Not much hullaballoo, Mrs Windsor

A visit from the Queen of England is not an every-day event. When it happens, there's a lot of kids carrying bunches of flowers, a lot of headlines, and a lot of speculation as to how the Australian prime minister of the day will behave - at least since Paul Keating place his arm on the Queen's back in 1992. But this time there's been a noticeable lack of excitement compared, say, to when my mother and father each grabbed a chair at the Melbourne cafe where they were eating to carry down the street to stand on to watch the Queen drive past (she thinks it was 1954 or 1956). "She was a beautiful woman," says mum.

This time, journalists got their underwear in a knot on the Queen's arrival in Canberra because Julia Gillard did not curtsey, even though protocol does not require such a manouevre from the sitting prime minister of Australia.

But apart from that undignified conjecture the visit has been very low-key, with Dame Windsor going about her duties in a relative obscurity that has been illuminated only by regular broadcasts and the nightly segments on the news. It's a bit of a dud, in reality, when titular majesty has been overtaken by irony, as in the Brisbane Courier Mail's humourous itinerary - on their website - showing 'Where one's been', 'Where one's at' and 'Where one's going'. We take our leaders with a grain of sarcasm and we don't chew for very long, unless we really care. The light touch these last few days contrasts glaringly with the soil liberally thrown at Gillard during the run-up to the recent carbon tax legislation where the attention - 'Ditch the witch', 'Bob Brown's bitch' - attests to the person's importance. Likewise, the recent ABC comedy At Home With Julia got a lot of airtime because it drew a lot of public comment. The scene where Jules and Tim do the dirty on the carpet in the prime ministerial office has been recycled multiple times by other comedians because it resonates with earthy reality.

We really do have a woman as a leader. The other woman - always away, never writes, and anyway she's stopped making payments - is not held in great esteem by the majority of Australians except in so much as we remember what it used to be like when dominion held real meaning. Now, we resolve our problems on-shore. We are independent in all ways. We are a strong and successful country and we do not need a foreign monarch to tell us what we should value, and what we should ignore.

It's fitting that the Queen should be spending most of her time in Canberra, this time round. It's where Jules lives, after all. We can only hope that the two women will discuss when and how to transfer the final vestiges of state sovereignty from the northern hemisphere to ours. A trip to visit the Aussie PM Down Under, the headlines should read. "Queen recommends native head of state in Australia." We can only hope.

Farmers can engage meaningfully with urban elites

Farmers often express regret that their interests are not given sufficient weight in urban electorates and feel left out of the national debate. You see it especially, now, on Twitter. If you didn't see it before it's probably because you're a resident of a metropolitan area and you don't read any of the newspapers that are written for - and purchased by - farmers. Those newspapers tell you a story. But even if you did read them you might be unnerved by some of the opinions they contain. Newspapers are not objective, that's an unarguable fact of modern life (it used to be worse but changes in standards that took place initially at the beginning of the 20th century made objectivity an aspiration - if not always a reality - of the news process). If you are an educated urban dweller and you read a paper online like The Land or the Weekly Times, you will come away feeling as though your interests, too, are being ignored. But you won't care because those views do not substantially alter the national debate, so you just go back to bemoaning the dominance of ignorant News Limited tabloids and ignore the virulent hatred of the Labor Party, for example, reflected in the pages of the rural press.

But the only hope for farmers, if they want to exercise more control over the national debate, is to engage with such educated urban residents. Even if these people vote Green or Labor. The uneducated urban resident will never give a hoot what farmers think - they are too busy worrying about their favourite football team. The Liberal urban voter thinks he doesn't have to worry about farmers because farmers overwhelmingly vote National and the Nats are slaves to Liberal policies. But in fact the outlook for farmers, politically speaking, has never been better than it is, now, with a minority Labor government that is beholden to the three rural independents, the Greens, and a Tasmanian independent.

A good place to start working out how farmers can better get along with the Greens and the Labor Party is to read Judith Brett's recent Quarterly Essay, 'Fair Share: Country and City in Australia'. It tells us, from the standpoint of an Australian historian, how the dependence of farmers on government largesse has become overshadowed by the more recent dependence of the National Party on the largesse of the Liberals. Under the Lib-Nat regime, farmers have actually gotten worse off because the neo-liberal imperative that drives the Liberal Party goes against farmers' most basic interests. It's a big country and user-pays can never work, mate. Those Lib wonks are all about opening up markets, productivity, and improving profits. It's got nothing to do with giving farmers a fair go. And the fact that we've got such popular rural independents demonstrates that many who are involved in rural politics realise that the Lib-Nat structure does not reflect rural interests, in a material sense.

Culturally, it's another issue altogether. I remember when the ABC's Q and A was held in Albury, the border town in northern Victoria. There was a middle-aged woman in the audience who stood up to pose a question. When, she asked, will the seabord urban majority stop imposing its values on rural Australia? I don't remember the answer but it struck me that this is how many rural residents must see the current situation. Socially, rural residents are conservative, and hence their support of the Lib-Nat alliance. Economically, however, they are closer to the Labor-Greens side of politics. They want conservative social values to dominate in the societal arena but they need softer, more communitarian values to dominate in the economic arena. It's a pickle.

On the one hand, rural voters need to attract the attention of the educated urbanite because he or she is the only urban dweller who will put aside time to give a fart about their issues. On the other, rural residents are wedded to conservative social values embodied in the policies and statements of the Lib-Nat alliance, which are anathema to the educated urban dweller. I think that rural residents need to think about what they really want from the political process. It might be time to make a choice between earning a good living and remaining faithful to outmoded values that are going to be overtaken by liberal urban values regardless.

There are many points of common interest for farmers and urban elites. One is carbon pricing. Instead of just sucking up the garbage produced by rural newspapers who are relentlessly anti carbon pricing, farmers should ask for more information and start entering into the debate in a meaningful way. The educated urban elites will start to pay attention if farmers start talking sense instead of just recycling tired objections. Another point of common interest is the dominance of the two major supermarket chains. Urban elites are passionate about authenticity and many of them grow veges in their backyards. They buy honey from urban beekeepers and think it's manna from heaven. They care about the environment but they also need to eat food and farmers' markets are catering to these people in growing numbers in cities around Australia. So what about talking to them about soft agricultural options that farmers take seriously because they are serious about stewardship of their main asset - their land? It's an option. And then urban elites love road trips - especially when there are music festivals attached to the end of them - and when they get out into the countryside they're the ones stopping to buy five-kilo sacks of off-farm potatoes to take back to their inner city apartments where they will talk about the value, the freshness, and the friendly farmer who sold it to them.

There are many options for farmers who want to engage more thoroughly with urban dwellers.

Broadcaster ABC's new series The Slap packs a punch

It was a no-brainer for me to buy Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap when I saw it high up on a shelf yesterday at a local second-hand bookshop. I'm an avowed long-time fan of Tsiolkas and Loaded, The Jesus Man and Dead Europe were all reviewed on this blog in early 2006, when I quickly made up my mind that Tsiolkas was one of Australia's best writers of fiction.

So when the ABC decided to commission a drama based on his latest book, and then started saturating their program ad breaks with trailers for The Slap filled with scenes of dramatic intensity that are overlaid with atmospheric music, I decided it was a duty to watch the first episode. I needn't have worried. The ep is good, offering plausible characters - none of whom, not even young Adam, Hector and Aisha's son, are denied agency and depth - as well as tight scripting and sound acting. As for action, the canonical moment  - the moment of the slap - is so meaningful because of what proceeds it and because of the rich tapestry of relationships that is woven through the characters and their interrelationships over the preceeding hour or so. Yes, the ep is an hour long but there's so much happening in this extremely average household that it seems to be much shorter. ABC managers should be pleased with the result. In my mind The Slap is a strong program and should do well in the ratings.

