The Turd Circus

According to the AEC, nearly 400,000 Strayans voted in the first three days of pre-polling. 

As of this writing, that means Antony Green would have a pretty good chance of putting us out of our collective hashtag auspol misery later this week, based on the assumption we keep that clip up.

That’d be about 10% of 15 million eligible voters rocking up early, all with a sense of getting this shit over with, stat.

“This shit” of course being six long years of the Coalition debacle - a rolling cavalcade of malfeasance, sneering corruption, palm greasing and fisting of the plebs on behalf of billionaire mates, all exacted by a mangy line up of low rent Dick Tracy heels.

I gritted my teeth and ran the pre-polling gauntlet last Thursday, keeping the urge to clothesline the reptile scum en route to the booth (the LNP spiv in our new electorate, Ryan, is one Julian Simmonds, who isn’t dog whistling AT ALL with his campaign slogan “protecting our lifestyle”) and did my intergenerational duty, even though the local Labor man is really short.

Seriously, though - how the fuck are Labor still in with a solid to likely chance of squibbing this thing?

Do you, also, get the sense of a graven slog emanating from the ALP camp?

Six years of the Libs cooking the joint and it’s still down to the razor’s edge, blancmange to the left, crooked tories to the right, and here we are - stuck in the coriolis en route to the existential s-bend.

This should be a cakewalk, whatever that is, for the ALP.

Have you looked at the incumbents, lately, those sad Chester Gould rejects?

Of course there’s our caretaker PM, the swivel-eyed Scummo, the cruel fundy overseer of turning back the boats (fair to say - Labor kicked off mandatory detention). 

For a nation that could give half a tug of a dead dingo’s dick about god bothering, this happy clappy bigot has spent his time in the big chair tossing the salad of evangelical fuckheads like Franklin Graham, nodding to a toxic streak of homophobia as wide as Cronulla beach is long.

Oberführer Spud, the increasingly puce Barnaby, the aerodymamic puckered sphincter Michaelia, the shovel headed Canavan all shaft us with abandon, sneering with untouchable contempt - water buybacks, union raids, Reefgate, HelloWorld, colluding with Rupert, robodebt, sticking up for Pell, felching the fossil fuel industry - a rap sheet long and damning but ultimately meaningless to a supine electorate fixated on their own bottom line.

Inequality?

Indigenous recognition? 

Incinerated planet?

Frippery.

My housing portfolio, my franking credits, my well upholstered rump trump your scratching it together er 25 years below the poverty line, suicidal.

Sure, Toney, flat earth wrecker of the discourse, is fighting for his pension with an uppity chick who dares question the fizzing santorum leaking from his boiled brain, and Frydenberg, the solar panelled sex machine (ironically a potential source of renewable energy) is copping it symbolically in well-heeled Kooyong from the Greens conscript Saint Burnside, but still…

Of late it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the Nats and the Libs, the LNP, are actively in cahoots with actual Nazis, for fuck’s sake.

Or, as the wizened sages in the meeja would have it, the “Far Right”, wherein the accepted wisdom is that sacks of rancid custard like Neil Erikson and the cartoonish dullard Blair Cottrell are somehow morally equivalent to yucky trade unionists or, even worse, actual socialists.

Just ask Professor Peter, he’ll word you up. 

I met Julia last year - she’s a very nice lady from Adelaide, and was PM roughly an eon ago. Ms Gillard was in Shepparton, which is where Tim the hairdresser is from, to do a talk for International Women’s Day.

She took the reins of Beyond Blue from Jeff Kennett, too, and gave the odd good speech (but also cut welfare for single mums).

I’ve spotted her accomplice - and then assassin - Shill Borten, in the wilds of Maribyrnong over the years. Abiding memories: dandruff, double denim, “would rather be anywhere else” energy.

To his credit, he beat Toney in a fun run once. 

Which must still burn.

Bill, the architect of a wasted, skullduggerous decade, maybe.

Sniff the wind and it seems like he might not even stick the landing here in ‘19, for all that.

But the alternative to sitting in neutral with Bill skulking around the centre while the planet accelerates into cinders is what?

