembers Billy Ray Cyrus’ singing career will recall. All I would have to do is persuade someone at ACMA that her work is offensive by playing them ‘The Climb’, and hey presto – she’d be blacklisted.

Actually, wait – that’s an argument in favour of the filter. But let’s not kid ourselves that banning a bunch of websites is going to stop the nasty stuff. All it’ll do is send it further underground, where law enforcement officers can’t find it.

Bangarooting Sydney Harbour

I don’t mind Richard Rogers’ controversial proposal for the Barangaroo site, even if the hotel seems a little high, but the idea of landfill is troubling. A government that’s already uncomfortably close to developers signing away a chunk of our harbour for yet another luxury waterfront development feels like a crossing of the Rubicon. And I mean literally crossing – I bet someone in the Premier’s office is developing plans to fill in the harbour from The Rocks to Kirribilli in a bid to raise some cash. Then again, NSW is the one place where adopting Dubai’s financial strategy would be an improvement.

Hey Hey it's a black day

Another week, another outrage perpetrated by the entertainment industry. And this time it’s Hey Hey It’s Saturday that’s in the firing line for that ‘Jackson Jive’ sketch involving blacked-up performers. At least it’s a change from the days when the show’s only crime was blandness.

Despite several opinion polls claiming today claiming the public didn’t think it was racist, to me the argument seems indisputable. It wasn’t an attempt at accurate impersonation, like when a white performer on Saturday Night Live dons brown makeup to mimic Barack Obama. Their choice of jet-black makeup was denigrating, transforming the performers into dancing golliwogs. So it was no surprise that the act raised the hackles of Harry Connick Jr, who hails from New Orleans, that town which recently experienced enormous racial tension in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The producers were intending to recreate a “classic” moment from twenty years ago, when the act was originally shown on Red Faces. But our sense of humour has changed in those intervening decades. I’m all in favour of edgy comedy, but white people mimicking other races feels inherently problematic nowadays even when it’s done by a performer as skilful as Peter Seller in The Party. Just as Paul Hogan’s 1980s ocker ignoramus Mick Dundee seems more embarrassing than amusing in 2009, Hey Hey succeeded only in proving that some classic television moments should not be revisited.

Though I can’t condone the act, our increasing hunger for the public crucifixion of would-be entertainers nevertheless seems an unhealthy trend. Crossing what can be a fairly blurry line in the sand of public sensibility should certainly be rebuked, but not with the kind of hysteria we’ve seen in recent weeks with the likes of Kanye and Kyle. Having been on the receiving end of the treatment with The Chaser team obviously makes my perspective biased, obviously, and we entirely agree that we made a serious error of judgement. But there’s a question as to whether the punishment fits the crime.

The reality is that unless we accept that making occasional misjudgements is an inherent risk of trying to entertain, we will end up with only the most tame, tedious television. If even a show as safe and dull as Hey Hey can provoke public fury, what hope is there for gifted comedians who push the envelope like John Safran and Chris Lilley, both of whom have also been subjected to the blowtorch of public outrage in recent years? If we don’t calm down a bit, we’ll get to the point where nobody except Sam Newman dares to try and make a joke on television. And that would be a very great shame.

This article was originally published in Grazia

Kanye and the conveyor belt of outrage

At yesterday’s Emmys, Toni Collette won, Simon Baker didn’t, and a galaxy of stars made broadly identical speeches thanking their colleagues, their families and their deities. Was I the only person wondering whether the event might have been a little more entertaining if Kanye West had taken to the stage?

“I’mma letcha finish, Toni,” he might have said. “But Tina Fey gave one of the best portrayals of a disturbed person when she played Sarah Palin. Of all time!”

West’s stunt at the MTV Video Music Awards last week, when he interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech to talk up Beyoncé’s video, was the subject of jokes throughout last night’s awards, of course. And the reason is simple. In an entertainment industry that’s generally all about plastic platitudes, West did something truly unexpected. I can’t imagine doing anything that foolishly arrogant – nobody can, except perhaps Souja Boy. It was the most fascinating moment at an awards ceremony since that fateful Logies night when Steve Irwin’s snake bit Tim Webster.

But the public reacted as though Kanye derailed the Middle East peace process instead of an award for a music video. Even President Obama called him a “jackass”, perhaps not realising that on MTV that word is a compliment. And that guru of decorum Pink, for instance, described him as the “the biggest piece of shit on earth”, which strikes me as rather unfair to Robert Mugabe.

Kanye didn't realise it – he didn’t realise much, by all appearances – but he was grabbing not only the microphone, but the mantle previously held by Serena Williams as Celebrity Villain of the Week. It’s an award that now carries a familiar timeline. When an entertainer does something shocking, Twitter explodes and bloggers put in the boot. News websites give the story saturation coverage, and traditional media join the party as well. A global jury of anyone with an internet connection reviews the evidence on YouTube, and a worldwide avalanche of Schadenfreude-laced hostility is unleashed upon the star. They apologise, but this is quickly rejected as insincere, and so they disappear to the wilderness to atone.

I’ve always enjoyed playing stacks-on-a-celebrity, but having been consigned to the doghouse this year with my colleagues from The Chaser has made me wonder. Our Make A Realistic Wish Foundation sketch was undoubtedly an error of judgement – a comedy show should make people laugh, not wince. And if you dish it out as much as we do, then you should be able to take it.

But it was surreal to see the Prime Minister taking time out from a press conference about the resignation of his Defence Minister to condemn a comedy sketch. A talkback host offered a bounty for our home addresses, and one of the reasons the ABC suspended the programme was its genuine fear that a studio record would endanger its staff. Even Guy Sebastian wrote on Twitter that he wanted to punch us, although to be fair that cheered us up.

