Club Politique by Che Tibby

The question that many people out there, including myself, need to ask themselves every now and then is, who gave me the monopoly on righteous indignation?

It seems that what with the seemingly inevitable ‘slide towards chaos’ and ‘end-times’ hypnosis overtaking our societies, old certainties like the bad guys wearing black shirts, or having sneaky looking, pencil-thin moustaches has gone out the window. In their stead we have this fear of guys with big beards and their pesky damn fanatical ways.

I mean, why is it that whenever the Middle East is shown on TV, and I mean anywhere in the Middle East, that it's always hirsute blokes with AK-47s, lots of shouting, jostling and 'the waving of the arms'. It's almost like the entire region is one long parade of 70s Mercedes sedans and pissed off guys called 'Mustapha' or 'Abu' someone or other.

By way of example, after writing the other day about all the examples of people being locked up for doing nothing, I got to see an interesting interview on the tube. It was of course Mamdouh Habib, and he was talking about his handling by our friends the Americans.

To be completely honest, while the story has been aired on all the major stations here in abbreviated form, and there's lots of denial by the Attorney General, including an effort to discredit Habib, they needn't have worried.

The AGs vain attempt in this regard was to indicate that Habib wouldn't talk about any trips to 'Afghanistan', as this implicated him in a nefarious region that obviously manifests terrorists by the simple evocation of its name. Go on, try this one at home, begin saying 'Afghanistan' very quietly to yourself. Then, gradually, very gradually, say 'Afghanistan' publicly in increasingly bitter tones. Add a little spit on the 'ghan' bit of the word, so you seem a little angrier. Finally, by the time you've really wound it up you'll be able to accuse your boss of 'having trained in Afghanistan' with such vehemence that the national Gestapo/spooks will be forced to do a Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, quietly removing the object of your bile and erasing memory of 'the incident' from the entire office, and all before lunchtime.

I suggest trying this one shortly after the Christmas party, ANY time you've been associated with either karaoke or cheap margaritas, or Feb.15, when Charlotte on reception has spurned your rose-bedecked chocolate advances, again.

The truth of the matter is that Habib said he was happy to talk, but would only do so in Court. Presumably he's going to sue the Crown. But, that didn't stop the AG from getting away a pre-emptive shot. Ah yes, Phillip Ruddock, doubtless the champion of the pre-emptive one.

Anyhow, to be completely honest, I didn't trust Habib. I actually think that there is a possibility that he's only giving us half the story. It's true of course that TV stories are difficult to judge from, editing complicating body language the way it does, but there was just something that unnerved me. Let me state categorically that I do not, in any fashion, think that he is a real terrorist, of the killing innocents and never mind the cost type. But I would not be at all surprised if he had in fact associated with terrorists.

But this is the core of the issue in my opinion. What really distinguishes this new threat to 'civilisation' is the de-centred and 'networked' nature of terrorism. Back in the day the bad guys were all safely behind the Iron Curtain, doubtless gorging themselves on borsch and swilling cheap vodka, but these days the sneaky buggers could be anywhere. Who knows if your swarthy neighbour is actually building a dirty bomb, or using his job as a taxi driver to case the city?

I mean, how many people haven't thought that the diabolical local kebab shop owner might be a sleeper agent? What chance is there that he's related to someone who's married to an authentic terrorist? What if he's married to the cousin of a terrorists' accountant? Isn't that association?

Sure, this sounds ridiculous, but there's more than a few periods of history in which meaningless association has resulted in enough hysteria to result in both persecution and incarceration, or worse, for harmless bystanders. Off the top of my head? McCarthy, Cambodia, Chile, Germany, the USSR. And the global search for terrorist organisations is likely to be fertile ground for these types of accelerating misunderstandings.

Lets go back to the heady days of the war on drugs for example. How many times do you remember a 'kingpin' being arrested on series drugs charges? Sure, we had great TV shows like Miami Vice that captured our imaginations, reassuring us that there was actually something happening, but those shifty damn South Americans are to this very day producing some mighty fine blow (I'm told). In the meantime, a number of 1980s small-fries were being arrested and jailed, because of the ever-present need for 'something to be done'.

