Heat by Rob O’Neill

You know how sometimes you are watching sports and a team thinks they’ve got a big enough lead that they can just play safe and see the game out for a win? I think the All Blacks have done that a few times but it’s even more common in soccer: pack the defence and let them attack.

That seems to be the way John Howard is planning to handle Mark Latham. The only problem is that in soccer at least the strategy never seems to work. Teams try and close the game down, but more often than not they pay with defeat.

And it’s not like Howard has much of a lead any more. Some polls are already putting Latham in front.

Last night the government announced it would dismantle the extraordinarily generous super scheme that applies to MPs after Latham attacked it a few days ago. Why? According to Howard so that it doesn’t become a “political football”. Read that: “To get it off the table before the election."

What really happened? Well, Latham has just scored a big win, despite losing God knows how many thousands out of his own retirement income. He has an uncanny knack of finding stuff out of nowhere that really hurts the government.

Another example? Tonight I saw Darryl Williams speak at the Australian Internet Industry Association AGM dinner. Williams, as minister of technology, telecommunications and the arts is what you might call a safe pair of hands. Some say he’s a bit of a nightwatchman, aiming to keep Labor’s quicks under control and his stumps intact for the election. Since he took over from ABC-basher Richard Alston last year Williams has been totally invisible and unavailable for interviews.

His speech, to a crowd of 400 or so, was notable for the fact that those 400 seemed to carry on as if he wasn’t there. The hubbub of conversation continued all the way through despite the odd “Ssshhhh!” from a young Liberal here and there.

It was very different when Oz magazine founder and self-styled stirrer Richard Neville spoke. His was an electrifying appearance covering the internet, Iraq, the military industrial complex and the sorry state of most modern mass media. I asked permission to reproduce his speech here as one of our guest speakers and Neville agreed, so with a bit of luck you’ll see that in the next few days.

Anyway, the government’s strategy seems to be to neutralize issues and keep the lid on any volatile sectors in the lead-up to the election. Their strategy is to bore their way back to power. It looks like a loser to me.

Okay so what about that free trade deal, huh?

Well, I’m not too big to admit I was wrong. Australia is about to embark on a new era of free trade with the US while New Zealand contracts a bad case of the Argentinian disease and withers into the third world.

Australia minus the sugar industry, that is. But sugar is pretty third-world anyway. Right? Florida, the federal election lynchpin, is a sugar state, you see, so you can’t really have free trade in sugar. Oh and the beef farmers are going to have to wait eighteen years before quotas are dropped. In the meantime they have gained .17% of total US beef production.

Apart from that it’s a really great deal, ushering in a new era of trade etc and establishing a shining precedents for the future. Did I mention the dairy farmers? Oh. The dairy farmers will partake of this new era in trade too. But tariffs will remain and so will quotas, though these will be increased

However, Aussie companies will now have access to the $US80 billion Federal procurement market. How about that! Okay, so apparently 80 other countries already have that status. So what? What’s your point?

I guess in the end the devil is in the detail and we will just have to wait for the release of the final 500-page document. In the meantime, though, you might want to ask yourselves why it takes 500 pages to announce the arrival of free trade.

Just a thought.

John Howard thinks George Bush and Tony Blair should get the Nobel Peace Prize. And why not? The terrorist Yasser Arafat won one. War criminal Henry Kissinger won one. Adolf Hitler was nominated in 1938. Hell, I might go nominate Saddam!

Even more appropriately, Theodore Roosevelt, the man who by subterfuge and on extremely dodgy grounds took the US to war against Spain in 1898, also won one. That was the war that secured Guantanamo Bay for the US, to the great and ongoing humiliation of the Cuban people.

Teddy knew it would come in useful one day...

To deflect suggestions of imperialism, the US passed legislation to ensure it could not annex Cuba. The large black population of the island also made this course unpalatable. Under annexation these blacks could become US citizens. With that option closed, the US had to address the vexed problem of delivering independence.

The war was ostensibly waged in support of Cuban freedom, but with the Spanish evicted the US set about imposing humiliating limitations on the new country's independence. J.A. Sierra reports:

“The United States conditioned its approval of the constitution on the acceptance of a series of clauses that would preserve its upper hand in future dealings with 'independent' Cuba."