Our scandal blew over – within a few days, the media were picking on Jodi Gordon instead – and fortunately viewers gave us another chance. But since that experience, I’ve noticed how our increasingly frenetic news websites, cable networks and blogs require fresh meat to keep people interested. Because as any Alan Jones listener knows, outrage can be entertaining. And so an endless conveyer belt of entertainers is thrown to the lions, and we watch with perverse fascination as they’re gnawed.

Perhaps in a time of moral relativism and economic uncertainty, it’s comforting to band together and condemn people. We humans have always enjoyed forming an angry mob. But the sudden intensity of our anger seems to have heightened at the same time as its targets have become more irrelevant. Rather than being enraged about Darfur or Guantanamo or climate change, we reserve our harshest condemnation for entertainers who spoil other entertainers’ thankyou speeches.

Kyle Sandilands has been through this wringer twice recently, and while I’m hardly a fan, I can’t help noticing that his audience loved his abrasiveness until he misdirected it. It seems hypocritical to worship Kanye and Kyle for their rapping and ranting, and then react with shock and horror when their overswollen egos carry them across what is always a somewhat arbitrary line.

Of course stars should be reprimanded when they get it wrong, but the flames of public condemnation are threatening to engulf their targets. And if they do, we’ll all be the poorer, because a world where shows like Idol contain only the Marcias of this world is a duller one – as its ratings have demonstrated. More soberingly, I was sad to read that Kanye’s friends are concerned about the potential for suicide. Such is the ease with which celebrities drop from universal adulation to evisceration.

Ultimately, like Picasso, the excellence of Kanye’s art can’t be divorced from his monstrous narcissism. If he didn’t believe in himself so unshakably, he wouldn’t have dropped out of college to become a music producer in the first place. And that would have been a far greater tragedy than a moment of rudeness at an awards show.

This piece was published in the Sydney Morning Herald, but reported as defending Kyle Sandilands because the subs cut a crucial sentence. They also cut my favorite joke, probably because it was just plain unnecessary. So, for posterity, this is the original version.

Geoffrey Robertson Q&A

SundayLife invited me to interview Geoffrey Robertson on the occasion of his latest Hypothetical for National Indigenous Television, with the brief of throwing the master some curly hypothetical questions of his own.

After your new Hypothetical screens, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offers you a safe seat in Parliament and immediate appointment to the Aboriginal Affairs portfolio. Recognising the urgency of the task, you put aside any political objections and accept. What is your first major initiative?

It’s now or never-never, so my policy would be education, education, education – including educating everyone else about the respect due to the first Australians, who walked this land long before the birth of Christ or the fall of Troy. But respect means rights. Other advanced nations – and even New Zealand – allow their indigenous people to vote for their own parliamentary representatives. So let’s create two extra Senate seats for Aboriginal voters. They might elect Pat Dodson and Noel Pearson. Let’s face it – they’d be a lot more impressive holding the balance of power than Brian Harradine, Steve Fielding or the Democrats. Their presence in the Senate would give Aborigines, for so long shut out of our democratic processes, a real sense of inclusion in the nation.

You met your wife Kathy Lette when she was a last-minute replacement for Kylie Minogue in a Hypothetical. If Kylie had been available, could the two of you have been happy together?

I should be so lucky. But I wonder whether our musical tastes could coexist – to me, pop is something you drink from a can. I’m not sure she could sit through Wagner’s Ring Cycle or my summing-up speeches, which are usually longer. So, sadly, even though Kylie has become a family friend, I don’t think she would ever be “spinning around” for me. As the fax from the ABC stated when it told me of Kylie’s replacement, “You’ll just have to make do with Kathy Lette.”

You are an advocate of free speech, and defended the editors of Oz [a 1960s satirical magazine] against obscenity charges. I plan to falsely and obscenely alter your Wikipedia entry. May I?

So long as you describe me as a tall, dark and handsome billionaire, with special tantric skills and a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, who can wrestle crocodiles with one hand while whipping up a souffle with the other. If, however, you add any truth to my entry, I may sue – and under current Australian law, without a freedom of expression of guarantee, you will almost certainly lose.

An Aboriginal group is granted extensive rights to self-determination by the Northern Territory Government, and reintroduces ritual spearing. A young Aborigine who is sentenced to spearing argues that it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. The Chief Minister asks your advice on whether to intervene.

I’m delighted to receive this brief. I would explain that under Australia’s new charter of rights, all laws must be interpreted “as far as possible” consistently with human rights. So “ritual spearing” would not refer to the passage through flesh of a sharply tipped length of wood, any more than “ritual boning” – a fate that threatened Ms Jessica Rowe – meant filleting her like a fish or carnally connecting her with the tribal elder of Channel 9. Where words in a statute are ambiguous, judges must now interpret them to accord with the charter. So ritual spearing would mean a cutting remark or a barbed comment or, in the case of a misbehaving young Aborigine, a searing and sarcastic judicial homily. A sharp tongue can do a lot of psychological scarring, but at least it doesn’t draw blood.

I’ve read interviews over the years where you claim to be planning a move back to Australia. An anonymous source claims this was merely a hypothetical designed to appease a parochial Australian audience. Do you agree?

