Breaking the heart of the party

Obviously I’m biased, because of, you know, science, but I reckon Mr Turnbull is showing more leadership in this speech than Mr Howard did in his entire run as PM, if leadership is taken to include telling your people stuff they don’t want to hear.

Slammed

“Slammed as racist”?

If only.

I would have said it was more “cringed over” or “blushed at” than “slammed”, but that’s how the rhetoric of this sort of thing plays out.

The reaction to casual racism has to be exaggerated. That way, the X% of Australians who think it’s all good clean fun can feel wonderfully aggrieved and wounded as the PC thought police stomp all over their simple pleasures.

Wake in Fright

A vision of Hell where the demons are a bunch of blokes who all look exactly like my great-uncles. It made me feel a very peculiar mixture of nostalgia and dread, and is one of the few films I’ve seen which actually gave me a hangover. When I came out I wanted a beer and also never to touch a drop of alcohol again.

The role of kangaroos in the film is interesting. Nowadays we find the idea of shooting them much more abhorrent than eating them. I think it was the reverse in 1971.

Parallel import restrictions: convince me

I’d like to be able to join the chorus of outrage about the Productivity Commision’s report on copyright restrictions on parallel importation of books.

Actually, I don’t really want to, but I feel bad that I don’t, because all the people complaining about it are the people I think of as being on my side of the argument about most things. But the arguments against dropping the import restrictions seem to me to be very “we’ll all be rooned, said Hanrahan”, with a nasty dose of snobbery thrown in. (People sneering at supermarket novels, etc, but isn’t one of the supposed benefits of PIR that supermarket readers are cross-subsidising more worthwhile things, so where do you get off sneering at them.)

Since this seems to be an argumentative week around here anyway, convince me.

Some disclaimers/notes:

Several of my close friends and many of my acquaintances are published Australian authors. If you ask me, the current system has rewarded none of them anywhere near enough for their labours. Dropping parallel importation might make it worse, but I honestly would like to know how much worse it could get when being an author is very often de facto unpaid work anyway.

As far as I’m aware, the parallel importation restrictions have their origins in an attempt to protect British publishers, not Australian writers or readers. That the Australian publishing industry has gotten used to the protection they afford doesn’t necessarily make them a good way to subsidise the arts. And it’s also still subsidising British publishers, for no good reason that I can see.

Books have got steadily more expensive, out of line with inflation, over my lifetime: as a teenager I used to buy new books every week. As an adult, I buy new books for presents, and very occasionally buy them for myself. I earn quite a bit more money now than I did then. I don’t think a market where new books are luxury items is a sign of a healthy literary culture.

Parallel importation already exists: it’s called Amazon.

Base football players

Or, instead of the usual hand-wringing, talk-show-interviews, counselling-sessions, all the pretending that this sort of thing hasn’t been a part of the game’s culture since as long as anyone can remember, and then packing it all away until the next scandal, we could just, oh, say, not care about sport so much.

As a nation, I mean. Personally, I’ve been not caring about sport for decades now. It’s really quite liberating, and I recommend that you try it.

All just a utopian pipe dream, I know, but sometime in the next couple of days I’m pretty sure that one of my daughters is going to ask me what all the fuss on the telly is about, and I’m going to have to awkwardly explain it to her, and it’s nice to imagine a scenario where I don’t have to be bothered with that. It consoles me, somehow.

Next time you see a media report about Matthew Johns, or the next one, remember: none of this would be happening if no-one cared about league.

Showbag

This year I decided to avoid showbag envy so I took Grace’s Kit Kat bag off her hands after she changed her mind, only to find when I got home that more than half of the items were past their use-by dates. I suppose that’s one of the reasons showbags exist.  I feel a bit like someone who only just noticed that the apples used to make toffee apples are the low quality apples.

There were some attempts at adult showbags but they were all either dull or comically sad, like the FHM bag containing back issues of the magazine, beef jerky and an Easy Mac pasta meal. All of these were sponsored by magazines, which made me wonder if The Monthly should produce one.

3 x back issues of The Monthly
1 x back issue of Quarterly Essay
1 x Australia’s Best Political Essays 2008
1 x hair shirt
1 x poseable Robert Manne action figure, with fence
1 x lucky dip item – secondhand volume of poetry by either Les Murray or Clive James

On second thoughts, perhaps not.

