The Best Australian Humorous Writing (7 page)

As intended, it drew the television cameras, with their inevitable following of supporters and opponents. What had been a solo performance turned into a daily spectacular with full-on audience participation.

Naturally the log-rollers and satirists seized their opportunity, and we had a few weeks of theatre of the absurd before the arena was swamped by full-blown loonies and exhibitionists. By the end, the walk had become wholesale theatre of cruelty—a bit like the entire election campaign, really.

John Howard was not the only player strutting and fretting his hour upon the stage: he had an all-singing, all-dancing supporting cast, with a generous sprinkling of stuntmen and clowns. But essentially it was all about him, and his increasingly farcical attempts to elevate what turned out to be a pretty mundane sitcom into something approaching high drama.

In hindsight, the tragicomic denouement was obvious from the time the polls settled in favour of our hero's unlikely antagonist,
a fresh-faced man with a plan. It was not so much that Kevin07 became an object of love and affection as that he was just something different. Without noticing, Howard had passed his use-by date, and there was nothing he or anyone else could do about it. But, being Howard, he refused to accept it; he might be mired in the merde, but he remained undeterred.

He had been written off before, but sooner or later the mob had been bribed or frightened back to their senses. Surely the tactics that had worked in the past could be made to work again. So, in the manner of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig in World War I, Howard spent the year hurling his (or, rather, the taxpayers') resources into the fray, regardless of cost, in increasingly frantic and always futile efforts to break the enemy line as measured in the opinion polls.

Send forward a revolutionary water plan. Cost: $10bn. Gains: Nil. Enlist a new education foundation. Cost: $5bn. Gains: Nil. Mobilise the troops to take over Aboriginal settlements. Cost: $10bn. Gains: Nil. Hit them with the big one: hitherto irresistible tax cuts. Cost: $34bn. Gains: Nil. Finally, call up the reserves: the great launch offensive. Cost: $10bn. Gains: Nil. And all the while keep up the advertising barrage in an unrelenting assault on the public purse. Cost: $1m per day. Gains: Well, you've got the picture.

The whole campaign cost (or would have, if the bills had ever come in) something more than $65bn. It was not totally wasted: over 12 months, the Liberal vote revived by just over two percentage points. This meant the party managed to avoid annihilation; they saved sufficient territory to regroup for another try in three years. But it need hardly be said they comprehensively lost the war.

The madness of it (in the clinical sense) was that, although from time to time Howard talked about changing his tactics, he never actually did; he and his demoralised army just went on pushing against the door clearly marked pull. The themes were unchanged:
WorkChoices good, unions bad, you can trust me, you can't trust him. Second verse, same as the first, a little bit louder and a little bit worse.

What do you mean the mob's stopped listening? They have to listen. It's their job to listen. They must be joking with us. Or perhaps they've gone off to live in an alternate universe for a while and will come back to Earth on voting day. Be reassured by our friends in the media, who say the polls defy reality, they can't be happening. I mean, Professor Paul Kelly says political reality is inside the beltway and people have moved outside it, whatever a beltway might be. That must mean something. Well, doesn't it?

This chronic refusal to accept the facts led to some wonderful instances of paranoia, one of whose victims was the Channel 9 worm. Howard had always loathed this innocent invertebrate, and its appearance, against his express wishes, sent him into paroxysms of horror. Unfortunately, the feeling appeared mutual: at his every statement, the worm retreated to the depths, while the mere sight of Rudd caused it to leap like a gazelle on steroids.

Rudd was so pleased with the worm's performance that, campaigning at a school the next day, and asked to paint an elephant, he elected to paint a worm instead. The young girl wanted to call it Samara; Rudd christened it Ted.

The ever-alert Tony Abbott deduced that the worm was clearly fixed: it was an anarchist annelid, a new left nematode, a filthy socialist crawler. But of course it wasn't; it was just another opinion poll, albeit a more immediate and graphic one. Once again, the Liberals declined to emerge from their state of denial.

There were flashes of insight: shortly before announcing the election date, Howard blinked his way out of his fantasy world just long enough to ask his colleagues if, just possibly, he might be a teensy-weensy part of the problem and they would prefer him to piss off. Obviously he expected a raucous rejection of such an absurd proposition.

When his loyal envoy Alexander Downer replied timidly that actually, while they all loved and admired him, truly they did, there was just a kind of a sort of a feeling that it might be better if he stood down, he went off to consult his family, or at least the bit of it that talks. Janette apparently advised that she was not going to leave Kirribilli House one second before she was forced to, and that was that.

Howard then embraced the worst of both worlds by saying he would hand the leadership, which he clearly believed was his own private property, to Peter Costello in 18 months or thereabouts. He also said he and Costello would campaign as a double act, but of course they didn't. Howard continued down his own doomed path while Costello did things like attending a children's teddy bears picnic and explaining to a five-year-old that God created cacti.

Eventually, maddened by relevance deprivation, he came out screaming that Australia was faced by an economic tsunami. Howard said it would only be a little tsunami and he could save us. Costello was taken away and sedated and soon afterwards Howard started talking about himself in the third person. Mark Vaile skateboarded down a footpath in Tweed Heads with a baseball cap on backwards and Tony Abbott abused a dying Australian folk hero. Malcolm Turnbull whined to his colleagues in obscene terms about Howard's refusal to sign Kyoto and was accused of leaking the story for personal advancement.

Finally, Howard and Costello did appear together on a commercial television chat show, where they were invited to say nice things about each other. Howard said Costello was clever and funny (implication: Howard wasn't) and Costello said Howard was a hard worker (undoubted fact: Costello wasn't).

Meanwhile, Rudd marched steadily forward from one FM radio station to another, being asked about the colour of his underpants by people with names like Miffy and Daffy and Cobber and Rowf. Having secured the post-adolescent vote when an old
home video showing him eating his own earwax was revived and became a bigger hit than
The Lord of the Rings
, he dived into the nearest telephone booth and re-emerged as Super Scrooge, a crusty old skinflint who could be trusted not to spend your savings—on political advertising, anyway.

Julia Gillard, portrayed by the government as Rudd's own Madame Defarge, became—at least for the duration of the campaign—more like Ben Bolt's Alice, the most dutiful and meek of helpmeets. The only break in the calm was when Peter Garrett lurched phallically into the picture and had to be treated with cold showers and bromide.

Rudd still found time to shadow most of Howard's promises and movements: in one memorable hour, both leaders managed to molest the same long-suffering infant in the same shopping centre. Howard accused Rudd of too much Me-Too; Rudd replied that this was just another scare campaign, and proved he was very different by unveiling a visionary policy whereby Western Australians could use their profit from the mining boom to set up as entrepreneurs and sell land in Latin America to wealthy Chinese. When Howard's best reply was a grant of $500,000 to Indonesian orang-utans, his defeat was inevitable.

Rudd won in a landslide—a conservative landslide, as it turned out—but he had always said he was a conservative. Or some of the time, anyway. And Howard went off on his morning-after walk. Even when it was all over for him, he couldn't break the habit of a lifetime.

FRANK DEVINE

The British journalist and author William Shawcross once described me in a book as a “cheerful right-winger”. Though welcoming the portrayal, it left me with a Zen puzzle: was I cheerful because I was a right-winger or a right-winger because I was cheerful?

The fact that I am cheerful following the election of a Labor government favours the second option, I think.

It goes without saying that we right-wingers require no government support to stay aloft. We are cultural knights rather than political infantry. The lavish skewerings and tramplings of political correctness we enjoyed during the Howard years have left us pretty jaunty.

Our spirits are further elevated by Kevin Rudd moving so close to us culturally, in order to win an election, that there is some talk of clearing a place for him at the Round Table.

In
The Daily Telegraph
in Sydney, our brother Tim Blair caused a small frisson by pointing to the pleasure that awaits us from being able to blame everything on Rudd.

However, there is no prospect of our festering with Rudd-hatred in the way that the sauvignon blanc sippers (chardonnay has become a bit déclassé) of the Left pumped themselves up and made themselves miserable by hating John Howard for a dozen years.

Self-evidently, the less we have to blame Rudd for, the more agreeable our lives will be. However, we'll probably get a kick from watching some natural enemies suffer in the grip of
scheissenbedauern
, a German word that means distress at seeing things turn out well.

Radical Greens have panicked at the prospect of their dreams of post-Howard life going wavery. On the day he was appointed Environment and Arts Minister, they called for the dismissal of the quasi-Quisling Peter Garrett.

Not only had he been ideologically quiescent during the campaign but he had climate change and water supply taken away from him and placed with a new ministry briefed for serious action.

As well, the second arm of Garrett's portfolio might be interpreted as a cruel hint from the Prime Minister that defending frog habitats, overgrown eucalypt forests and weeds from attack by dams, desalination plants, farmers, mines, airports and highways is less a noble cause than a tributary of showbusiness.

While unproductive, Rudd's signing of the Kyoto agreement will cause a severe depletion of the Greens' whingeing resources and devastate their self-righteous posturing.

We haven't heard from the neo-Rousseauians yet but their pain will be a treat to observe when they wake up to the extent of their disarmament by Rudd's apologising to Aborigines for past injustices.

We of the cheerful class are most pleased by the unhurried way the Prime Minister is approaching the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, in planned consultation with the US. This is, indeed, a matter calling for prudence. It's one thing to remove fighting men from a losing campaign, another to have them scurry away from an onerously won prospect of success.

Many people may wonder where the war in Iraq has gone, since there has been hardly any media coverage or pundit commentary over the past two or three months. Perhaps coincidentally, this
period has seen a significant turnaround of the conflict in favour of our side.

Industrious prowling through cyberspace delivers reliable accounts of the reinforced American military (and their 550 Australian comrades) routing al-Qa'ida in Mesopotamia and damaging and frustrating home-grown militias sufficiently to turn local populations against them. Violence has been notably reduced in Baghdad. Iraqis who fled their country are starting to return, a reported 46,000 in October alone.

The New York Times
, the most ferocious of anti-Bush, antiwar campaigners, has largely let the war slide from its front page, after it dominated for five years. In compensation,
Times
commentary has dwelt, until a month or so ago, on political progress not following military success.

However, Shia and Sunni appear to be seeking accommodation. The Iraqi government is rehiring relatively large numbers of Sunnis who were ejected from public service jobs after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Though parliament has not yet passed a law specifying a system for distributing oil revenues among the provinces, the government is fairly equitably handing over the money.

Of profound strategic significance is the government's reportedly favourable attitude to permanent US bases in Iraq.

With a dainty turn of phrase,
The New York Times
notes that US presidential candidates are seeking “tonal adjustments” of their Iraq positions. After wavering for a long time, Hillary Clinton declared herself anti-war when the Democrats won a congressional majority a year ago. The latest Rasmussen poll shows her trailing leading Republican candidate and war supporter Rudy Giuliani.

With the schadenfreude prospect of watching some awkward clearing of the throat by our own proclaimers of American humiliation in the morass of Iraq, it's no wonder I'm cheerful.

MARIEKE HARDY

“I would like to keep our place like it is and I guess (joining the) Liberals would be natural.” This was the important announcement this week from a colourful and in no way unhinged Sydney resident, Kate McCulloch of Camden, after she had successfully prodded at her local council to reject a proposed building site for an Islamic school.

This, of course, was after she'd appeared on television wearing an oversized Akubra hat that had Australian flag postcards stapled to it like a misguidedly patriotic entrant in a primary school parade, blithely referred to our general Muslim population as “the ones that come here”, and then rounded off by declaring that famous colonials John and Elizabeth Macarthur would no doubt be on Team McCulloch were they a) alive and b) remotely concerned with local education-based planning issues. She certainly couldn't be accused of being dull.