We Told Them Everything!

In 1977, Voyager 1 & 2 were set loose into the solar system. Voyager 1 is now 10 billion miles from home, and sometime in the next few years will reach interstellar space. Both spacecraft contain copies of The Golden Record, gold-plated discs filled with information about where Earth is located in the Milky Way galaxy, how our genitals work, far too much info about human DNA and various images of humanity at play and at work, and a selection of spectacular locations from across the planet.



One of those images is of Heron Island (image 41 in this collection)



Another shows the Sydney Opera House (image 95)



Maybe it's the booze-alternative talking, but I think that is monumentally cool.

It's possible that long after the Earth has been burned to a cinder by the death of our Sun, those images of Australia, and the greetings of Earthlings from more than 100 nations, will still be floating through the galaxy (fuel sources are expected to expire around 2020), waiting for something to find them, to fire up the disc player, push the right button and to learn all about our species, who we were, what we did and how we once dreamed of something bigger than ourselves and our petty squabbles that seem to consume too much of the lives we live on this little blue-green planet.

UPDATE : Carl Sagan says it all so much better :



I'm on a bit of a Carl Sagan jag at the moment, which never fails to refresh the mind and refill the well of wonder that can get a bit dry sometimes.

Carl Sagan On Cannabis : There Is A Religious Aspect To Some Highs

"Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds.

"When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time."

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Murdoch Journo Declares Allegiance To Taliban

Yesterday I pointed out the shared beliefs of conservative extremist Andrew Bolt and The Taliban.

Today, another Murdoch conservative extremist, Piers Akerman, announces his solidarity with The Taliban :



I thought it was illegal to announce your support for terrorists?

Next thing you know these conservative extremists will be telling us that the Taliban and Hamas are legitimate freedom fighters.

Someone call ASIO. These people are fucking insane.


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It's a clever way to announce your return. Pick up exactly where you left off, almost mid-sentence, when you were fired :

"The federal parliamentary Liberal Party is consumed by fear and loathing. Barren of anything that might be tricked up as rational policy, its members are stuck together only by a seething stew of grudges and whinges and a gnawing sense of entitlement denied."



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Laurie Oakes : Hark, Hear The Turnbull Death Rattle

Brendan "Pensioners Eat Cheap Soup! Soup!" Nelson must have to steer clear of most newspapers and TV news these days, lest he risk choking to death on karma laughter.

Laurie Oakes explains why :

Now that Joe Hockey has indicated he would not leave the party in the lurch should Turnbull's leadership become untenable, you can hear the death rattle. No matter what he does, the muttering among Liberal MPs becomes increasingly ominous and the erosion of his authority gathers pace.

The public sees an Opposition racked by internal brawling and a leader lurching from crisis to crisis, so the polls get worse and Turnbull's position deteriorates further. The accepted wisdom is that the Coalition has brought all this on itself through a lack of discipline and Turnbull's ineptitude.

But credit where it is due. Turnbull and the Opposition would not have got into such a disastrous position without a great deal of help from Kevin Rudd.

Rudd has played clever and ruthless politics. Wedge politics. And he learned how to do it from an expert.

John Howard made an art form of using issues such as asylum seekers to divide the Labor Party. Climate change is for Rudd what Tampa and "children overboard" were for Howard. He has used the emissions trading scheme legislation as a wedge to open up a deep ideological fault line in the Coalition.

The only valid reason for Rudd's insistence that the ETS Bill must be passed before the United Nations Copenhagen climate change conference in December is a political one - to wedge his opponents. And the strategy has been spectacularly successful.

Rudd long ago refined the Divide & Inflame techniques used so effectively by John Howard. The prime minister now does pretty much the same thing to Turnbull, month in, month out, that he did to Howard for the entire year leading up to the 2007 elections.

Rudd promised to fuck with the minds of the Liberal Party when he became the Labor opposition leader. Becoming prime minister only meant he got to have more fun breaking their spirit, and sowing confusion and paranoia amongst their ranks. So much so, the Liberal diehards are pulling away, distancing themselves, and have taken to claiming they are "Conservatives" instead of Liberals.


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Andrew Bolt : The Taliban Are Right

By Darryl Mason

Back home from what one Murdoch colleague has labelled a "typically fascist" European holiday, Herald Sun conservative extremist blogger Andrew Bolt finds himself in almost complete agreement with like-minded conservative extremists The Taliban, over the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the President of the United States, Barack Obama.

Bolt :

"Obama did nothing at all to deserve an award once handed out for ending wars"

The Taliban :

"We condemn the award of the Nobel Peace Prize for Obama"

Bolt :

"Where is the peace Obama has brought?"

The Taliban :

"He has done nothing for peace..."

Conservative extremists in Australia, like their comrades in the United States, and Afghanistan, have nothing left to contribute now to plans for a more peaceful world but their endless hate.

Well, It Was A Kind Of Peaceful First Week And A Bit For The Obama Presidency


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A Political Party Suicides, In Slow Motion

By Darryl Mason

Devastating. What a headline from the ABC :



Is it still dirty, rotten, ABC Lefty Bias when it's also the stone cold truth?

Chris Ulhman :

Mr Hockey has never actively sought the leadership, having made the quite astute decision some time ago that now is not a good time to be leader of the Opposition.

But since Mr Turnbull declared last week that his party should back him or sack him over his push to propose amendments to the Government's emissions trading plan he has completely lost control of events.

A growing group within his party is now desperate to see the back of him, declaring it's time to put an end to what some mockingly dubbed "the Turnbull experiment". For them ETS has become the "eliminate Turnbull scheme".

Yesterday one senior Liberal crystalised the views of many with whom I spoke.

"There is broad consensus in all parts of the party that it's over," he said. "It is just a matter of time. It's just not working."

And all the Liberals I have spoken to about this - even Mr Turnbull's supporters - lay the blame for the unwinding of his position squarely at his feet.

Turnbull will soon be gone. It can't last more than a few weeks. The daily humiliation is clearly eating away at him. When he steps down, presumably due to "health problems", in November, his attempt to lead the Liberal Party out of the 20th century will have cost him (depending on who you believe) $10-50 million out of his own pocket.

Will Joe Hockey step up before Christmas? Losing one election is not an unshakable curse, but if he doesn't take the leadership, Tony Abbott will and once Abbott has done his best to storm up a national vortex of peak-stupidity, by campaigning on a score of Andrew Bolt-approved conspiracy theories, there may not be much of a viable Liberal Party left for Joe Hockey to lead.

