Duffy, Patents, Copyight, Private Property, Public Domain, Public Enemy and the joys of Piracy

Every so often, Michael Duffy delivers a stand which befuddles and bemuses, and that's why the esteemed columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald and part time token right wing broadcaster for that nest of basket weavers at Radio National is such a shimmering, silken, gossamer web of inconsistencies and incoherence.

It' what makes Duffy the proud Duffster, fierce Quixotic tilter at windmills, and you never know who or what is going to experience his fierce vorpal blade as it goes snicker snack. Last week it was wretched scientists, who had embarked on a vast global conspiracy to conceal the truth about global warming because of their lust for gold and coin and research grants - you know, seeing as how being a scientist is the fast lane to untold wealth and riches, and getting a PhD in physics on $20,000 a year allows for all kinds of mental and physical depravity (in much the same way that blacks living on the dole for a couple of hundred bucks a week are luxuriating in the wealth they rip from the Malcolm Turnbulls of this world by way of taxes).

This week the Duffster has decided that scientists and governments and real estate agents and drug companies and Radio National are all being hard done by - for in his wondrous way, in "Economic and cultural gridlock is creating disastrous detours", the Duffster denounces patents, copyright and private ownership of property.

Yep, one week it's crocodile tears for the good folk of Ku-ring-gai as they experience the ravages of government planning, and the next it's a full on cheer squad shout out for the necessity of government planning. Has libertarian socialism ever had such a pronounced and schizophrenic supporter?

You might almost think the Duffster's gone Communist, but at the least he's starting to mutter the kind of socialist thoughts you'd expect of Wasilla Alaskan natives.

The Duffster cites a couple of disastrous and tragic examples of the way so much of the knowledge boom in recent decades is "locked up in dispersed private ownership". There's patents, which protect biotech drug companies at the expense of inhibiting other drug companies (such as one which had thought it had found a cure for Alzheimer's but was forced to shelve it because it couldn't obtain rights to dozens of patents). And there's copyright which prevents poor old Radio National from streaming music around the world at a whim and via podcast because of nasty copyright owners (well not really but because they get 1% of the market and have no budget and are just too cheap and socialist, they refuse to pay the going rate).

Shockingly this has caused the demise of hip hop and its sampled ways. So there you go, knock me down with a tail feather, the Duffster is a supporter of Public Enemy and hip hop, which as a result of rights restrictions, he thinks has become arguably less interesting. Could this be the reason the Duffster plays torpid musical treats from the nineteen thirties on his show? 

And then there are the documentary film-makers forced to pay squillions to obtain rights to use footage, music and material in their shows, and worse to pay even more when these rights expire (though if you approach the average documentary film-maker and ask them for the rights to their own films for free they seem to take a somewhat intemperant and volatile stand).

But worst of all it seems is private ownership of property, since a couple of landowners in Parramatta are thwarting the Parramatta council's desire to build a massive retail and residential development, including a new library, art gallery and heritage centre. And we all know that packing them in like rats is perfectly acceptable in the west, if not in the north.

The Duffster is concerned at this kind of medical science and cultural and physical gridlock, inspired as usual by his idea of the week, this time obtained from Michael Heller's book The Gridlock Economy (and reinforced by the death of novelist Michael Crichton from cancer after Crichton railed against gene patents, though the Duffster provides no list of gene patents which have prevented a cure for cancer) .

And as usual the Duffster's hint at a solution involves the use of eminent domain, which has become popular in some American circles of the right wing kind, and provides a mechanism whereby government can forcibly acquire property - and in America, as is the way, this often involves government acting for and on behalf of speculators and developers who can't use standard, market-based mechanisms to practise their thievery.

This means of course that eminent domain can be deployed not just in the case of helping that icon The New York Times build a relatively hideous high rise as its new home, but could also be used to benefit any gaggle of private property owners who might decide they have a grand vision for a city block or two, and don't want to have to face down the current private owners. How best to solve this kind of smackdown? Bring in the government and trample on the people! You can almost feel the New South Wales government salivating at the prospect.

The Duffster has, in his usual way, managed to conflate all kinds of issues regarding private ownership in ways that even Stalin might find difficult to accept, though I guess in the long run you can still see a collectivist mind at work in the Duffster's thinking.

Most of the problems originate in the United States, and most could be solved - but won't - by changes in U.S. law. It just so happens that American cultural exports make up the second biggest strand in the economy, behind defence, and copyright, including the Mickey Mouse extension clause, has been re-designed over the years to service the needs of big U.S. corporations.

The term of patents could be cut to ten years - they were once 14 years, then extended to twenty (design patents currently have a term of fourteen years). The term of copyright for individuals could end at the time of death of private holders, thereby protecting the rights of creators during their lifetime but ending the gravy train for family and friends who go on mining their goldmines for ever after. Corporation ownership of copyright could be limited to twenty years. That'd sharpen up the Disney mob. Forget creative commons, let's degut the Mouse.

Of course it will never happen, and that's why piracy is the new way forward. The marketplace has already spoken about copyright, and in terms of digital content, it's simply that information and ideas want to be free and will find their way around the world by other means than the usual channels. A few companies and organisations have already worked this out - hence You Tube deciding to run long form shows with advertising support, hence other companies video streaming content around the world using advertising as a base. 

There are problems with this - the streaming has proven so popular in some cases, advertising isn't covering costs, while others, still unable to understand that there is now a global economy, try to limit their streaming on a territorial basis so as to conform to studio limitations. But in the same way that a region coded  dvd is now a folly, courtesy of a simple act of ripping, so will these kinds of practices begin to feel like Noah's Ark.

So being a pirate is actually and suddenly a noble and ethical stand against unhealthy copyright practices, and will in due course force proponents of the old copyright model to realise that new revenue models are required. The times are rapidly changing.

Private ownership of property however isn't so easily tackled, especially with any power that allows government to override that ownership for whatever collective good is on offer. Where the Duffy suddenly seems to think that property development and governments and speculators are good and wholesome people, only interested in turfing out owners for the common collective good, I have a sudden desire to reach for my shotgun. 

This land is my land, not your land, and if you want my land, you have to pay for it. And if I don't want to sell it, if I want its unencumbered pleasure and enjoyment, that's my right because I own it. That used to be the creed of ownership, which only Ruskies and Alaskans would deny, and now it seems the Duffster is proposing in a socialist way - or is it Napoleonic - that if a street full of peasants gets in the way of a grand development, then they can be swept away out of sight. Well I guess that's how you end up with the grand spoke-like streets of central Paris, and who gives a toss about a few peasants, except for the peasants.

Oh I know, I know, let's face it, putting all the peasants in grand high rises with exceptional city views has worked very well in both Melbourne and Sydney, allowing for the crime rate and graffiti, and it's also allowed the middle classes to colonise the inner cityscape. 

I guess we should have allowed the government to build that motorway right through our front yard instead of suffering from the delusional notion that (a) any motorway promoted by the government of NSW is an exercise in futility and folly and (b) we'd actually prefer a suburb not bifurcated by a motorway and (c) while there's only five feet of front yard attached to the house, it is in the Sydney way a splendid place to grow dicksonia antarctia ferns and monstera deliciosa.

The fun bit is that next week we can look forward to a rant by the Duffster denouncing the development practices of the NSW government in the northern suburbs of Sydney, or a rant on the way government is infringing on the private rights of companies by suggesting that they should share the wealth around, or a rant, a cri de coeur, on the way hip hop has ruined the noble minds of blacks these last twenty years.

But then if the Duffster were to be consistent or logical, he'd lose his charm, because the quark would have been tamed and become the staid world of the atom. Or some such metaphor. Meanwhile, we can feel his pain, forced week in and week out to play Minnie the Moocher when he could be playing Public Enemy.

Power to the people

Put your hands in the air

Peace sign high

Like you really do care ...

Rather be sitting just a gettin it

Power to the people not the governments

Capitalists, Communists, Terrorists

Swear to God I don't know the difference

Makin' new slaves outta immigrants

Wanna know where all that money went

Another trillion spent by the Government

Here the bomb go. Sent by the President.

Yo man, get down and jiggy with it. The Duffster be the man, be cool with it. And so to this week's scorecard, a relatively tame affair as Duffy takes in a whiff of Radio National socialistic thinking without understanding how smelling that weed week in, week out, while lurking behind the mike is slowly turning him into a ganga man.

Capacity for confusing patents, copyright and private property: 11

Capacity for proposing solutions in relation to ownership issues:2

Willingness to embrace the novelty of eminent domain without thinking of its consequences:11

Love of inherent contradictions in thinking:11

Failure to care about the future of Mickey Mouse and the Disney folk: 8

Failure to mention the elephant in the room, piracy, or to consider its relevance to current private ownership practices: 11

Implied endorsement of the NSW government and Parramatta Council's right to trample on property rights, together with the implied benefits of bringing back Michael Costa to run things, and introduce single carriage trains in a system designed for dual carriages: 11

Well maybe that last score is stretching things - maybe the Duffster will tackle City Rail next week - but it's a high scoring, high five time for hipster Duffster, with points on the board every which way we look. But in the world of the Duffster, a high score is actually a low score, because nothing is but what is not, and words mean what we chose them to mean, and when the Duffster speaks of overturning patents and copyright and private ownership, we might only be weeks away from the peasants personning the barricades. Aux armes, citoyens, formez vos bataillons, and keep on downloading.