Again, back in the day the spooks could work out that the bad guys had X number of troops, Y number of planes/tanks/ships etc. But these days, like the war on drugs, the actual enemy is so scattered and intangible that symbolism becomes the good guys main weapon, as it does for the baddies. Iraq? Symbol. Twin Towers? Symbol. If you can't set up your war toys in a big field and nail each other, you do it through the media instead. To be thought to be doing something is far, far more important than actually doing it.

I mean, every pubescent guy in the world knows that, right?

Meanwhile, I hear myself yelling at the TV, 'but he's not the problem!' and feeling completely indignant because the methods involved to find out who his associates are involved torture. And that is what the real problem is. What do you do when you have a bunch of individuals and no way to get them to talk? If you can't knock over their infantry and take their capital, what does the war machine focus on?

The trouble is capturing individuals and using completely inhumane methods to try and find out who the real combatants are. As I say, there are more than a few examples of both frightened and/or tyrannical regimes having to 'question' wider and wider circles of people to try and flush out the 'real' bad guys. And I have no interest in ending up in Habib's shoes for the simple reason that I don't like American foreign policy, and could have spent time talking to people with more of an aggressive tendency than my bad self.

And this seems to be the case with Habib, once again, we don't really have any details on exactly what he's supposed to have done, except for accusations he's supposed to have confessed to and confirmed while being 'questioned' in Egypt (of all places). I think he has in reality associated with some people who turned out to be up to no good, but the question of whether this implicates him in their actions is a very large one.

I am therefore looking forward to more information before I condemn the man.

I originally wanted to call this post, ‘bastards I haven’t the time of day for’, but decided to wind it in a little and try sneak a cultural reference in there instead.

The question we all need to ask this week is, where is the love? Where? Swept under the carpet of three terms of hard-line xenophobia? Carefully tucked in Dubya’s back pocket with the object of Howard’s affections?

Again, where in the frickin’ hell is the love?

You might remember a post of last year where I had a little rant about this poor bloke stuck on Manus Island with no other company than the interweb and a stray cat. All this time costing the public $26k a day. Well, it turns out that that story is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this Government’s need to be a bunch of hard-line, tough guys.

Ok, so maybe before this post does actually descend into a litany of anti-conservative caterwauling, let me state that as far as the dinner-party-indignation scale goes, the current Governments actions are off the Ricther, as my conversation of a few nights ago prove.

Being politically minded, I like to surround myself with people who have political opinions. I know this is potential snobbery, but to me anyone who says ‘why can’t we just all get along?’, or ‘I know that deep down everyone just wants to love one another’, is asking to be slapped with a little post-1970s realism.

For this reason it’s always to be in the company of people being outraged by the actions of people like Little Johnny and Dubya, if not only because it restores my faith in the democratic process. Sure, I end up being used as an inexpensive ‘person with whom to consult’, but at least that edumacation is going completely to waste. And maybe the world isn’t degrading into a series of individuals concerned solely with interest rates and their mortgages.

Most of the indignation being expressed the other night was generated by the current case of a Ms. Cornelia Rau, imprisoned for ten months for the crime of being mentally ill and refusing to speak English to the police. The story is still unfolding, and the Labor Party is using it as a way to get stuck into the Government, so I’ll let you read what details there are here and here.

The main thing to get my goat about this story is Howard’s total and complete reticence to apologise to the woman or her family. Sure, he’ll apologise to tsunami victims he’ll never meet for a good soundbyte, and hug just about anyone in a disaster zone for a videograb, but to a woman terrified of incarceration that was granted her own personal hell courtesy of the Queensland police and Immigration Department, nada. And why? Because of legal concerns. There’s an outside chance that compensation may have to be paid.

The same goes for the case of Mamdouh Habib.

