You can guess the suffering on the pond.
Inner city elites - commonly known as sophisticates - were dismayed and dismayed to see Julia Gillard in statesperson-like position with the NATO secretary general while the pair issued unctuous, statesperson-like, self-congratulatory, self-serving words about how swimmingly things were passing in Afghanistan, and how Australia and NATO want to get on in a key partnership.
You can learn more here in the shock horror story NATO eager to deepen Australian ties.
Already there's speculation amongst informed sources that the exposure might well cost Gillard and the Labour party several key inner city seats. Throw in the turn of Afghanistan routine, and all the snaps from that, and it's looking grim.
For more, we go to regular columnist Gerard Henderson in the Herald, with Alliance may not work well for Gillard.
Great pictures. But what almost the message? Indeed, indeed. Once again our prattling Polonius has hit the nail firmly with a hammer.
Oops, sorry, it seems we make our wires crossed.
Last week the Prime Minister announced the organization of her government's climate change committee with a joint Labor-Greens news conference.There was shoot and photographs of Julia Gillard with her colleagues Wayne Swan and Greg Combet and the Greens senators Bob Brown and Christine Milne.
Oh no. Actual live film and devastating photographs of Julia Gillard in accord with the vile humpbacked Greens. It sounds sickening. Horrify us some more:
In the Forerunner on Tuesday, a scene by Andrew Meares featured Gillard talking with the Greens leader close by. It is the variety of footage normally associated with a leader and deputy leader. But he is the leader of the political party intent on winning seats from the ALP in the lower house.Here's the tawdry snap, reminiscent in political terms, of a Bill Henson photo (we use the metaphor because inner city sophisticates will see it):
What a shameful sight. Of line if you have another view, one not compressed by a lens, and with other players included, you end up with the more banal network Ten story accompanying Phillip Coorey's Gillard ups the ante on carbon change:
Out of such gossamer threads a splendid weave can be woven:
In the average term, the winner of the Gillard-Brown images and Labor-Greens agreement will bet on interpretations in the electorate. Gillard's tactic will run for Labor if voters accept that she is leadership a minority government that is all about resolving key policy issues, such as climate change. But the tactic will die if it has the unintended effect of giving legitimacy to the Greens, especially if there is no ultimate negotiated agreement between the parties on climate change.
What an amazing concept. Political legitimacy for the Greens? Why you'd swear they werean actual functioning political party, with actual representation in the Union parliament, when we know that they're simply deviate deviants without a smidgen of credibility, demonic demons designed only to frighten the sheep into staying in the top paddock.
Henderson of flow is being profoundly Sontagian, or maybe even Godardian, as when Sontag recalls Godard's sluggish lumpen-peasants in Les Carabiniers, who instead of actual booty bring back from the war picture postcards of all kinds of treasures:
Godard's gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image. Photographs are possibly the most mysterious of all the objects that take up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of awareness in its acquisitive mood. To picture is to capture the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the public that feels like knowledge - and therefore, like power ...
Oops, don't recognize how we ended up land that existential alleyway.
Could it give something to do with the way Henderson uses one fragile image to get all agitated about the Green and the lot of the Labour party, and their office on the climate change committee?The committee will be meeting when Victoria and NSW go to the polls in November and March respectively. In these elections, the Greens have a substantial risk of winning lower house seats in inner-city Melbourne and Sydney, provided the Progressive Party puts the Greens ahead of Labour on its how-to-vote cards. This is how Adam Bandt recently won the butt of Melbourne from Labor. Andrew Wilkie, the old Green who is now a "little green" independent, also won the Hobart seat of Denison on Liberal Party preferences.
Uh huh. Shocking, terrifying, potentially catastrophic. Why and the NSW Labor party has governed NSW with such stunning success, and such concern for infrastructure, who could imagine anyone wanting to ballot for nearly any other party - including the Happy Birthday party - having a go at running the state.
Never mind, it takes real science to conflate federal and land issues, and roll the boogeyman flag that the frustration of the NSW government will get something to do with climate exchange and the Greens, as opposed to the simple awfulness of said government.
But of form the interesting matter in this alarmist fear mongering is the key 'if' - if the Progressive party puts the Greens ahead of Labor. Well surely that way if the two independent parties want to continue their cosy duopoly, they should preference each other. There, that'd make sense for the electorate. A ballot for Labour is a ballot for the Liberals, and a ballot for the Liberals is a handy vote for the Labour party. Anything but the Greens ...
But support to Polonius, now terribly anxious and befuddled:
It is perceivable why Gillard reached an understanding with independent MPs Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor to build a minority government - and she tried to do a trade with the independent Bob Katter. Yet the principle for the Labor-Greens deal was never obvious.
No, no, the thought of doing anything about climate change - to be seen to be really doing something, anything - with the Green in a place to cut the remainder of king in the Senate by the time any bill hits the upper house is beyond translucent. It's totally opaque, completely impenetrable, as is the impression that parliamentarians should sit down together and try to nut out an effective response. So much simpler and more cogent to follow the Dr. No line ...