But Turnbull's insistence on all but fully agreeing with the Rudd government on the ETS, even as it turns the full force of the Liberal Party backbench against him, and sinks his poll numbers even further, has to make you wonder who Turnbull's political masters really are, and how many more major missions he has other than to get Australia signed on to an ETS and the seemingly inevitable worldwide carbon tax that would follow.

Then again, what the hell would I know? I announced the resignation of Malcolm Turnbull back in early August, while anticipating the return of Brendan Nelson.

And when Turnbull's resignation does come, Brendan Nelson will probably weep tears of laughter.


November 2007 : Listen Up Turnbull, This Is How It's Going To Be

How The Australian's Caroline Overington Tried To Help Malcolm Turnbull Win Wenworth

January 2009 : Turnbull's Problems With Coalition Climate Change Doubters Break Into The Open When Barnaby Joyce Says He Refuses To "Goose Step" Around Liberal Party Offices

July 2009 : In a Monty Python-esque Moment Of Doubt, Turnbull Almost Admits The Liberals Will Lose An Election Fought Over Climate Change Policies.

They May Be Out There, But They Won't Save The Liberal Party

By Darryl Mason

There is a conservative-minded fantasy that if only a Liberal Party leader would stand up and dismiss the entire idea of an ETS, and confidently, skeptically, laugh off the reality of global-warming induced climate change, that there will be a sudden, election-winning size surge in Liberal Party support. But it's just a fantasy, something for reflexively contrarian opinionists to fluff up to fill their blogs and columns with, and nothing more.

Numerous polls consistently, constantly, show the vast majority of Australians are convinced climate change is a dangerous reality and they believe that the introduction of an ETS will help fight those destructive changes.

There is a tiny minority of Australians who think Kevin Rudd, Malcolm Turnbull and Al Gore are all secret partners in a New Green World Order conspiracy to destroy the coal and oil industries and force Australians to live in electricity-free tee pees and ride tofu bicycles to work, but the AGW Skeptic Vote is not big enough to cause any major waves in Australian politics, at least not at a national level, no matter how many times some in the media try to claim otherwise.

Tim Blair, of the Daily Telegraph, recently tried to hype the (illusory) power of the unrepresented Skeptics Vote on Insiders, as a way for the Liberal Party to not only differentiate itself from Labor, but to also save itself from compete immolation. A last desperate gasp, presumably. Blair's curious little theories were quickly slapped down by The Australian's George Megalogenis and Radio National's Fran Kelly.

Blair : The one thing that's interesting about this...the more both parties bang on about the ETS, the more the public is disengaged. We had another poll today, saying, I think, only 14% of Australians think that climate change was an important issue. So, (this is) one of the great sweeping mysteries of our time. The biggest argument we're having right now time is what the temperature will be 100 years from now. And one of the big flaws about the Liberal Party's ETS is that it has an ETS. I know, privately, a lot of people in the Liberal Party are a lot more skeptical than Mr Hockey would let on.

(Insiders host) Barry Cassidy : But you haven't actually seen a poll that convinced you that the Coalition can vote against this and benefit politically.

Blair : Well, they might actually get some traction out of it. They might actually be seen to take a stance. At the moment it's arguments over tiny fractions. Anything with the word 'Copenhagen' in it will turn the public off.

Kelly : Yes, Tim, but as soon as you do that, then you're arguing, well, what next for climate change? So you're either arguing, we don't have to do anything right now...

Blair : Yeah, I'll vote for that.

Kelly : Yeah, I know, but I don't think a lot of the public would. I think the people are convinced that something is happening and something needs to be done.

Megalogenis : NewsPoll has tried to ask this question every which way, and the answer still comes out the same. Two thirds or more of the electorate want action.

Blair : But as soon as you put that in monetary terms, as soon as you say, "How much are you going to sacrifice" or anything, then the number drops off.

Megalogenis : It doesn't drop as much as you think, because even half were prepared to pay more for petrol. But the more interesting thing that has happened in the polls this year, there is no distinction between the views of Coalition voters and the Labor Party. So basically, it's at the same 'Yes' rate.

Another recent poll backs George Megalogenis' claims :

Three-quarters of Australians believe that the price of fossil fuels should be increased to deal with climate change and 92 per cent believe a legally binding global climate deal is urgent and should be made at the conference to be held in Copenhagen in December.

A surprisingly consistent majority (about two-thirds to three-quarters) in most countries believed that fossil fuel prices should be increased....

An overwhelming majority of respondents globally (Australia 94 per cent, Indonesia 92 per cent, US 90 per cent, China 89 per cent and Russia 86 per cent) believed their government should give high priority to joining any deal made in Copenhagen.

The Liberal Party will have a new leader within a month, but whoever that is, you won't see them fully opposing the introduction of an ETS, nor will they be embracing Andrew Bolt-style skeptic/denialist pronouncements ("Belief in man-made global warming will soon be laughed out of existence").

There is no potent political gain for the Liberal Party in embracing these positions, unless they want to make it all that much easier for The Greens to get that much closer to finally replacing the Libs as the second most powerful political party in Australia.

The United States' top general in Iraq, Ray Odierno, said today :

"I'm not sure we will ever see anyone declare victory in Iraq...."

That can't be right. Andrew Bolt declared Victory In Iraq in late 2007.



Army General Odierno, therefore, has now de-declared victory.

It sounds like the US is trying to cover up their late 2007 Iraq War win.

Must be some new kind of strategy to throw the enemy off.

Unless Andrew Bolt was wrong.

But how could that be? Look how accurately Bolt predicted the reality of the swine flu pandemic :

Australians are more likely to be eaten by mice than to die of swine flu

More than 140 Australians have died suffering from swine flu, including many children, since the first death from the virus in July.

But reports of Australians being eaten by mice are curiously rare in the Australian media. Must be another cover up to make Andrew Bolt look like a complete dickhead.

Why ABC Boss Mark Scott Should Tell The Daily Telegraph To Fuck Off

By Darryl Mason

After only one episode, Hungry Beast looks like a lock to replace The Chaser as the supplier of easy n free content for our tabloid media of Perpetual MoralOutrage! :

Netball Australia has condemned an ABC Television skit featuring a fake interview with a man claiming to have been sexually assaulted by the national team.

The skit, a clear reference to May's Four Corners interview with the woman at the centre of the Cronulla group sex scandal, is due to air on ABC's new current affairs/comedy crossover show, Hungry Beast next Wednesday.

