Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Piers Akerman, NSW Labor, Malcolm Colless and Malcolm in the Middle, and fresh hope for a Hanson doppelganger led recovery

At last the fat owl of the remove, aka Piers Akerman, has found a safe target for his bile. NSW state Labor. 


If anything, the fat owl goes a tad soft in his rant.

Not once does he mention Michael Costa, former state treasurer, current political feather duster and now a News Ltd neo-hack neo-columnist, though the fat owl goes as far back as Bob Carr to tar and feather the hapless Labor rats. Has neo-Costa now gravitated to the inner sanctum of neo-chooks, and his neo-past been erased from the neo-record?

It's a great pity that Barry O'Farrell has been off promoting a kind of California style citizen's recall routine (it worked so well getting rid of Gray Davis in California, didn't it), when all he has to do is kneecap the Opus Dei element in his party (a tough ask, they keep rising like scapula laden vampires) and promise the good folk of NSW four years of solid, decent managerial state politics - tidy, business-like, secular, you go about your business and the government will get on with managing well what  it can with the resources it has. We'd all faint with relief.

More amusing was Malcolm Colless's line in his column ALP lacks IR Mandate. He's way more gung ho than our prattling Polonius Gerard Henderson on the subject of the Fair Work bill as it meanders through the federal parliament.

The electorate, whipped into a frenzy by the combined efforts of the union movement and the then Labor Opposition, was clearly confused, concerned and even angry about Work Choices. But was the electorate's rejection of Work Choices at the ballot box an automatic endorsement of Labor's industrial relations reform now before the Senate?

Of course not you dummies. The electorate was simply confused. So it seems was poor Malcolm Turnbull, who muttered something about a mandate and promised some kind of safe passage. What a mug. And what's Colless propose as a solution?

Instead of pussyfooting around, Turnbull should challenge Labor to test its mandate claim by putting the unexpurgated version of its industrial relations policy back to the voters at the federal election due next year, and take its industrial relations legislation off the table in the meantime.

Sure, and pigs might fly. Poor Malcolm in the middle, and likely to stay there, lost and bemused, if he follows Colless down the path of hysterical industrial confrontation as the economy collapses around our ears. Peter Costello's foot soldiers keep on doing the great man's foot work, but will he ever strut out and do it himself, rather than sniping from the policy sidelines?

And is there enough fish and chips in the world to justify all this endless over-production of wrapping paper for a decent meal or two?

But enough of that. The really big, truly exciting story today continues to be Pauline Hanson's tits. It now seems that Pauline Hanson might well have a doppelganger - a very literary conceit involving a double or look-alike person, beloved of Shelley, Donne, Lincoln, Goethe, Poe, Jung and dozens of other famous neurotics.

It's been a TV war of tears and smears, according to the slobbering, salivating Daily Terror, and Jack Johnson, the proud owner and revealer of the Hanson nudie photos, sounds a little worried that he might have wandered into an existentialist alternative universe:

"I believe it is (Pauline Hanson). If it's not I am dead set sorry. But I still believe, me, myself, it is. But I just can't prove it," he said on Seven's Today Tonight. "I don't think there's any chance it's someone else. I think it's Pauline Hanson."

Well that's a relief. Now we wait with bated breath to see if someone can turn up the notorious doppelganger as a way to settle the dispute. My partner reckons there's a fortune to be made if someone can turn up any original period nudie photos which someone could have used as a source onto which to graft Hanson's head. If you go digital to analogue and then back to digital, you can hide your tracks in ways surpassing even the best fraudulent photo manip photoshop artists can manage by staying in the digital realm - and these days they're usually pretty good.

But then my partner claims to be a connoisseur of cheap assed professional period pornography, and reckons the snaps fit that profile to a T, especially as they feature strangely different decor, poses and attires for a couple of hasty amateur snaps taken in a motel room. You can see why I consider my partner a wanker, but who can argue with a lifetime dedicated to Russ Meyer and Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill! (not to mention Supervixens).

And come to think of it, maybe not as much of a wanker as the pious hypocrites at News Ltd, who give a whole new meaning to Grub Street.

Readers of Edgar Allen Poe's William Wilson (available in digital form at Project Gutenberg for free) will know that doppelgangers produce unspeakable misery, unpardonable crime, moral turpitude, a wilderness of error, wildest caprices, ungovernable passions, evil propensities, profligacy and soulless dissipation.

Up to now I've always thought of Hanson as just a dipstick symbol of the loonacy of the far right, but here's hoping now that News Ltd. experiences some of William Wilson's torment. Who knows? What say of it? What say of Conscience grim, That spectre in my path?

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