It's a bit difficult to say too much about The Slap in a review of this kind because you don't want to give away any surprises, so this post will not be overly long or detailed. Suffice it to say that the primary protagonists in this first ep are Hector, played by Jonathan LaPaglia, and his wife Aisha, played by Sophie Okenedo. Hector's turning 40 and today is his birthday party. Friends are invited. Aisha has been up since six making preparations and Hector is trying, without much enthusiasm, to give up smoking. Hector's family - mother, father and cousin - are arriving. The tense relationship between Aisha, fussing and burdened by her responsibilities as host, and Hector, who is busy with his own plans, furnish the ep with its core focus. There's also Hector's relationship with his son, Adam, who feels that his dad is too strict on him. Hector's mother and father arrive bringing presents and food (Aisha thinks her own preparations are sufficient for purpose), giving the birthday boy and his family air tickets to Greece, his country of origin, but Aisha and Hector had plans to get away as a couple to Bali. This event is typical of the way small details add further to the gamut of forces acting upon the couple.

Then there's the small matter of enjoying your birthday party while looking after a house full of kids, one of whom, Hugo, the son of Aisha's old friend Rosie and her husband Gary, is a real handful.

Tsiolkas and the program writers have efficiently drawn their characters with enough detail in order to give the episode's main point of drama - the slap - the impact it requires in order to generate the resonance it will have during the remainder of the series, and the book. Without knowledge of Hector's complicated relationship with Aisha (what marriages aren't filled with this kind of routine, quotidian drama?) and his philandering, the slap would not carry the load that it does. And Hector's friends are all drawn accurately to type so that you have the successful businessman (Hector's cousin Harry), the Muslim couple happy with small things, the combative bogan Gary, and Aisha's old friend Anouk, who works in TV and arrives with Rhys, a soap opera actor. The ep is mainly set in Hector and Aisha's kitchen and backyard, giving it a satisfyingly claustrophobic intensity. While Hector can escape to the upstairs bathroom to dose up and grab a quick smoke, in the main everyone is always watching everyone else; even Hector checks out the action downstairs out of the bathroom window. There are few secrets, it turns out.

Occupy Wall Street: It's our turn, says the Left

It seems to me that a lot of people would just prefer that the Occupy Wall Street protests just go away because coverage in the media has been uneven. Puzzlingly meagre, in the main, I should say. I tweeted my concern at the lack of coverage by mainstream media outlets and was told that CNN was doing a lot. But the majors I usually refer to - the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald - have been rather mum about the whole business. This morning, it seems about a week after protesters began to appear in the financial district in New York, the Melbourne Age put up a syndicated piece from the New York Times that expressed unease at best and disapproval at worst.

Which is somewhat surprising since Occupy Wall Street appears to be the Left's answer to the Tea Party movement. It's young, raggle-taggle and unfocused (unlike the Tea Party, which is mainly middle-aged, highly organised and supported by right-wing pressure groups). It's also late (the Tea Party began in 2009 with actions starting in Seattle and Chicago). The Tea Party is different in another sense. They mainly resented the fact that people without legitimate means to afford a home had secured one - albeit temporarily, for many, as events led to disposession and eviction in a lot of cases - and so it was a case of the middle class feeling ill-used, with the perception that it was carrying the can for the unworthy, economically speaking. Occupy Wall Street appears to be a more traditional protest by the fringe Left in the face of fiscal misdemeanours perpetrated by those bankers and other people who make a living out of manipulating global capital - the real villains in the piece.

It's a sign of how far to the Right the mainstream media has been pulled in recent times that their coverage of Occupy Wall Street has been so poor. There's really no excuse for outlets such as the New York Times and the Sydney Morning Herald - traditionally liberal vehicles that have been pretty consistently at odds with the Murdoch-controlled media that dominates the Right globally. I cannot account for the failure of these parts of the press to give due attention to the Occupy Wall Street protests, except to say that, somehow, the whole process has fairly confused them. Or maybe, faced with a rag-tag bunch of hippies with cardboard signs marked with red and green Textas, they have reverted to form as true guardians of the status quo. The Sydney Morning Herald was, for a long time until recent decades, the voice of conservatism in New South Wales, after all. Maybe the young, rag-tag nature of the OWS protests just doesn't possess the systemic gravitas that the Tea Party (middle class, organised, taking possession of the political process) has and Big News has decided that these kids in T-shirts and face paint are likely to flare out. Live fast, die young and all that.

Or maybe to acknowledge the OWS protesters would mean admitting that global banking had failed, and failed miserably, to justify the routine claims of capitalist boosters that capitalism is the best possible model for economic organisation. To admit this would mean a lot of scrutiny of a lot of entrenched interests, and so might risk losing the support of the middle class and possibly also advertisers. Maybe it's just too freaking inconvenient.

Whatever the problem, it just annoys me. It annoys me that the Australian media have given front-page attention to the Amanda Knox appeal trial (the American youngster was acquitted of a charge of murder in Italy after serving four years of an earlier sentence) while utterly ignoring what is a much more interesting phenomenon. Occupy Wall Street looks to have legs (as they say in the agricultural sector in reference to fruit that has to travel long distances to market) and we can only look forward to more balanced coverage in the coming days. Maybe we'll even see analysis pieces appearing that will give some meaning to what is, at the moment, a fissile and chaotic moment in world politics.

Nothing impressionistic about hatred of Jews

There he is. Charles Ephrussi. In the black top hat at the back of Renoir's 1881 painting Luncheon of the Boating Party. Charles loves art, collects it, writes about it, surrounds himself with it. He's the scion of a rich banking family. He employs Proust as his secretary at one stage in his life. He's a flaneur and a socialite and a womaniser. It's the final decades of the 19th century and Charles buys a collection of Japanese sash toggles - netsuke (pronounced NAY-tsu-kay) - with his lover but he's a bit tired of them now so he gifts them to a nephew in Vienna who has just got married. In Vienna at the Palais Ephrussi, the Austrian branch of the family is a bit embarrassed about the gift and the nephew's new wife relegates the showcase to the dressing room. Here, each day in the evening, while Emmy dresses for dinner, the children will be allowed to play with the objects for an hour. For decades the netsuke remain there, sequestered away from the public's gaze in plush comfort. Then the catastrophe arrives after Hitler annexes Austria and the Gestapo arrive to Aryanise the household. Everything is lost. Emmy and her husband eventually get out, Viktor ending up in England with his daughter Elizabeth, whose grandson will one day inherit the netsuke.

He is Edmund de Waal, an English potter. The gift comes from his uncle Iggy, a rich expatriate who lives in Tokyo and who took the netsuke there from England after WWII when he was demobilised. Edmund will end up practising his craft out of a studio in London but he has other accomplishments that enable him to write a book about the netsuke and their history. Edmund has also studied literature at Cambridge and, importantly, he knows French and German. With the 264 netsuke in his possession, Edmund sets out on what he thinks will be a few months of research but it turns into a multi-year quest to chronicle the story of the netsuke and the people who came into contact with them. They are objects to be touched, and touch implies people doing the holding, and people implies societies that nurture and punish them.

What de Waal does is to write a history of anti-semitism from the middle of the 19th century to WWII. Anti-semitism began a long time before Hitler began to mobilise the masses in his quest for total global domination. It was present in Paris while the Impressionists were painting their most important work. It was present during the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was a product of the new status afforded to Jews by enlightened European rulers who, in the new spirit animating Europe since the American Revolution, took it upon themselves to dismantle old barriers to full participation in civil and commercial society as they remodelled legal frameworks that embodied social structures and prejudices dating back centuries. In England, the Catholic Church was reanimated due to changes made to laws that had been in place for hundreds of years. In France, full citizenship was granted to Jews for the first time. The Ephrussis of Odessa took advantage of these changes to move west, where they took up residence within the growing economies they had previously dealt with only from the sidelines, along with the Rothschilds and other rich Jewish families originating in the East. But there was a backlash from people who resented the wealth these families commanded and these people animated others to protest, which led in the end to the Final Solution. In his book de Waal describes this progress from ugly undercurrent to official policy by concentrating on the people who had owned and loved the netsuke.