A promo for the skit aired on Wednesday night.

Err, yeah. It was pretty obvious the short segment that aired was the skit in full, and not a promo for a longer segment next week. How fucking dim do you have to be to not get that?

And how ironic then that Hungry Beast's first show also featured a segment testing the gullibility of Australia's media.

I liked Hungry Beast. I thought the mix of skit comedy, serious interviews, media japery and WTF? statistics was very interesting. The jump from jokes to a shattering segment on the wife and mother of an Australian soldier killed in Afghanistan was jarring, but not wrong. And one seriously bizarre haircut from a host was not enough to turn me off.

Here's producer Andrew Denton talking about his latest creation :



UPDATE : The Daily Telegraph is crowing now about how it's manufactured MoralOutrage! beat up got the Man Gang Raped By Australian Netball Team skit pulled from repeats of Hungry Beast.



Gee, what a victory for good taste. Society has been saved, yet again, from laughing by the Daily Telegraph, backers of kid-killing wars and co-distributors of made-up stories about children having sex because of coloured wristbands.

You won't see the the skit on ABC TV again, but, curiously enough, the Daily Telegraph is running the 'banned' video on its website, with no adult content warning, generating revenue from taxpayer-funded TV clips, for which they paid nothing to use, as number-one-story-of-the-day content.



Most of the people who bothered to comment on the story at the Daily Telegraph website see it as anything but yet another pathetic MoralOutrage! beat up, and a further denigration of Australia's once infamous reputation for being able to have a good laugh at themselves.

"I feel sorry for my 8 year old son, because when he grows up Comedy will be illegal."

"Oh My GOD! Its official, we are now just like the YANKS. Consumed with political correctness and afraid to laugh at ourselves. WE ARE AUSTRALIAN PEOPLE."

It's an interesting conjob the Daily Telegraph has been running, from the days of The Chaser. Record a clip from an ABC-TV show, whip up some MoralOutrage! the next day, try and get the clip banned from further repeats on the ABC, while running the clip on your own news site, while also pointing out that the fact the 'controversial skit' has now been censored, leaving most readers little choice but to watch the clip at the Daily Telegraph website.

When will ABC managing director Mark Scott stop caving in and finally tell The Daily Telegraph to go and get fucked?

Join Twitter and ask him yourself right here.

Liz Ellis, by the way, doesn't have a problem with the skit at all :

"She knows it was a joke and can see the funny side of it — she doesn't feel defamed at all," Ellis' spokesperson Jessica Ball told ninemsn.

"She is out on the golf course playing a round right now, which shows how concerned she is about this,"

And thanks to the Daily Telegraph, the words "Liz Ellis Group Sex" now has a permanent listing in Google search.

No doubt Liz Ellis would probably find that funny, too.


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Cannibalus Australis

If it's playing near you, and you're looking for a movie to see this weekend, you can't go past Van Deimen's Land, a brilliant Australian movie with plenty of, dare I say it, bite :

Of course, a new debate on the death penalty will not be influenced at all by fevered front pages and panting columnists :

THE killer who escaped the noose in the '60s only to kill again 40 years later has sparked a debate on whether the death penalty should be reintroduced.

A poll conducted in Melbourne, where Leigh Robinson committed his crimes, found 78 per cent of about 3000 respondents voted for the return of capital punishment.

Was it a phone poll, or a read-this-story-and-now-click-vote poll? The story doesn't say. But only one person, Leigh Robinson's stepson, was needed for this headline :



We just can't get out of the 20th century.

Ring Of Fire Unleashes Death And Destruction In Indonesia, Samoa

The reading of the 7.6 magnitude earthquake off Padang

The death toll from two monster tsunami waves that smashed into islands of Western Samoa and American Samoa yesterday is expected to reach more than 200, but so little is still known about the extent of damage in the many villages that dotted coastlines and the dozens of isolated communities across the smaller islands. Whole towns, shopping districts, marketplaces, resorts, hospitals are in ruins. Thousands of homes have been destroyed, key bridges and vital roads washed away.

18 hours after the massive 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck near Samoa, causing the tsunami waves, another huge earthquake erupted 78 kilometres off the coast of Padang, in Indonesia's West Sumatra province.

The 7.6 magnitude quake collapsed hundreds of buildings across the island, and of this 1.20am posting, has killed at least 80 people. Thousands are believed to be trapped or lying dead in the ruins. Landslides are reported to have blocked roads, hampering rescue efforts. Power and phone lines to Padang were cut after the quake, leaving the city of 900,000 in darkness.

An eyewitness report from Joey Cummings, a radio host in American Samoa :

We immediately sent out an earthquake warning on air, to tell everyone to stay away from possible landslide areas. We also asked schools to initiate their tsunami plans to get kids up the mountains.

We sent a tsunami warning 10 minutes later as we saw the first rising water.

We stayed on the air as the water reached three or four feet in the parking lot.

The water stayed at that level for a few minutes, but then it surged to around 15 feet.

All of the staff at the station went outside to the second floor balcony to see what was happening - and the air was filled with screams.

The devastation was complete.

The villagers immediately started looking for trapped survivors. I dedicated myself and my staff to helping those that were hurt, and gathering food and water.

Debris was everywhere. Broken furniture mixed with old tyres and trees. Children's clothing and road signs were crushed under telephone poles.

We screamed for people to run up the mountain but they just ran down the street away from the wave rather than make a sharp left and up the steep mountain just feet away.

We walked down the road only to find that people who weren't trying to help had already begun looting the stores.

School buses full of kids were smiling and waving at all the excitement, while behind them there were pick-up trucks with bodies in them - their feet were hanging out over the tailgate.

Aftershocks from the quakes are still being felt in Padang and Samoa.

I'm not going to tell you what this remarkable story from 2007 is about, because I don't want to spoil the tale as told by Jack Marx, in a brilliant piece of journalism. I will only try to convince you to read the full story, by quoting these two paragraphs :

Patients were booked into the clinic under assumed names - an understandable necessity for privacy - and travelled in Leighton Jones' car from Eraring to Morisset, spending the 30-minute journey in the back seat with the donor monkey as companion.

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Today, the people of Dora Creek know little of what happened all those years ago, and they'll tell you even less. They squint through security doors and murmur that it's "all but forgotten now" or was "a queer thing". Some joke about it, reciting the urban myth all over again. Even the editor of the local paper declares the story of Henry Leighton Jones "nonsense" that belongs in "a mixing bag of about 5000 other local myths".