Duffy, the new Messiah, the Dirty Digger, Global Warming, and the Scientific Method from the people who built Frankenstein's monster

What a fine week it's been. A black man heading to the White House and the forces of evil routed, though as we know from various films, the Darth Vaders of politics can never be truly defeated.

It's almost too good a week to spend any time with the wretchedly narrow and circumscribed Michael Duffy, but the thought did arise that if ever Duffy was to be taken away from his esteemed column in The Sydney Morning Herald - snatched from us in the prime of his intellectual life - then  there'd be nil effect on that butterfly roaming the Amazon - though on third thoughts maybe the world would be a little bit more cheerful and the outer west of Sydney would be free of his baleful eastern suburbs concerns.

And this blog could turn its attention to other fruit loops and loonies, with the ascendancy of Hussein bringing out standard, grudging responses from local right wing standard bearers. Gerard Henderson is typical. This is a man who said he was rooting for Sarah Palin, thereby abandoning any intellectual pretensions, any claim he stood for anything other than cheap, superficial, sordid, supercilious partisanship (not so the McCain seagulls as they now proceed to crap on her from on high). GH kept whining about how the media was in love with Obama, especially the ABC, and guess what - the American people, or at least a majority thereof, were also in love with Obama.

Even Christopher Hitchens, enthusiastic cheer leader for colonial adventurism in Mesopotamia (a land which exists in the bible and his imagination) knew that support for Sarah Palin involved nuking the fridge, jumping the shark, or gerunding the Gerard  (as in, I love Palining). Sure enough, Henderson, at a time when his dour posturing was receiving scant attention, came out with a baleful piece about Hussein that was a fragile echo of Tom DeLay. By the company they keep so shall ye know them. Little Billy Kristol with a tangy eucalyptus smell.

And then of course in The Australian came the usual ranting from Janet Albrechtsen and Greg Sheridan, as they saw the tedious censorious world of the neo-cons shrink. They can spend the next four years polishing and burnishing the image of George W. in a private temple far away from the rest of us. He'll need plenty of elbow grease and the kind of rose colored glasses (such a nice shade of red) these wretches have been wearing for years.

Time for me to polish up my 'Obama for President' T Shirt and wear it with pride in the dusty western streets of Sydney. (Oops, am I suddenly in trouble as a furtive foreign influence trying to affect US domestic politics by sending money to the Man? Just where did he get all that private cash from, moan the rightwingers, when they suddenly realise that no one loves them, not even their momma. Or wait, maybe it's just good ol' fashioned capitalism. These are quality T shirts, manufactured in Nicaragua and sold abroad with a hefty USA premium, and don't Americans want to export their political ideals, at a fair price of course? It's a win-win for northern and central America - get Sarah Palin to point it out on a map - and a decisive blow against cheap Chinese manufacturers).

You have to love America. If it's not the World Series in baseball, it's World Championship Wrestling or some other self-bestowed crown in which only Romans compete against Romans, as if the new Rome is the world. Go to any small town, and you'll find some hot dog vendor boasting about being world famous or world renowned or the best in the universe. (Well Nathan's really is famous I guess). But this time they've really done it. They've been positively, definitively and categorically unique. The day a Jamaican or an Indian gets to be PM of Britain is the day vindaloo replaces warmed over baked beans at breakfast, and the chance of an indigenous citizen running Australia is so slim I'll have been in grave fifty years or more before it happens. 

As a result, those who had any emotions, danced in the streets and celebrated with joy. It might just be a tentative beginning - the way ahead is hard, thanks to the Republicans, and Obama will face all kinds of turmoil, and he is of course a Chicago politician, but all the more reason to celebrate a black Carcetti getting to the top. Plus any new beginning with a "liberrrul" is way better than the eight years of purgatory America has endured with the gang of three, Bush, Cheney and Rove (the gang was bigger once, but who remembers Rumsfeld or other members of the reactionary clique). Monsters, Paul Krugman called them, but he's always understating things because he's so nice.

I'm looking forward to being in New York for Christmas and being amongst real Americans - the ones the terrorists attacked, not the hixs from the stix who think that being rustic and dumb somehow makes you Palin super plus real.

The chief danger - it being America and every lunatic having the right to bear arms - is that some useless twit in search of his John Lennon moment in the sun, will take a shot at the man, thereby adding Obama to the list which includes a couple of Kennedys, Martin Luther King and Ronald Reagan. But that's where hate speak of the kind favored by shallow right wing ratbags invariably takes society, and there's no reason to expect the hating generated by talk back radio and right wing television will suddenly moderate because someone intelligent has been elevated to the White House. 

They play it hard in America - there was an amusing story in The New Yorker about a couple of men trying to get to the ballot box, with one shot and one killed for their troubles, and the results upheld because the judge determined that an ordinarily brave man could get to the ballot box to cast his vote (so it was in the nineteenth century, so it seems now for all the gilding of the new age lever-laden switcheroo machines in a few wilder parts of the woods. Why they even tried to nobble Tim Robbins, but on the other hand, maybe that's not such a bad idea).

Never mind, the wheel's turned now, and I'm not such a 'liberrul' that I can't do a little hating, and here's hoping the reactionary forces in America and Australia get a good pasting. I'm thinking particularly of Faux Noise, which surely has to make Pravda on a bad day look like exemplary journalism.

That makes it all the more poignant that this was the week that Rupert Murdoch, an American citizen, had the cheek to come amongst Australians, and pretend that he was still one of us, and lecture us on the future - like, we should all sell out our Australian citizenship and move to America to make a motza? That's being Australian, like the fearless Rupe?

I hear you can pick up a house for nothing or next to nothing if you don't mind the crack heads next door. Well on the principle that anything Murdoch touches is tainted, it's a pleasure to suggest you can survive really well in the world by never buying The Australian, and by saving the monthly fees to the cable TV monopoly racket known as Foxtel. 

Better still, I'm told by my partner that if you chose the right hairdresser, you can read The Daily Telegraph once a month, for at least five minutes, and surely you lose a few brain cells, as they store key information about which show biz bimbo is fucking which Alaskan jockette, but it's a Tele guarantee that this will allow you a full minute of vivacious water cooler chit chat. Did you hear about Madonna and Guy Ritchie? What, you didn't, it's all in the Telegraph, saving the world for us and Rupert Murdoch.

By end of week the news got even better, with a heavy downturn in News Ltd revenue, and a nineteen per cent drop in the stock price. Has the recession caught up with Rupe, or is it the Revenge of the Liberals? Either way it's happy days. Now switch off the telly, stop buying The Australian or The Wall Street Journal or The Weekly Standard or The Times, and find some other form of kitty litter. You can do it, yes you can.

Despite being Murdoched by the Sun King for a moment (I switched off as soon as he started to speak, since it's not only rightwing ratbags who reserve the right to be intolerant), it's a testament to Obama  and his oratory that it still feels at the moment like the potential for change is amongst us, and if only for a moment, it feels like a Louis Armstrong song, such a sparkling and wonderful world.

As a corollary, it almost filled me with dread this Saturday to do my duty and to open up the Duffy files, and see where our intrepid, legendary columnist hero - if only he were the donkey to someone's Shrek - has arrived in his meditative musings on the state of the world, in a week when 'liberrruls' finally had their long overdue moment in the sun ...

Last week's effort - where he wrote about the way Christians were bringing peace and enlightenment to the heathen Asians of Fairfield - was stomach churning, and reminded me that Western thinkers needed a good dose of Confucius, not to mention a lashing of Zen Buddhism. This week's effort is even more tragic, for Duffy has decided to go back to doing his Andrew Bolt impersonation on climate change.

Yes, "Truly inconvenient truths about climate change being ignored", shrieks the Duffster's column heading, as he plunges back into the debate on global warming. Last month, it seems, he witnessed something shocking, and since the Duffster is rarely shocked, this kind of shock indicates something truly shocking. It turns out it was another scientist saying that global warming was on the rise, when in fact we all know that global warming was either plateaued, or falling. You know, all those stupid people affronting sceptics like the Duffster with images of the North Pole shrinking or polar bears drowning, when any sceptic like the Duffster and Sarah Palin knows that the only thing causing global warming is scientific hot air.

Why is this so, the Duffster asks, how could this be, that scientists so willingly deceive him? Well it turns out that thanks to Professor Richard Lindzen, he's discovered that the scientists, those devious bastards, are just doing it to make money. It's all due to government funding of science, a real tragedy, because the private sector does such a good job of funding science, like the way they fund research into drugs and establish museums showing dinosaurs walking the earth with people. 

"Much of that funding since World War 11 has occurred because scientists build up public fears (examples include fear of the USSR's superiority in weapons or space travel, of health peoples, of environmental degradation) and offer themselves as the solution to those fears. The administrators work work with the scientists join in with enthusiasm: much of their own funding is attached to the scientific grants."

Yes, at just the right moment in time, the Duffster reverts to a jihad on scientists, and I quote him at length so the absurd tone of paranoia can be fully felt. You see, it wasn't politicians building up public fears - like the demonstrable fear of the USSR's superiority in weapons or space travel. You see, it wasn't politicians (or indirectly everyone engaged in the struggle) who assembled scientists to build weaponry that would become destroyer of worlds. No, it wasn't the Nazis, or the Japanese code of the Samurai,  it was that meddlesome scientist Einstein who insisted that the Bomb be built. If we just got rid of scientists, and left the world to politicians, how peaceful and advanced it would be.