Because they are objects with an aesthetic value de Waal is able to depict these individuals in detail as he describes the special relationship between the owner of the objects and the objects themselves. Anti-semitism is an inescapable element of life and so it enters the narrative at multiple points through the years. In promotional videos and reviews of the book this aspect may not feature prominently but this is the most insistent theme it bears. It emerges time and again as shouts in the street, magazine headlines, comments written by an artist in a letter to a friend. In the end this vocal tide of hate and fear ends up destroying the Ephrussi family in the form it had taken from the time of its migration out of Odessa into the big European cities which provided the massive profits it used to fund its lavish lifestyle. Again and again de Waal notes the existence of these voices expressing displeasure. Again and again the sound of crowds enters the story. There are only 264 netsuke but there were millions of people who benefited from the inhuman crackdown that Germany inflicted on Jews in Europe from 1938 onwards. Surely de Waal must regret many things that he has investigated.

It was de Waal in a YouTube video who mentioned the Renoir painting that I have attached to this post. When I look at it I cannot help but wonder how many of those happy boaters would one day turn on the likes of the debonair Charles Ephrussi in order to undertake the systematic process of tearing his life apart. This is the canonical moment that I experience from reading de Waal's book, Hare With Amber Eyes. Please do so if you value the unusual and the beautiful.

More news from China than just buried sex slaves, please

If Julia Gillard expects Australians to look closer at China the news media has to get on board too. We need more than just news about sex slaves held for years in underground caverns - though, admittedly, the story is justifiably newsworthy.

The prime minister has said she will establish a working group to write a white paper to act as a basis for Australia's future government policies in relation to China.

But more will be needed. A government policy direction is all fine and good as it can encompass such things as military and trade links. The way companies and their executives and employees adapt their approaches to China is going to be just as important, however. And stories such as the recent expose by Ji Xuguang, a Luoyang reporter, showing how a government functionary had incarcerated six women aged 22 to 24 over a period of two years in a bunker underneath an apartment complex, hardly help to cement ties between our two countries.

The story of the illegal detention was enough to interest Western media but the subsequent developments around the story made it even juicier from the point of view of Western journalists. The New York Times covered the case - and got some facts wrong - but Australian media have yet to pick up on it. That's surprising, because the facts surrounding the treatment meted out to Ji after he started reporting on the case - he was threatened by government officials on the basis of revealing "state secrets" - are exactly the sort of odd behaviour on the part of China's leadership that excites the most interest in this country. Sure, reporting on the vicious attitude of the Communist Party toward the media is fair but if this is all we get - along with negative stories on the treatment of Tibet, Muslim unrest in the country's west, threats to Tawian, and sprays at foreign governments that criticise the Party - then we're just creating a readership that will hold overwhelmingly negative attitudes toward China. This, in turn, leads to more negative stories because the news media thinks it's giving people what they want.

Keeping women locked up underground is not something China pioneered. There have been three separate cases in Austria alone in recent years. Badgering journalists for accurately reporting on such occurrances is not, indeed, something Austrian authorities normally resort to. Yes, the Luoyang city officials who threatened Ji are in the wrong but, fearing for his safety, Ji was able to turn to China's version of Twitter, Weibo, where he generated a large volume of support from ordinary Chinese. This probably saved him from worse than mere threats. What it does show is that Chinese people are not the same thing as the Chinese government. The way that Western media report on China, the Chinese people never get a showing. It's time for this to change.

Government relations are important, the prime minister realises, but she should also be looking to improve relations between ordinary Australians and ordinary Chinese. The two countries have a lot of things that they can profitably share as the new century wears on. The Australian media is part of the problem.

Brissie day trip turns surreal with great GOMA show

When I jumped in the car yesterday after a sleepless night seeking diversion, and drove 100km south to Brisbane's entertainment precinct, there to take in an art exhibition, I had no idea that Surrealism: Poetry of Dreams would be showing at GOMA. Or a Henri Cartier-Bresson show next door at the QAG. "There," I thought, "nothing like a solid dose of high modernity" to placate the spirits that had tormented me during the night and so I entered and took in the surrealism exhibition with years of exposure to the period under my size-42 belt.

I cannot say I was disappointed. The curators had done their work in bringing hundreds of artworks across the sea from France, labelling and hanging the pictures. And $20 is a small sum to pay for good editing. The crowds were a bit of a bore but nothing out of the usual for a major exhibition in any big city. No. What disappointed me was how small-scale and precious the works seemed, now, three generations on from the time when they had been created in Europe and, finally, in America. Everything seemed so precious, calculated and contrived. The shock of the new was accompanied by an unbreakable attachment to concepts of beauty that belonged to the past, and this collection of techniques served to drain the images of much of their impact. It's easier to change subject matter than to change your way of creating an image, I decided. And so when I saw the Jackson Pollock painting that accompanies this post, painted after many of the surrealists had taken themselves away from a turbulent Europe, in 1940, to the refuge that New York had become, I realised that the strength of the surrealist movement did not last long in the new world and that another, even more modern, movement was about to eclipse it and relegate it to the dry status of a historical moment.

Making these connections only after leaving the exhibition, I made my rounds looking at the careful colouring and painstaking brushwork of pieces from the 1920s and 1930s. Of course there were more-talented artists such as Miro and Ernst, but even here the attention to detail pales, now, in the light of the abstract wave that would come in America during the 1940s and 1950s, into insignficance. It's easy to make such comparisons after the fact (even abstraction can seem quaint, now), even while doing it in what was then a rural backwater with nothing even remotely approaching surrealism in terms of daring. It's easy to write off the gains made by these curious men and women in the light of what was to come afterward. But nevertheless it's useful to try to see the whole picture, as it were.

It was the right decision, my idea to drive down to the capital to take in a bit of kulcha. I got back in the car with a salmon sandwich and a chicken foccaccia for the ride home, turned onto the Go Between Bridge, and negotiated the Gympie Road as big drops of rain splashed onto the windscreen. They disappeared by the time I hit the Bruce Highway but I had the catalogue next to me on the passenger seat to peruse at greater length at some point in the future. If I start drawing again will I include nude torsos, eyeballs, or a melting clock in my frames?

The party's over and I'm ditching the Oz

I've posted in reaction to stories in The Australian on many occasions and in that sense they are driving the agenda and I'm frankly quite sick of the whole enterprise. Truth be told I know what angle they're going to privilege on any given issue so the reading is wasted, a confirmation rather than a learning experience, a new opportunity to get hot under the collar merely, and really no way to spend your time. So I've decided to say "Talk to the hand, Australian," and so saying will direct my eyeballs elsewhere on the internet instead. They're going to put their material behind a paywall in November anyway (why is noone talking about this?) and other news vehicles will no doubt follow. Most importantly, Fairfax broadsheet websites will also move in this direction in order to stop the financial leakage. The time has come to take sides.

In a way I'm preempting the inevitable because once behind a paywall the newspaper will be less important on the national stage than it is now. When the Times, in the UK, went paid someone said it had become a high-end newsletter. Making money out of his websites will force Rupert Murdoch to give up some of the influence he so assiduously cultivates by the running of campaigning newspapers. OK, I'm ahead of the pack then. Nothing to regret. Reacting angrily to another's dishonest contrivances is, indeed, no way to spend your time.

I gave up reading Murdoch's Punch op-ed blog a long time ago because of a heated exchange I had with one of its editors. My new resolution merely extends this disenfranchisement. I am no longer going to suffer the abuses of journalism that are committed daily by editors at the Australian in their quest for ownership of the national narrative. The more people who do this, the less influential the paper becomes. If you want to follow me, leave a comment and then just remove the bookmark from your browser. Let's spend our time making a better narrative, and not reacting to every editorial sin like a bunch of sharp-eyed wowsers at a metropolitan race meeting. Let the horses run and let the grog flow. I'll be keeping my money in my pocket, and my attention focused on more reputable media outlets.