The truth, as it so often turns out to be, is far more interesting than the myth.

UPDATE : Jack Marx has a new book out called Australian Tragic, a few dozen forgotten tales of our dark history. Haven't read it yet, but there appears to be a follow-up on the story of Henry Leighton Jones in those pages, as well as a whole load of remarkable Australian stories stories I haven't heard about before.

Dust Storms : Caused By But Also A Solution To Climate Change?


A NASA satellite image of the dust storm shrouding the New South Wales coastline

According to the UK Guardian the sort of massive dust storms that blanketed country New South Wales, Queensland and red-skied Sydney and Brisbane are "are spreading lethal epidemics around the world", including "influenza, Sars and foot-and-mouth and....respiratory diseases."

Curiously though, not only are such dust storms apparently the result of drought and climate change, they can also "absorb climate change emissions."

The Sydney storm, which left millions of people choking on some of the worst air pollution in 70 years, was a consequence of the 10-year drought that has turned parts of Australia's interior into a giant dust bowl, providing perfect conditions for high winds to whip loose soil into the air and carry it thousands of miles across the continent.

It followed major dust storms this year in northern China, Iraq and Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, east Africa, Arizona and other arid areas. Most of the storms are also linked to droughts, but are believed to have been exacerbated by deforestation, overgrazing of pastures and climate change.

Sydneysiders were quite excited by the blood-red dawn, and orange skies, on September 23. But on a global comparison scale, the Sydney Red Dust Storm was a junior ranker. Only about 5000 tonnes of soil was dumped across Sydney suburbs. A dust storm coming out of China's Taklimakan desert in 2007, according to this story, lifted up some 800,000 tonnes of dust In 2006, a dust storm deposited 300,000 tonnes on Beijing.

Each year, some 2 to 3 billion tonnes of dust are whipped up by winds from Africa and carried around the world.

Drought, deforestation, land clearing, too many goats chomping every blade of grass they can find, all lead to soil becoming loose enough to lift off, but the apparent good news is that massive dust storms "could be mitigating climate change, both by reflecting sunlight in the atmosphere and fertilising the oceans with nutrients."

So climate change can help cause the dust storms that may help mitigate climate change?

Nature abides.

What Market Is The Murdoch Media Trying To Reach With Fictitious Stories About Children Having Sex?

It was the biggest story for the Australian online Murdoch media yesterday, so does it matter if it was made up?

From news.com.au :

From PerthNow :

They look like a symbol of childhood innocence. But these bracelets are part of an "insidious" game that sees primary school kids perform sex.

And it is feared the craze may soon sweep WA.

The exact same story, under the same byline, appeared in the Courier Mail. With a slight change of emphasis to lock in local interest, and concern :

"...these colourful bracelets are behind an "insidious" craze of primary schoolkids performing sex acts that it is feared will soon sweep through Queensland."

WA, Queensland, where will this insidious made-up craze that doesn't drive children into sex spread next?

PerthNow readers were not so easily fooled :

"this is so obviously made up/an urban legend, nice 'news' story"

"'And it is feared the craze may soon sweep WA' a fine example of yellow journalism."

"Stupidest news report I've ever seen. Parents don't be concerned if see kids wearing them it means nothing. Ridiculous!"

"These harmless fashion statments are not promoting the sexualisation of youth - this ill-informed journalist is!"

"Theseare all over the u.k media as well with almost identical headlines andstories.why would adults honestly think 11 year old kids would behaving sex behind sheds because the right bracelet was broken!!Hysterical adults on one side and pedo dreamers with wild fantasies ofdelusion on the other.Leave the kids alone!"

This near daily focus on the alleged sex lives of children by the mainstream media,where the stories more often than not turn out to be totally false, is disturbing to say the least.

Incredibly, this trash also made it into The Australian.

Is this the kind of "quality journalism" News CEO John Hartigan thinks Australians will pay to read online?

CosmicJester notes the only sources for this 'story' appear to be a Facebook page and UrbanDictionary.

If the"journalist" had bothered to google these evil sex bracelets, theywould have found out that they are nothing new and they are mainly amoral panic/urban legend designed to scare dim witted journalists andparents.

Snopes.com reveals that this panic goes back till at least 2003 and is a slightly updated urban legend from the 1990's.

UPDATE : The bullshit 'shag bands' story did the trick. It became the most read storyon the CourierMail, News.com.au and PerthNow websites :

Interview With A Zombie

(photo source)

By Darryl Mason

Media reports continue to be suppressed about an outbreak of zombie attacks in Sydney, which social networking sites are reporting occurred under the cover of the Red Dust Storm, earlier this morning.

Twitter reports at least 12 confirmed attacks, most are said to have occurred near the north and south pylons of the Harbour Bridge, where hundreds gathered in the deep sepia-toned dawn to photograph the Bridge shrouded in ochre dust.

The Orstrahyun spoke to Zed Immortal from the Post-Life Institute For ReHuman Affairs (PLIRA) and president of the Association of Concerned Undead Citizens (ACUC).

Q : Are your lobbying groups responsible for the media blackout, and the silence from police, who refuse to confirm or deny at least 12 attacks by zombies earlier today at....

A: Let me just stop you there. Firstly, we have no control over the media, or the police. The idea is laughable, and...

Q: But you cannot deny that lobbyists working directly for you are...

A: Let me finish, please. I'll repeat, we have no control over the police or media reporting of these alleged attacks. And right now they are only alleged attacks. This Twitter thing is notorious for false reports of celebrity deaths and events that simply did not occur, and Twitter is the only place where these attacks have been reported. Now, I am not going to deny there was some violence this morning near the Harbour Bridge, but I've been told the violence was limited to a brief physical exchange between one of our association's members, out for a morning lurch, and a photographer, who did not ask permission before taking his photo, and ...

Q: I'm sorry...the smell is just, good Christ, it's so terrible....

A: Open a damned window then.

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"We are a peaceful people who, because of the derision of the general public fueled by the hysterical media and anti-undead politics, keep mostly to ourselves."

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Q: So you're saying reports of brain-feeding by, as you say, members of your community this morning are false? Are in fact just Twitter gossip? A hoax?