I return to Australia regularly. The main reason I don’t move back for good is that I’m a workaholic, and no one has offered me a full-time job. My wife goes demented – or more demented than usual – in the English winter, when she threatens to strangle a royal corgi in the hope of being transported to Botany Bay. Can you suggest any useful judging work that’s on offer – umpiring test matches, inspecting the width of bikinis on Bondi Beach, or… is the governorship of Tasmania still available?

Australia heeds your call for a Bill of Rights. The free speech provisions lead to a sharp increase in racist hate speech, culminating in the re-election of Pauline Hanson after advocating a new White Australia policy. In a speech to Parliament, she pays tribute to you for making it possible. What’s your response?

Can I volunteer for a ritual spearing? Actually, one of the great things about free speech is
that when racists can say what they really think, the public realise how disgusting they are. It’s when the law makes them clean up their act that they appear more reasonable and electable. And free speech enables satirists to get their teeth into people like Pauline Hanson. When she ran for Parliament back in 1997, it was only the comedians who were censored – Pauline Pantsdown’s satirical song [Backdoor Man] is still subject to a court injunction. So free speech? Bring it on. See my book, Statute Of Liberty: How To Give Australians Back Their Rights, which should be in your local bookshop by now.

You forbid your teenage children from attending an all-night party, because you hypothesise they may come to harm. They prosecute you for infringing their rights to freedom of association and movement. How do you plead?

I’ll ask the court for a parental protection order. Perhaps I’ll put myself up for adoption. “Look, yer Honour, I admit to driving my children crazy, but I also drive them everywhere.” When you Chaser boys reach middle age, you’ll find teenagers are God’s punishment for having sex in the first place. By that time, of course, there will be Chaser girls – otherwise your show will be condemned for sex discrimination. If women are good enough for the High Court team, why aren’t they good enough for the Chaser team?

You’ve advocated the closure of Guantanamo Bay and President Barack Obama has obliged early in his first term. However, it seems nobody is willing take in the current inmates. Are there any spare rooms at your place?

No, but I hear there are some empty basements in the “Toaster” and at Blues Point Tower [controversial apartment buildings on Sydney’s harbour]. Do those guys still have their alleged bomb-making skills? Quite seriously, there is a moral point here. For five years, Australia stood four-square behind the Bush lawyers who created this legal black hole, where inhumane treatment and torture were free of the Geneva Conventions. So we do share some responsibility for it, unlike Britain, which condemned Guantanamo and insisted that British citizens should not be held there. So perhaps we do have a moral responsibility to take a few of these people against whom the United States can find no evidence – let’s see if Janet and John Howard have any space. And a source tells me there’s a spare room at chez Ruddock.

This interview originally appeared in SundayLife in February 2009

How I write, and more importantly, how you can

So many people have been asking how I managed to write a book that I’m starting to wonder whether I should be feeling a little insulted. Yeah okay, so I produced something  that someone, in a moment of either extraordinary generosity or extraordinary folly, decided to publish. But me succeeding in releasing a book isn’t, like, one of the seven signs of the Apocalypse or anything. Or at least I hope it isn’t – WikiAnswers is worryingly inconclusive on the subject.

The question has been particularly popular with people who know me well, which is no surprise really – my most outstanding talent is generally agreed to be procrastination.  So I guess it is a bit of a surprise that someone who isn’t able to complete a tax return on time might have a bit of difficulty completing 70,000 words which, when read consecutively, make at least some degree of sense.

The reason people ask, of course, is that like running, singing and laughing at Peter André and Jordan, writing is one of those things that we’ve all done a bit of ourselves. I know for certain I haven’t got a Nobel Prize-winning theorem in me, or a shot at the Tour de France, but like most people who enjoy reading books, I’d always wondered about writing one.

Actually, the answer of how I did it is simple. I enrolled in a creative writing Masters at UTS, and did a bunch of courses, after which I’d written about 60,000 words. After all that work, it wasn’t that much more strenuous to polish it up into a first draft, which I sent to publishers.

But of course that’s not the answer people want to hear. I remember, because the question used to absolutely fascinate me way back in my B.N., or Before Novelist period. And yes, I know this sounds a bit patronising, but hell, I just wrote 70,000 words that some people, at least in my immediate family, have actually bought – I’ve a right to be slightly smug.

The answer people want to hear is the one that explains a great mystery – how on earth you actually discipline yourself to do all that writing. A Masters deadline helps, but it doesn’t explain how you actually do the assigments. The thought of writing all those words sounds to most people like a quirky variant of  waterboarding where your clothes stay dry. And even after I’d written the first 6000 words of my novel, for an assignment, the prospect of pushing it up to 70,000 seemed more painful a prospect than hammering rusty nails into the soles of one’s feet, or doing the publicity for Dick Cheney’s forthcoming autobiography.

But during my Masters, one of the things we learned us was how other people do it. Authors love nothing more than writing pieces explaining how they write, and we read dozens of them while I was studying. Every author has their own approach, which they insist is the definitive solution which all wannabe writers must adopt. And the hilarious thing is, every writer is utterly different. Some exhaustively plan their novels, and write full, detailed biographies for every character, while some let them flow spontaneously from their subconscious. Some rouse themselves at 4am each morning and perform callisthenics before settling in, while others burn the midnight oil. Some writers plough through all day, some stop when they’ve hit a specific target. There really is no secret.

To cite some famous examples, JK Rowling writes in an Edinburgh Starbucks, which isn’t something I could possibly recommend because it’s hard to concentrate when you’re gagging on terrible coffee. While Roald Dahl had a shed in his garden in which he would always have exactly six sharpened yellow pencils, which sounds more like a basis for diagnosing obsessive compulsive disorder than a surefire technique that should be adopted by other writers.