These “represented a permanent restriction upon Cuban self-determination. Cuba’s constituent assembly modified the [US] terms … and presented [these] to the United States only to be turned down. The United States-imposed amendment was a tremendous humiliation to all Cubans, whose political life would be plagued by continual debates over the issue until its repeal in 1934. On June 12, 1901, Cuba ratified the amendment as a permanent addendum to the Cuban constitution of 1901 and the only alternative to permanent military occupation by the United States.”

Such is the way of US imperialism; all substance, minimal appearance.

And here's a little known fact: the Castro government receives a rent cheque each year of about $US4,000 for Guantanamo Bay. It doesn’t cash them.

That reminds me; we may as well nominate Castro for a Nobel prize as well.

Meanwhile in Iraq there are strange goings on in Samarra. And we’ve found the source of those rogue WMDs: Looks like Iraq wasn’t the great nucular proliferation threat at all – it was Pakistan, with shipments continuing right up until late 2003.

As to Hutton, the wonderful Spectator can say it much better than I:

"Saddam turned out not to have … stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and certainly no capacity to launch them ‘within 45 minutes’. These errors would have emerged anyway, in the course of the defeat of Saddam. What would never have emerged, had it not been for one enterprising reporter, was a series of other amazing facts about the production of this influential dossier…"

Ciao.

It’s Australia Day over here and the whole place has gone spastic with patriotism. We’re reaching the sharp end of the Aussie Open, Australia is taking on Zimababwe in a one-day match, the ferries are racing each-other on the harbour and everyone has little stick-on Aussie flags on their shoulders or any other exposed flesh, of which there is much to choose from.

Australia Day weekend is a big deal and at the heart of it lies conspicuous displays of relaxation. How you relax is very important. It helps to define who you are; cracking a few beers with your mates at your local, hosting an Open barbecue, dining out on the waterfront. Whatever. In Australia you can spare no effort when it comes to doing nothing.

The day has not been without its upsets, though. The lead story in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning is that Aussie’s free trade deal with the US is on the rocks. If one does get signed, according to a US trade magazine, it will redefine the word “minimum”.

No doubt this sorry state of affairs is US payback for Australia's lack of support during the Iraq war, for John Howard’s continuous “unhelpful comments”, and in ongoing objection to Australia’s ridiculous anti-nuclear policy.

Whoops, that’s why New Zealand didn’t get a free trade deal, isn’t it? Sorry. I got confused there for a minute.

But you don’t go to war to stitch up a free trade deal. Of course not. Australia went to war in response to the imminent threat posed by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. And while Aussie did its duty, Helen Clark ignored the mountain of evidence, buried her head in the sand and New Zealand shirked its international responsibilities.

You kiwis should hang your heads in shame.

Even while the issues are totally unrelated, next time there's a war we should remember to get the US to sign a free trade deal before we decide whether to support them or not.

Anyway, I for one am really looking forward to George Bush's next speech on trade issues. It'll be a scream.

For me the barbecue was yesterday followed by a net session with a couple of mates. Boys in the park, the sound of leather on willow, a bag full of beer, womenfolk pretending to be interested on the sideline. One of these, just off the boat from the UK, commented how every second conversation is about cricket and the rest are about real estate prices.

Australia Day commemorates the arrival of the first fleet, a rag-tag convoy of 11 ships that carried 759 convicts to Botany Bay in 1788. They didn’t like the look of it so they relocated to Port Jackson and founded what would become the City of Sydney. As columnist Ann McGrath points out today, where America commemorates the arrival of the austere puritans, the landing at port Jackson set a certain tone for Australia’s future when Captain Arthur Phillip ordered extra rations of rum and everyone got slaughtered.

Not a bad founding story at all, really. Anyway, I've got patriotic duties to attend to - it's time for a coldie.

If you haven’t yet tuned into the joy of reading Theodore Dalrymple, a regular at The Spectator, I recommend you check him out. His latest offering tells of plans to move to France. Britain is just too awful.

Curmudgeonly Dalrymple is a stylist, an elegant old-fashioned writer. So imagine my surprise on finding him being corrected online on a matter of usage by somebody going by the name of “Gaz”. While tripping through NZPundit the other day, looking for a laugh, I noticed Gordon had linked to Dalrymple and this “Gaz” had left a note:

“Well, all joking aside.... ‘Ironical’ isn't a word,” he wrote.

