Catching a Melbourne tram, our vaguely socially aware hosts advised us, is approximately equivalent to contracting a pane of the bubonic plague, or perhaps pulling on a couple of extremely smelling socks.
Unreliable, uncomfortable, slow, dysfunctional, hopeless, and a dreadful way to give the centre of the metropolis in research of a drinking session. Almost better to get caught drunk driving and lose the license.
End result? Catch tram and come on time, feeling vaguely European, and with an early love of trams revived. It wasn't a W-class tram, but it still throbbed and pulsed its way on the track ...
But the conversation with the hosts stuck in the mind, as they explained how a knight and cart might be a best way to travel, or a train, or certainly a taxi, or just cause and open up the drinking ...
Does this explain why the W-class tram is now lost to go the way of the dodo? So that Melbourne can reach the point of public transport achieved by superficial Sydney? So it seems, as This city has class, W-class, so let's keep it explains how the Victorian government is running towards removing an actual genuine tourist pleasure, on the ground that it should be plucked, stuffed and mounted in a glass case in a request for modernism.
Returned to superficial Sydney to find broadband is off. While unplugged, rather than do an MTV album, read actual newspapers acquired in Qantas lounge, as percentage of an abundance designed to sustain illusory circulation figures. Seems like they can't throw off enough Weekend Australians to innocent punters, and so the couch is good of dumped newsprint, like a pulp mill in process ...
That's when I say that Smart meters look dumb for users, and see that connectivity isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Could such a dumb implementation of "wired" electricity be a foretaste of the "wired" NBN?
Not so, says Mark Day, who turns up with Let's concentrate on the big show of the National Broadband Network.
Fall down in a dead faint. Cunning Murdoch journalist quotes Rupert Murdoch in favor of real broadband, and so suggests the NBN will have real connectivity.
The NBN, as a government initiative, will get the job done much more quickly, to the gain of a far greater number. Some critics decry this as a counter to socialism, but I say building infrastructure to rise and benefit everyone is the job of governments. Astonished readers, fed The Australian kool aid for so long, react angrily, remembering that spotting a Melbourne tram is roughly akin to Stalin's first five year plan, and that the NBN is likely to raise as useless as the telephone.
Still unplugged, so picking up a local rag, in the promise of discovering an even keel, a balanced way to recall to the pond.
Sure enough, Paul Sheehan obliges with Our army is at war ended the pursuance of commandos.
Within the text, dedicated to considering a military system devised by the Howard government, and run by a Howard appointee, Sheehan offers up this disclaimer:
Nothing in this column should be taken as a criticism, overt or implied, of Brigadier McDade. She, not I, has seen all the grounds from the incidental in Afghanistan, and is a lawyer of long standing, and has spent 23 years in the military and military reserve. I do not question her mind or credentials. Sheehan then spends the remainder of the column questioning her mind and her credentials. Did you know, for instance, that she was a fan of the Taliban loving David Hicks?
Well it's one thing to give an impression on Brigadier McDade, but it's surely another to have a spiteful malicious column full of judgments, questions, and criticisms, overt and implied, while at the same time washing hands Pontius Pilate style, and expression that all these criticisms and judgments are naught to do with me.
As usual, for specious meretricious duplicitous humbug and breath-taking double talk, Sheehan takes the cake. Pontius Pilate would doff his lid to a true master of the art of complete and rank hypocrisy.
Phew, back on the pool at last, and all's well, as loons everywhere turn out to be squawking in the Sheehan style about the military justice system and/or the Murray Darling. The parrots alway wheel through the sky in unison ...
So what does Tuesday bring us? Can everything be second to well ordered squawking as connectivity reigns supreme, and ill advised nostalgic outings on despicable trams are forgotten?
Yes, indeed, as our very own prattling Polonius, Gerard Henderson, reminds us that Sheehan isn't only in his capability for double think hypocrisy. Out of touch bureaucrats fail to cross the river, Henderson shrieks - if a plodding Polonius can be said to shriek - and delivers up a moral that will be companion to all that fall asleep reading his dismal, dull, eminently predictable thoughts.
Scribbling about the late fall out in congress to the Murray Darling, the consequence of a Howard government -established authority carrying out the brief instituted in the Water Act 2007 (Murray-Darling Basin Authority), Henderson concludes:
It was the classic disconnect between the inner-city, well-educated professional with a good job and guaranteed superannuation and the less-educated small business operator or employee in the regional centres or outer suburbs.
Uh huh.
Yet somehow Henderson, an interior city well educated professional running a well established institute which presumably offers guaranteed superannuation, can get the classic connect?