Every aspiring writer wants to know how they can actually make themselves do the work. The glib answer is that you have to have self-discipline. But frankly, I don’t. So I essentially tricked myself into writing the novel. See, I hate working, but I love cafés. Knowing this, I would take myself off to my favorite café, and sit there for an hour or two, having a coffee. I get bored easily, so to avoid the tedium of my own company, I’d pull out my laptop (with no internet or games on it – that’s essential!) and write. And once I actually started tapping away, I found it fairly easy to concentrate, and I wouldn’t let myself go home until I’d written 1000 words, and edited the last 1000 words I wrote. (I’m lucky to write fast, but if you set your own target at 250 words a day, that’ll still work.)

I also had an incentive scheme where once I’d finished, I gave myself a reward. Sometimes it was an arcade game if there was one near the café, sometimes a bit of browsing in a music store, and sometimes even a gelato. Yeah, it was really literary.

But the biggest reward was that, to my surprise, I really, really enjoyed doing the writing. It made me feel like, well, a real writer, like I’d always dreamed of being. Sometimes I’d work in a bookshop café, like the one at Kinokuniya or Berkelouw’s in Paddington, and imagine what it would be like to see my work on the shelves around me. In other words, I’d daydream – but it worked as an incentive.

So if you want to know how other writers do it, you’re actually asking the wrong question, in my opinion. What you need to ask yourself is how can you make yourself write. No-one else can answer that for you. For me, it took deadlines imposed by a university course that was so expensive that I simply wouldn’t let myself drop out – and most importantly, yielding to my own personality. That is, I ended up working with my flaws rather than trying to overcome them. I would love to get up at dawn and write every morning, right after I go to the gym for an hour and bake fresh crusty bread rolls for the homeless. But the fact is, I never will. So I made writing a pleasurable activity, and before I knew it, I’d written a whole book.

There is one downside to this. I’ve now carefully trained myself only to work in cafés – in any other environment, I will simply procrastinate. And to be honest, the café habit is getting expensive, and I’m doubtlessly eating way too much gelato. Still, at least I’ve found a way to make myself do the work. And as my friends will tell you, that’s something of a miracle. In all honesty, I can hardly believe I did it either. Perhaps it is one of the signs of the Apocalypse after all?

This post originally appeared on the Random House Australia blog.

Be careful what you wish for...

Okay, it’s time for me to eat some humble pie. Or perhaps humble Codral would be more appropriate. Because – oh, what fun I had last week with my jokey little piece on swine flu, and my little list about what I’d read if I was confined to my home with an illness. Oh how pleased with myself I felt.

Well, guess what happened? That’s right, I’ve spent the past three days stuck in bed with a cold. It’s not actually swine flu, apparently, because I don’t have an elevated temperature. And I’m not sure how to feel about that – on the one hand, I’m obviously pleased that I’m probably not going to die. On the other, if I’d been one of the first fatalities, it would have really helped with promoting my book.

There’s another thing I didn’t consider. Oh sure, I thought – it’d be fun to be stuck at home, unable to go out because of possible flu contamination, if you were actually well. But if you have most of the symptoms, as I do, you don’t exactly get to partake of a full intellectual diet while stuck at home. For one thing, I’ve got a headache and watery eyes. Which has meant that I haven’t been able to read a thing since I’ve had this cold. I’m certainly not up to tackling Infinite Jest, which is hard enough to follow when my brain’s functioning normally.

My activities have been severely restricted Other than lying in bed and feeling sorry for myself, I only did three things over the weekend. The first was watching The West Wing, and fantasizing about a world in which the politicians’ speeches are actually eloquent because they were written by Aaron Sorkin. Secondly, I spent about four hours hours playing a game called Flight Control on my phone, the point of which is to make aeroplanes land on three different runways without crashing into one another. And let’s just say we can all be thankful that I’m not an air traffic controller. My  landing skills are roughly equivalent to Mohamed Atta’s.

The other thing I did was go and see Star Trek on Friday night. Sure, I probably infected most of the cinema while I was there, but it was worth it – at least for me, since I’d already caught had the cold. I’ve never been much of a Trekkie – while I like Patrick Stewart as Picard, most of the series is way too cheesy for my tastes. It’s hard to take Captain Kirk’s preaching about tolerance for other species seriously when he’s a) devoting most of his energy to trying to suck in his gut and b) the supposed other species is clearly just a dude in a lame rubber mask.

It looked good, and the cast is young and spunky – especially, I thought, Uhura, who featured in her underwear in a scene so gratuitous it could have come  from Underbelly. And, as those who’ve seen it can attest, she’s apparently got a thing for nerds! Woman of my dreams. Anyway, the main reason the new Trek is wowing everyone, with an extraordinary 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, is because it has a great story.

It’s sad that a tight, well-constructed plot is so rare in mainstream cinema, but Hollywood thinks nothing of putting tens of millions of dollars into special effects and approximately zero into developing a story. Or worse still, I imagine, they get promising scripts rewritten by a committee, until they’re leached of any spark of originality and you get movies like Quantum Of Solace, which have a few impressive action set-pieces linked by a dour plot and dialogue consisting largely of clichés. James Bond has beaten SPECTRE and Smersh dozens of times, but he seems powerless to resist the evil cabal of Hollywood script doctors.

This is very different from the novel-writing process. Sure, you get feedback. My novel was sent to an external editor who wrote a very thorough report detailing its flaws. There were quite a few, and I had to rewrite it extensively – which, since it was my first attempt writing a novel, was hardly surprising. But the rewrites were still completed using my own words. Even the copy edits were only ever suggestions which I got to approve. So the novel, for better or worse, is very much my own work.