Comedy of manners actually goes easy on Gillard

At Home With Julia has its supporters and its detractors. The ABC comedy has copped flak from those who say such a program would never have been made about a male prime minister and these people tend to fly off the handle pretty sharply when they criticise the show. Supporters guffaw, snicker and chortle happily. What noone has said in my proximity is that the show - especially in episodes one and two - goes really easy on the prime minister, who turns out to be a bit clueless, a career politician, and well-liked by everyone. And so I chose this image to accompany my post. It shows Gillard making a triumphant entrace to her scheduled appearance as Tim Mathieson's mannequin at a school hall in front of a crowd of Muslim voters. The triumph stems from the fact that she has negotiated suburban Canberra effectively even, at one stage, taking advantage of an offer of clothing from a dead-set bogan chick who felt sorry seeing her running around the burbs dressed in a pink dressing gown. Due to funding cuts Gillard had got locked in the bathroom at the Lodge and had escaped by climbing out the window.

In those first two episodes it's Mathieson who is the stand-up guy as Gillard blithely puts her career first whenever a conflict appears between spending time with her boyfriend and looking after government business. The highlight of this charade comes when the three Independents come to dinner at the Lodge and start making unreasonable demands of the cook. Mathieson eventually cracks and tells off the three men. Gillard just keeps going, making sure her guests are happy - at Matthieson's expense. They are happy with her - as is everyone else, even the girl who gives Gillard a set of clothes from her own closet.

Episode three offers a bit of a change and features Gillard and Mathieson doing the nasty on the rug in the office at Parliament House. Instead of using a sheet they cover themselves with the flag from behind Gillard's desk. As if this scene were a bit much for the average punter to take, in this episode Gillard ends up alone cleaning dog piss off her leg after Mathieson leaves. "I'll call you," are his last words before exiting. But the reason for his disappointment is poor mobile phone reception - Mathieson thought Gillard said 'Yes' to a proposal of marriage and Gillard thought Mathieson said 'Yes' to an offer of a cushy government sinecure.

I think the reason the program got made is not due to disrespect for a woman in a position of high office. Rather, it's a reflection of the surprise felt by Australians that they had done something so audacious. Electing a single woman to lead the country turned out to be headline news in the US and the UK. The show is not an attempt to pull Gillard down a peg or two. Instead it is a piece of self-criticism aimed at the electorate itself, an attempt to play down the importance of the fact with a bit of familiar laughter. More like the admiring nudges given to a stand-out performer at a school prize-giving than an attack on Gillard's self respect.

As for the Liberals getting hot about sex in the prime ministerial chambers, they will do anything to have a crack at the ABC. It's run by socialists, after all.

Oz rebuttals to Manne uniformly antagonistic

The response to Robert Manne's Quarterly Essay, 'Bad News', which I wrote about on this blog a few days ago, was predictable. The Australian summoned forth not one or two leading lights to rebut the thesis put forward by Manne - that The Australian is a campaigning newspaper that ruthlessly pursues a set of specific agendas - but eight of them and they all read from the same script: Manne is ideologically motivated and misleading in his claims. What better proof - if any further proof was needed - of the paper's editorial bias than this uniform response to a highly convincing essay by one of Australia's foremost intellectuals and polemicists.

To be frank I didn't read much of what was published today. There's simply no point. It's a predictable litany of offenses that shamelessly tries to underscore all the things Manne missed reporting that The Australian has written over the years. The evidence is often old - some sources date from the late 90s - but it is simply a cherry-picked assortment of get-out-of-jail-free cards that some prescient editor made sure were included at the time. Anyone who regularly reads The Australian knows that it is just the PR arm of the Liberal Party and that Manne actually has understated the case because he restricted himself - usefully, it turns out - to a small set of issues. If he had cast his net wider there would have been much more damning material for the paper to deny, now, as though Manne were somehow a unique and deluded maniac with an axe to grind.

He's not. There are thousands of intelligent people who read Manne's essay with a sense of peace because all it did was say - and back up with copious evidence - what they had been thinking for a long time but never had the time or energy to prove. Manne did Australia a great service by subjecting himself to such an onerous labour. Who else would put aside the months needed to scrutinise reams of tedious and one-sided material in order to prove a point? Mann alone. And what do we get in response? Eight quick throw-offs from a bunch of interested parties who represent a media owner who most definitely has an axe to grind and takes every opportunity to do so.

You wonder how these phone calls went. Just how did Chris Mitchell get all of his trusty warriors on side? What did he say to them in order to make sure that the response to Manne's essay was as complete and unanimous as concievably possible? No emails, for starters. Rrrrrrinnnnnnnnnnngg! "Hey, Joe, it's Chris here. Just wondering if you'd had time to read Robert Manne's essay. You did? Great. I'm sure you have a lot to say, Joe. I'll be using my past experience with Rob to attack him but you might want to look at genocide. You have? That's great. OK, mate, talk later." Click. Joe turns to his computer, rubs some almond oil into his palms, checks his Facebook one last time before beginning, then sets to: "Manne is just a stupid ass and nobody likes him, not even leftie intellectuals because his prose style is boring ..." Joe highlights and deletes his first attempt ruefully. No, something more is required, he thinks. The file is named 'Manne rebuttal first draft' and by the time Joe has completed his afternoon's work there are 2000 shining, sharp-edged words sitting on his hard drive. He leaves the office, goes to his pilates class, picks up some cheesecake from the patisserie on the corner, and when he reaches his kitchen he cracks open a cold one. He silently toasts his stubbie into the empty air, thinking, "This is for you, Chris."

Meanwhile, in a cafe in Newtown, two 25-year-old locals - one a legal clerk and the other a graphic designer - are talking about - what else? - Manne's devastating essay about The Australian. "They're going to be shitting themseslves in Surry Hills," says Graeme as he takes a spoonful of sticky-date pudding and pops it ironically into his mouth. "Yeah. Fuck that shit," says Imogen as she replaces her cup for emphasis on its saucer. "I'm sick of reading that crap. It just makes me want to vomit." "Mate, you should send a copy to Aaron in New York. He'd really dig that stuff. You know he got a piece published in the New Yorker?" "I heard," says Imogen. "He emailed me the link. Great job there." "Yeah," Graeme replies.

Imagine how these two young people will react when they see the eight responses piling up on the page The Australian dedicated to the essay.

Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng! "Hello?" "Mog, it's Graeme. Just calling to ask if you'd seen the Oz's reaction to Manne's essay on their website." "Yeah, sure," says Imogen. "I read a bit of the one by the guy who writes about Aborigines but I couldn't be bothered with that self-righteous crap." "No worries, Mogs. Hey, you right for Tuesday?" "The Fringe gig? Absolutely." "See ya." "See ya."

Back on King Street, Graeme exits the pie shop holding his breakfast in a plastic singlet bag. He navigates around the pair of police talking to the beggar in front of the IGA and enters the cavern that leads to the ticket counter of the Dendy. He picks up a few promotional leaflets, turns round, and walks home. It's not far to Alice Street but by the time he gets there, the pies are almost cold. Good thing he bought a microwave.

Top chefs issue future-facing manifesto

A group of chefs who jointly serve on the international board of the Basque Culinary Centre have adopted a vocal position with regards to the way they will carry out their profession in an 'Open letter to the chefs of tomorrow'. Meeting in Lima, Peru, the nine chefs issued the statement in the "hope that these reflections will serve as a reference and inspiration for the young people who will become tomorrow’s chefs". The Guardian reported on what it called the "starry-eyed manifesto" which it said was "a plan to save the planet, one dinner at a time". It's an attempt to lead from the front, and a welcome one at that. There could be plenty of followers, and not just those who call themselves chefs.

Cooking has never been so popular in the West. Lift-outs in magazaines and newspapers mix it in the public sphere with special cooking sections offering readers new recipes on a daily or weekly basis. High-end foodstuffs are more and more commonly found in even the most pedestrian supermarket as shoppers look for the ingredients they are told on TV and elsewhere are necessary to produce the dazzling and scrumptious concoctions they regularly behold. Stuff that is commonplace now in the fruit or cheese section was available only through specialty outlets only a few years ago. If we are what we eat, then we are to an increasing degree a sophisticated and discerning bunch. The Lima Declaration makes that sophistication a bit more understandable for everyone.