A: Right now, that is exactly what I'm saying. Now, I'm not saying that nothing violent did not occur, but I am saying that if it did, it only involved one or perhaps 50 members of our large Sydney community, and such incidents of violence, which I fully condemn, should not reflect on all members of our community, both locally and nationally. We are a peaceful people who, because of the derision of the general public fueled by the hysterical media and anti-undead politics, keep mostly to ourselves.

Q: Zombie attacks in Sydney have been on the rise in recent months, and there is ample evidence that...

A: I have to stop you again,, I'm sorry. But I and many of my fellow post-lifers find that word terribly offensive, and outdated. We prefer the term post-lifers, rehumans or, if you insist on using the jargon most popular with youth, and the movie and video game saturated public, the undead. .

Q: Excuse me, I didn't mean to offend you.

A: That's quite all right. But it shows how much work our associations and action groups have to do to change the way the public views people like me who are no longer living, but are not yet dead. "Zombie" is a word that should have stayed in the 1970s, along with all those awful, awful George Romero and Italian horror movies denigrating our kind.

Q: It's true, isn't it, that lobbyists from your institute are responsible for the banning of video games where post-lifers are massacred and brutalised?

A: No, it's not true. But I wasn't displeased by the decision of the federal government agency responsible. Now, we really need to wrap this up, I have religious duties to perform this afternoon and...

Q: Could you explain, briefly, some of the tenets of the post-life religion for my readers? The red dust storm that covered Sydney this morning was seen by some as apocalyptic, and related to the End Of Days Christian beliefs, and some are already blaming what they call "the ungodly existence" of post-lifers as being somehow responsible for it.

A: What utter nonsense. We don't control the weather. Today is the most sacred day of our religious year. We will gather around the graves of recently departed loved ones and wish them a speedy return. We believe in the Third Coming of our Messiah. We believe we are currently unliving through the Start of Days, and soon, very soon, our Messiah will descend from the living.

Q: You don't believe your messiah will come from the ranks of the already dead?

A: No, he will be born in a post-life state, he will be rejected by his family and community and will come to unlive amongst us, where he will be treated with respect and honour. The kind of respect and honour we all believe the still living deny us, all these years after the outbreak began.

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"We will be pushing for the Australian government to include measures to combat vilification of the undead in the new Hate Speech laws."

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Q: What it is like to be dead?

Z: Well, obviously it has its disadvantages. It's hard to get a decent table at good restuarants for starters. There is the smell factor, which is why we tend to only mix with our own kind. Then you have the moronic people in the street who keep shouting "Brrrraaaaainssss!" while you're trying to go about your business, or take your children to school. I understand why the pre-dead feel the need to mock and denigrate us, after all there are many, many popular movies where the undead are not portrayed in a positive light, at the very least. But we are taking action to rectify this kind of public vilification. We are sending a delegation to the UN in December to lobby for representation on the UN Commission for Human Rights. We will be pushing for the Australian government to include measures to combat vilification of the undead in the new Hate Speech laws.

Q: I'm sorry....I just....it's the smell. Christ, it's like finding a packet of old bacon that fell down behind the fridge two months ago. Can't you do anything about that?

A: We've tried. Nothing can cover our scent, and many of us choose not to try. We do, indeed, find it an attractive smell. Rich, tangy. I actually find the smell of the living quite repulsive.

Q : So are you in a constant state of decay? Are you rotting right now?

A : No. Actually I feel quite good. I haven't had any major repair work done in months. The decay across our community appears to be slowing, which is good news for state and federal health care budgets, and local hospitals.

Q : Isn't true that there are other ways for the undead to halt the physical decrepitude, so you don't have to have so much repair work done quite so often?

A : I know where this question is going. And I don't appreciate it. I made it very clear to you that we were not to discuss this topic.

Q : But it's a topic that very much fascinates people, living people I mean. About your people.

A : Well, that may well be so, but that's their problem, not mine.

Q : It's their problem if your hunger and horror of personal decay becomes so overwhelming that people like you jump on the freshest living human they can find and tear open their skulls and feast on the....

A : You've been watching too many movies. Incidents of...what you describe amongst the undead are very, very rare. As this morning's events, or non-event as it was, will no doubt prove, incidents relating to the old myths that you seem obsessed with are actually few and far between. All but non-existent these days, in fact. The living are far more prone to violence from their own kind, then from ours.

Q : But there's few if any recent accounts of normal people eating the brains of...

A : Normal people? Is that what you said? Right, I'm going to have to stop you there, and end this interview. Thank you very much.

Q : What do human brains' taste like it, sir? Is it true they're delicious?

A : No, that's it. I've had enough of this. You're not only being rude, but utterly offensive.

Q : How many human brains have you eaten, sir? 10? 50? 100?

A: I'm not answering any more questions.


A tense end to an interesting interview.

Reports of zombie attacks in Sydney are still appearing on Twitter, as the last of the red dust storm moves up through New South Wales and into Queensland, but these reports seem to be closer to satire, or blatant hoaxes, than any representation of reality.



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There are so many brilliant photos of the Sydney Dust Storm on Flickr, Twitter and dozens of blogs I haven't got around to seeing much of what the professional photographers of the mainstream media have come up with yet. But for me, it's going to be hard to beat TomHide's Flickr portfollio of incredible, apocalyptic images of the Harbour Bridge and Luna Park.

How Much Will It Cost To Stick Our Cool New Sunglasses On Those Old Digger Statues?

The Australian War Memorial, the Last Post and the Eternal Flame are now brought to you by BHP, Boeing, Qantas, BAE Systems, Rio Tinto, Fosters, the Australian Gas Association, News Limited and some 80 other corporate sponsors.

The Full Story Is Here

I suppose it makes sense that the manufacturers of weapons and bombs kick back something (if only a minuscule amount), from the billions of dollars they've reaped off Australia's century of foreign war fighting, to the memorials that honour the hundreds of thousands of Australians killed and maimed fighting those wars.

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Just Blame A Typing Cat

Hold the presses, associate editor of The Daily Telegraph, and hilarious failed litigant, Tim Blair, finds a spelling mistake on Twitter!

Deep thinking from Antony Loewenstein:

The thought of telling Israel what to do is plesant and necessary

Antony Loewenstein failed to insert the letter 'a' into the word 'pleasant'. Yes, isn't that exciting?

In part due to the very restrictive 140 character limit per post, Twitter is often a correct spelling, good grammar and even basic punctuation free zone. The information, the link, the joke, the snark, the insight, the trivial detail, the content of the brief comment, is all that matters, as all the established rules of the English language can be, and most often are, casually cast aside so as to fit the comment inside that tight character limit. Finding spelling mistakes on Twitter is piss easy. Too easy.  