Yes indeedy, it's always been scientists meddling and insisting on doing things. Mad bloody scientists playing on the fears of the public, since they are given a weekly column like the Duffster and Andrew Bolt to rant each and every week on disturbing matters designed to instill fear in the populace because they're after public grants to study fire flies in Paris. You can hear the echo of John McCain and Sarah - let's all root for her - Palin in this mantra. 

What's that, you say - there is actually no column in the Herald on a regular basis dedicated to science, and instead we have the rantings of Duffy, who's qualifications in science are exactly and precisely, zilch, nada and nil? But, but it was scientists who invented Frankenstein's monster, it was scientists who gave us vampires, and garlic, and zombies, and voo doo childs. It was scientists who ruined the fifties with the Bomb and plunged the sixties into a world of LSD and free sex, and nothing's been good ever since (damn you baby boomers, damn you to hell).

What's that, you say - science funding in Australia has fallen, with the government in 2006 cutting funding of the CSIRO (one of the main arms of scientific funding) so that Australia spends around 0.1% of GDP. A pitiful amount. Of course. It's all a clever plot by scientists, who having fallen so far behind in public funding, have to invent imaginary crises to get that funding back. You know, because the earth is running so well, just needs a few repairs and a little oil in the sump, but otherwise it's all fine, don't you worry about a thing, let's just fund the Duffster's think tank on keeping government out of everything.

As a capper, the Duffster evokes a 2005 paper by John Ioannides, and uses it to claim that most published research findings are proved false within five years of their publication. This is is a remarkably crude summary of the point and meaning of the paper in relation to biomedical research - available here with some relevant commentary - and it makes you wonder just why the Duffster strays into this turf. Amusingly, the moment Ioannidis's contention that most published research findings are false was published, there descended a flock of scientists to prove that his published research finding was false.

But that, as Ionnidis himself conceded, is part of the scientific method, and no cause for alarm. Scientists jostle and contend about the truth about the nature of things. Okay, let's agree the scientific method is a fine thing. It's just a pity the Duffster is incapable of practising it.

But he does know how to do an insinuating analogy. Duffy has a brand new,  knockdown, lay down misere explanation for every scientific problem. It's not the scientists, but the journal editors eager for a big splash, who are concerned with selling their publications. Gasp, publication practices might be distorting science.

Ergo cogito sum ipso ferret angus dei, climate science is a load of malarkey, and inconvenient truths proudly promoted by the Duffster are unwisely ignored. To which I say, go Duffster, and publish your scientific findings in a respectable science journal, and let's see where you sit after a half dozen scientists have dissected your feeble brain.

It's all so familiar and so utterly tedious, and it's been going on ever since Al Gore offended the right wing in America, and it's got bugger all to do with science or global warming. It's columnists like Duffy who want to see science politicised - since  it's the Duffster, not the scientists, promoting panic and confusion. You have to wonder why the Herald bothers with this kind of lame duck neo con controversy at a time when America and the world has moved beyond George Bush's end of world rapturism (let us not forget that the people most opposed to science in the United States are the ones who believe the world is about to end, people will flee to Alaska in the end days, and the chosen will be whisked off to heaven).

Duffy's scientific method is to cherry pick one talk and one paper and thereby build a monumental souffle that fails to rise. While Herald readers would do well to drop their subscription, and go to Scientific American or the New Scientist for a little generalist science writing - check them out, they're both online - it almost seems like the Duffster's putting up his hand for a job with Rupe.

But it's equally likely that in this new climate, the dirty digger - whose always managed to blow with the wind - wouldn't be likely to take him. It's strange and sad that the nickname for Rupe - that dirty digger tag - derived very early from his addiction to sleazoid, tabloid afternoon papers (like the long lost News and Daily Mirror), no longer applies - even if the English cable and papers he owns dig for dirt in consummate style and the English adopted and still cherish the nickname with a ferocity reserved for colonials who thrash them at business and cricket. 

Rupe and his minions might still dig the dirt, but Rupe is definitively a dirty ex-digger. Australia's gain, America's loss, the world's loss. But we still have Michael Duffy. Can someone arrange passage for him to work on a right wing blog headquartered in say Waco, Texas or Wasilla, Alaska, where he can live amongst real outer western Americans, and be so much closer to the second hand neo con opinions he recycles here as original thinking. Better still, pass me that gin and tonic so I can drop a few tears into it ...

I can barely muster the enthusiasm for a score this week but I guess it has to be done:

Duffy's scientific method: zero to the power of zero, to infinity and beyond.

Duffy's understanding of global warming: zero to the power of infinity in a galaxy far, far away.

Duffy's contribution to rational public debate: zero to the power of stupidity.

Duffy's willingness to continue neo con rants at a time when no one's sipping the cordial: 11

Duffy's refusal to acknowledge the earth has shifted under his feet: 11

Duffy's fine tribute to Obama's arrival: forget it, group hug time as the Man comes to save the world and maybe even the Thermians. But can Rupe make money and can the Duffy be saved? Stay tuned next week.

Duffy, Conroy, the Intertubes, the Catholics, the Baptists, the Presbyterians, and the Harmony of the West

Have I mentioned lately that Senator the Honourable (I use the term loosely) Stephen Conroy, Senator for Victoria, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, and Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate, is a knave or a fool, or both?

His plan to filter the Internet will see this new and wondrous beast run in Australia as it runs in Iran or China, or even worse. His profoundly stupid plan is naturally opposed by the industry and by any sensible adult with an interest in their right to interact with the world on a level playing field. The ponderous and bureaucratic plan he proposes in effect shows a desire by government to reduce the Internet to the level of an innocent ten year old's view of the world, stripped of piracy and pornography and all evil things that the government of the day might determine is evil (such as my liking to visit Comedy Central to view, gasp, left wing comedy).

His plan is so much worse than anything the Howard government threw up that it makes me profoundly glad I didn't vote for Labor, and now can only slobber at the bit waiting for the chance to express a view about State Labor. The rumor is that Conroy - a minor Rooster with no native intelligence or wit - is beavering away at his plan to please almighty Chairman and Christian Rudd, who apart from being plainly scared by Bill Henson's photography, has expressed even less interest in or understanding of the arts than John Howard - and that takes some doing. For Rudd, the Internet is probably some unruly Sendakian wild thing that must be tamed, and taught to like beer and football like any decent Queenslander.

The further rumor is that the hapless, hopeless Conroy is beavering away in a desire to please Senator Steve Fielding (let's forget the term Honourable), the leader of Family First in the Senate, a lobbyist for hard right Christian fundamentalist values who picked up under 2% of the vote in Victoria and still got into the Senate courtesy of Labor's strategic bungling and perfidy. Now he's an albatross around their necks and around every living soul in Australia because of his balance of power vote.

Hence the Conroy plan - block everything bad on the Internet, slow the devil tubes down, fill it full of Christian goodness - and the jolly Fielding will be more likely to help us out in the Senate. God knows, Conroy might even be dumb enough to believe in what he's doing. What a dumb Rooster. 

Of course the industry has to show a kinder public face, but behind the scenes people are fuming at the folly. Labor is already on the downhill slide towards being a one term government, and this kind of nonsense fuels an interest in the inestimable ego of Malcolm Turnbull, who's shown an interest in selling out everything and anything in his bid for power, but who has never shown much interest in kowtowing to Christian lobbyists and fundamentalists. And who, having been around in the early days and made a killing with OzEmail, is likely to be a little more sane about the way the Internet should function in Australia.

Which brings us to the esteemed (let's forget the term honourable) Michael Duffy, columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald, who somehow by chance has this week jumped the Christian shark, or more likely, nuked the fridge by doing a Spielberg and raping the minds of his readers.

His column is poignantly entitled "A place where religion, harmony and vitality can be found", which is devoted to establishing just how wonderful the outer west is because of the tremendous job that three churches are doing in helping immigrants settle in Sydney. And just to be fair, he covers Catholics, Baptists and Presbyterians, and leaves out the Islamics and other ratbags who might spoil his vision of harmonious bliss.

Let's forget for a moment that Duffy is opposed to immigration of this kind, and that he doesn't believe in public transport which might connect the outer west to the rest of Sydney - his mates in Labor have just dumped the north west metro, as long predicted, and not a word from the Duffster.

No, let's accept the visionary dream, as far reaching and wondrous as Rosseau's romantic vision of nature - but wait, scrub that, in his Social Contract, Rosseau argued that followers of Jesus would not make good citizens, thereby alienating the Calvinists and the Catholics, and copping the usual bucketing from the Papists, who've always been happy to abuse their power in pursuit of mindless conformity. Stupid enlightenment philosopher.

No, in Duffy's dreaming, all is good and Catholic in the outer west of Sydney. Could this be the same church as ruled over by the reactionary Pell, a man so problematic that Melbourne was pleased to see the back of him? You see, there's barely a need to think about actual religion in Duffy's dreaming. It's all about being multi-cultural - 45 different national flags in the one church! - and having international nights and people bringing along their own national food. It's like an old fashioned bowling club, without the bowls - just a crazed and vengeful god lurking in the corner.