The No Clean Feed scorecard

I don’t want Friday to become No Clean Feed day here, but did you see Q&A last night? It did not give me much hope that we are going to win this argument. I came in late, so I guess it’s possible that the first ten minutes were full of insightful commentary and mature debate, but the rest of the show had such a bad effect on my nerves that I don’t think I can steel myself to catch up with it on iView.

What depressed me was… Well, let’s imagine that the whole thing is a sort of game, and that the object of this game is to convince the wider Australian public that those of us opposed to mandatory ISP filtering are not just a bunch of creepy Internet riff-raff, hopelessly addled by vitamin D deficiencies and addictions to unspeakable foreign pornography.

We start the game – let’s be really generous – with 5 points. Scoring proceeds as follows.

Eccentric facial hair: -10 points

Use of glib references to 1984 or Big Brother: -10 points

Nerdy sarcasm: -25 points

Nerdy, sarcastic “satire” which only your supporters will understand: -50 points

Deface a government website: -100 points

Use of any net/gamer slang, in any context (‘pwned’, ‘EPIC FAIL’ etc): -75 points

Wear ANONYMOUS/V for Vendetta mask in any public forum: -75 points

Australia: censorship as usual

Applause (1930): sex, chorus girls

Frankenstein (1931): horror

When the Kellys Rode (1934): against the public interest

Ten Days That Shook the World (1936): communism

The Duke of Windsor Skis in Austria After the Abdication (1937): against the public interest

All Quiet on the Western Front (1939): pacifism

Love on the Dole (1941): realistic scenes of poverty

Indonesia Calling (1946): criticism of the Dutch

Violence (1948): violence

Children of the Wasteland (1953): criticism of treatment of Aborigines

Creature With the Atom Brain (1955): horror

The Werewolf (1956): horror

The Art of Rubens (1956): nudity

The Fly (1958): horror

The Fall of the House of Usher (1960): horror

Viridiana (1962): blasphemy

The Leather Boys (1963): homosexuality

Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1964): horror

Kitten With a Whip (1964): violence

Naked as Nature Intended (1965): sex

Hit the U.S. Aggressors (1965): propaganda

Ulysses (1967): sex

The Trip (1967): drugs, violence

Detail of a list of repressed films with official justifications, excepted from Geoffrey Dutton and Max Harris (eds), Australia’s Censorship Crisis, Sun Books, Melbourne, 1970.

Almost ten years ago I posted the foregoing to my old web-thing big tank (a blog avant la lettre, if you will) as a sort of comic tribute to Sen. Brian Harradine. The Dutton and Harris book was a fascinating eye-opener. I had not realised just how well-protected the Australian public had been from such discreditable foreign concepts as sex, chorus girls, pacifism, homosexuality and criticism of the Dutch; among the democracies, only Ireland came anywhere near us.

At the time, I assumed that the post-censorship Australia I had grown up in was a permanent state of affairs, but the Government’s Clean Feed plans have made me realise, with a kind of dawning horror, that I was wrong. For all our self-congratulation about how tops and democratic we are, such freedom of speech as we have in Australia is only about forty years old, and we are going to have to fight to maintain it.

One thing I’m certain of is that this is my generation’s fight. The boomers grew up under censorship and only a minority of them fought against it at the time. Somehow I doubt that they have grown less amenable to being censored with age.

Further info:
nocleanfeed
Background Briefing 15th March

Bushfires

ABC Melbourne’s list of links for donations.

Richard III

Shakespeare: the funny bits

I’m told that the STC’s production of  The War of the Roses didn’t quite make Richard’s seduction of Anne plausible, even with the distraction of girl-on-girl casting. It’s supposed to be one of the hardest scenes to get right in Shakespeare, but the following lines could be almost as tricky when played in front of an Australian audience of the right age:

1 Murd. How now, what mean’st thou that thou help’st me not?
By heavens, the Duke shall know how slack you have been!

At this point First Murderer has just stabbed Richard’s brother Clarence and drowned him in a barrel of Madeira, and he’s complaining to Second Murderer that he had to do all the work himself. How slack is that?