“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”


DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little, Ludmila’s Broken English, Lights Out In Wonderland ... Winner: Booker prize; Whitbread prize; Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize; James Joyce Award from the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin)


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30 June 2013

BRIEF GUIDE TO AUSTRALIAN POLITICS

For a while, this bloke, Heavy Kevvie,  was our Prime Minister, which means most of us voted for him and his Labor [sic] Party.  He was like this.

Then a hard right Catholic bloke called Senator Don Farrell (below) and some of his mates from the union representing the supermarket slaves and the poor dills in the cheap grog outlets and big dumb hardware barns told Kevvie to piss off. This old news clip is about his influence on the parliament of my home state, South Australia.  But this Godfather Don had even more power in our national parliament, in Canberra.

Godfather Don and his shelf-stackers gave the top job to Julia Gillard.  Which, despite the smelly method,  pleased many of us, as we were suss of Heavy Kevvie, who showed signs of a kind of patho control freak streak.    On the other hand, Julia had a strange Miwbin accent and famously red hair, and was shacked up with her boyfriend Tim, a hairdresser from Shepparton.  



Most Australians seemed cool with this.  But famous feminists, redheads and hairdressers were delighted to the point of delerium.  Oxford Street ran out of red hair dye.  Ignoring all that blingorama, Julia did a lot of really good and clever shit running a hung parliament, which depended on the vote of a few independent wildcats, like the great statesman Tony Windsor.  

And she was capable of really cool humour, some of which was strangely prophetic. 

 But Heavy Kevvie, who has prayer meetings where they call upon a god of some sort, destabilised her act with constant shows of bitchiness and determined backroom manoeuvrings.  During this evil period, the Prime Minster of Australia was subjected to constant abject idiocy like this.  

Worse, she hit the shredder patiently accommodating unforgettable geniuses like the dreaded Alan Jones.

Struggling to assert their dodgy authority, the wild dogs of the  Canberra press gallery pushed for a leadership spill, without ever questioning much the leader of the opposition, a hard right catholic bloke called Tony Abbott, or Mr. Rabbit, who you heard Tony Windsor above accuse of doing anything short of selling his arse to get power.




So now Heavy Kevvy once again has  his little hand on the national joystick, and without popular election, is the Prime Minister of Australia. This makes many of us feel nostalgic for the inspiring days of yore. It was telling that it took The New Yorker to first accurately recognise and analyse the importance of this great speech ... that pack of wild dogs in our national capital were the last to appreciate it.  

For now, however, we're stuck with this Krudd, who obviously thinks his prayers have been answered by something we the people fail to grasp.  

In spite of an immediate sympathetic swill in the polls, people will eventually remember why they were relieved by the Gillard/Godfather Don coup, and the bouncing twerp will lose the election with a fat layer of bruised hubris if Mr Rabbit is his opponent.  But if the Liberals (which typically means conservatives, or Tories in Australia) sensibly throw their leader Rabbit out in the next few weeks, their new leader will be Malcolm Turnbull, whose reformed Liberal Party of Australia will chew up this dodgy sexist Catholic Labor supermarket mob - or whoever they are - and banish them to obscurity for at least a decade. 

Here's our former Prime Minister in her early union/lawyer days, having a good night groovin with Joan Kerner, who became Premier of Victoria, back in those times when women were only just beginning to rightfully invade the territory of Labor Party macho men.  



 

1 comment:

SASSY VIDAL said...

LOOKS LIKE TIM CUTS KEVVIE'S HAIR TOO