It seems the main achievement of the Catholic Church in this far flung outpost was to send more busloads of pilgrims to the World Youth Day (13) than any other Parish, so they could hear the words of Pope Ratzinger, former member of Hitler Youth, anti-aircraft gunner, and deserter (in America and Britain they shoot deserters and traitors to the motherland). 

And if it's not the Catholics being so harmonious, it's the Baptists, who just want play groups and bible studies and programs for drug addicts and victims of sex abuse. Or the Presbyterians who hold services in Mandarin, and can get toilets fixed in big public housing estates with a phone call or two.

Duffy's final heart warming wrap up quotes Nick Lalich, the Mayor of Fairfield, as saying "Mate, there's 12 places of worship within two square kilometres. All these communities live next to each other with absolutely no problems. If you could bottle what we've got here and export it, you'd save so much trouble in the world."

Sure, where drive by shootings are a way of life, and they even managed to assassinate - the first such in Australia history - John Paul Newman, member for the seat of Cabramatta, and former acting mayor for Fairfield (despite appeals, Phuong Ngo, a political rival of Newman's, remains locked up for the killing). You can go for a celebratory, multi-ethnic, peace and harmony swim in the local swimming pool named after Newman.

In our local area, we have the same peace and harmony. In the square at night, peaceful hordes gather to lick up the lentils doled out in thoughtful packets by the Hare Krishnas, while just up the road, a school peacefully indoctrinates its young in the thoughts of L. Ron Hubbard, helpfully aided by Government grants dedicated to furthering the cause of non-government and non-systemic educationists. The kids seem normal and cheerful, though if you do shout out Xenu, they jump a little and their eyes dart about wildly.

You see, however you cut it, they're cults. That people believe in Scientology as a religion is one of the great conundrums of the modern age, though it helps explain how eccentricities like Mormonism got started, and it also helps explain how long enduring cults like the Catholic church, with its gobbledegook transubstantiation stuff, keep attracting an audience (presumably lured on by the cannibalistic notion of having a munch on Christ's body and a sip of his blood). 

The Baptists are no better, long removed from their Anabaptist origins (which had a few good philosophical points, including living apart from the rest of the world). Now they're a disorganised grouping without any central leadership and a tendency towards Pentecostalism.

Well here's a thought - a pox on Duffy, Conroy, Fielding, and all the lickspittle Christians who seek to do down the calm and even life of the sensible atheist. What this country needs is a Christopher Hitchens, a tool when it comes to the Iraq war because of his fear of Mesopotamia, that figment of the colonial mind, but ever willing to wield the scalpel when it comes to the nonsense the Christian churches trot out as they try to stay relevant in an increasingly secular world (well increasingly secular in the sensible non-Duffy bits, like Europe and China). 

I can accept that deluded fools will seek to persuade others to be as deluded as they are. It's in their nature and they think they do it for a good cause, in much the same way as the Inquisition thought it was carving out a better world from the blood of disbelievers. But to have this nonsense aided and abetted by Duffy, with his 'pie in the sky by and by' romanticism, and  his infatuation with the outer West, all doled out and laid bare in the Herald ... it's just too fucking much, it produces a kind of Nietzschean, syphillitic scream of despair at the sky. 

Why the fuck doesn't Duffy just shut up about the place? Why doesn't he just shift out there to live in peace and quiet and leave the rest of us alone? Better still, why doesn't he just shut up if he doesn't have anything sensible to say?

He doesn't live in the west, he doesn't believe in the kind of immigration that has generated the Fairfields and Bonnyriggs of Australia, and in the past he hasn't shown any signs of bible bashing. But I fear for him. It's likely he's a closet Chrisopher Pearson, and as he's aged, and become fearful about the world, he's decided to convert to Christianity so he can be closer in body and soul to his much beloved Sarah Palin. In which case he's triply damned forever, because if he believes all the various religions of the world can live in peace and harmony together, he's a bigger fool than I ever took him for - he's a monstrous fool.

(By the way, the food in Cabramatta is truly excellent, with duck and pork freely available in time honored recipes, and not a hint of religion on view in the throng of people in the street as they go about their lives apparently free of western religiosity).

Next week, having given the Christians a run,  I look forward to the Duffster's column on the way Islamic thought and teaching is bringing harmony to the outer West, with specific reference to the way being a youth worker is likely to see you shot down in the streets of Auburn. Because after all religion is such a good force for good. But I suspect that the Arab presence and the issue of Islam fundamentalism might just be too much of a nuke the fridge moment for even the huckster Duffster ... (maybe he could do Falun Gong instead?)

So to the score this week, and what a depressing total it is on the tape:

Capacity for lick spittle fellow traveling with crazed Christians: 11

Capacity for doing a Conroy from the safety of an eastern suburbs bunker: 11

Actual insights into religion and its ideological activities amongst westerners: 0

Glassy eyed, glazed acceptance of cults while chanting 'angus dei': 11

Capacity for injecting sanctimonious pontificating smarmy tone worthy of a Sunday sermon: 11

Willingness to be the bearer of glad tidings and joy while at the same time reserving the right to be cynical and snide when needful to sound hard edged and tough on immigration: 11

Yep, the stench of hypocrisy and celebration has produced a record score.

So this is what we have to look forward to. A denuded Internet and Duffy ranting about the joys of religion. Well at least I won't have to read Duffy, because surely in the first cull of content, Conroy will ban him. And sure as hell I won't be buying the Herald so long as he keeps writing this kind of guff and I can insult my eyeballs by reading it for free as it comes on down the tubes (and let's have a big shout out for convicted Republican senator Ted Stevens, who first understood that the Internet was a series of tubes, and so helped Senator Conroy understand that you can easily shove a large cork up a series of tubes and the people will be ever so happy and joyous and dancing down in Duffyland).

"From the churches to the jails tonight all is silence in the world

As we take our stand down in Jungleland".

Bring it on Conroy.

Duffy, Chokoes, Filthy jokes, Filthy Thoughts, Failed Public Policy, Failed Metros and a Failed Future for a Growing Sydney

My father hated garlic. Thought it was wog food. The very thought of chillis sent him into a frenzy of fear and loathing. His favourite food was chokoes (a kind of vine growing pumpkin), which is what the poor in Australia ate during the first great depression, as it's a rampant grower and easy to cook. As it lacks any significant taste of its own, throw it into a stew or a curry, heavily laden with garlic, and you can get the benefits of low fat fibre and vitamin C along with some flavor. Not the way my father ate it, boiled and flavourless and stringy and limp.

Funnily enough, my father loved pepper. He'd put it on anything, even if it was usually white pepper, which tended to be bland because it'd been ground and left in the shaker for months on end. He also loved mustard,  and didn't mind it hot. Worcestershire sauce was fine, but olive oil was for wogs.

But that was the style way back then - certain foods were intrinsically good, others intrinsically bad. Wog food was bad because wogs were invading the country, but the Chinese restaurant that sent left overs to the poor white trash family across the road (us) knew what worked for working class men - a healthy mix of sweet and sour, sugar and spice, and lots of white meat, even if everyone wondered about the cats of the neighbourhood making it through the night (ah yes, the good old days of racial stereotyping, still rampant on talk back radio to this day).

Luckily, after I left home, some kind person introduced me to a glass of really rough red and a bowl of spaghetti bolognese, heavily laden with garlic. And a few months later a kindly academic fed me mountains of Indian food, laden with all kinds of spices I didn't know existed. Thank the ever-absent Lord for wogs and other peoples and other lands, who have different ways of knowing, being and cooking than the wretched English, Scottish and Irish who gave Australia its peculiar Anglo-celtic tinge. The heritage we're supposed to love.

Once you get a taste of the dark side, there's no way back, though occasionally it's nice to have a lamp chop or two, with a potato mash - though there's no way I can go back to bicarbonate of soda to keep the green in the heavily boiled peas, or vegetables boiled to a soggy pulp. Instead I go to a Pakistani shop on Enmore Road in Sydney's Inner West for the best chicken tandoor in the country - call in to Faheems Fast Food to see what I mean, but make sure a glass of water is nearby when you tuck in.

Every so often, decades after the jibe became fashionable, you still see a conservative writer admonishing liberals for having a taste for coffee or chardonnay (as if it was the only form of wine that indicated decadence, when the passionfruit taste of a New Zealand sauv blanc is surely the Maquis de Sade of wines).

Only a couple of weeks ago, Gerard Henderson berated liberals in just these terms while celebrating his rooting love for Sarah Palin - though thank God David Brooks of the New York Times has fallen out of love with this creationist cancer on the Republican party. As if Gerard prefers a beer battered fish avec a Barking Duck in a long chilled glass to that poncy French crap designed to turn a man into a Continental.

I never could understand why love of good food and wine and refreshments like coffee became a term of abuse. There's something so abjectly puritan about it, so Mayflower about it, that you have to think right wing columnists don't enjoy eating, drinking and fucking. You could imagine Henderson in Cromwellian black garb roaming the streets, fining women for wearing make-up and men for laughing too loudly, perhaps because his feeble attempts at humor only manage to prompt groans, or perhaps a faint chuckle from Henry James.