And I think that’s where Hollywood so often goes wrong. Though other writers were apparently involved in the overall shape of the plot, every word of the first four  seasons of The West Wing was written by Aaron Sorkin, and that’s probably why they are so extraordinary. Sure, this process can backfire, as we saw with his subsequent series Studio 60. Very few writers always deliver gold. But good writers often do, whereas, compelling stories are almost never delivered by committee.

Similarly, this delightful blog post has been written entirely by me. Any bit you liked is due entirely to my own brilliance. Its deficiencies, though, I will blame entirely on my cold. I realise it’s been a bit random (although hey, that’s the name of the blog…) but that’s just how my brain works when it isn’t feeling terribly well.

Alright, it’s time I returned to today’s primary activity, air traffic control. Those computer-generated planes aren’t going to land themselves. And seriously, I’d consider wearing one of those face masks, no matter how dorky it looks. You don’t want to catch whatever I’ve got.

This post originally appeared on the Random House Australia blog.

The Joy of Marketing

Marketing is a bit of a dirty word for writers. We like to think of ourselves as releasing our work into the world like a precious, special patch of flowers that discerning readers will bend over and pick, sniffing gently and appreciating each petal’s delicate beauty.

But that’s not how it works. It’s a struggle to get a book published, and a far harder struggle to get people to read it. The Australian publishing market is small and crowded, and it’s tough to break through and tell people you exist. For that, you need publicity, of course, and marketing.Why? Well, of course you want people to read your book because of your own hideous vanity because it will change their lives for the better. I personally believe that if the Israelis and Palestines could only get together and read Disco Boy, peace would break out faster in that war-torn region than my skin did when I was 16.

But of course, there’s the money. As much as I subscribe to the ideal that creativity is its own sweet reward, the truth is that I have a mortgage, and in the event I ever sort out my personal life, may  have other mouths to feed at some stage as well. So, in a bid to prolong how many years I can make some kind of a living from this writing thing, I want to actually move units.

When I was talking to the gurus at Random House about how to market my book, they were firmly of the view that these days, it’s all about social media. You know, web 2.0, interactivity and a whole lot of other buzzwords.  And above all, that means one thing: Facebook.

So, like the obedient first-time author I am, I set up a fan page for myself and invited my friends to join it, as awkward as it seems to have to ask your mates to become your “fans”. I even did something that I would usually go to considerable lengths to avoid, and put up a video of myself.

I guess the point is to set off a grassroots groundswell that makes geeks across the nation realise that they need my book in their lives as badly as they need sunlight and interaction with the opposite sex. (And I’m allowed to make that joke because hey, I’m one of them.) That hasn’t exactly happened yet – after a strong beginning, my fan army now numbers about 130 – but I’ll bet that it’s helping to sell books.

But there’s a problem with all this. Facebook has already proven a great way of getting in touch with my friends, and it seems to be quite a good way for me to reach members of the general public as well. Here’s the thing, though. All of this social media stuff is destroying my ability to concentrate.

I have developed a compulsion to check Facebook for the latest update on the minutiae of friends’ lives. For some inexplicable reason, I must constantly keep in touch with who’s getting married and having kids. And, just as prominently within Facebook’s hierarchy of information, I must constantly keep in touch with who had a nice lunch, or didn’t much like that Wolverine movie. Sure, it’s almost entirely a bottomless well of non-essential information, but because it’s about people I know and like, I can’t back away.

Mind you, I’ve always had a bit of an online addiction. To get the novel written in the first place, I kept having to take myself off to cafés without wireless access. But now, I’ve got Facebook on my phone. So there’s literally nowhere except underground bunkers and the Outback where I can’t check it. And this is starting to make me worry makes me worry that perhaps I’ll never actually get my second novel written. So Random House, by encouraging me to use Facebook to promote the first novel, may have also ensured there isn’t a second. Hmm, perhaps it was deliberate?

But there is a way forward. I can simply write my new novel a sentence at a time, via Facebook status updates. Here’s how it might work for the first lines of some classic novels.

Dominic Knight is Ishmael (Moby Dick)

Dominic Knight must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. (The Trial)

Dominic Knight, light of my life, fire of my loins (Lolita)

Dominic Knight died today (The Outsider)

Dominic Knight don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter (Huckleberry Finn)

Dominic Knight, it is a truth universally acknowledged, is a single man in possession of a good fortune who must be in want of a wife. (Pride & Prejudice)

Actually that last one’s true, at least according to many of my relatives. Well, except for the fortune bit. After all, I am trying to work as a writer.

Anyway, that’s enough blogging for now. I need to go and check Facebook.

This post originally appeared on the Random House Australia blog.

Stockpiling books for swine flu

The world has been panicking. As if the climate crisis, economic crisis and Spice Girls reunion tour weren’t keeping us sufficiently terrified, we now have to deal with swine flu. Experts warn that it could become a global ‘pandemic’, a term which I find bizarre because it reminds me of ‘pancake’ and ‘panforte’, making the prospect of a mass disease outbreak seem considerably less scary and considerably more delicious.Numerous Mexicans, and at least one American, have been killed by swine flu. And our own Kevin Rudd is advising us to stockpile two week’s worth of supplies as well as remembering to wash our hands – you know, like he got to do of Mick Keelty today.

All over the world, health authorities are getting tough. In Hong Kong, authorities locked hundreds of tourists in their hotel for seven days after a Mexican guest was discovered to have contracted the disease. Which sounds serious, except for one thing. As long as I wasn’t actually dying of swine flu, being forced to spend seven days relaxing in a hotel sounds pretty much a dream to me.