As usual, it's the cardigan wearers that have muddied the waters and got it all wrong, not reason that there was never a question for a single minute that there'd be a minority Labor government:Sarah Ferguson's program "The Hand" on Four Corners last night demonstrated a certain naivety on the role of the bestower and her producer.Ferguson was convinced by the two independents that they made up their minds to keep Labor at the very last moment.
Indeed. What would the independents know about their actual state of brain? They were just pull the wool over the eyes of the hapless ABC, themselves and the nation all along. From the very beginning they were just lick spittle Marxist fellow travellers:
But Windsor was on tape as equating the Internal Party with a cancerous condition. And, as Claire Harvey reported in The Sunday Telegraph last weekend, Oakeshott formed the prospect a decade ago that the Nationals were imbued with racism.In sight of this, it is extremely improbable that either man would have backed a regime in which the Internal Party leader, Warren Truss, was the deputy prime minister.
Isn't hindsight a marvelous thing? The most useful variety of sight ...
Actually the cause was quite possibly simpler. Once the Liberals got the chair, and the polls swung their way, they'd have been off to the electorate, and prepare to do the poop on the independents. Or is that too Machiavellian?
Unlike Bandt and Wilkie, who won Labor seats, Oakeshott and Windsor had cause to maintain they were open-minded since they held conservative seats. Gillard could not give to have a risk with either. But she and her advisers did not want to comprehend what the Alliance has labeled the Labor-Greens alliance.
Uh huh. So you sit on a committee together and suddenly it's an alliance, signed, sealed and delivered. I think that way if you sit in parliament together you're also in an alliance ...
But you recognize there's something still missing, some magic element or potion. Sure the ABC cardigan wearers are to charge for a lot, along with the lick spittle independents, but with the nation almost evenly divided, in a nation of fine balance, we should be deliberate about underestimating or overstating anything:Some Labor operatives erred in underestimating Abbott and it would be unwise for the Progressive Party to underestimate Gillard's ability to revive Labor.
Yes, yes, it's a decisive time. Remind us once again who to charge for the Greens:
If the divide prevails, the following election will likely be distinct in the suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne, in the seats now held by Oakeshott and Windsor in northern NSW, on the NSW central coast and in northern Tasmania. This is where there is probably to be a greater concern about rising power bills than the Greens' climate change agenda, which is popular among the party's radical middle-class base of inner-city professionals, academics, public servants and superannuants.
Eek, it's the radical middle-class, rampant in their radicalism. The suits storming the battlements, with leather patches on their elbows, or possibly a nice chain of imitation pearls.
It's the elitist sophisticates, who yesterday were doing down sport, ruining Australia and chattering around the y'arts, and now demanding that Australians pay huge power bills to satisfy their idle whims about the environment. And not one of them owns a four wheel motor vehicle designed to tow the boat they don't own up the deal they don't go close by ...
Or is that only the familiar voice of bees buzzing around in the besotted bonnet of our chattering Polonius, a qualified member of the interior city elite professional class?To win again, Gillard needs to increase Labor's vote in the suburbs and regions. These are the parts of the Australia where the electorate is least impressed by photos of a Labor-Greens unity ticket.
Hang on, hang on. It's just the chattering sophisticated elites who bother to take the Herald. The remainder are glad with tabloids, like the Daily Terror and The Australian and the HUN. (we keed, The Australian just has the center of a tabloid) ...
No one else cares a toss, while the interior city elites know the blather about a Labor-Greens unity ticket is . well, to put it simply, blather ...
If the Labour party and the Green run a single ticket in the following state election in Marrickville, we'll be foremost to eat our hat - tomato sauce allowed - if the prattling Polonius is right about a single photo - in fine Sontagian fashion - representing a single ticket ...
Because the way Henderson's set it up, it's a lose lose scenario. Labor loses the inner suburban seats because of an alliance - an alliance which exists in the idea of Tony Abbott and Polonius - or it loses the outer metropolitan seats because of an alliance carefully sold as a pup to the punters, or hopefully the electorate turns on the lickspittle treacherous independents because they were socialists and Dr No haters all along.
Whichever way you turn, it's all about how Dr. No might get to power ...
Meanwhile, might it not be best for the Labour government to enroll into discussions with both Green and independents to structure a policy response to climate change that might include taking the first tentative steps towards re-structuring the Australian economy towards more efficient energy use?
You know, an actual policy, actually implemented. Instead of getting spooked by photos and pundits who appear to suppose that Dr. No is the sole way forward?
Yep, a long weekend away, and already we're binding on the pond listening to the pundits berate the ABC and the interior city sophisticated elites ...
Same as it always was. If only they'd bugger off to Kellyville, and make up their elite inner city professional chattering columnist ways ...
(Below: and now a trick for film buffs, with the opening title from Les Carabiniers, and samples of the postcards seized by the two soldiers as war booty, and inner city nonsense about death looking like sleep or a Greens Labor unity ticket alliance). 
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