We’ve got two daggy dad dickheads staking out the tiniest patch of rotten earth and marking it “the economy”, “immigration”, and “religion” while the planet heats up inexorably and we cheerfully volunteer ourselves as a test case for white nationalist eco-fascist siege mentality fomented in the face of the mass continental exodus climate crisis to come.

It’s always been thus, but full credit to Howard, via Hanson, dragging us entirely into the shitter we now call home, with a healthy dash of Stockholm syndrome to go.

We don’t demand much more than porridgy white middle management class apparatchiks around here, and are sure to hound women out of the game and strip the flesh off anyone reeking of progressive bones just when we need some piss and vinegar vision and revolutionary steel in the spine the most.

Our leaders are unremarkable save privilege and self regard, all craven ambition and utterly ill suited to lead in times like these.

These fuckers, mostly, have kids - what’re they going to tell them, when any coal’s the goal and let’s kick the can down the road until the sky rages red and George Miller is proven a Prophet?

True, the standard of journalism we’re beginning to reject - shit cunts like Bevan Shields, Joe Hildebrand, the Kennys, the Marist circle flog squad at the Oz, the alt-right rabble baiters Andy, Rita, Miranda et al, the faltering Murdochracy, and the deadshit cheer squads of commercial telly, with Aunty and the beast with two backs that is Nine/ Fairfax - 

11 have more than their fair share to answer for.

Did someone say complicit?

Still - six years of captain’s calls, clownish idiocy and rank LNP incompetence and the ALP’s still on the precipice of converting all those gift horses into an own goal, to mangle a few sporting analogies (as Scummo is wont to do).

Many of us have never experienced the luck that this country’s allegedly imbued with, by virtue simply of not being white, straight and, preferably, male. 

Politics have always been kinky-broken, and hashtag auspol is utterly depraved.

This election, in less than a fortnight, feels like a critical juncture that none of the key players are capable of addressing. If ever there was a time to go off brand and dig in for a proper fight for our actual existence, it’s now.

Pity, then, that our hypothetical progressives have self owned so badly over the last decade, and remain suicidally timid when it comes to breaking that cycle.

Show us a decent pie chart soon, for fuck’s sake, Antony.

Is it over yet?

Mystery panel van artist unmasked

There was this sort of crimson, mandibled crustacean demon that leered out of the pages of my computer games mags – ZZAP64!, C64, Commodore User – back in the late ‘80s.

Maybe it was Predator inspired, maybe not - who even knows what the arcane production schedules of 8-bit video games and print advertising were in relation to the 1987 Arnie ‘Nam rerun.

The game’s name was BAAL, and it looks like a sort of fangless, platform variation on DOOM based on that video.

BAAL’s publisher Psyclapse – an imprint of Psygnosis – had an epic brushed metal logo designed by Roger Dean, and their every release seemed to be boxed in exquisite none-more-metal artwork that the lumbering games tech of the time always failed to live up to.

Ballistix – a pretty shit Arkanoid riff – was another Psyclapse release - this one had some sort of winged techno-angel heaving bombs down from on high. This was the image I later came to associate with the cheap re-release of Judas Priest’s debut album, Rocka Rolla, whose original, iconic cover with the bottle top was designed by the legendary John Pasche.

Later still, I spotted that same very  bomb-bot on the cover of Michael Moorcock’s The Steel Tsar, unwittingly having traced the image’s lineage backwards, perfectly.

Hunting down the artist’s name had completely failed to occur to me until a couple of weeks back, when I picked up a copy of Piers Anthony’s Faith of Tarot on a rare moment spent pawing through a second hand book shop.

The wild magenta hell spawn looming up on the cover must have felt familiar on some gut level.

It was thirty odd years (jesus) since those games ads piqued my burgeoning trash-kid aesthetic, and I was finally about to unearth the name of the artist who’d linked my gaming to my music fandom and a very occasional interest in panel van art.

After a bit of light google-fu, I had my man.

Melvyn fucken Grant.

Hit the link and revel in the majesty and little a artistry of a bloke that never quite hit the heights of Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell, but probably definitely was behind more than a few of the posters on your wall and CDs on your rack if you’re anywhere south of fifty.