In fact, I’d love for our government to call on Australians to stay in their homes, like the Mexican authorities have just done, leaving only essential services in operation. It would be my idea of paradise, especially if “essential services” includes Pizza Hut.

Which reminds me – I don’t have enough food in my house for two meals, let alone two weeks. So before all hell breaks loose in our streets, with the dead rising from their graves and mindless zombies wandering around looking for fresh brains, I must remember to visit the supermarket.

So – we’re supposed to be stockpiling food and medicine in case things really start to go downhill. But in the event of a compulsory holiday, we also need to stockpile ways of entertaining ourselves. Over the past year or two, I’ve developed a massive pile of books I really should read, but haven’t quite gotten around to. Perhaps, if I’m forced to spend a week at home, I’ll finally be able to get through Infinite Jest? Well, maybe if I had a month. Or perhaps a year.

A major outbreak would be a wonderful opportunity to work my way through some of the recent releases piled up on my bedside table. I could read more than a fraction of A Fraction Of The Whole, and what better time to read the new novel by a former writing teacher of mine, Debra Adelaide, A Household Guide to Dying? Speaking of which, hasn’t that hit bookstores at the perfect time? Talk about viral marketing.

Okay, so I probably wouldn’t read such literary, high-minded books at all. I’d probably stick to the popular stuff  – you know, keep things light so I can keep my brain cells ready for when I need them for post-apocalyptical survival. I’d probably work my way through Exit Music, the last Ian Rankin, which I still haven’t gotten around to reading. And I haven’t yet re-read the last Harry Potter, and I’m hoping that when I get back to it, JK Rowling will somehow magically have changed the schmaltzy ending.

Now look, I’m not saying I want swine flu to cut a swathe through Australia the way it has through Mexico. I’m not pro-mass death, I’m just pro-mass holidays, that’s all. And I just think it’s a good idea to point out that if everything is shut down, it’d be a good idea to be prepared, and build up a supply of quality reading material.

On which note, welcome to the new Random House website, a perfect source of books to stockpile for the end of the world as we know it. Unfortunately I really can’t recommend my new novel, Disco Boy, but some of the other authors featured on here are pretty good.

In particular, browsing around the site, you’ll probably notice that there’s a new Dan Brown novel coming out soon. And while I haven’t read it yet, I’m pretty confident sure it’s going to reveal that swine flu is entirely the fault of the Freemasons.

NB - this post originally appeared on the Random House Australia blog

Sydney Writers Festival this week

I'm getting ready to pontificate at several SWF events this week. I'm reading everything Gideon Haigh and Robert Manne have ever written, shopping for a fetching black beret and approaching random strangers to adamantly express my opinion on a range of culturally important topics without being asked. Can't wait!

I'm doing a panel on Irreverence on Thursday, talking about my book on Saturday and providing some extremely uninformed opinions on the teaching of grammar on the Sunday - details are here. Also, I've added a few new reviews and audio/video things to the Media page. And if you spot me uninformedly mouthing off down at the wharf, do come and say hi, thereby rescuing whoever I'm talking at to!

Blogging cameo

I'm doing the Random House author blog this week. Really fun writing about writing, I've never done it before.

First review, and other articles

I've added Disco Boy's first review, from the Sunday Age, and a few other profile pieces to the new Media page. I'll figure out how to make the page look spiffier soon, but at least it's up!

Appearing at Sydney Writers' Festival May 2009

In connection with the launch of Disco Boy, I'm excited to be appearing at three events this year, as follows. Please come and watch as I pretend to be a notable literary figure in this idyllic harbourside location. Sensibly, SWF has made all my events free.

• Irreverence – panel on Thursday 21 May at 1.30pm, SDC Studio 1
• In conversation – Saturday May 23 at 2.30pm, Philharmonia Choir studio
• Much Ado About Grammar – debate Sunday May 24 at 5.30pm, Heritage Pier main stage

Announcing my first novel, Disco Boy

My big news for this year is that I wrote a novel. It's called Disco Boy, and it's a story about living in Sydney, and being a bit immature, two areas in which I have considerable expertise.

Disco Boy was published by Random House on 1 May, and I'm currently gallivanting around the country to disprove the theory that if people meet me, they might want to buy my book. Click on the links above for details on the book and my various appearances.

Australia Day and reconciliation

The sixth and last of my columns subbing in for Peter Fitzsimons at Sunday Extra.Advance Australia Day where?

The mixed emotions around Australia Day were never highlighted more pointedly than this year, when the Australian of the Year celebrated his award by immediately calling for the day to be moved to February 13th, the day of Kevin Rudd’s apology. While I have to declare a vested interest in this question because 26 January is my birthday, and I love always having the day off, we saw from the response to Mick Dodson’s suggestion that moving the date will create a degree of resentment that will only hinder race relations. We can’t simply undo the fact that European settlement began on that date. And trying to shoehorn a reconciliation theme into a day that bears unhappy associations for many Aborigines, as the Government did this year, will always feel shallow and awkward.

Dodson’s call for a public holiday on February 13 is sensible, but as I suggested last week, it should be a separate Reconciliation Day, devoted exclusively to celebrating our indigenous community and remembering the terrible casualties it suffered. 26 January will never be a happy date for Aborigines, but moving our national day will only transform its original date into an annual festival of the kind of hateful displays of white pride we saw in Manly this year. And fuelling that “love it or leave it” mentality will only undermine the inclusive, multicultural spirit that makes modern Australia worth celebrating in the first place.