Habib was arrested in Pakistan a few years back, sent to Egypt, and finally ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Yay. Naturally, the means to try and extract information from this highly dangerous Sydney taxi driver have allegedly included

living in a cage, sensory deprivation, being regularly beaten, electrocuted, immersed in water and having a prostitute menstruate on his face. However, US authorities were not able to find enough evidence to put him on trial and consequently set him free

This guy was abandoned to the US military for three years of the treatment being alleged. Much like the people who ended up in Abu Ghraib for the unconscionable crime of breaking curfew, Habib appears by all accounts to have simply been in the wring place at the wrong time.

Terrific. Let's hear it for procedural fairness. Now, if we actually had any credible information about what Habib is alleged to have done, maybe we could justify his treatment. Maybe. If you can ever justify the things that are supposed to have been done to him. But, strangely, all that Phillip Ruddock (the Attorney-General, and a weasel of a man) will say is that Habib 'remains a person of interest'. Which is the equivalent of saying, 'he's a bit suss'.

To reiterate. We don't know what this guy is supposed to have done, and the Government refuses to tell us.. There was a TV report I saw in which he is a background face in a photo of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the first guy to try to demolish the World Trade Centre (1993, remember that?). But reports of his arrest in Pakistan just seem to have this guy in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he was tortured because of it.

Meanwhile, the PM and the Attorney-General have continued since his release to characterise him as 'suss' and are willing to impose surveillance and a media-blanket over him. Ruddock has even gone as far as to threaten to remove any monies Habib might make by selling the story to the media, even though the AG apparently cannot do this.

This story stinks to high heaven.

If there's one thing that will characterise the Howard Government when judged by history is its complete unwillingness to cut anyone any slack if there was political mileage to be made.

From the Tampa, to the ‘Children Overboard’ lies, to the 'Pacific Solution', Howard's track record is remarkably stingy and at times downright mean. Witness also the Bakhtiyari's, an Afghani family who after having spent considerable time in Woomera Detention Centre, became the poster-children for the Australian refugee advocacy movement. They were deemed by the Immigration Department to be Pakistani, denied status as asylum seekers and deported by chartered jet late last year. They were then told that they were liable for the cost of their detention ($500k+) should they ever return to Australia. Part of that detention involved the mother of the family being kept under house arrest in a motel, at taxpayers expense. Not a cheap flat, a motel. Reports are that they have since travelled from Pakistan back to Afghanistan.

And, on an incomparably harder line to the Rau case, Howard has completely ruled out either an apology or compensation for Habib. Now, if he has actually associated with terrorists, or is a terrorist, then sweet as. But absolutely nothing has been proven. Nothing.

It really makes you wonder doesn’t it? I mean, why draw such a hard line?

What makes our societies liveable is that we have things like procedural fairness and recourse to an equitable system of laws. If doing things like being desperate to escape Afghanistan or not having the right papers results in being locked behind razor wire, then in reality how free are the rest of us? Moreover, if public opinions such as those that opposed looking for WMDs in Iraq are ignored and subsequently poo-pooed, or the justifications our leaders provide for their actions can change willy-nilly, then were is the democratic accountability?

Instead, we’re left with the impression that all is good in the world because the economy is (currently) healthy, and that the concerns of a few individuals are little to worry about. But I worry. I worry every time another one of these cases is aired in the media, because I know when push come to shove someone like Howard would abandon me to the permanent scars of incarceration, even if I’m completely innocent and deemed by unhappy coincidence to be suspicious.

And I think you should worry too.

PS. I just noticed this story, which was brought to my attention by DreamOnBlackGirl, the first Aboriginal woman I’ve seen on the web.

Without doubt, my one accomplishment yesterday (other than completing the first draft of the conclusion to ‘thesis’, a presence threatening to become my lifetime companion), was realising the full extent of yet another childhood trauma. As anyone who attended Arataki primary school in the 1970s can attest, all the primmers lived in morbid fear and fascination of a particular office on school grounds.

That one office must have brought more pain and misery to children at that place than any other four walls in creation. We all lived in constant dread of that note being delivered to the teacher, the one that called you out of class and forced that long nervous walk across to the little building, the anxious wait in the lobby on those little chairs they only have in primary schools, and the inevitable look of disappointment on the adults face as you reply “no…” to “have you been brushing?”