One thing's certain - characters like Piers Akkerman and Christopher Pearson didn't get so portly by a diet of chicken nuggets and hamburgers. You have to suspect that along with imbibing right wing tosh, they also indulge in a glass of wine or two or three, and a good beef bourguignon heavily laden in the French style with red wine, garlic and a bouquet garni.

But that's the way it is, one law for the rich, and another for those who seek to ape their betters and are punished for their upward ostentation when it comes to drinking and eating (the Chinese emperors had it right when they left the rice to the peasants and stuck to meat).

Michael Duffy, esteemed columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald, avoids cliches like chardonnay lovers and chattering classes. Probably broadcasting on ABC radio to an audience of chattering chardonnay lovers of a hardcore Radio National kind has introduced a tad of caution into his thinking. But it doesn't stop him from playing The Shadows on air, proving that cardigan wearing retro fashions don't just belong with tree huggers - you can almost smell the leather patches on the Duffster's jackets from a mile away.

But on a meta level you also sense that Duffy takes an abstemious view of life. Take this week's column, dubbed "Why Filthy is filthy, but it could be just a relative concept". It's an attempt at humor by the Duffster, as he wrings what he can from the new NSW Premier's nickname "Filthy", and the man's capacity to shoot from the lip when he does policy on the run.

Duffy has some easy targets - Rees has made boofhead statements about the number of houses available for rent in Sydney, and even had the honesty to admit his predecessors, Bob and Morris, were boofheads who made boofhead policy decisions in relation to Sydney (which is perhaps why Duffy gives him such heavy handed treatment, because the Duffster has never resiled from his description of Morris as a visionary politician a couple of weeks before he was lost to the NSW parliament forever). Ah well, what would have got you good press one week from the right wing loons, the next week gets you an outing with a filthy nickname. 

The profound irony is that this time Rees is copping it for quoting the Real Estate Institute of NSW - a fine private sector body - who for their own reasons sold the pup of only 700 homes being up for rental in Sydney at any one time, and Rees, who clearly majored in rocket science when a degree in reality would have been much more useful, used the press release for his own mouthing off.

The Duffster leads as exhibit two Rees' riff on traffic - if you think you are in traffic, you are in traffic - which suggests the new Premier has imbibed a bit of Tarantino-lite zen. And then the Duffster rounds out the column with snide, furtive references to how Rees worked for the notorious Milton Orkopoulos but didn't know what he was up to with boys and dope. 

It's impossible to work out what Duffy is implying, since he seems to be saying Rees was clean while transparently hoping and thinking that he's not, and using the lack of evidence to indicate that Rees will keep clowning around in front of the cameras while Joe Tripodi and Eric Roozendaal will get on with the real business in the shadows, 'whatever that business might be'.

Well indeed snide innuendo and total lack of substance surely demonstrates where the Duffster's head is at. Firmly up his bum. In the same week, the Planning Department released data suggesting that Sydney is likely to reach a population of 6 million by 2036 - higher than forecasts done as recently as three yeas ago - and requiring a million new homes to be built to house new residents.

Just as we get the politicians we deserve, so we get the columnists we deserve. At the same time as Filthy was saying a few home truths about his predecessors, he set about emulating them - by announcing a brand new, ultra new metro scheme for inner Sydney which would happen to help out the Labor party in basket weaving territory over in Balmain, and would help the big end of town, which persists in driving into the heart of the city in search of extremely expensive parks because (a) they can, and (b) they can afford it, and (c) if you can't, you can get fucked. 

Yep, it's a metro here, and a metro there - this time to be exclusively funded by Federal Labor to help out their state mates - devised on the back of a coaster (as the leader of the opposition said with more wit than the Duffster) and with about the same substance as a pub lemon squash.

Meantime, the north west metro, previously announced as a policy initiative, is about to collapse in the November mini budget - as long predicted - while the other news story for the week is how comprehensively City Rail has fucked the construction of the Epping extension, most notably by building the line with such steep alignments on it that they have no trains which will run quietly on it.

Yes, at a time when NSW Labor is running the city into the ground, and yet the alarm bells are ringing loudly about how Sydney is about to have a population explosion, the Duffster is only up for jokes about Filthy's zen and his obscure relationship with Orkopoulos. There's plenty of column inches available on these disasters, and on the many urgent things that should be done to secure a reasonable future for Sydney's tortured inhabitants. Even if neither the Labor party, or the Liberals slobbering quietly below the low hanging vines waiting for the fruit to drop, have no imagination or capacity for such matters.

Yet the Duffster clearly, quaintly, happily, perkily and pathetically sits in the same policy free zone as the Labor government, bleating about a few green zones in the northern suburbs while a hard rain is about to fall on the city's inhabitants.

Yes, we get the columnists we deserve, but when they play The Shadows, it's time to say no more and switch off. In the same spirit, can The Sydney Morning Herald find someone else to write about the very real problems that Sydney faces, and explore some policy options which might go towards providing some solutions. The state government doesn't have a clue - nor does the Duffster.

I think it's likely that in the next few years we will all be reverting to eating chokoes, if we can find a patch of soil in which to grow them, as Sydney collapses around our ears. Fortunately newspapers when shredded make a good mulch in the garden. Duffy might be of use, and not just to wrap fish and chips. His future is as choko mulch. 

It's unlikely that his printed thoughts would infuse the chokoes with ideas above their station, and even if that were to happen, throw in plenty of garlic to kill off the vampire, and enjoy the chokoes. Just don't expect to catch public transport.

So to this week's scoring:

For fiddling while Rome burns and Sydney grows: 11

For cheap attempted humor about a filthy nickname: 11

For actual useful thoughts about Sydney's future development: 0

For wilful ignoring of substantial news about Sydney in preference to raking old coals about Milton Orkpoulos: 11

For proving that filth in a heading is likely to show filth in the mind of the columnist: 11

For attempting humor while wearing leather elbow patches of the mind: 0

This week it's a pathetic, tragic column, one which demonstrates that the people of Sydney are now lost and without any policy help from any one anywhere at any time. It's all too hard, and doom and gloom are the only likely outcomes. I guess even though I loathed Forrest Gump, the truth is life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get. With Duffy, why does it always have to be liquorice all sorts? Filthy is as filthy does.

Duffy, bunyip democracy, Radio National, the Religion Report, heritage, sara palin, and wild kinds of justice

Along with this site's boycott of The Sydney Morning Herald, the time is shortly coming when it will be a just and righteous moment to turn off ABC radio's Radio National.

Mysterious changes have been proposed to the programming, and the first I heard of them was an impassioned two minute spray at the start of The Religion Report, wherein listeners were advised it was about to be shelved (along with other programs) and be replaced by 'interdisciplinary programming', whatever that might mean. You won't hear that bit of direct honest and emotional broadcasting anymore - as with any self-respecting Stalinist ghetto, it was immediately stricken from the record. The thought police are coming to get you.

There's a couple of management issues here - first the proposed changes had proceeded by stealth, but clearly management had failed to bring along some staff, and of course nobody, outside a token survey directed mainly at on line use, had bothered to consider the listeners. They'd take what they were given. And nobody had bothered to work out what was being proposed to replace the axed shows. So the news, what there was of it, was about negativity and unhappiness.

Funnily enough, the head of radio at the ABC was a nice, caring and committed broadcaster when she started out on radio 5UV these many years ago, though even then with short, spiky salt and pepper hair that evoked, or reflected, a certain firmness on many aspects of life. You'd have thought by now she'd have understood,  that while the audience for Radio National is small, its listeners are engaged and involved. They want an intelligent exchange, not the treatment dished out by talk back on AM.

Right now they're conducting a survey, but it's not actually pitched to the listeners, but to the ABC trying to work out how they can force-feed more content via the Intertubes. The bias and the irrelevance of much of the questioning (and the studious avoidance of any useful way to provide qualitative comment) ensures they will go on doing what they want, and claim the initiative is a response to public feedback (well up until the point their hatchet schemes became public before the survey was complete).

It seems odd for a comprehensive atheist like myself to be arguing in favor of The Religion Report, but there you go - it was always well researched and well presented, and it gave wonderful insights into the world of the Jensenites and Pellists, two minor heresies that have temporary control of Sydney's soul. Ditto The Media Report was always worth a listen, even if it did tend to be a tad superficial and uncritical, never quite matching the incisiveness of Media Watch (but of course that had a television budget).

Quality radio programs - which require research time, and some care in production and an ambition to cover the turf  - are relatively dear, though up against what the government pisses against the wall on feature films no one wants to see, the term 'high cost' is extremely relative.

So there's a cost benefit to the current slash and burn, but there's also a delusion about the role of the internet in quality broadcasting of a domestic kind. Right now if I wanted to, I could tune in to over 2,500 stations streaming from the US on the internet, and god knows how many more from Britain, Ireland, and so on and on. But I sometimes prefer local broadcasting, if it's intelligent and capable, because it tells me about things happening in my neck of the woods amongst the movers and shakers. 

I suspect what will happen now will be that the station will introduce more talk back and chat - cheap to deliver, and resulting in instant turn off by me. Right now, straight after the various reports in the morning - the intelligent radio half hour - comes Life Matters, and instantly I'm off to listen to something else somewhere else. I don't care if the content's streamed on the net, or podcast, or delivered by carrier pigeon, if the content is boring I'll find some better content - and right now Radio National is up against PBS and the BBC and any number of ports in between. Going cheap or going online doesn't cut it. Heck, maybe I'll just listen to the BBC on News radio, since it's usually better than the cheap-assed, non-parliamentary stuff they funnel into the hapless, poor cousin, third call sign (they also run NPR material, but again, why not just go to the source?)