Almost as easy as finding a spelling mistake on the Daily Telegraph website.

So while Tim Blair was busy stalk-trawling Antony Loewenstein for inconsequential spelling mistakes on Twitter (where Blair doesn't have an active account, at least not one under his own name) this doozy appeared in the first line of the first story on the front page of The Daily Telegraph, where Blair is, of course, an editor :

The Hurt of being "knocked bledding to the ground", you'd have to imagine, would be Immeasurable.

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Rupert Murdoch's UK Sun, where nothing is beyond the pun, even terrorism :

(via Reddit)

He Had Himself Nailed To A Cross For Your Entertainment

John Safran's new eight part series on love beyond your tribe, Race Relations, is only a few weeks away. It looks hilarious, thoughtful and very timely :



More detail from The Age :

John Safran's Race Relations will see the comic examine cross-cultural, interracial and interfaith love in a series that features scenes shot in Israel, Palestine, Togo, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the USA.
Other crazy stunts will see Safran talk to his dead mother, become a ladyboy and an Elephant man, and even turn black and go undercover in Chicago.

Pilger : The War On Afghanistan "Is A Fraud"

Australian journalist John Pilger was awarded the 2009 Sydney Peace Prize in August :

The jury made the decision on the basis of Pilger's “courage as a foreign and war correspondent in enabling the voices of the powerless to be heard”. It also praised his “commitment to peace with justice by exposing and holding governments to account for human rights abuses and for fearless challenges to censorship in any form”.

On November 4, he will receive the award at a lecture at the Opera House. On November 6, Pilger will speak to some 1500 students at a peace festival hosted by Cabramatta High School.

John Pilger's work is not published in any Australian city daily papers, despite being our most famous, internationally recognised journalist. Nor is Pilger published on supposedly "edgy" comment and opinion sites like The Punch or The National Times.

Why?

This is why :

The Afghan war is a fraud.

It began as an American vendetta for domestic consumption in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks, in which not a single Afghan was involved. The Taliban, who are Afghans, had no quarrel with the United States and were dealing secretly with the Clinton administration over a strategic pipeline. They offered to apprehend Osama Bin Laden and hand him over to a clerical court, but this was rejected.

The establishment of a permanent US/NATO presence in a resource-rich, strategic region is the principal reason for the war.

Too Much Truth

Germaine Greer, in the recent documentary on Skippy The Bush Kangaroo, describes seeing the show while living in England in 1968 :

"It was one of those dead moments and I kicked on the television and there was Skippy. And I watched it absolutely hypnotised, because it was very sunny and there was a cobalt blue sky, grey vegetation and ruddy brown rocks, and that was what I was staring at. Just staring at, because I don't think I even realised how homesick I was until I saw those tree shapes. There was all kinds of things about it that were totally unbearable, but the landscape, and the light!"

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd : "You Can Get Fucked!"

Prime Minister Kevin "Strippers & Booze" Rudd listens to the latest string of complaints from Labor factional bosses, and replies, curtly :

"I don't care what you fuckers think!"

"Don't you fucking understand?"

"You can get fucked!"

Rudd's swearapalooza was unleashed on Labor faction leaders when they apparently kept whining about the slashing of MPs' printing allowances from $100,000 to $75,000 a year.

You can't say Rudd's response was altogether inappropriate.

UPDATE : The story above was reported by Glenn Milne, who Kevin Rudd called "the Liberal Party journalist of choice" when asked about his swearing this morning. Rudd didn't deny he unleashed as quoted, saying :

"I think it's fair to say that consistent with the traditions of the Australian Labor Party, we're given to robust conversations. I made my point of view absolutely clear, and that is these entitlements needed to be cut back, and I make no apologies for either the content of my conversation or the robustness with which I expressed my views."

Fair enough.

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That's Not A Name, It's A Thrash/Speed Metal Trademark

Somewhere in Australia, there is a child legally named Metallica.

However, according to this story, it is illegal to call your child 'Ned Kelly.'

Sir Lady Chief Maximus Duke Seven is also out.

"I've Not Felt This Well For Ages", Then Death

The last meal of legendary British TV chef Keith Floyd, stricken with bowel cancer, was as follows :

A Hix Fix cocktail - "a morello cherry soaked in Somerset apple eau de vie topped up with champagne"

Cigarettes

A glass of white burgundy

A plate of oysters, plus potted Morecambe Bay shrimps.

Red-legged partridge and bread sauce for the main, washed down with a bottle of Côtes du Rhone red

Apple pie and perry jelly

Floyd's personal motto was to enjoy good food and wine to the full. A few hours after the meal, he died in his sleep.

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You Drive Me Insane, In The Nicest Possible Way

Nick Barker's back on the road in October. Always an excellent show, from one of Australia's greatest live performers.

This is his song about his grandmother, who suffered from senile dementia. She came to believe that she lived in two homes, and wanted to know when her family would take her to "the other house". A song from the heart. Sad, but beautiful.

Murdoch Media Reports Murdoch Media Plans Won't Work



It was there on the front page of Rupert Murdoch's news.com.au for a few hours, then it was gone. A story featuring Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, explaining why Murdoch's plans to charge people to read digital news is doomed to fail :

Publishers of general news will find it hard to charge for their content online because too much free content is available, (Eric Schmidt) the chief executive of Google says.

Mr Schmidt was responding to an announcement by News Corporation chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch that he could start charging for content online.

"In general these models have not worked for general public consumption because there are enough free sources that the marginal value of paying is not justified based on the incremental value of quantity," he said.

The story was open for comments, all of whom agreed with Schmidt. One example :

Gone are the days of people getting all of their news from the one source. People get their news from a variety of sources now. There is absolutely no reason to confine oneself to a singular edition of news on a single web site. I wonder why Murdoch doesn't understand this?

No doubt the automated publication of that news wire story on news.com.au must have caused a few palpitations.

What Would Jesus Do...If He Took Control Of Your TV Remote?


image from the Orlando Weekly

The Australian Christian Lobby is sending out 'Stop The TV Smut' press releases again :

With standards governing on-screen content being reviewed for the first time in six years, the Australian Christian Lobby launched the "Tame the Tube" campaign to combat what it says are industry attempts to weaken TV standards.

"Sex, violence and foul language are normal fare these days as TV networks push the boundaries," ACL managing director Jim Wallace said.