What could be more sophisticated than acknowledging "a responsibility to know and protect nature, to use our cooking and our voices as a tool for recovering heirloom and endangered varieties and species"? This type of language could help to further transform the way we think about where our food comes from. Ethical purchasing is a disputed area, with retailers and food producers gradually giving ground in the battles being fought over labelling and disclosure. If a group of top chefs manages to get the message out that buying only sustainable food is cool, then we can expect to see more and more transparency in labelling in future because shoppers will ask for it. This part of the 'Open letter' is just one of seven elements but it is also number one in the agenda and, as such, stands as a keystone of the chefs' statement. Ethical sourcing must be a factor in cooking and it will be part of a retailer's job, to an increasing degree, to ensure that shoppers are given the opportunity - through clear and unambiguous labelling - to make ethical choices when they go on their rounds in the store.

Watch for coverage of the Lima Declaration down the line, folks, and make sure that you always try to encourage biodiversity and sustainable production when you shop. Tomorrow's foodies will salute you. They are already high-signing the nine international chefs shown in the picture at the top of this post.

Murdoch's Oz flagship examined in Quarterly Essay

It's funny that Australian polemicist and academic Robert Manne decided to leave the board of The Monthly immediately prior to his Quarterly Essay, Bad News (issue 43, 2011), appearing in bookshops. Or not. I'm not suggesting that he anticipates a lawsuit from News Limited (the essay is a lengthy investigation of News Limited's flagship broadsheet, The Australian) and was asked to leave by the publisher, Melbourne property king Morry Schwartz. It probably doesn't mean anything at all, but the fact that it is of interest makes you realise that The Australian has a signal relationship with controversy. They certainly have a signal relationship with a broad cross section of the public.

It's as though Rupert Murdoch and his editors globally have decided that, these days, the fiction of impartiality that newspapers give lip service to, is no longer necessary. You don't have to worry about consequences because governments everywhere in the West are so weak as a result of two generations of peace that people can be relied upon to ignore expressions of outrage from politicians. Capital rules, buddy. Newspapers like The Australian have deep pockets and, as Manne points out repeatedly in his essay, millions of words at their disposal.

If impartiality is no longer a requirement for the media and you are a conservative gentleman like Rupert Murdoch then what will happen is that your broadsheet will become progressively tabloidised. The Australian is now the broadsheet that anybody can read. Conservatives rely on the population's baser instincts in order to maintain their privileges, so if you're a conservative media guy you slap on your granddad's old helmet, gird your loins and drum up outrage among the plebs during the day. Then at night you retire to your penthouse and open a bottle of $100-a-bottle chardonnay such as any self-respecting Left-wing liberal bureaucrat or academic only dreams about imbibing. Robert Manne doesn't say as much in his essay, but he does say that The Australian has broken ground in a number of ways:

It is an unusually ideological paper, committed to advancing the causes of neoliberalism in economics and neoconservatism in the sphere of foreign policy. Its style and tone are unlike that of any other newspaper in the nation's history. The Australian is ruthless in pursuit of those who oppose its worldview - market fundamentalism, minimal action on climate change, the federal Intervention in indigenous affairs, uncritical support for the American alliance and for Israel, opposition to what it calls political correctness and moral relativism.

Manne then goes on the explain what he means by making such claims, in an essay that began a year ago this month and that has clearly occupied a lot of his time and energy. It is devastatingly well-researched and its conclusions are equally devastating. If you are interested in the spread of influence from the extreme Right (yes, it is more pronounced in the US but it's still visible here, for example in the way the Liberal Party has changed since November 2009 when Tony Abbott took over the party's leadership), or if you are interested in the media in Australia, then you should read this essay. There is no evidence that anyone at The Australian has read it - a search on their website delivers no related links - but it is bound to cause numerous sets of teeth to grind there. Hence my idea that Manne had been asked to leave The Monthly's board to limit any resulting damage if a lawsuit were to result from the publication of his essay.

The Australian's editor, Chris Mitchell, comes out of the wash looking a bit dishevelled. More precisely, he looks a lot like a tanty-throwing rugrat wearing a Hogan's-Heroes helmet. At any sign of resistance to his will the knives come out, it seems, and his myrmidons are unleashed on some unsuspecting public figure. Manne backs up the serious claim encapsulated in the extract I included above and thus links Murdoch's Australian operation to the ones he owns in the UK via the problematic relationship that seems to exist between his media vehicles and politicians in countries he operates in. In the UK there was a feeling of relief from both major parties when Murdoch began to buckle under the pressure of the Hackgate scandal. In Australia the feeling is equally heartfelt.

In short, says Manne, The Australian makes no bones at all about being impartial. It's not. It is a campaigning outfit with multiple axes to grind and it goes about its business with zest. No wonder the pollies of the Left are sharpening their own knives.

For journalists at the newspaper there might be moments of conflict. From my own experience this seems to be true. I was at a book launch at the University of Sydney in October 2007 where the topic was the media and I remember making a comment to the gathering about the lack of press freedom in Japan, where I have lived. Another person in the room said that, at News Limited newspapers, there was also no freedom and that journalists were routinely told what to write. It didn't strike me at the time because back then I was not reading the news many times a day as I have done since becoming a freelance journo two years ago. Now, however, those comments strike me as revealing.

It goes without saying that I will be monitoring the media for appearances of references to Manne's essay. If the essay gives any of the beleaguered pollies on the Left some courage, then it will have done its job. If it takes the heat off Julie Posetti, the Canberra academic Chris Mitchell threatened to sue for accurately relaying what a person said during a public meeting in Sydney earlier this year, then it will have served a purpose. If it encourages the newspaper it was written to understand to behave with more balance and adopt more ethical behaviours, the essay will have done all thinking Australians a service. For unthinking Australians, don't worry: there are scads of stories being produced by Murdoch tabloids every day. You don't have to blow a fuse, Robert Manne is doing all the hard work for you.

Twin Towers a blip on global radar amid economic shift

Over the coming week we're going to see a lot of images like this. It's sort of comforting in a perverse way. It's comforting because not only are such images now plain fare for media consumers, but because they recall a moment of common purpose. Nine-eleven is a historical moment most of us can share. Those excluded - the very young - can refer to their parents' or relatives' memories and the emotions that are connected to them. The memories attached to such images must take into account a striking reality - office workers falling from a high-rise building, passenger planes colliding with buildings, a pall of grey smoke running away across the sharp New York skyline - and also the underlying reality embodied in the hatred that unleashed this quantity of violence against a symbol - for most in the West - not of oppression but of progress and prosperity.

Since nine-eleven al Qaeda has changed although its ultimate goals may not have. The overthrow of America and the establishment of a pan-national Islamic state were concepts hard enough to accept in 2001 for most Westerners, but we learned. The movement tried a few more things but since 2005 there have been few serious incidents. The official response led to a number of new laws and new protocols at airport security points, but these changes are no longer overly irksome for most people. A number of al Qaeda leaders have been eliminated, anti-terror authorities have thwarted a number of new attacks before they could be carried out, and we are left to contemplate those memorable images in relative peace.

The sleeping giant in the new post-nine-eleven world is, of course, China. The bulk of economic growth, says Angus Taylor, an economist with Port Jackson Partners, a Sydney consulting firm, has been since 2003 outside the developed world. The video is on today's The Australian website.

What we've seen in the global economy in the last 10 years has been an extraordinary flip, where if you looked prior to 2003 or so, about two-thirds of economic growth was coming from the developed world and one-third from the developing world. What happened from about 2003 is that turned on its head, so that you're seeing now about two-thirds of economic growth coming from the developing world and one-third from the developed world.

The reason that matters so much for us is that those people in the developing world are poorer and what they want as their economies grow is not so much plasma TVs or cars, but the basic infrastructure and food, fibre. [It's a] transition into the middle class.