Compared to some of the current RN chat shows, the Country Hour is more entertaining and engaging, and re-connects me to rural interests and concerns in a way that Macka, whom I'd cheerfully spray with buckshot, never manages.

In the afternoons, it's a similarly mixed bag, with emphasis drifting over to cheap music, a bit of book reading, and the likes of recycled Adams and Duffy, who just deliver talk, theoretically balanced in terms of political leanings, and practically balanced in that they offer all the interest of listening to a bag of concrete harden in the moist air. 

Here's a few things they could have done - retired Fran Kelly for a year. Morning radio and the essential AM suddenly became more listenable simply because we didn't have to put up with her in between stuff - especially  her faulty interview techniques and her clumsy cutting off of people so she can make some phony deadline or the news. Maybe they can find another documentary series for her. 

Similarly in the afternoon, it's time to retire Phillip Adams, who usually wants to talk about Adams even when he's talking to really interesting people like Oliver Sacks. I know there's ego in broadcasting, but when it gets to blimp size and obscures the guests, it's time to stop. Enough already with the chemical free beef and the dangers of coal-mining and the ancient antiquities and the charms of the Muswellbrook studios. Bring back Mt Helen radio I say and give him a gig playing Shania Twain.

And then there's the Michael Duffy hour (along with his fellow insipid host), which offers silly period music interludes, and soft soap questioning of serial right wing loons which can only be matched by Rachael Kohn's ability to keep a straight voice while listening to the nuttiest of religious ratbags give us the good oil on all kinds of auras, aromas and karmas. 

Duffy and his co-compere never engage in controversy or debate - they only nod sagely when some right wing loon explains how left wingers have had their brains invaded by aliens, and that's why they want to take over the world (or any other right wing or libertarian or anti-flouride or anti-anything paranoid fantasy you can imagine). It's entertaining for five minutes out of the hour, in the same way that listening to socialists is amusing until you realise they actually believe what they say.

I imagine someone deep in the bowels of the ABC thinks the changes are all about being more relevant and attracting a youthful audience instead of the old farts who sometimes take the station away from an asterix in the ratings charts. But of course it's not an age or a sex divide that counts here, it's actually intelligence and an interest in intelligent subjects, like science or music or architecture (or gasp, yes even religion and media). You can be a Radio National listener at twenty or eighty. The real and only test is whether you've ever listened to Shakespeare in a BBC recording, off air or off disc.

Duffy couldn't manage a Religion Report or a Media Report, but as token right wing window dressing for the house lefties, he gets to stay, the other shows get the flick, and I get to open up my radio options. Yep, it's time to take up listening music again, from the world wide resources of the Intertubes. Come on down New Orleans public radio, though maybe I'll weaken on a Saturday morning, if only to listen to Andrew Ford at a handy time.

Duffy of course has a nice routine going whereby the work he does for Radio National usually ends up as one of the themes in his Herald column - his column about the big sort in America was matched by an interview with author Bill Bishop on air. Funnily enough, the book's title - The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart - aptly describes the clustering mind set of the like minds who foregather on Duffyradio to rail against the rest of the world.

Which is a handy introduction to this week's Duffy column in the Herald. Say it ain't so, Duffster ... not another tedious column about politicians in New South Wales, and this time with a populist tone which reflects the amazing 130 comments the Duffster got in his blog about the way people in NSW hate their politicians.

From the bleeding obvious to the obviously bleeding. To cut to the chase, the Duffster wants politicians who leave their posts early - like the current flock of rats abandoning the good ship NSW Labor - to be punished. No pensions, no golden parachutes, no office, no driver, no pay outs, no nothing, nada, zip. Or better still, make them pay for the cost of a by election if they stand down early, with a kind of reverse HECs scheme applied to their pensions.

Clearly Duffy's fulminations touched a nerve, and clearly his railing excites the popular imagination, but of course any of these steps would have to be implemented by politicians - and waiting in the wings to take over from Labor is a Liberal party that has in the past featured rorters with an even more impressive track record, often driven to the brown paper bag by a sense of their own living needs and the low pay on offer. Come on down Sir Robin Askin. By the way, when you drive your leader to a suicide attempt over relatively minor matters, and then he drops out, does the cost of the by election land at the feet of the depressive sook who tried to kill himself or the bastards who provoked it? 

I'd like to be the Jesuit drawing up the many reasons you could legitimately resign early - once you introduced any mental illness clause the whole parliament could be out the doors - versus the illegitimate excuses that would ensure you stayed handcuffed to your seat for the full term.

The ideas are so painfully childish, and so unlikely to be implemented - since it would mean politicians knee-capping their own possible futures - that they barely warrant a discussion - and all the more funny when you think that the previous day on radio Duffy and his co-host spent time discussing why any kind of cap or limit on executive payments and benefits was a complete and inefficient waste of time. Nodding in time like a couple of yo yos to the plaintive calls to let the rich executives run wild, run free.

You would have thought a desire to keep politicians in the same mind set as successful executives in this wonderful capitalist system that we have would be uppermost in Duffy's mind, but no, he's concerned at the fate of independent contractors (you know, like that dipstick Joe the Plumber who didn't happen to be a plumber). Nor does it worry him that democracy comes at a price, and that we should be prepared to pay for the pleasure of losing one rat, even if it means voting in another, the minute a politician has been required to fall on their sword. It's the least we can do.

Even the American system doesn't achieve this level of vengeful hostility to its former politicians, and the childish tone, even if populist, the 'there that'll teach 'em', suggests exactly why this state gets the politicians it deserves - because it has the columnists it deserves, incapable of setting a level of sophisticated debate.  (The Duffster even manages to evoke 'Sara Palin' as speaking of sacred political duty, which gives a new meaning to the Troopergate affair. He sure knows his tokenistic red flags, you betcha).

Meantime, we pay a fortune to big business executives to run the economy into the ground, while the state is run by people being paid relative peanuts - no wonder we get monkeys of dubious skill and talent running the state.

Finally, the Duffster ends with notice on Sunday of a rally against the state's planning laws, especially with regard to over-development and the trampling of heritage values. This piece of Nimby cronyism will only concern those people who live in the leafy north shore, where of course all they really want to do is preserve their own exclusive turf and views. This happens to accord with heritage values.

Of course in the west, if we go back to real heritage values, we'd chop down all the trees just for starters - an idea Duffy would warmly support. Take a look at period photos of western streets - note well how it was deemed irrelevant that workers get to look at a bit of greenery, and wonder how suddenly gum trees in the street came to represent heritage values to people with no awareness of history. Heritage values also seem to exclude the 'mediterranean' 'wogcrete' values migrants brought to Anglo-celtic buildings over the last sixty years. Personally I sigh with relief to see a Spanish arch, a dash of pebblecrete, an abundance of concrete, an absence of grass and Victa lawnmowers, the odd olive tree and a couple of decent grape vines. Now there's heritage values at work. 

Meantime a pox on the northerners and their lickspittle columnist lackeys because they don't want to share some of the strain Sydney is facing as it stretches to accommodate all the people who want to live here. Yep, they've got their two to five million dollar quarter acre homes with trees and a view, and that's heritage enough for them. When Duffy says we've got a bunyip democracy, he should have said that his aim is to return the state to a squattocratic burgermeister democracy where the rich can live in sheltered peace, and the rest can ... get fucked.

Hopefully no one from the west will attend this wretched, self-seeking, self-serving rally.

So to this week's score:

For saying bunyip democracy when he meant rich people democracy: 0

For continuing to exist on the gulag of ABC radio while good shows whither around him: 0

For  petulant and childish solutions of the most impractical and populist kind: 11

For proposing columnists and radio broadcasters pay back their fees each time they write a dud column or deliver a dud radio program: 0

For ongoing use of the cliche 'surrender monkeys' and allowing a mis-quoted Sarah Palin to be spelled 'Sara Palin': 10

Yes, the title of this week's column is "Hit these surrender monkeys where it hurts - in their pockets", and that's more than enough about that. The online Herald thought so little of it they didn't even give it a place on the front page, you actually had to know that Duffy existed and click through to his name. As usual,  we don't link, it only encourages him. If Duffy keeps going like this, he'll become unreadable just as RN becomes unlistenable. Thank god for Shakespeare.

Duffy, the big sort, the soft sell, the rope a dope and the rusted sword in the scabbard

There's little doubt that Peter Garrett cuts the sorriest figure of any Australian federal politician, at least when you compare what he once said or sang about to what he now does. Better to die on your knees or sing on your feet, or was it better to sing on your knees and sell out on your feet, or - can't quite recall it - did it have something to do with the revolutionary philosophy of dying on your feet rather than living on your knees.

Whatever, Garrett now makes Sir Humphrey sound like a clear-cut moral philosopher whenever he tries to explain he's doing a big fat fatuous nothing about his portfolio. And even more incongruously, the bald-headed Garrett evokes images of that long lost British film by the Boulting Brothers - Fame is The Spur - the one where Michael Redgrave plays an ambitious radical politician spurred on by stories of the Peterloo massacre, and the sword handed down to him as a relic of that day. 