ACL said it had about 10,000 registered supporters, mainly from orthodox and evangelical churches.

They don't like Underbelly much.

There should be a suburban crime show based around the jaw-dropping Biblical tale of Lot and his two daughters. Then we could have a God-fearers friendly TV drama where a stranger wanders into a new town, say St Kilda, pursued by a gang of locals intent on raping him, the stranger takes shelter in the home of Mr Lot, who then volunteers his underage daughters to the rape gang when they drop by to attack his house guest. The town explodes, killing just about everybody. Mr Lot flees with his two daughters, who then get their father drunk and seduce him. But no swearing, butts or tits, of course. The ACL thinks that would be going too far.

@ClubWah provides a provocative retort to the lobby group the Daily Telegraph has, curiously, branded the 'Wrath Of God' :

"fuck off you fucking shit-eating fundi cunts!"

In answer to the question posed in the headline, I'm sure Jesus would be regularly tuning into Top Gear, if only to marvel at how far transport has come since the days of the donkey express.

The Dan Brown Code

The secret is out. Outraged connoisseurs of fine literature, formal sentence structure and the holiness of the Queen's English crack the secret to Dan Brown's success :

(In every book, the) attractive protagonist gets called unexpectedly to help in a case where he/she is an expert. There's an obvious antagonist, physically unattractive, who's clearly out to get the protagonist. There's also the trustworthy mentor, who helps out the protagonist. At about three quarters of the book, the antagonist gets killed and turns out to be actually been helping the protagonist, whilst the mentor is the evil one. Meanwhile, the protagonist and his/her attractive helper of the opposite gender run all over the place to collect hints and clues, they persevere in the end, and in the final chapter they have intercourse. Oh, and every chapter ends with a cliffhanger.

Sounds great, fast-paced, a few twists, but easy on work-depleted brains. No wonder he's sold so many books.

Another commenter to the hilariously tweed-draped Dan Brown's Top 20 Worst Sentences rams through this observation, bursting with snark for the grammar nannies :

Proper grammar exists only to keep snobz in jobz.

It's all about getting yer message over, Innit? If yer message is much more interesting than the crap that some people write in t'fish wrapper, then everyone's happy except those who got battered as kids by sadists in public schools for splitting infinitives.

For many millions who buy and read Dan Brown's new book, The Lost Symbol, it will be the only book they read this year, or will have read in years. But They're Still Reading A Book where they otherwise would read nothing. How anyone can see a massive, if brief, enthusiastic increase in novel reading as a bad thing, as something destructive, because the writer often beats the English language out of shape for the purposes of page-turning entertainment, is beyond me.

Move Over, Kevin, We Have A New Contender

Our prime minister is probably the world's most famous living picker of head-located orifices.



Well, not anymore.

While President Obama was posing for what will easily become one of the most legendary presidential photos ever taken (at least for the Star Wars generation)....




This guy went for a dig....



It's too late for Photoshop.



(h/t - Reddit)

Murdoch Celebrates Death Of Newspapers : "It's Going To Be Great"

By Darryl Mason

It's not just smirking bloggers and feisty independent New Media snarking over the Death Of Newspapers. Now Rupert Murdoch, who convinced a generation of British fathers in the 1970s and 1980s that they should be proud to see their 18 year old daughter's tits on Page 3 of The Sun, is joining in the newsprint grave dancing :

"I do certainly see the day when more people will be buying their newspapers on portable reading panels than on crushed trees.

“Then we’re going to have no paper, no printing plants, no unions. It’s going to be great.”

But the monopoly of distribution and political influence he once enjoyed, and exploited, with newspapers is gone forever. Now Murdoch's news has to compete in the ultimate free market, as he tries to force readers to pay for news that they will (soon after it breaks) also be able to find elsewhere on the internet for free.

Murdoch has also announced plans to increase prices for the cable sports programming he controls. He believes News Corp. has been “undercharging". Australian subscribers to premium Fox Sports channels will be surprised to hear that.

The first example of how Murdoch's YouWillPay! system will work, as far as news and opinion content is concerned, comes with the announcement that :

The Wall Street Journal...will start charging non-subscribers $2 a week to access content on mobile devices such as the BlackBerry, he said. Current subscribers will be charged $1.

So even if you already pay a few hundred dollars a year, or more, to access The Wall Street Journal, Murdoch's going to hit you up for another $52 a years minimum to read it all on your hand screen.

The headline on this Financial Times story reads :

Murdoch Hails E-Readers

Like he has a choice now.

How Can We Sleep While The Earth Is Weeping?

By Darryl Mason

I don't know about you, but this is one of the stupidest fucking things I've heard this year :

A Midnight Oil hit advocating Aboriginal land rights in the '80s is being used in the noughties to mobilise nations to combat climate change.

The band's former frontman and now Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, helped write new lyrics to Beds Are Burning, as part of the celebrity-led initiative.

Yes, Bob Geldof is involved. So is Duran Duran. Nothing in music is sacred, not even a Midnight Oil song that helped to bring the idea of Aboriginal reconciliation to a new, more open-minded, less bigoted generation. The only consolation I suppose is that Bono isn't involved.

Well, not yet anyway.

The original Beds Are Burning lyrics....

''Out where the river broke/The blood wood and the desert oak/Holden wrecks and boiling diesels/Steam in 45 degrees''.

....have become :

''Down at the river bed/The earth is cracked and dry instead/Farms a failing, cities baking/Steam in 45 degrees.''

This :

"The time has come/A fact's a fact/It belongs to them/Let's give it back."

Has become this :

''The time has come/A fact's a fact/The heat is on/No turning back.''

"The Heat Is On"? Someone call Glenn Frey!

Garrett won't be singing on the rebake, and it will be given away online.

In a few years time, if global warming doesn't turn out to be the "clear, catastrophic threat" that Rupert Murdoch predicted, and the Earth turns more icy than melty, Midnight Oil could always rewrite the lyrics to Cold Cold Change.



Great fucking song. By the way, Cold Cold Change is now 30 years old.

Impossible Fiction

By Darryl Mason

Found this on Twitter last night : 'Enter The Times Cheltenham Twitter Competition'. The task is to write "a story" in less than 140 characters. Fucking hard. Infuriatingly hard. Which, of course, is what makes it such a fun and 'must try this now!' writing challenge.

So here's a few of my post-midnight entries :

* "Run! the voice in her head yelled. "Run NOW!" She got up from the table and ran outside. A car mounted the curb and killed her instantly.