Weirdly, that Faith of Tarot abomination sure looks more than a bit like I’d envisioned a certain diabolical entity  in my book, Home Brewed, Vampire Bullets, too…

Best of 2018 mixtape

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

Journalist Michael Wolff’s Fire & Fury – Inside the Trump White House, was published last week in a storm of anticipation and controversy.

Wolff offers a chilling insight into the Trump administration’s tumultuous first year. Predominantly an entertainment writer, Wolff gained access to the chaotic Trump White House from its inception by merely turning up on a daily basis.

Inevitably disavowed by a furious Trump White House, Fire & Fury is a breathless tabloid exercise. Nonetheless, Wolff’s colourfully observed account is corroborated by the countless volumes of reputable reporting generated since the outlandish real estate mogul and reality television star announced his candidacy.

Leaning heavily on access to Trump Svengali Steve Bannon, Fire & Fury confirms the worst suspicions many hold about the 45th president’s temperament, lack of agenda and complete disinterest in the fundamentals of government.

Bannon, the strategist behind Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ and an alt-right figurehead in his own right, is given to flights of Shakespearean melodrama and palace intrigue. The former presidential aide and Breitbart news chairman, whose candour has led to disgrace – for now – in even the most right-wing circles, gleefully lays bare the unhinged volatility of the Trump White House.

Bannon puckishly details the ongoing internecine War of Roses between Trump’s family and the Washington insiders tasked with attempting to bring the erratic, Twitter-distracted president to heel. Indeed, there have been revelations this week regarding the conspicuously threadbare presidential attention span, giving further credence to Wolff’s account.

Fire & Fury – Inside the Trump White House reads like a trashy airport novel, very literally trumping Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) and Beau Willimon (House of Cards) in terms of dysfunctional, real world political intrigue.

As the second year of Trump’s presidency begins, and we grapple pervading sense of global anxiety, Fire & Fury leaves us with a particularly unsettling coda:

“The Trump presidency – however long it lasted – had created the opening that would provide the true outsiders their opportunity. Trump was just the beginning.”

Originally published here.

Tony Martin’s DEADLY KERFUFFLE

CAST your mind back to 2006.

The Australian twenty four hour news cycle was in its infancy - scuttlebutt, innuendo, hearsay, grossly ill-informed speculation and flat out bullshit travelled at much slower speeds.

It was a gentler, simpler time of Blackberrys, Sky News and anti-terror fridge magnets.

Terrestrial television, talkback radio and tabloid newspapers were still the preferred delivery methods for half baked dog whistling and racist paranoia - Twitter and Facebook were years from hitting their straps in any meaningfully awful, democracy endangering way.

Fake News – AKA spurious bunkum–  was what you heard over the back fence from your gossipy neighbour, or over a few pints from the dotty old racist down the local.

Viewed in the rear-view mirror from here in bad old dystopian 2017, 2006 has almost acquired a warm, nostalgic glow. Even the Howard Government looks vaguely – vaguely –  palatable from this historical angle.

Believe it or not, that was all a mere decade ago.

Tony Martin’s career has thus far spanned four decades.

From his early days with The D-Generation and The Late Show, through film (Bad Eggs), popular commercial radio stints (Triple M’s Martin/ Molloy, Get This) and a return to the ABC (Upper Middle Bogan), Martin’s comedy has long been attuned to the art of gently pulling the piss out of day to day Aussie mundanity.

Deadly Kerfuffle, Martin’s debut novel, leans heavily on the Kiwi author’s keenly observed insights into the sinister flip side of our daggy national character.

Lifting directly from the cover blurb:

“It’s 2006, and terror scaremongering in the media has rattled the residents of sleepy, suburban Dunlop Crescent. When a Maori family moves into number 14, the local cranks assume they are Middle Eastern terrorists hell-bent on destroying the Australian way of life. Rumour has it that they plan to turn their house to face Mecca...”

Events spin madly out of control – as they’re wont to do – when pompous radio shock jocks, fedora sporting conspiracy theorists, cable news muckrakers, hysterical tabloid newspaper coverage and bumbling national security apparatchiks quickly turn a bit of benign cul-de-sac pensioner bigotry into a potential terrorist event.