By film's end, Redgrave is very successful, mainly at selling out his constituents and his radical ideas, but also in terms of power and prestige, so it's no surprise that when he gets down the sword from above the fireplace and tries to release it from the scabbard, he finds it rusted tight. It's a simple visual metaphor, but an effective one, and the only problem using it with Garrett is that it gives his past as a rock singer mouthing empty radical rhetoric more status than it deserves - Midnight Oil certainly ain't no Peterloo sword, and while Garrett is now firmly rusted into the scabbard, he's not even trying to pretend he once had the sword out of the sheath and ready for action.

Now what, you might ask, has all this got to do with the esteemed Michael Duffy, columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald? Well, it comes down to trying to work out what a person believes in, since that usually determines what he does, or attempts to do. Garrett, for example, espoused an abundant number of causes, and then turned his back on them. 

But Duffy is opaque. It's hard to work out what he believes in, if anything. Each week there's a new wrinkle - for example, one week he's saying how incompetent slack supervision by credit agencies led to the subprime crisis, the next week he's whinging about the way fierce credit agency supervision is preventing the state labor government from indulging in a pre-election spending blow out.

So we can't expect consistency. But what does he think on crucial matters like fundamentalism and the belief in God? Does he believe, as Bill Maher puts it so neatly, in a talking snake? Is he on the same wavelength as creationists like Sarah Palin? Does he think that having a delusional man like George Bush, who thinks God talks to him on a daily basis, was a good choice for President, and does he welcome the prospect of the even more delusional Palin being a heart beat away from the possible Presidency of a 72 year old recovering from a potent form of cancer?

Well, this week provides no further clues, except that the study of Duffy is as compelling and intriguing as trying to find a minotaur dwelling in the depths of a Cretian labyrinth. Yep, you betcha, we have to turn to the cult of the bull to get an answer on Duffy.

The punchline at the very end of his column entitled "America shows politics of a sort is a real threat to democracy" - sorry if it's a spoiler - is that he's having second thoughts about his long held belief in favor of voluntary voting. Maybe, opines Duffy, if you look at what's happening in America, it isn't such a good idea. 

Duffy, it seems, has been stricken with the same kind of second thought thinking that's recently struck New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks, who wrote that the likes of Sarah Palin was a cancer on the Republican Party, and who now sometimes sounds like a secular rationalist where once he was a fervent holy roller for the cause.

But back to Duffy. He's read a book by Bill Bishop, The Big Sort, which looks at the way that Americans have sorted themselves into like minded groupings, because they can afford to, and political partisanship has become more extreme, and there's a growing intolerance. Lordy, it sounds just like the Republican party, and their attempts to smear Obama (with a Hussein) as an outsider terrorist interloper who isn't really American and just happens, in case you haven't noticed, to be somewhat black as well as a founding member of the SDS before moving on to join the Weathermen in their campaign to end the Vietnam war. No wonder he's political now, imagine how political he was when he was five.

The intolerance and hatred spewed out by the right - as they go about the business of losing for a change - has been a reliable subset of Rovian politics for some time, but it also reflects the benefits of power in an imperial America. There's real bucks to be made if you're in charge of the system, hence the growing divide between rich and poor, and the absolute obscenity of consumerist indulgence that saturates the whole economy.

For Duffy this seems to be some kind of revelation. Easy enough to differ with someone on health care - especially if you think the poor don't deserve it but you do - or take a different view on foreign policy, like killing off thousands just to show you can by invading a country because of weapons of mass destruction it never had, or the handing out of school vouchers, when it's better to turn a secular education system over to religious schools run by fundamentalist ratbags, and provide a handsome government subsidy to assist the process.

Oh yes, that's all just friendly shit, jolly japes amongst chums. What, you actually don't like these things going down? Well not to worry, you'll have your say at the ballot box. And so, lordy lordy, Garrett and Saint Kevin hoved into view, and we were supposed to feel grateful? 

Bottom line, according to Duffy,  it's appropriate to have any number of simple minded divisive issues - call them 'policy matters' - but strangely enough "when you differ on everything, there is a risk opponents will become enemies and democracy will start to break down."

Poor Duffy just wants to be loved. The right just wants to be loved. Why, oh why are people so unkind, easy to be cruel.

Suddenly Duffy has discovered the benefits of political moderation and apathy - it seems being indifferent, apathetic, and totally out of it, means politicians don't have to be so hard, they can cushion the nation from the shock of disagreement and change. Yep, Duffy has finally discovered that slackers rule, that dole bludgers disengaged from society who go surfing are performing a vital social service. Well let's see him write a revelatory column - how I became a slacker for democracy, extolling the benefits of a joint and a good lie down.

Having seen the light in America, Duffy's alarmed for the implications in Australia - have Australians done the big sort, is there a boom in trailer park trash, have the rich pushed away the poor? Well yes, the Duffster opines, the poor have been pushed away from the coast (evidently Duffy hasn't thought of living in Port Kembla), and worse still the middle classes are unlikely to catch public transport, except when commuting with people much like themselves.

Well flip that pancake, that's no surprise, since Duffy favors bigger and better motorways and bugger all for public transport, and seems to hate the thought of sharing a carriage with sweaty smelly lumpenproletariat types.

Even the mass media has broken up "so we can all pick what reflects our existing interests and ideas" - and publishers can impose twits like Miranda Devine (or Janet Albrechtsen or Gerard Henderson, or yes even Duffy himself) on us in the interests of diversity, and making sure there is now a profound, and hardened intellectual divide in this country. Sadly Duffy is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Still, never mind a return to better columnists - whatever happened to Mike Carlton? Never mind stupid sentimental ideas about a fair and balanced society. Policies which attempt that kind of 1984 social modeling require subtlety, nuance, and a willingness to share.

No, all might be well if we just keep on with compulsory voting - but wait, just as you think Duffy has made a really firm point, has come out against the likes of Nick Minchin and the other free market fundamentalists who think they can transform the Australian political scene by Rovian tricks, he stops short of committing to anything. In his typically obtuse way, Duffy doesn't cede anything, he just says he's having 'second thoughts' about voluntary voting. So we will never really know if he's prepared to recant, or he's just having another wank in public. 

Of course if he actually said he was in favor of compulsory voting, he'd be breaking with his libertarian colleagues, and so in a queasy way. Duffy exemplifies how we prefer to maintain the picking and choosing of 'what reflects our existing interests and ideas'. He can't even begin to become the Peter Garrett of libertarians,  and move over to the dark side.

Well you can bet that if the depression develops full time, and the rich begin to feel the wrath of the poor, the free market idealogues are going to dance around on a hot griddle a lot more, and think about changing their ideas. There's already an argument that George Bush is perhaps the greatest socialist President America has ever seen, what with his nationalising the banks and pushing forward the military industrial complex in a way Stalin could only dream about.

Meantime, Duffy can continue - along with Henderson - to rail against do gooders who like coffee and wine and take silly green bags to the supermarket so they won't bring home plastic bags. They can continue to write about how soft and pudgy and pathetic these liberals are, what a group think herd mentality they show, and they can continue to imagine they're the Rambos of ideas, the Adam Smiths of today, when in reality they're just the lap dogs of a political class which imagined, as Rove did, that they could rule for a thousand years.

It's a pity a hard rain has to fall to muddy these delusions, and the delusions seem to be getting nicely muddied as a very hard rain begins to fall, but having lived with intolerance for years, it's hard not to give a little intolerance back. Duffy just wants to be loved, but now he's discovered that being infuriating and intolerant, can lead to being loathed. And all he had to do this time was say he fervently, emphatically thought compulsory voting was a good idea - so that at least once every four or so years we could acknowledge an obligation to the polis. No, no, no, Mr udon noodles man goes limp as usual. The sword of ideas rusted into the scabbard long ago.

So to the score:

Discovery that American political system is fucked (even if belated): 3

Discovery that America itself is fucked (even if belated): 3

Realization that slackers rule dude: 11

Realization that the poor find public transport useful: 2

Understanding that denying poor slackers access to surf is a crime against humanity: 2

Realization that Australians devoted to importing American ideas will fuck the country: 3

Ability to flip flop and have second thoughts without committing to anything: 11

Titillation at being able to use Margaret Atwood's word 'pleeblands': 11

Continuing willingness to travel with the herd of right wing columnists: 11

A high scoring column. Duffy is always at his most compelling when offering to open up his entrails for scrutiny, only to make us wonder who slipped the chicken livers into the bottom of the tea cup.

Duffy, AAA Credit Ratings, Milton, Rowling, Rees, Iemma, the Metro and the figuring of meaning

This blog is dedicated to a simple, powerful and perhaps ultimately terrifying notion - that the path to the truth and enlightenment can be attained by studying in detail the thoughts of Michael Duffy in his columns for The Sydney Morning Herald.

True, it's an indirect path, for the winding, twisting path relies on the fact that Duffy is infallibly wrong, and therefore intense study can always lead to an alternative, infallibly correct insight offering redemption and understanding. Thus when Duffy says Morris Iemma (remind me what did he do again?) is a great reforming politician, we know with absolute certainty and clarity that the opposite is certainly true. When Duffy proposes that the whole landscape be covered with righteous McMansions on quarter acre blocks, motivated by some deep seated primeval territorial urge and a desire to assert the truth of Rooty Hill over Paddington, we are given profound insight into urban planning and the human condition.