Here is the offending item:

“Try as I might, however, I can see little charm to life in Britain, even if its vaunted economic recovery were not, as it clearly is, a house of cards. The British strike me as frivolous without gaiety and earnest without seriousness, which is why Mr Blair is so apt a leader for them. They have all but lost their saving grace (and a very great saving grace it was), their ironical humour.”

This may seem a minor thing, hardly even worth noting, but it made me think and wonder, either of which is no mean achievement. Also I’ve just bought Boswell’s life of Samuel Johnston and fully intend to read it one day so, qualified or not, I’ve been feeling a bit grammarian recently.

Initially I was inclined to agree with “Gaz”. My gut feel was “ironical” was some awful modern mutant. It is a damned ugly word and should not be allowed to exist. Certainly I would discourage the Girlie from using it, especially when plain “ironic” does the job so well. But then I had a creeping suspicion that if I bothered to look up the Oxford “ironical” could well be there.

I did. It was.

Ironical is an adjective with three listed meanings with a first citing dating from 1576: “He was (belike) some Pomilio or little dwarfe and that made him to use this eironical method.”

So, it shouldn't come as any surprise that Dalrymple (and the editors at The Spectator) were correct. Not only that, in his sentence the word reads rather well. It's not ugly at all. And that in turn reminds me of the Girlie, a few years back. She was enquiring about some Girlish issue and asked if it would be “more better” if she did this rather than that.

“Just better, Girlie," I corrected. "You don’t need the more."

A few months later, after seeing the surreal Peter Greenaway film of The Tempest called Prospero’s Books, I was reading the play to find out what the story was about. And there in Act 1, Scene 2 you find Prospero saying this to his Girlie Miranda:

“I have done nothing but in care of thee,
Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter, who
Art ignorant of what thou art, nought knowing
Of whence I am: nor that I am more better
Than Prospero, master of a full poor cell,
And thy no greater father.”

Like rain and a free ride, isn’t that ironical?

And now a public safety warning...
Pauline writes in response to our dryer lint discussions to warn you all NOT to use this to stuff toys. Apparently it's highly flammable.

So maybe we should take Shyrel's advice, which I didn't post a few months back, and add it to your compost. If that's okay with you Greens...

She also says she's had an online journal for five years "and have written about any number of subjects and what gets the most hits, the most attention, the most links? Yep... this silly entry that I did as a gag!"

Right. OK. The new year then. Let’s get into it.

What’s new about the new year? Well so far it’s been full of flashbacks for me.

First off, the Girlie asked me the other day if I’d pay her university fees. It was a simple proposition. She wasn’t trying to get out of her student loan, which is now everyone's birthright. She just wanted to save the interest and pay me back.

“Girlie,” I said, “are you familiar with the concept of inter-generational theft?”

She wasn’t.

“Okay, this is how it works,” says I. “I never paid for my education, so why the hell should I pay for yours?”

That had her flummoxed.

“But, Dad, you didn’t pay because your parents paid.”

“No they didn’t,” I say.

And it’s true. First, paying through tax is different. Why? Because by doing so you are, one way or another, funding public programmes that are considered of benefit of society and not just to the individual.

I still believe that in the case of education, and health just as I believe it in the case of spending on defence or police or roads or customs services.

Second, I believe the free education I received was a darn sight better than the very expensive vocation-driven education now being offered by many alleged universities. I can’t prove that. I just thought I’d hang it out there and wait for the abusive emails to roll in.

Anyway, I’ve just given the Girlie her first good reason to hate baby boomers.

That was flashback number one.

Flashback number two was Colin Powell saying pre-emption was not a cornerstone of US foreign policy in the same week Richard Perle releases a new polemic aiming to take the US to even more extreme international stances. One aim of this policy is to split the European Union by forcing governments to choose between supporting Washington or Paris.

You’d have to say Perle won the last round. That's where I'd have to put my money.

Then, flashback number three, I was watching TV and saw an item on the World Bank or some-such (a rare international institution the unilateralists support. I wonder why?) lecturing Bolivia on how they should develop. Here’s the formula: privatize everything, remove all barriers to trade, create an environment amenable to foreign investment, bend over and lube up.

Now correct me if I’m wrong but weren’t such policies disastrous in the case of Argentina? Isn’t that formula the exact opposite of the very successful policies used to develop that model socialist state, Singapore? Or Japan. Or China. