Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

. Someone has to die for their beliefs to be a martyr . Drudge pointed to headlines last Friday saying that Jackson's was a " Death by Showbusines s". So in the sense that Jackson seems to have died for his belief in celebrity, yes, he might be called a martyr. I never got Michael Jackson. Thriller didn't thrill me at all ( Now Noel Coward, that's another story ). But I did get a bit of a kick from seeing others get him. He was boppy and catchy and slick, as well as monumentally fluffy and hugely impaired. What I struggle with is the apparently massive consequentiality of fluffiness and impairment like Jackson's. What is the fuss about the passing of a semi-talented song and dance weirdo from decades past? Boris Johnson, the London Mayor, has had a stab at explaining it to we mystified souls who struggle to get with the programme. He reckons it's just like Princess Di. And I agree, to the extent that I was almost as unprepared for and dumbfounded by th...

I thought I was confused about Utegate and then I saw this: This apparently is Godwin Grech's home in Calwell, South Canberra. The one the Federal police raided on Monday and that Godwin holed himself up in over the weekend. He is a single, mid-forties, senior public servant who has lived alone in this house for about a decade. That prominent, upright, emblematic thingy thrusting itself at us in the foreground is described in the Daily Telegraph, whence the picture came, as a "palm tree". Although it obscures our perspective of his mock Spanish home, it might not be entirely frivolous to suggest that it could be more telling of Godwin, than his home. Certainly after seeing this for me the whole Utegate affair suddenly took on yet another unexpected and disturbing dimension: thwarted love and revenge gone wrong. The anguish we saw in Godwin's Senate testimony now can be interpreted through the lens of the torn heart of a smart but desperately lonely man being found out...

Holy utegate Batman ! What happened there ? Friday 19 June was a fascinating day in politics. We were introduced to Godwin Grech at a Senate inquiry. He seemed a mild mannered Treasury official in anguish over testimony that contradicted the Prime Minister. Monday 22 June was gobsmacking . The Federal Police raided Godwin's home in the mornin g. Found evidence on a home computer that the alleged damaging email from the Prime Minister's department to Godwin at Treasury had been concocted inside Treasury. By mid-afternoon the Feds had announced their findings to the world. And thereby exculpated the Prime Minister from the Opposition's assault on his credibility. Malcolm Turnbull's case against the PM for misleading Parliament collapsed. With a hiss. Other than a gloating and more than usually sanctimonious Prime Minister, the big winner is going to be Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan. His goose was all but cooked by the actual emails tabled before the Senate inquiry o...

The opportunity to upgrade the Treasurer may be passing. An interesting day in Parliament on Friday. In a Senate inquiry today a Treasury official admitted under questioning that offiicials administering the government's OzCar scheme were asked by members of the PM's office to look after a mate of the PMs. Nothing too egregiously scandalous about that, even if it does smack of ethical dodginess, but that's not the real issue. It's Rudd's sanctimony. The real problem is that the Kevin stood up at the despatch box last week and loudly proclaimed that neither he nor his department had ever made any representations to Treasury on behalf of this chap. On its face it looks like Kev has lied to Parliament, since that not what Mr Grech, a treasury official, has said under oath. By the accepted standards of Parliament recently affirmed by Kev in his dealing with Joel, Kev should now resign. That won't happen of course. There's this massive distraction campaign on poi...

. Persians have seen their Iraqi and Lebanese neighbours get democracy. Now they want it too. So who has dared to point out the elephant in the room about the current upheaval in Iran over its disputed election result ? Of all people its, Thomas Friedman in, of all places, the New York Times. Here's what he let slip: "... for real politics to happen you need space. There are a million things to hate about President Bush’s costly and wrenching wars. But the fact is, in ousting Saddam in Iraq in 2003 and mobilizing the U.N. to push Syria out of Lebanon in 2005, he opened space for real democratic politics that had not existed in Iraq or Lebanon for decades. “ Bush had a simple idea, that the Arabs could be democratic, and at that particular moment simple ideas were what was needed , even if he was disingenuous,” said Michael Young, the opinion editor of The Beirut Daily Star. “It was bolstered by the presence of a U.S. Army in the center of the Middle East. It created a sense t...

No, this not more commentary on Joel's barely veiled accusation that his own Defence Department plotted his undoing. At " Read More" below is my review of a recent book by David Kilcullen on counter-insurgency warfare: The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the midst of a Big One . I recommend it highly to students of geo-politics and strategy. It's challenging, but does repay the effort. The Accidental Guerrilla : Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One By David Kilcullen Lt Col David Kilcullen, apparently rose to fame in the US whilst serving in the Australian Army, when his article “Twenty-Eight Articles: fundamentals of company-level counterinsurgency”, was published in the Military Review and read by General David Petraeus. Petraeus was so impressed he sent it by email to his officers in the US Army. Kilcullen was subsequently recruited by the General to serve with him in Iraq, helping implement the successful “Surge” strategy based around some of...

Just off the top of my head, in his short time in this senior Ministerial role this belligerent and unrepentant, but clearly politically well placed Hunter valley unionist, has: failed to get the US to sell us any F22 Raptors notwithstanding his idle boasting that he could when opportunistically simply aping some spectacularly ill informed, politically motivated and superficial views of the ABC's 4Corners programme, about the capabilities of FA18 Superhornets that had been ordered by the Coalition before the last election; inadverantly been caught by counter-intelligence spooks whilst Minister of Defence sleeping with a Chinese government sponsored business women ( his "very close family friend") ; failed to disclose gifts to him from Chinese nationals, including paid visits to military shows in China with his father (from whom he inherited his seat in parliament) ; obfuscated the future funding of proposed new Labor Defence projects so completely that defence industry...

Warning: The current state of the UK is where feel good populist politics built on "clever" media management , rather than "good" policy, takes a nation. Brown looks like he will imminently be just a short skidmark on the surface of the body politic of Britain: a Prime Minister who not only never had an electoral mandate, but who never even led his party into an election at all. After 12 years of New Labour cleverness, Britain is a complete mess economically and culturally . Character matters. If politics becomes only about winning by appeasing the noisest special interest pleaders and serviceing the appetites of the parasites on power, the body politic loses. Leadership really is about taking tough decisions in the nation's interest. If courage becomes a dirty word in politics then the nation those politics serve becomes cowardly. What chance the opinion leaders who will get published in the mainstream Australian and US media will even acknowledge this saluto...