Sounding all-too eerily plausible?

With an insider’s ear for the local media industry, Deadly Kerfuffle wrenches back the curtains on the sordid inanity of Melbourne’s rampant pundit class, throwing particularly dense shade at certain overly familiar personalities from the right wing nut job commentariat.

Deadly Kerfuffle’s plot – driven by mistaken identities and escalating farce – nods to Martin’s cinephilia. There’s a healthy dash of film noir via Coen Brothers quirk inherent in the book’s intertwining, pulp novel narrative beats, and the seedy cast of oddballs is fleshed out with bumbling twits, scheming egomaniacs with half-arsed schemes and some all-too believable Nazi thugs.

Martin’s keen eye (and ear) for trenchant detail – note the author’s obvious affection for the quaint anachronisms of mainstream Aussie culture – permeate Deadly Kerfuffle. Melburnians in particular will revel in Martin’s sense of place – dramatic hostage scenes play out in the absurdly appointed confines of an extinct theatre restaurant, and elsewhere some of St Kilda Road’s more naff “iconic” architecture is treated with the contempt it invites.

Deadly Kerfuffle is, to engage dual critical clichés, a laugh-out-loud funny page-turner. Martin’s affable literary voice makes this a jovial holiday read, while darker truths bubble at the fringes of this amiable tale of radicalised OAPs and outsized egos.

Having shrewdly set his first novel in our recent past, one wonders what accelerated horrors would beset Martin’s protagonists were it to have been set in the present day?

Helen Razer’s Total Propaganda

EIGHT rich, old, white dudes control more wealth than the poorest 50% of people on planet Earth.

That’s a depressingly slight percentage of the vaunted 1% which benefited from the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and birthed the Occupy movement.

As global inequality has intensified in the decade since the GFC, the shock of the decline of Capitalism has given rise to Trumpism, Brexit and the re-emergence of fascist politics.

Helen Razer’s Total Propaganda: Basic Marxist Brainwashing for the Angry and the Young poses the question: surely a better, more equitable alternative exists?

Razer – a Gen X figurehead whose punk ethos defined Triple J radio for a generation of ‘90s kids – is today an author, Crikey columnist and cranky public intellectual.

She’s also a proud, self-described Marxist.

Karl Marx, the revolutionary German political theorist and economist, was a nineteenth century critic of Capitalism and the father of Communism.

Taking a cue from her Millennial readers’ online intrigue, Razer has producedTotal Propaganda, a handy primer on Karl Marx’ ideas intended to inspire activism in a new generation of workers.

With a professorial zeal for clear explanation of dense economic, philosophical and cultural concepts, Total Propaganda zips succinctly from industrial revolution to GFC and beyond.

Razer unpacks automation, neoliberalism, the offshoring of manufacturing and the exploitation of the global south using a curt turn of phrase and direct language. The author also nods to the popularity of Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders – two woolly headed old white dudes espousing Marxist ideas – with Millennial voters.

Total Propaganda: Basic Marxist Brainwashing for the Angry and the Young is brisk, often hilarious, and most importantly educational read for anyone intimidated by the language of class, political theory and economics.

Razer’s book is an excellent jumping off point for further reading in the field, and includes a comprehensive further reading section including links to all of Marx’ writings, which now live in the public domain and are available online.

Total Propaganda: Basic Marxist Brainwashing for the Angry and the Young is out now.

Benjamin Law’s Moral Panic 101

AS I prepare this review, the Coalition government’s same-sex marriage postal survey is entering its second week.

The Australian Christian Lobby, led by Lyle Shelton, is presently staging a ‘no’ campaign launch in Adelaide, the City of Churches.

A quick scan of my - or anyone else’s - social media feed is more than enough to confirm that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s promise of a “respectful debate” on same sex marriage is naive whimsy, at very best.

We are just seven days into a two-month process, and it is sadly evident that a festering national wound has been opened. Hysterical misinformation and threats of violence permeate the print and online sphere - a relentless march of jaundiced think-pieces and partisan dog whistling.

It is hard to imagine journalist and author Benjamin Law’s Quarterly Essay #67, Moral Panic 101, arriving at a more socially and historically apt time.