Slumdog Miserliness

I probably wasn’t the only person this week to feel disgusted after reading that the producers of Slumdog Millionaire paid their child actors a pittance of only a few thousands dollars, and the kids and their families are still living in the same slums depicted in the movie. The producers’ defence, that the actors were paid three times the average local wage for adults, sounds hollow to say the least in light of the film’s earnings.

Slumdog Millionaire’s message is that children in Mumbai’s slums have to look out for themselves because in this world, you can’t trust anybody – least of all grown-ups. Well, nobody can accuse its producers of being inconsistent. Perhaps they should make a sequel where instead of being cruelly used by gangsters and orphanage proprietors, the kids are exploited of by award-hungry Western filmmakers?

Short Message Scamming

This week, an exciting opportunity was texted direct to my phone by my pals at iqquizapp.com. At least I assume they’re pals – I don’t actually remember giving them my number. They offered me a kind invitation to receive two SMS messages a week which left me torn. $6.60 per text message seemed a lot to pay, but naturally I wanted to help out a good friend’s business. Ultimately I regretfully declined, what with the global financial crisis and all.

When SMS scammers list the price legibly, like they have to in a text message, surely nobody ever signs up. But on TV and online, we’re constantly bombarded by ads for these services that hide their true costs in microscopic text. One particularly heinous violator is the Love Calculator, which supposedly texts you the name of your soulmate for $19.80, and then charges you $13.20 a week for horoscopes until you wise up to the scam and unsubscribe. (Admittedly, I’d pay more than that to actually learn the name of my soulmate, but something tells me mobile phone fraudsters ain’t gonna know it.) These services should be banned immediately, with violators imprisoned and forced to listen to an endless loop of the Crazy Frog.

Is the dope Catholic?

This week, the Catholic Church welcomed back its very own David Irving, the British Bishop Richard Williamson. An anti-Vatican II traditionalist like Mel Gibson and his charming father, Williamson not only denies that millions of Jews died in Nazi gas chambers, but that the gas chambers existed at all. The Bishop also believes that the Jews are concocting a dastardly plot to take over the world, and that September 11 was an inside job, which you’d think would make him unsuitable to speak not only in church, but to anybody.

John Paul II expelled him from the Church, for his religious views rather than his anti-Semitic ones, and it defies belief that Williamson has been rehabilitated by the very Vatican he once claimed was run by Satan. You’d think a Pope who has spent his life living down once being a member of the Hitler Youth, albeit involuntarily, would exercise caution in this area. But as his lurid footwear indicates, Pope Benedict is not one to tread carefully.

Catch a falling Starbucks

The world’s largest coffee chain announced this week that it’s closing 300 more stores in the US. Its Australian operations have already been scaled right back. But if they want to turn their business around, Starbucks’ employees only need to do one simple thing: learn how to make coffee.

Barack Obama and the donuts of democracy

The fifth of my Fitzsimons columns from summer 08/09.

Barack to the future

I regularly get up in the middle of the night to watch football (or soccer, to the uninitiated), but I’ve never before woken at 3am to watch a speech. And I’m glad I did. A friend threw a “Yes We Canapés” Inauguration Party – surely a strong early entrant for Groan-Inducing Pun Of The Year – and the thirty or so insomniacs in attendance drove the neighbours batty with our cheers. Like the crowds in Washington, we also booed Dick Cheney, who was looking even more like an evil mastermind on Wednesday morning than usual. All he needs now is a fluffy white cat to stroke indulgently while he pushes the button that sends the henchmen that fail him to their doom.

I was struck by the stark contrast between all of that American idealism and pageantry and our own low-key attitude towards politics. Can you imagine anyone watching Kevin Rudd give an 18-minute speech with tears in their eyes caused by anything other than boredom?

But then I remembered a day when I stood and watched the PM speaking in Canberra, and his words brought a genuine drop or two to even my cynical eye. It was February 13 last year, when Rudd apologised to the Stolen Generation. We don’t have a black Prime Minister yet, of course, but like Obama’s inauguration, the event saw thousands of people take to the streets in a moment of national reconciliation.

The day 250,000 Sydneysiders walked across the Harbour Bridge in 2000 was a similar moment of genuine collective joy at confronting a past wrong. And it made me think – shouldn’t we make sure there are more days like that? There’s a public holiday tomorrow to celebrate the foundation of white Australia. It’s time we had one to pay tribute to our indigenous heritage as well.

Krispy Kreme meets the dough nutcases

Of course, Inauguration Day saw a frenzy of promotional tie-ins. A doughnut chain released this inspiring statement:

Krispy Kreme is honoring American's sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day, Jan. 20. By doing so, [we] are making an oath to tasty goodies -- just another reminder of how oh-so-sweet 'free' can be.

Now, see if you can guess what aspect of that corny press release whipped the religious right up into a frenzy? Ten points (but no free doughnut) for anyone who guessed “choice”. According to Julie Brown, the President of the American Rights League, “the unfortunate reality of a post-Roe v. Wade America is that 'choice' is synonymous with abortion access.” As opposed to something that’s exercised on voting day, of course.

I’m not going to delve further into the thorny politics of abortion, since I don’t really think men should lecture women about what to do with their bodies. The surprising thing, though, is not the utter loopiness of this press release, but that Krispy Kreme bothered to issue a response clarifying that their free doughnut giveaway “was not about any social or political issue”. Big mistake, guys – it’ll only encourage them.