The price of food has been named as one of the reasons for social unrest this year in the Middle East that has led to the overthrow of three governments - in Tunisia, Egypt and Lybia - rather than an al Quaeda-led shift away from the notion of the sovereign state to a multinational Islamic regime. Corruption and wealth disparities are matters of as much concern to average residents of such countries as the issue of Israel and the struggles of the Palestinians. The grievances of an organised militant operation are of less moment than the aspirations of a nominal mass of people who want the same things that Westerners have taken for granted for at least two generations.

Chinese people also want these things but the difference here is that China also stands as a destabilising influence on a global scale in a way that no country has done since the Soviet Union collapsed, starting in 1989. Nine-eleven was a blip on the radar within a 14-year hiatus during which China reconfigured itself to emerge as a major player on the global political stage. The rise of the developing world is a fact of far greater import to the West than al Qaeda's theatrical coup amid the high-priced real estate of downtown New York City.

What al Qaeda represents in a wider frame of reference, however, is a matter of identity, of status. The attacks on the Twin Towers were a visible statement that said, 'We're as good as you. Don't underestimate us.' It also pointed to the use of religion in Islamic countries as a means of stabilising personal and community identity within an environment of shifting priorities and values. As these countries have grown economically and, in many ways, begun to emulate the West, something other was needed - on both a personal and a community level - to offset the stresses of change. New commodities, new priorities, new ways of looking at the future - possibly even the idea of "the future" itself - have led to a new way of framing the world. The most obvious tool for use in this quest was, of course, religion.

'We are as good as you. In fact, we're better than you,' has been the tone of this historical moment. More wealth and persistent corruption have meant that people are looking for a way to compete on the global stage with those they are coming to rival. But in Indonesia and China the way people are working out these problems, unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, is not through regime change. There are opportunities here for Westerners to capitalise on these changes. Instead of looking at images of planes flying into buildings, we should be looking at how these countries are expressing their aspirations, and not just reporting the stories that demonstrate that we are, still, in some way better than them.

The Greens take the high road by walking the walk

It's an unmitigated disaster for Labor and a PR coup for the Coalition. The High Court's ruling in favour of refugees who want to be processed for asylum in Australia is quite clear: Malaysia cannot offer adequate protection for asylum seekers sent there, and it does not have adequate provision for access to effective procedures for gauging asylum claims. Australia's international obligations have trumped political expedience and Immigration Minister Bowen is left holding the can. He must be very unhappy right at this point in time, despite assertions that he is seeking legal advice.

Pleasing sectors of the electorate who harbour their racism behind objections to those who make a business out of trafficking people from overseas to Australia via points in Southeast Asia is something the Coalition are very good at. Conservatism almost demands that you take a xenophobic view of the world, and is more closely aligned in its values with the lower strata of society. Progressives aspire to improve the world, conservatives merely claim validity for the status quo on the grounds that it's better for business. It costs less to do things if you are stingy both emotionally and financially. Don't give 'em a farthing, is the mantra from the Right. But for Labor to align its immigration policy so closely with that of the Coalition is a behaviour that should not surprise us. Since the 1980s, Labor has been drifting Rightwards with alarming consistency. Hence the rise of the Greens.

The High Court's decision will be seen as a vindication by those who vote on their side of politics. It's a reminder that there are higher goals to which Australia should aspire, having taken on the responsibility - as well as the cachet - of progressive decisions designed to protect the weakest and most vulnerable, wherever they reside. The Greens have been saying for a long time that Malaysia is not a "fit and proper" country under the terms of our obligations, just as they aim to prove through an enquiry into the media that News Limited is not a "fit and proper" guardian of our democratic interests in the form of control of a substantial segment of Australia's media. There are real principles involved here, not just economic reasons for doing this or that. The Greens prove, again, that they are the real guardians of Australia's collective conscience, not either of the two major parties.

Michele Bachmann channels angels, and wants to be Prez

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, 'CAN I HEAR THE LORD?' OF COURSE I CAN, WITH THIS SPECIAL ETHERIAL MESSAGE TRANSPONDER ATTACHED TO MY SKULL! ARE YOU BLIND?

Well, at least that's the picture I get from where I live Down Under after reading Ryan Lizza's well-researched piece in a recent issue of The New Yorker (admittedly a pretty liberal Big City, blue state magazine) about Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann. Such notions would probably be denied by Bachmann and her coterie because of worries about alienating Middle America (at least those parts of it which are likely to vote on the Right next year) but it's pretty clear that this born-again Christian does, indeed, believe that the Scriptures ought to be implemented in a literal sense within the jurisdiction of the United States of America. As Lizza points out, a lot of the literature that Bachmann has, at one point in time or another, endorsed lies well outside the bounds of sanity. A Christian Caliphate? You bet.

And we thought that Tony Abbott was a worry here, in Australia. The Opposition Leader is of course a Catholic and has supported policies that work against abortion, in the past, but he's at least not someone who believes that he has a secure phone line to the Almighty.

The Tea Party voters that Bachmann is trying to win over are sympathetic to such rhetoric, of course, but by using such terms as "liberty" Bachmann is trying to win over other parts of the Right in US society.

[T]he Pew Research Center, in its recent quadrennial study of the American electorate, noted that “the most visible shift in the political landscape” since 2005 “is the emergence of a single bloc of across-the-board conservatives. The long-standing divide between economic, pro-business conservatives and social conservatives has blurred.”

Ouch. Bachmann is not the only option, certainly, but on the other side of the ring stands Mitt Romney, a Massachussetts Mormon (if that can be given any sort of credence). So it looks as though the US is set for an entertaining year of pollie-schtick as the Republican Party moves toward actually making Barack Obama a "one term president" (the cry is Bachmann's signature, popping up at almost every public appearance). Lizza suspects that the electorate will cotton onto Bachmann's true wierdness before the election, however. We can only hope.

Hand-wringing over Qantas expansion will be forgotten

Here are two images showing air transport in action. At the top is a Qantas aeroplane, the kangaroo emblem on its tail significative of a solid, safe Australia. As Matt O'Sullivan describes it in his story today in Fairfax papers, Qantas is "linked to the national identity" in a way that many other companies are not. While Qantas no doubt enjoys some market advantage as a result, the link also brings with it the distinct disadvantage that changes to the way Qantas operates are always greeted with a chorus of jeers, as has happened in the past week or so since the airline announced that it would establish a premium carrier in Asia and extend Jetstar's reach in Japan. How will it pull off the move? What about jobs lost in Australia? Asia is already catered to. Will the brand become diluted? Is the sky falling in? Sacrilege!

Unfortunately for those in the public sphere who lambast the current Qantas plan, the second image shows the reality in air travel. It's a crowded marketplace and companies who want to compete and survive must adapt to changing circumstances. Asia's middle class is growing year-on-year. Australia is fortunately situated next door to Asia. So why is the Qantas expansion of its brand to the region seen as a threat to national pride, or something even less appetising - as a threat to a national emblem that represents something essential about Australia? Alan Joyce, the airline CEO, frames the argument in dire terms when he compares the weakening situation now faced by Qantas with other airlines. Ansett went broke, he says, and we don't want to go down that route. While naysayers conjure up a range of emotionally-charged reasons why Qantas should stay "truly Australian", men and women like Joyce will be mindful of the weakened condition of such a premium carrier as Japan Airlines, which has not been able to expand its operational base in a way they now propose and which is in deep trouble.

In Southeast Asia, Qantas' competitors must be wringing their hands in anxious expectation that their prestigious Australian competitor will take customers away. Everybody knows that Qantas has a gold-plated safety record, and the airline's managers will be packaging their marketing messages to profit from that fact. Exporting Qantas operational systems to Asia could be a way of improving airline safety in the region generally, and the challenge for the company's management will be to ensure that nothing gets in the way of the brand's zero-fatality record enduring for another 90 years.