Moral Panic 101 forensically deconstructs the unhinged response - dare I say it, the ‘Fake News’ - deployed by the Murdoch press and some right wing Christian groups in relation to the Safe Schools program.

Safe Schools - ironically an Abbott government initiative - was subject to a scare campaign which, it is now apparent, provided the broader, twisted blueprint for the present ideological trench warfare being conducted over same sex marriage.

Law, an LGBTIQ Asian-Australian, empathetically relates the deeply traumatic consequences of this negative, ugly campaigning on the school children impacted.

Safe Schools, a program intended to provide 21st century appropriate sex education to kids across the gender attraction and identification spectrum, was quickly hijacked by the petty, culture warrior agenda of Australia’s self-designated guardians of conservative morality.

Moral Panic 101 illustrates the heavy burden of this demagogic cane waving.

Law’s essay is a sad litany of traumatised queer kids’ lives ruined, and in some cases cut short, by bigotry, ignorance and political point scoring.

Of course, when such a low rhetorical bar is being set by politicians and figures in our news media, what hope does ‘respectful debate’ actually have?

Transposing the ugly battlelines drawn over the mental health of children, we are now confronted with the very real ramifications of the rhetorical escalation of conservative Australia over the right for same sex couples to marry with equal rights.

If the reaction of the Murdoch press is anything to go by, Moral Panic 101 has certainly poked a conservative nerve.

Sadly, Law’s essay - in daring to question the relevance and reach of the agenda-driven tabloid morals campaigners in Mr Murdoch’s employ - has triggered an aftershock of moral panic over Law’s social media usage among those unfamiliar with the ironic vernacular of the online sphere.

It is here that at the precipice that Law’s essay -  a class in lucid, careful journalism - presently teeters.

If you’re yet to return your same-sex marriage survey, and are perhaps conflicted (they need to be in the mail by October 27) I urge you to search out Law’s timely and essential essay.

We stand at the precipice of an important, defining schism in the fabric of Australian society in the early 21st century.

As Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews pointed out in a tweet in early September, US television comedy The Golden Girls had the last word on marriage equality during the first Bush Presidency:

“Everyone wants someone to grow old with... and shouldn’t everyone have that chance?”

David Marr: The White Queen

IN his seventh Quarterly Essay, The White Queen - One Nation and the Politics of Race, journalist David Marr examines Pauline Hanson and One Nation’s re-emergence in our current global political context.

Collaborating with a team of statisticians, Marr analyses the resurgence of Hanson through the lens of Australian voters’ demographic makeup.

One Nation’s rise itself is investigated through an exploration of PM John Howard’s mid-late 1990s political opportunism, providing an illuminating timeline of Hanson’s hot button topics. Muslims, for one, have obviously replaced Asians as our nation’s greatest existential threat.

Marr discussed The White Queen at Carlton’s Church of All Nations in late March, noting that his work can be robbed of topicality by the rapid pace of modern political theatre. In June 2010, soon to be ex-Prime Minister was in his sights. ‘Political Animal’, Marr’s piece on then Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, arrived in late 2012, just months before the ouster of Julia Gillard and the doomed return of Rudd.

Released on 27 March, The White Queen was published in the wake of the Western Australian state election. Then Liberal Premier Colin Barnett had engineered preference deals with One Nation, which backfired spectacularly and led to – for the Liberal Party – an ominous electoral wipeout.

In the current edition of The Monthly, journalists George Megalogenis and Richard Cooke also reflect on One Nation’s constituents steadily eroding the Liberal Party’s traditional voter base.

This explains the Turnbull Liberal Government’s further push to the populist right. The recent abolition of certain 457 Visas subtly dog-whistle to Hanson’s base and are met with approval from Hanson herself. Bill Shorten’s Labor Opposition – hardly immune to criticism – has also embraced Trumpian ‘nation first’ rhetoric in an effort to woo disaffected middle Australian voters.

As noted, the frenzied pace of modern political discourse renders any printed work fleetingly contemporaneous. Regardless, Marr’s newest Quarterly Essay provides us with a useful snapshot of the present condition of mainstream Australia, and is recommended for those critical insights alone.

Originally published here.