You thought I was talking about the Headmaster? No. Ours was a jovial old coot with a friendly, pipe-smoking habit who eventually went off to become Mayor of Tauranga. I can’t remember him ever giving me the cane, although I’m assured by my brother that it did happen. Bastard.

Anyhow. The ‘murder house’ was a place of untold dread. For the life of me I can’t remember what the dental nurse looked like, all I can imagine is some old fishwife in a smock, but the chair she used to make us climb up into is indelibly burned into my mind like a scene from a Manson video. Either one. Take your pick.

Even worse was the “drill”. I use the term loosely because to this day I regale dentists with stories of the foot-pedal contraption, a monstrosity that was all cords and little spinning wheels. She might just as well have used a hammer and chisel. The nurse would lay into our newly grown ‘adult’ teeth and demolish them with the voracity of a seven year old getting into a double-flake Mister Whippy.

I insist that the gasps drawn from new dentists these days are the result of surprise at finding the shoddy and numerous fillings that glisten and cluster ominously at the back of my mouth, like an El Dorado of silver amalgam. And not just halitosis.

When her leg got tired the drill would slow, and the pain would arc into crescendos of pain, manifesting itself as white clenched knuckles and involuntary spasms down through the limbs.

At intermediate they introduced me to new forms of agony, such as the needle to the roof of the mouth, although all things being considered, ‘anaesthetic’ was a new and fascinating development in dentistry. A new development I was all too happy to cling to, when all the botched fillings miss whoever the hell she was gave me were replaced with some new form of mercury-leaching technology.

Ah, Happy times.

One small mercy was being spared any trip to the orthodontist. I was scared enough of mentholated spirits without having to make regular trips to have little rubber bands attached to the oral equivalent of medieval torture devices. It would have been like a constant replaying of that Steve Martin scene in the Little Shop of Horrors, but less masochism and more sadism. Who says that poverty is all bad? Pity about the train wreck in my mouth, but hey, small mercies, small mercies.

After college I stayed away from dental offices for as many years as I could, ten to be exact. It wasn’t the bovver boys of the teeth world, my wisdom teeth, really started to cause an oral ruckus that I ventured into the white walls of a dentist reception again.

Having consulted with a couple of friends, after staying out of the game for too long you need a little guidance to ensure you’re heading in the right direction, I found that a particular dentist in downtown Auckland offered a student discount, so I plucked up my courage and headed over there on the Link Bus.

Oh, I so wish I could remember this guys name, if not only to defame him. And defame him viciously.

I spoke to the receptionist, and she assured me that I’d be able to pay the amount owing in instalments, all I had to do was get a check-up, and then make appointments for fillings, repair etc. I booked myself in, and the years of technological advance I’d missed out on were immediately apparent. This guy had a nifty oral camera that showed exactly how crappy my gnashers really were. It is simply amazing how cavities can look really ugly when they’re blown up to TV size and in full colour. Dentists, if you’re reading this, get one of these things. Best sales technique EVER.

So, the day for the first appointment rolls around and I dutifully squash the fear to the back of my mind, along with turning up to class with no clothes on and walking in on my grandparents making whoopee, and place my trusting self in the chair I’d been afraid of all these years.

And then it started.

The first thing that happened was me opening my all-too-foolish mouth and asking if the cavity behind my buck teeth could be the one fixed first (blame vanity for that one). The dentist says, “No”. I say, but, it’s the one I want fixed the most. I’ve never been able to whistle between my teeth and have no inclination to do so. He however insists that another filling will be fixed first, because he is the dentist and I am the income… I mean client.

Now things start to get out of hand. I say, hold on, since I’m not sure when I’ll be able to finish paying off the first filling, maybe we can get the cosmetic one done first, and then we can worry about the others. He says, “what do you mean paying it off? There’s no instalment plan around here”. I reply, but your receptionist said I could pay off the filling then come back. He is starting to get angry at this point, and insists that all work done is paid for on the spot.