Ultimately, the argy-bargy we're being exsposed to will fade from memory as long as that safety record is unblemished. Australians will be even prouder of the flying kangaroo if they can see it taking customers away from major competitors like Singapore Airways and Cathay Pacific in the markets where these companies now dominate. We anticipate seeing aerial photographs of Qantas planes skimming over the towers of modern Shanghai when, one day, Qantas finally cracks the big one: China's massive market.

Australian farmers face poor returns from gas extraction

Coal seam gas (CSG) has helped produce a mass of words in Australia, as well as handsome profits for well developers. Since these companies started to target agricultural land the debate has become progressively more heated, reaching - it's fair to say - epic proportions in social media, let alone the traditional media. Farmers are outraged, and rightly so. In Australia they hardly benefit from hosting wells on their properties. In the United States it's quite a different proposition, as we can learn from reading the New Yorker's (itself epic) feature story, 'Kuwait on the Prairie'. There, it's oil they're extracting. But the technologies used to get the stuff out of the rock formation in which it sleeps are similar in nature to those used in Australia to extract gas.

The big difference between the situation that has developed in the two countries is that, in North Dakota, farmers are getting seriously rich. One woman interviewed for the story said that leasing development rights to her land netted her "several hundred thousand dollars a year". Another woman said that it was "free money" for farmers. And farmers and speculators in North Dakota are turning their exploration rights into new houses, new cars, and new farm equipment. The returns available for farmers in Australia do not match these.

Why is it that Australian farmers are made to get by on a return of a couple of hundred dollars per well per year? It must be to do with land laws. In Australia, it seems, the farmer owns the surface of the land but not what lies beneath it. In the US, the freehold goes all the way down. That's a sobering reality, and it's almost certain that a lot of the arguments about food security and sovereign risk that are being put forward in the public sphere by farmers' groups would disappear if the financial returns available from leasing access rights to wealthy gas companies were higher.

London riots represent triumph of the market over politics

Within four days rioting had spread from London to Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham and Manchester. The spark was police shooting a young black man in Tottenham, where the disturbance started. But it's not about that death any more. "They just want to be heard," said a young black woman quoted in a Guardian story that assigned blame to society at large. "This is the only way some people have to communicate." Another story, by Laurie Penny and published in the Sydney Morning Herald, repeated the message, saying that people don't know why the riots happen "because they were not watching these communities".

In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything.

''Yes,'' said the young man. ''You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you? Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.''

But what are they communicating? The story by Laurie Penny appeared with an image of something burning in the street, but soon afterward the image changed to a shot showing youths in hoodies carrying boxes of electronic goods through the streets. There are few voices of these youths recorded by the media. There are no political slogans, no overt references to the death of Mark Duggan, which was the spark that lit the conflagration. But on one occasion youths breaking into an O2 mobile phone shop were heard shouting "O2, O2, O2". The kids carry no signs, but they're organised. They do not ask for better access to education, they take goods that have value to them. Their voices are rarely heard, but they communicate constantly on handheld devices.

If they do not respect either their parents or the police it is because that's what they've learned. If they zoom in on respected brand names in their looting it is because that's where their attention is normally focused. As Laurie Penny's story notes, "the politics are there" but these are the politics of the market, not of the public sphere as it is normally recognised by the media, politicians, trade unionists, and other institutional players in society. And it's no wonder that in the society of these youths the market has triumphed over politics, because the market has triumphed over politics everywhere globalisation touches. Which means everywhere on earth.

Loretta Napoleoni in her book Rogue Economics: Capitalism's new reality (2008) talks about the shift in power that has taken place since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989:

During major transitions, illegal businesses, which have at their disposal large service networks, can supplant national economies, while the policies of powerful governments can serve to empower organised crime. Against this scenario, we cannot avoid posing the question: has politics died?

In Britain today the disparity of wealth that exists between unemployed youth and the richest citizens is greater than it has ever been. And the way these riches have been earned has depended on the globalised market, which erodes the power of domestic politics because it operates outside local jurisdictions. You can shift money around, place it in convenient locales, and buy a house in Chelsea with the proceeds. You can make a fortune in Russia and buy a British football team. You can do anything that you want and still enjoy living in a peaceful place like central London. And people do. When he was expelled from politics in Thailand Thaksin Shinawatra retreated to his London house, where he could enjoy the proceeds of his questionable business practices in relative peace. There are hundreds of similar stories that never make it into the newspapers in Australia. But the kids on the streets in Tottenham know about these men and women because they see them every time they take the Tube into the city.

They read about them in the newspapers. But now they're reading about themselves. It's their time in the public gaze, the time of the children who are the product of decades of neo-liberal reform: privatisation, cuts to social welfare, the rise of a super-rich class of citizen. Under Labour and Conservative governments alike the result has been the same. The market has triumphed at the expense of all other institutions. That is what these kids are telling us: "This is what you told us to do. See? We are as good as you."

China's rebukes to US hide the historical truth

China's second rebuke to the US in almost as many days provides a stinging challenge to America's national pride and it won't be forgotten. What has been forgotten by politicians in the US capitol and in Beijing is that it was a Democrat president, Bill Clinton, who serially favoured granting Most Favored Nation status to China. That took place back in 2000, which led to China's acceptance in the WTO a year later. Access to foreign markets then led to a shift in global trading patterns. At the time Clinton was pushing for China's acceptance by the world it was said jobs would be created in the US. What happened instead was the hollowing-out of the US industrial heartland. Both jobs and manufacturing capacity migrated to China. The resulting surge in employment in China has led to its massive current-account surplus. Clinton's decision to engage more fully with China - putting off improvements in human rights in the Middle Kingdom - gave China the strength to buy US treasury bonds. This, in turn, has led to China's rebukes.

But China has always used history liberally. Historical truth is not important, says Loretta Napoleoni in Rogue Economics: Capitalism's New Reality (2008), for Chinese leaders are mainly intent on restoring the greatness of historical China, not forming a consistent image for the use of a politically-aware contemporary electorate.

By undermining regionalism and recycling history, the Cultural Revolution ensured the uniform development of society across all of the nation's spaces. But to do this, individualism could not impinge on the collective and homogenized Chinese identity that focused, above all, on the common cause. Maoism became the common ground of the new society.

...

History has become nothing more than a cultural resource, shaped according to the needs of a particular group, and is the social glue of a postmodern tribalism that is defined by the territory of the tribe.

...

In the context of China's controversial love affair with globalization, tribalism keeps the influence of foreign cultures at bay.

Napoleoni calls China a "market-state" where "politics is nothing more than an accessory to business and economic opportunism". So China's rebukes to the US must be seen in this rather sinister light. But the audience is not only an external one. The rebukes also constitute a form of internal PR, designed to diminish the stature of the US in the eyes of China's youth, who are becoming increasingly Westernised.

In reality, Clinton did the Chinese leadership a massive favour by granting businesses from the mainland access to global markets. But things have changed and it's inconvenient to acknowledge this truth. Instead, China's leadership just rewrites the record and posits as an autonomous economic virtue the prosperity China's people have been allowed to access by the US leadership pre-2001. China's leadership wants nothing more than to acquire additional power in both an economic and moral sense. In order to do that, truth must be sacrificed to the greater common good. No only truth, but rightful gratitude as well.

Last time I was down in Sydney I dropped by Gleebooks for a recreative fossick and asked the guy behind the back-store counter for a book about the Tea Party movement which has taken the US by storm over the past two years. A book, Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America by New York Times journalist Kate Zernike, was chosen in preference to one by an actual Tea Partier since I wanted something non-partisan and well-informed. I got it. Australian public-sphere watchers may think they know about the Tea Party but historical divergences mean that you really need a primer like Zelnike's book to glom onto the way the Tea Party emerged, and how it has developed as a grassroots activism project in the US.

The Tea Party stems from post-GFC disgust with bail-outs. George W Bush was the first president to start coughing up cash to prevent financial institutions from falling over, and his lead has been followed by Barack Obama since. Tea Partiers resent their money being used in this way. Initially it was the undeserving poor - who had borrowed money from rapacious financial institutions at initially-low rates to buy houses they could otherwise not afford - that attracted the ire of those parts of middle America that would probably not have been caught in default when the 2-year interest-free periods on such "toxic" loans ended. These parts of middle America resemble those parts of Australian society who backed Pauline Hanson. Mixed up in the Tea Party mindset is anxiety about indigent citizens and a deep distrust of elites - those parts of society that hold higher degrees in, say, business management and who fill key positions in government.