Naturally the ABC is involved, and so Henderson smotes mightily at Deborah Cameron making a few off the cuff remarks. One hopes that Henderson uses a media monitoring service for this kind of information. The disclosure that he might listen to Cameron for his morning entertainment is too often to stand, though it certainly would explain why he sometimes sounds like one of the dimmer bulbs in the commentariat pack.
The growing disparity in Australia is not so often between productive and miserable but between the well-educated in secure employment and the less educated in small business and uncertain employment or on pensions. Any exchange which does not return this section into account is lost for political failure. You know, only person in the bag of a classic disconnect between the interior city, well educated professional class, with a good job and guaranteed superannuation, could swear that the growing disparity in Australia is not between the deep and the poor, but between the well educated and the less well educated.
Because of track the major item that the educational gap produces is a disparity in income. Show me the less well educated person who cares more about their failure to understand Shakespeare than about having some more cash in the paw.
On the other hand, it's quite comfortable to show that there's been a 30 year course of rising inequality between the deep and the short in Australia (Gap widens for mega rich). Could it be that the gap in education leads to a conflict between incomes, which in turn leads to a growing disparity between comfort levels and well paid jobs, versus discomfort levels and poorly paid work?
But of line if you go down that path, you might start wondering why well paid members of the chattering commentariat get paid well to run handsome private institutes.
The indolent ways of the chattering inner urban elite represented by Henderson aside, there's no question that the Murray-Darling Authority has been miserable in the way it developed its findings, and still worse in the way it implemented its series of public consultations.
But to charge it all on well paid bureaucrats suffering a disconnect says more about Henderson than it does about reality. Because the Office was ever on a hiding to nothing, as has anybody who's ever proposed to do anything around the Murray in the last 40 years.
The validation of that pudding? The way keen 'save the Murray' folk like Mike Rann and Nick Xenophon have suddenly gone to water, so to speak, when confronted by the sizing of proposed cuts for the South Australian side.
Rann says basin guide is unfair, which I think in Henderson speak, means that suddenly Rann and Xenophon have become at one with the butchers and bakers and candestick makers, and abandoned their secure superannuated jobs as they whine and groan about the Authority getting it incorrectly and being unjust to dem poor cousin croweaters, and how bad behaviour only exists in the greedy and inefficient upstream states (translation: it's those durn furriner easterners up to their dirty tricks again).
Henderson of feed is keenly aware that he might be bearing down a socialist path when he starts talking around the poor, and the accuracy and judge of their thinking, juxtaposed with the well off.
After all, taking their position against the rich might indicate revolutionary tendencies.
Yet he always wants to translate the earth as being in a land of a certain form of class warfare:
The disconnect between those who backed the guide's thesis and those who might have its recommendations was dramatic. The supporters were public servants along with the likes of Professor Richard Kingsford - academics who exercise at publicly funded universities. Support was too evident among journalists who have rarely worked outside the public broadcasters or big media companies. Uh huh. I reckon that's a nice, safe tea party form of class warfare, because it's all the usual suspects, academics at public universities, public broadcasters (or a grudging note about big media companies), and inner city sophisticated elites.
The extent of the silliness this form of myopic thinking can make is shown in Henderson's attempt to juxtapose reactions to the proposed Footscray tunnel in Melbourne - as if all opposition to it is forthcoming from fashionable Yarraville, while Footscray residents would be gung ho for it, unless prodded to the opposite by condescending Greens candidates.
Apparently Footscray residents understand what their material interests are - which is to take a tollway built below the suburb, with the most significant surface impacts taking office in parts of West Footscray, Tottenham and Sunshine West.
It takes the most inane and ill-informed peddler of class conflict to suppose that resistance to the burrow is somehow the process of deviant Yarraville ponces, and that decent Footscray folk are all in favor of the Brumby vision.
The problem with attributing NIMBY positions on NIMBY issues to a variety of inner urban class divide is that follow the revolution, the chattering Polonius would be the amongst the start of the dissemblers to be swept away.
Second thoughts, vive la revolution.
It'll save us a lot of nonsense about how educated well paid members of chattering class inner city elites like Henderson are at one with irrigators on the Murray ...
(Below: Tony Abbott, Barnaby Joyce, and the usual ill informed disconnected political elite wandering in the Coorong, and offer up threats, as in Tony Abbott threatens to hold referendum on Murray-Darling if states fail on water reforms. But that was in August, and the past, they say, is a different country, especially if you're working a tidily funded inner city elitist lobbying institute).
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