I should reiterate that while this is occurring I’m lying prone in the chair, with that nifty little paper towel thing they put on you as the only barrier between me and the looming face of an increasingly apoplexic dentist. There’s only one thing for it.

I launch myself out of the dentist chair and we have a stand up shouting match, including me pointing my finger angrily and dramatically ripping the little paper towel thingy off, chucking it on the floor and stamping on it.

Now, I’m not a violent man. Me and dentist man didn’t actually end up having a fist fight. For one thing, he has numerous sharp and/or pointy objects at his disposal while I merely had a wounded pride and shonky nerves. But it was once the misunderstanding was sorted out (I hadn’t explained my expectations to the receptionist), and our respective testosterone swept back under the id, I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

I got back in the chair.

The needle has never, ever been more painful, or more forcefully driven under my teeth or into my pallet. That bastard.

The only consolation was explaining to the person making the follow-up call six months later that I’d received the worst treatment ever at the hands of a medical practitioner, and thought of going to the ombudsmen with a formal complaint. Heh heh.

Finally, finally, when I got here to Melbourne I found that you can get good and cheap dental treatment through the university. In the end I got about ten fillings done and four wisdom teeth taken out for less than five hundred bucks, a miracle in anyone’s books.

In fact, a run in with the crunchy bit in a lamb chop sent me to my great and careful dentist yesterday afternoon, with him explaining at length in dentistese that my teeth are fine, I just bruised a tooth (hence the pain. I’ve never heard of bruising, but hey, he’s ‘da man’). Otherwise I just need to brush and floss more carefully to avoid future work.

No lollies or balloons to distract you like the old days, but current technology is amazing, fancy white non-mercury fillings and weird guns that dry them in an instant, or these rubber things called ‘dams’ that stop too much liquid from getting out of your mouth and onto the nurse, and a dentist who appears to have actually studied the science of his trade. Amazing.

Fear? Gone. Let’s hear it for moving on from the Murder House.

For those of you not up with the state of play here in Oz, it's Australia Day, this country's version of Waitangi. Here we celebrate with cricket, a VB, a bit of lamb on the Barbie, thereby commemorating the landing of some English bloke on the barbarous shores of Sydney harbour. Excellent.

Look, I'm the first to admit that if the English gentry and their Irish convict labour hadn't pushed the remnant Aboriginal people into little internment camps called 'Missions' and taken the Roo by the tail, as it were, this country wouldn't be the economic haven for impoverished Kiwis it is today. However, this doesn’t stop Australians from either grabbing an opportunity to try and remind people about the horrors exacted against a tribal people by Prince Harry's ancestors, or a chance to crow about the glory of the 'Australian achievement'. Either way, everyone gets a day off to do nothing but lounge, and that's never a bad thing. Never.

And all this happening while New Zealand digests the shock and awe tactics of Brash and the much-vaulted son-of-Orewa speech. Jesus, what an anti-climax. Look, I know it's so hot right now to point out that Donnie is merely repeating National policy a-la the Ship (no offence to anyone who's done so, after all, you're right), but I want to reiterate that labelling beneficiaries as the national albatross is so passé it's becoming ridiculous.

I'm sure you all think that this one has got my goat on account of me being a bona fide dole bludger over here in Melbourne, but hey, I'm kiwi, going on the dole in Australia is a tradition amongst our people, remember? I used to show my New Zealand passport and immediately ask the stuffed shirts at customs check-ins at the airport where the nearest dole office was. You could tell their bungholes were puckering from the strained look on their face (one eye in spasm while the other kind of bulges).

And all of you who haven't spent time sitting on the beach thinking, "some sucker in an office is paying me to do this" probably take yourself waaaay too seriously.

Go to Ikea and buy something. You'll feel better.

To be entirely honest, my time sponging off the system is all but at an end. I have in fact been actively seeking work over here for about six months, and also in New Zealand (honestly). But as ninety percent of my work experience is in the service industry, the world-wide mainstay of casual employment, moving across to being a salary drone is proving difficult. For some reason being paid to clean/pick up after people doesn't translate well into the world of answering emails and moving paper around for a living. Regardless of this technical hitch, we battle on.