The Tea Party really took off once they got help, in this case from FreedomWorks, a conservative non-profit think tank that is backed by the wealthy Koch brothers. FreedomWorks showed Tea Partiers how to launch campaigns, build support bases, and get involved in the public sphere. They were aided in their rabble-rousing (if you like) by Fox News. The Tea Party is mainly white, middle class, male and religious. But its ability to latch onto existing narratives within the American story meant that it took off where other aggrieved sections of society had failed. There were things in the American story just waiting to be actualised, and to motivate people sufficiently that they have been able to challenge the status quo and change the direction of the country.

In Australia we don't have the same referents available for similar purposes but I propose launching a movement to counter the deadening effects of certain parts of this country's leadership. I call for the establishment of a Manifesto of the Elites and I have chosen as an emblem one of William Blake's illustrations for Mitlon's Paradise Lost: Satan rousing the rebellious angels.

After reading Kernike's book for a few hours last night I got on Twitter and started to look around, tweet, and attempt to engage with the Tea Party grassroots. I had no luck. The #TCOT tweetstream is filled with Tea Party chat but the people there were impervious to my appeals for reason. I understand how they want agency, community and companionship, and I tried to show my awareness, but it was impossible even to raise a peep from these committed tweeps. So I went to Facebook and posted a draft manifesto. It reads:

Power to the Blooming Wattle! The elites and progressives of Australia demand recognition. We celebrate ambiguity and foster education as a means of channelling it to good purposes. We shun mere material wealth and anticipate a brighter future for all humankind. We know ourselves and are happy with our possibilities. We seek out new options, undertake difficult challenges, and encourage entrepreneurship in a material and in an intellectual sense. #PWRTBW

I chose the hashtag #PWRTBW because it means "progressives who refuse to be wedged" and it represents a wish that progressives could mobilise in the same way the Tea Party has mobilised, and change the direction the country is taking. There were no comments on my post, or even 'likes'. There was only silence. And perhaps this says something about progressives: they are as hard to mobilise on an acknowledged platform as cats are to herd. My movement remains stillborn. It is possibly doomed to oblivion. Like Satan in Milton's extraordinary epic poem. Like Blake for most of his life. But perhaps there's a lesson to learn in the way Blake was eventually picked up by the youth of the emerging Victorian era: young, religious and earnest, they idolised the old man in his dotage.

If I'm right there will be more written about the case of Mazoltuv Borukhova, the woman sentenced in 2009 for paying for the murder of Daniel Malakov, her husband. If only because of the "disquiet" The Guardian's Rachel Cooke estimates as one of the rewards available to the careful reader of Janet Malcolm's latest essay Iphigenia in Forest Hills. Like Malcolm's other books - or at least the two others I've read - the book has an evanescent quality like a watercolour painting. But the heavy message contained in her famous The Journalist and the Murderer is absent here. Partly, it's due to the stark fact that the author had no access to any of the principal players. Malcolm observes in the courtroom, chats with the lawyers, approaches members of the family (and eventually gains access to the homes of members of the dead father's family), and fraternises with the other reporters in the courtroom. But she only ever passes by Michelle, the daughter who could likely be deprived forever of the care and company of her incarcerated mother - and whose father had already been buried.

This lack of access is not unusual in books of the genre. Australia's own Helen Garner has written books comprised entirely of renditions of interactions with secondary players when the principals were accused of crimes and had to face court - journalists are generally relegated to a low place on the chain when it comes to giving access to suspects. 

And in Malcolm's case, too, the author enters the drama as an actor. This is entirely suitable where personal, subjective assessments are critical to an appreciation of the hidden reality behind the words spoken by prosecution, judge and defence. Cooke says that Borukhova hired Mikhail Mallayev to shoot Daniel like it's a fact but Malcolm's detailed and dense recount of the facts of the case dare us to claim that we are certain of the truth of the matter. Dense. It's a book with the specific gravity of the heaviest elements on the literary periodic table, replete with names, events, legal facts, claims and counterclaims. It's a tangled skein of flowing aspersions that get thicker and more unpalatable as the book draws to a close and we find ourselves in the homes of people on Daniel's side of the family.

Michelle, as Cooke says, is Iphigenia; a character out of one of the oldest books available to us, Iphigenia was murdered and then her death was avenged by the mother on the father who killed her. In Malcolm's book the taint of child abuse hovers sickeningly over the spaces inhabited by the narrative like some ghoul in a film about sorcerors and magic wands, always prompt to fly away whenever someone is asked an unpleasant question. The hatred shared by Daniel's relatives is dismally abhorrent and gives the reader no comfort when it is laid in the balance with Michelle's true best interests: it's clear the girl still loves her mother. Whether Daniel molested her is one of those facts that is liable to reemerege in the appeals court and run shrieking around the courtroom laying curses on all the houses the guilty inhabit.

I read this book in a little over one sitting and reckon that it does an incredibly efficient job in a very small space. But then all Malcolm's books are diminutive, unlike her talent.

Everyone of my generation knows the TV character Kojak played by Telly Savalas in a police drama that screened regularly during the 70s but they may not know where the character originated and why. This book will help to understand where Kojak came from. For people growing up in sleepy Australia throughout their teens during the era of civil rights protests T.J. English's The Savage City (2011) provides the backstory to Kojak and other things besides. So, OK, you've seen Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown, you used to love James Brown, and you know that New York socialites like Norman Mailer once had a thing about Black Panthers. But you never really understood about Malcolm X or the Nation of Islam and why these people did what they did. In fact you probably don't even know what they did. This book is the answer. It will help you to understand much about the civil rights era and the cultural spinoffs that you grew up with and could immediately relate to though you never read the news stories in the papers that reflected the events that spawned them.

The book focuses on the lives of three individuals whose lives represent something essential about the era of US civil rights protest. There's George Whitmore, a young black man from New Jersey who is charged with three crimes that he didn't commit, including the murder of two young, well-off New York women. This was a crime that was dubbed the "Career Girls Murders" and is the case that led to the emergence of Kojak from Hollywood after a screenwriter adapted the book on the subject by a journalist into a screenplay. Abby Mann's The Marcus-Nelson Murders included a character named Kojack who was a good cop and was a "composite character, based on a number of detectives, lawyers, and reporters who were involved in the Wylie-Hoffert murder case", according to Wikipedia. In fact there was no "good cop" in Whitmore's case and for almost a decade he fought against conviction for this murder and for two other crimes. Whitmore's struggles were part of the reason that the Black Panther Party began (although it started in San Francisco, not New York, where Whitmore's travails played out), in a reaction against corrupt police practices. It was also during this period that the well-known Miranda warning emerged in the US. The common practice of police to set up individuals for crimes by manipulating their testimony resulted in an official response: individuals must be informed about their constitutional rights before they are interrogated. It also resulted in the formation of the Black Panthers and a virtual war between black man and white police on the streets of US cities for half a decade.

Dhoruba Bin Wahad is the second person whose life is chronicled in the book. A member of the Black Panthers, Dhoruba was born Richard Moore but became a key lieutenant in the BPP. The third person who features in the book is Bill Phillips, a currupt cop who was turned and used by the Knapp Commission set up to investigate corrupt practices in the New York Police Department. All three of these men are alive in the US. All three of them served time in jail. One was completely innocent of the crimes originally laid upon him. One was deeply corrupt but representative of the entire police force. The third, Dhoruba, was a product of a society still struggling to deal with the legacy of slavery. English, the journalist who wrote the book, has undertaken a massive exercise in witnessing, for the modern generation, the forces that shaped the lives of these individuals. It's an pretty extraordinary book and a great find for those, like me, who value good non-fiction. For this reason the book comes highly recommended from me.