* The plane exploded. She counted the stars as she fell, ready for death. Then she saw her house far below. She aimed for her pool....

* "How much do you love me?" "More than life itself." She handed him a knife, "Prove it." "Okay," he said, "you're number two on my Love List."

* "I can't marry you," she sighed. "I'm not real. You made me up." The moment he realised this was true, she vanished. He picked up his pen, again.

* "One day you will invent a time machine," the visitor said. "I'm here to show you how." The visitor was decades older than my reflection

* When he left Earth, he was an astronaut. When he arrived on The Moon they told him he was, in fact, a soldier, and he would never go home again.

Note, these stories as they exist here are slightly longer than 140 characters, but only because I removed the Twitter shorthand which renders 'about' as 'abt', 'you're' as 'yr', 'realised' as 'realsd' and so on, for easier reading.

You can look at the other entries to the comp. here.

I'm still up in the air about Twitter as a vehicle for fiction, incredibly short fiction as above, or very well structured serial fiction told 140 characters at a time, over God knows how long. It's like trying to stuff a fat old reluctant dog through a tiny cat door.

Turning, or translating, a finished novel into a Twovel seems an equally impossible task. I've been working my way through a novel of mine that was published in 1996, Max & Murray, converting it into a twovel, as you can see if you look to the right of this page and down. But so far it feels pretty much like a total fucking disaster. Which makes me want to both abandon it and finish it as quickly as possible so this ridiculous experiment is done with.

Anyway, I'll get into all that in a longer post, later, with some examples of paragraphs from Max & Murray the printed novel versus the twovel posts I've done so far here.

Yes, I know, thrilling stuff.

@darrylmason

Professor Blainey : TV Has Taught Footy Players To Speak Proper

From the Herald Sun :

Prof Geoffrey Blainey said one of the biggest changes over the past 50 years was the astonishing improvement in pronunciation and grammar.

"That clearly has come from television and radio and films, not from what's been taught in schools," he told the Herald Sun.

Prof Blainey said earlier generations used to say things like "them days" and "all of youses".

"I'm not criticising them, that's what they learned in childhood, but that old grammar has virtually vanished," he said. "Even when you listen to the footballers today, they all speak well."

It Was A Stupid Waste Of Time, Until I Started Using It

In May, Tony Wright, national affairs editor for Fairfax media, unloaded a tirade of anti-Twitter bitterness, claiming "much of the chatter is less substantial than air" (excerpts) :

Twitter, for those free souls who have avoided contact with modernity, is a method of shooting your latest thought (a term used loosely) into that disembodied world inhabited by the millions who operate a computer or a mobile phone. You have precisely 149 characters, including spaces, to type each thought, which boils down to the sad question: "What are you doing now?"

The result, almost universally, is banal communication almost beneath description.

It is the current equivalent of citizens' band (CB) radio, where the poor sad sods who drove trucks up and down the highway shouted "breaker, breaker" into their hand-held mikes, followed by inane fantasies that rarely amounted to more than the truth that here was a bored person sitting isolated on his bum, watching the traffic go by.

A recent Nielsen survey that found 60 per cent of Twits quit in the first month is cause for hope that we have not all lost our minds. Dross is dross, even if it spins in the enchanting cosmos of cyberspace.

Tony Wright joined Twitter on August 15. He now uses Twitter prolifically, primarily to cover Question Time.

"Look! They're Reading! Books!"

Australia's media, including Channel 9 News, Channel 10 News, Live News, News.com.au, SMH and the Daily Telegraph, according to Mumbrella. gathered this morning in a Sydney bookstore to watch people speed-read Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol.

Freemasonry, and its role in shaping George Washington's revolution against England and the building of the city that bares his name, including the often downright bizarre architecture of Washington DC, plays a key role in Brown's new book.

The Sydney Museum of Freemasonry, only a few blocks away from where dedicated journalists reported stoically on people reading books, must be wondering why they didn't get a call.

It's not like the MoF is trying to distance itself from The Lost Symbol. They're now selling it in the museum's bookshop, with big posters in the foyer.

BTW, freemasons' run the country. At least, they did between 1923 and 1941.

Mungo MacCallum On The Legacy Wars

From Crikey :

It’s all Kevin Rudd’s fault. Here we are, nearly two years out of the Howard years and happily consigning them to well-deserved oblivion.

And then Rudd has to mention the war; and of course John Howard and Peter Costello lurch out of the political cemetery to boast about the size and quality of their tombstones and pretend they are not really dead after all, and Malcolm Turnbull feels that he has to join in and defend the two people in the world he most wants to forget. Such is the level of discussion in contemporary Australia.

The trigger, of course, was Paul Kelly’s latest blockbuster, a weighty, indeed ponderous, attempt to spin the 24 years of government by Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard with (in alphabetical order) Peter Costello into one seamless thread of economic reform.

Launching the book, Rudd predictably dismissed the Howard-Costello period as a mere hiatus; he and only he was the true bearer of the flame kindled in 1983. This admittedly partisan view was derided as mean-spirited and mendacious, but it did invite a critical appraisal of Howard’s legacy and what, if anything it has left us. And on close examination it is not a legacy which can be dismissed lightly. It can, however, be dismissed heavily, so here goes.

The proudest boast of Howard and Costello was that they handed over a robust and vibrant economy, free of debt and sizzling with growth. It was indeed free of government debt; on the other hand private debt, vigorously encouraged by government policy, was through the roof and still climbing. And certainly Australia’s economy was growing and had been for many years.

The problem was that the growth had been squandered on election bribes to middle class voters. Vast quantities of tax had been collected only to be handed back, although the hand outs disproportionately favoured the top end of town. Very little was invested in infrastructure and still less set aside for the inevitable downturn – thus Rudd’s need to borrow large amounts, which is now the target of coalition outrage.

Indeed, so extreme had been Howard’s profligacy that if all his 2007 election promises had been honoured, the budget would have gone into structural deficit even if the boom had continued. Not much of a bequest after all.

*************

Rudd’s principal charge against them is that they did almost nothing to boost productivity against the inevitable time when the mining boom came to an end. Education, research and innovation were all allowed to run down, almost to the point of stagnation. This is where the bonanza should have gone and this will be the priority in the years ahead.

In other words, economic reform will certainly continue, but not as an end in itself: it will henceforth be a means towards social reform. And it is by this criterion that Rudd’s own legacy will be judged.

Read The Full Story Here