Now, I have very good reason to dislike the want of people to get stuck into beneficiaries. I know I'm committing the cardinal sin of opinion-stating by referring to a colleague to justify what I think, but as Graham pointed out yesterday, it wasn't the content of Orewa One that was the problem, it was the way it granted the more vociferous and angry an excuse to vent their spleen about "Maoris".

As I'm sure you've all read me say before, you can't suppress this kind of thing, sometimes letting people have a little hissy fit is the way to deal with entrenched prejudice. You know, bring it out into the open so that bigots can be seen for what they really are. But, just because in a liberal democracy even poorly-informed fools get their day in the sun, it doesn't excuse anyone who acts like a dick in making their opinion known.

In making this pitch to the talk-back-angry-first-time-caller demographic Brash is really only moving himself firmly onto safe conservative ground. It's just a pity that the old two-party system has faded into obscurity along with dinosaurs like 'job security', and 'a fair days pay for a fair days work', implying that National can't wedge the public enough to secure a few extra seats.

I reckon this is probably straying way too far into the realm of 'personal information', thereby breaking a second cardinal law of blogging (and considering that this is a very public forum), but something has to be said. I dislike people who bash beneficiaries because I'm the child of one.

Once again, people seem to be referring to the 1990s and policy that got stuck into dismantling the welfare state, but in my experience the real beginnings of this problem began in the 1980s, when 'that' Labour Government started the reforms that took us away from social democracy. It was then that solo mums really started to get the bash.

I know this because I remember very, very clearly the stigma that was attached to 'solo mums' and the way people used those words. The fact that the State was supporting us because my father, and my step-father had both died was of little consequence; a woman with kids and no man to take care of her was a target to every pasty-faced weasel with a penchant for misogyny.

And this is what I see in this kind of target-the-vulnerable policy making. It's not that Brash and the right isn't 'sympathetic' enough, or that there aren't genuine cases of people on the benefit gravy train, it's that people who have no fucking idea what it's like to be a state ward will cast dispersions on people who may simply be struggling to get by.

If you've never actually tried to live on a benefit you've no idea how difficult it really is. They design those things to make sure you're barely above the poverty line. Once again, I'm hardly guilt-free when it comes to sponging off the system myself, but just because I was brought up inside that culture of beneficiaries it doesn't mean I'm trapped in the system. After all, I'm a straight, white, male. The world is my oyster.

Christ, I don’t what else to say, besides quote a line from “Madeline Avenue” on DLTs Altruism that’s always struck a chord.

While bourgeois faces smile,
over houses, lives and sins,
covered up and bulldozed in,
on a street called Madeline Avenue.
How dare you call this our street of shame.

So there I am all settled in for a news marathon. SBS world-news from 6.30 to 7 (the 6-6.30 news here, like New Zealand, is basically infotainment, I watch re-runs of Dr. Who on ABC instead). Then the ABC news from 7-7.30, then the 7.30 report. The drama I'm trying to get all angles on? Bye bye Mr. Mark Latham it seems.

Unfortunately, half-way through the SBS news I get the call to help out by doing an emergency shift in the sink. It seems the dishy 'cracked it' to use the local vernacular, and stormed out in a haze of those wavy anger lines you see in comics. And flies. You can never forget the flies.

Anyhow, so this means that with Fro-Man beating a hasty retreat from being 'paid out' (vernacular) by one of the chefs I was unable to watch the good insider interviews that would have aired on these channels. Goddamnit. You get the vibe of the thing though (vernacular). Mr Latham, after two bouts of something called 'pancreatitis', the loss of an election, and something else I'll mention later, has formally resigned from both the Leadership of the Parliamentary Labor Party and his seat of Werriwa.

We all should have seen this one coming. Latham's been under siege since November, and the likelihood of him surviving another putsch in the party were looking slimmer and slimmer by the day. Although much of the media speculation was of the usual 'internal party ructions' reporting that seems to always occur after yet another loss to an incumbent Government, there was always this undertone of something brewing.