Kentucky Fatso Cricket

Why on earth has Cricket Australia appointed KFC as its Official Restaurant? Now, I enjoy the flavoursome oil bonanza they call Original Recipe Chicken as much as the next person who ought to be dieting. But in a nation where children’s waistlines are ballooning like a Richard Branson publicity stunt, associating fatty foods with sport is surely unacceptable. KFC has already succeeded in rebranding itself so its name no longer contains the embarrassing F-word, and now they’re being allowed to run ads where our cricketing heroes order food that surely no responsible athlete would dream of eating. For the sake of children’s health, KFC should either be forbidden to sponsor the cricket, or forced to feature Merv Hughes and Boonie in every ad.

Bagging the plastic

Driving into Kangaroo Valley this week, I noticed a sign proudly claiming that the South Coast town was plastic-bag free, a policy they’ve had since 2003. In practice, it meant that when I stocked up at the minimart, the cashier just put my groceries into a cardboard box. Why can’t every supermarket do this instead of forcing absent-minded people like me to add to our vast collection of reusable green bags every time we shop? It’s such a simple concept that even Peter Garrett might be able to make it happen.

Wayne’s World

Every year, the G’day USA Festival promotes Australia to our beloved allies across the Pacific, and the Aussie contingent in Hollywood mucks in to try and give our national profile a boost. It’s a more crucial mission than ever this year in light of the financial crisis. And the Government representative attending to stir up excitement about Australian tourism and investment? Wayne Swan. We’re doomed.

Nathan Rees vs Prince Harry

Episode #4 of my Fitzsimons substitute column from summer 08/09.

Rees in pieces

How’s this for some profoundly unsurprising news? The NSW ALP is already considering dumping Nathan Rees, the supposed cleanskin who has utterly failed to revive the party’s dim electoral prospects in his four months as Premier. John Della Bosca has released a statement expressing his support for Rees, which veterans of previous leadership struggles will recognise as a near-certain sign that the axe is being sharpened. And little wonder when even Kevin Rudd has expressed concerns about the State Government’s performance.

It might seem a little cruel to plot against the Premier just after he’s taken a few days off for his honeymoon, but his honeymoon with voters was even shorter, so if Labor wants a shot at avoiding a landslide loss in 2011, they really need to find someone vaguely competent pronto. If indeed there is anyone meeting that description in Macquarie St – the rumours about Frank Sartor and John Robertson doesn’t exactly signal a dramatic break with past failings.

Of course, the most popular politician in this city belongs to neither party. Clover Moore has disproven the ALP’s perennial argument that she cannot serve effectively as Lord Mayor and an MP. Perhaps she could find the time to be Premier as well?

When Harry met Sooty

Prince Harry’s latest gaffe is just more evidence that the Windsors are well past their use-by date. Calling a fellow-soldier a “Paki” may seem an innocuous abbreviation to Australian ears, but the baggage associated with the term was very evident when I spent two years in a London school as a child, when the term was constantly slung around the playground despite our Muslim students being Bangladeshi. Even I was constantly called a Paki on account of being Australian, which is amusing in hindsight but was both hurtful and etymologically confusing when I was nine.

Now we learn that Prince Charles and his children call a polo buddy “Sooty”, which is fairly insulting if based on his Indian background, and extremely insulting if based on the children’s television teddy bear. Of course, that Sooty never speaks, which is an idea Prince Harry might explore.

Nevertheless, this latest controversy has surely laid to rest those lingering rumours about Harry’s parentage. With such a gift for racial gaffes, he must carry the genes of Prince Philip, who once warned a group of British students in China that if they stayed much longer, they’d “all be slitty-eyed”.

The Pacific shark solution

What’s even more damaging to our tourism industry than ads starring Lara Bingle? Three shark attacks in two days which have made headlines the world over, with more than 600 articles on Google News as at the time of writing. Patrolling has increased, and no-one’s better at keeping unwanted arrivals away from our coastline than John Howard and Phillip Ruddock. They should be sent out on jetskis to divert sharks without appropriate documentation to Christmas Island.

It’ll be all white on the night

Here’s a little game for Where’s Wally fans. Take a copy of the Sydney Festival programme, leaf through the sixty pages of events, and see if you can spot one East or South-East Asian face. In the official guide to the biggest annual cultural event in our supposedly multicultural city, I couldn’t spot a single one. Okay, so they’re screening Enter The Dragon, but good luck finding a living Asian performer in the programme.

Fergus Linehan should attend the Film Festival to see how successfully an arts event can engage with the vibrant artistic output of our own region. By contrast, his Eurocentric choices seem a return to the cultural cringe.

To be fair, the musical programme achieved a degree of diversity. But while I love Sharon Jones, surely Linehan could have found a better headliner to follow Brian Wilson than Grace Jones, who is remembered by most people only for a bad Bond movie and a worse haircut. I listened her biggest hit, ‘Slave To The Rhythm’, to make sure I wasn’t merely betraying my quasi-youth. I can assure you that it should never have been exhumed from 1985.

The Decider departs

This week, we finally bid farewell to George Bush, the man history will remember for his twin wars on terror and the English language. But in the general air of celebration, spare a thought for Jacob Weisberg, the Slate editor who has tirelessly collected Bushisms for the past eight years and whose lucrative side business of compilation books now comes to an end.

But while classics like “They misunderestimated me” and “Rarely is the questioned (sic) asked: Is our children learning?” will no doubt outlast the man, it seems fitting to farewell the 43^rd President with the quotation that best summarises his time in the Oval Office: “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” As an ill-judged sign once said, mission accomplished.