When Duffy demands more and more tunnels for more and more motorways, we are not too far from the need for rice boys, Marrickville doof doof, speed, autobahns and liebensraum. And so on. Of course there are dangers in any such carefree reading of the holy text. As a contrarian, Duffy opposes any conventional thought, particularly those held by inner city dwellers with a taste for the product of the evergreen bush coffea arabica, and a weakness for descendant mutations of gouais blanc. So any contrarian to Duffy's contrarianism must perforce arrive at a third place, a synthesis of the dialectic which is tinged with Duffian and arabica drinker insights, but takes us to the top of the mountain. 

This can be difficult given that Duffy, as a broadcaster for the ABC as well as Granny columnist, appears in many ways to be exactly alike to the things that he most dislikes and argues against. One small flip of the coin and you might see him hanging up his bicycle clips as he heads to the ABC cafeteria for a sip of magical brown arabica. 

This week's column - luminously entitled "I'm an AAA credit rating addict" with withering irony - raises all these issues with an almost hideous intensity - for at last it seems the scales have fallen from Duffy's eyes, and he has discovered that Morris Iemma's pet project, the North West Metro, is a folly.

Duffy has discovered this via figures being peddled by Michael Easson, snakeoil salesman for another outfit peddling another project of equal irrelevance - a western fast rail link between the west and the city which would fail to integrate in all the ways the North West Metro fails, but with bonus private sector carpet bagging thrown in for good measure (Easson, as former secretary of the NSW Labor Council, presumably got the gig so he could deliver his Labor mates to the Leighton contractors wanting to put together the boondoggle - now let's all sing along together Simpsons' style, what this town needs is a monorail, oh it's got that, ain't it grand, what this town needs is a fast, oh so fast super train duorail).

Duffy, if you recollect, in between bouts of hatred for all public transport, managed to see the Metro as a valid contribution to Sydney's transport problems and hungered for it to be built. Now - while having no knowledge whether Easson's $40 a trip passenger trip is actually a fair calculation - the Duffy is mortified: "I don't know if this figure is correct, but it fits broadly with overseas experience of new railways. If it is true, why have we been taking the metro seriously for so long?"

Only in Duffyland would such a profound reversal and a continuing lack of insight be feasible. But then the rest of his column is dedicated to wondrous illogicality. First of all he's driven by his new fixation with credit agencies and their rating of New South Wales as AAA, which threatens to drop to a lower rating (with an increase in interest payments) if the NSW government - with an election in mind - embarks on an orgy of debt and infrastructure building.

Duffy is appalled by the thought that Standard & Poors might be running the state (though how they would manage this by simply observing the debt level and credit rating of a state and dropping it a notch if it over-spends would be a mystery to most disinterested observers.) Duffy is at his most socialistic deploring standard private sector market place ratings mechanisms, and the consequence of what he is proposing would be to encourage the government in embarking on  higher debt levels and greater expenditure.

Hang the budget, we've got a point to make about Standard & Poors and we need a heck of a lot of money to boondoggle the next election, so let's spend, spend, spend. But just as you think Duffy might have made a break through, he berates the new premier - a literature graduate for god's sake - for building a useless desalination plant, and wonders about the wisdom of Kevin Rudd pouring $8 billion or so into infrastructure projects for the state. "You have to wonder whether it will be spent wisely", opines Duffy, so then you have to wonder exactly why the Duffster wants to break the credit rating, borrow money, and have the government go on a spending rampage just to show it can.

But as always the Duffy can be relied on for a key insight, one that explains everything. Like a blinding flash, he strikes when he writes: "It seems that we're best in Sydney where the state's future is concerned is talking. Unfortunately, the conversation is rarely informed or sustained and rarely does it lead to action". Substitute "It seems that we're best in Sydney where the state's future is concerned is writing blinding drivel for The Sydney Morning Herald" and the insight is complete. As usual, the sacred text has delivered a profound insight.

Sydney is fucked, fucked by years of a derelict Labor government - especially and notably Bob Carr, so here's hoping Macquarie goes down the tubes. New South Wales is fucked, fucked by a derelict Labor government. The opposition is fucked, fucked by years of futile opposition and a devotion to internecine wars about fundamentalism and moralism that have nothing to do with running and managing a state. Consequently the state budget and the state's infrastructure are both comprehensively fucked. If I was Standard & Poors I'd give it an F and move on.

Worse still, by extension, Duffy himself is fucked, since it was only a little while ago that he was singing the praises of Morris Iemma and looking forward to the Metro. In fact it could be said that in this whole sorry dereliction of duty, Duffy and his fellow columnists should claim the credit for fucking NSW. My point being that in Duffyland, with the rules of logic behaving like a Dali clock, stretching and flexing, any truth is as subjective as a French structuralist philosopher.

But wait - that's a cheap shot - as cheap as Duffy having a go at Rees for liking Milton's poem Paradise Lost and having a degree in literature rather than economics. That would be like me asking what qualifications Duffy has for writing a column on economics and credit ratings and all that other figuring stuff  - given that when he writes his column, he doesn't bother to check crucial figures proffered like burnt offerings, but still uses them for a dialectical purposes to prove a point (thought exactly what that point is, except to say that Duffy loves rubbery figures, is moot). How else to explain a column intended to praise a "boring mathematical line"of thought, and then delivers a capper line "I don't know if this figure is correct" - but I'll go ahead and use it because it suits me, just like Humpty Dumpy, who knew that words mean exactly what I want them to mean.

Worse still, perhaps harking back to his time as a publisher, Duffy has a fondness for unseemly, cheap literary metaphors that make Rees's love of Milton positively Shakespearian. This time Duffy deploys Hogwarts and magic wands and spells to diss Rees. God, to go from disparaging a man's love of Milton to deploying J. K. Rowling is spell-binding, though perhaps not in the way Duffy intends. No wonder he apologises, but here's a tip - when you write the cliche 'with apologies' you should never have written what you wrote in the first place.

But there's a grander point here.  At a time when the world's economic system is verging on collapsing to the ground, Duffy's rant is strangely surreal and irrelevant. It seems he wants us to defy the credit rating systems when it provides a credit warning (yet whose lack of supervision he blames for the subprime crisis in the United States), with the implication of a plunge into debt the only way to prove that inept politicians are indeed running NSW. And it seems he now has a new ready made pet project - the snakeoil fast train project - as a folly to contemplate as the Metro slowly disappears up its fundament.

But you know there's one thing about being caught up in the weird world of Duffy. At least it's not Gerard Henderson. Last week Gerard, the dull, lifeless fellow columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald, said he'd be rooting Sarah Palin during the VP debate - sorry, correction, he actually said he was rooting for her, because the inner west liberal elite hated her, as well as everything about Penrith, like football trophies and bingo. Poor Gerard (and Duffy) - to so love a dumb bell because some people think she's a dumb belle. Trouble is, I can't recollect either Gerard or Duffy telling us once which team they barack for (no, we're not talking Obama).

Where do they stand on the crucial issues of the Storm and Manly and the grapple tackle? What do they feel about the All Blacks? It was easy to know where Mike Carlton stood, sad though that was for a rugger bugger sniffing the backs of men in scrums. I don't recollect this other pair, who struggle and toil for the natives of Kellyville, managing to write even once about the hot feud between VB and XXXX, or taking a position on Holden v Ford or the futility of SBS making a local car show (or the role of Japanese cars in the lives of doof doof rice boys). 

I can't even remember them waxing lyrical about the joys of poker machines, not once in their columns. In fact most of the time they carry on like a prissy, poncing Henry James, writing with fastidious care about boring politics no one in the outer west could give a blind flying fuck about - where hard nosed realists know the state government will do nothing for you, and even if they try something, it will be spectacularly useless.

You get the sense that Henderson (or Duffy), if he ever bowled a ball, would see it bounce first very close to his toes, then dribble its way towards silly leg, in a way that would make Greg Chappell give him the final over in a 20-20 against NZ. Maybe Gerard got excited about Sarah doing a field stripping on him, and claiming his precious bodily fluids. Maybe the notion that he wants to root her, if only he knew how, isn't so far from the truth. 

Get a life guys, and let's hope that Melbourne thrashes the shit out of that bunch of silvertails hailing from Manly. Yep, it's come to that, we must chose between the mortal enemy and the mortal enemy, between Southwark and West End, between soap and soap, between Reschs and Tooheys, between out of towners and northerners so far from the real world of the west they might have come from Unley. Hell, there isn't even a toad to whack with a two iron from North to South head. But that's okay, normal programming will return after Sunday, and neither Gerard nor Duffy will have to pretend they want to take an interest in western suburbs passions. 

Oh but they will, and that's the sadness of it all. We have many more Duffys to trudge, promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep, and the Herald's columnists are properly scourged.

So to this week's score:

Love of Milton lovers: 0

Love of snake oil salesman: 11

Love of Metros: 0

Love of Iemma and Rees: 0

Love of credit agencies: 0

Love of logic: 0

Understanding of economics: 0

A low scoring week, but as any Zen follower would know, nothing is being and being is nothing. Duffy, it seems, can open the gateless gate.