And there it is, the thing brewing was Marks' pancreas. And probably from too many brews (and stress). Shortly before the last Federal election this one brought Mark down, and his strange absence during the obligatory Tsunami disaster shock-horror public statement rounds was obviously not because of callous disregard for the suffering of hundreds of thousands, but conveniently, because he was at deaths door.

Or at a resort getting some R&R just like his doctors told him too. But hey, I'm suspicious that he'd already decided to quit politics on advice, and thought, 'Bugger it, me saying "omagod!" and waving cheques I don't actually sign isn't going to do anyone any good when I'm bailing first chance I get anyhow. So there.'

Strangely though, editors such as the guys at The Australian are using it as an excuse to put the boot in. Maybe I've a soft spot for Latham, as I've said before, anyone who calls the Liberals' foreign policy 'a conga-line of suck-holes, leading all the way to Washington' gets my vote, but I think people may be over-playing this Tsunami thing and his lack of comment. In fact, both his lack of comment and the lack of consideration for the fact of his illness, screams petty politics.

The guys over at Troppo Armadillo think that Michael Gordon's article in The Age is probably the best comment so far, and I tend to agree, although the number of people referring to Kim Beazley, the former leader, as a 'safe pair of hands' is probably the kiss of death for the big fulla. Although you might also want to read Tim Dunlop over at the road to surfdom, who makes some good points about keeping the next campaign economics-focussed.

Thing is, Beazley has the distinct taint of being a loser to Howard, although he was of course ripped off in 2001 in regard to the Tampa. Much like the last election, Howard stepped in a used a last-minute issue to really hammer home the message that Federal Labor didn't really have what it takes to 'look after' the Australian public. This time it was the forestry issue, where he appeared in front of a crowd of cheering timber workers, and last time it was the famous 'we decide who comes to this country' speech, while 438 refugees floundered in the open seas.

So while Beazley may be a great conciliator, and provide a bit of stability to Federal Labor after the humiliating loss in 2004, I'm suspicious of his lack of ability to produce the needed kind of visionary policy to capture the Australian imagination. Safe pair of hands, sure, but we already have one safe pair of hands on the national tiller. Little, grabby, midget hands, sure, but safe and predicable nonetheless.

You can say whatever you like about Latham. He was a bruiser who broke a cabbies arm when he thought the guy was trying to steal he wallet, he made up some great phrases that were borderline obscenities when describing the Liberals, he called a prominent female journalist a 'skanky ho', Dubya ‘the most dangerous President in living memory’, and he basically burnt his bridges in the way he resigned.

But, for a while there he really did invigorate the Federal Labor Party. His 'ladder of opportunity' speech and ideas were really good, and I’m of the opinion it actually reached a lot of people. Also, during the election campaign Labor did actually look like an alternative government, they had numbers, Latham was high in the preferred PM stakes, and the Liberals weren't actually producing any new policy, but were simply throwing money at everything. It was a long-shot, but compared to Labor under Crean they were far and away better off.

I think I know what really scuttled Latham though, and it's a three-second video grab of Latham exiting a radio interview and coming face to face with Howard, maybe two days before the election. Now, Latham was doing great up to this point, and seemed to be convincing people that he wasn't the bovver-boy he seemed to be depicted as all too often. But, in what would doubtless have been played time, and time, and time again during the next election, is footage of him 'stepping up' to Howard and basically going eyeball to eyeball with him, big firm handshake and all.

Anyone saw that footage and didn't think 'thug' is fooling themselves. Howard just kind of patted Latham on the arm and asked if he was 'alright?' (leading me to think he's been bullied before). The contrast? Exuberant, aggressive youngster, and that mature, steady hand thingie again.

So will Beazley make it? I can't say just yet. We'll have to see how Labor falls into line, or if Beazley even gets picked to lead. There's still a chance Kevin Rudd could get lucky. But, someone wants to tell Julia Gillard that Aussies aren't ready for a female leader just yet, any more than Americans want Hillary to get to the White House.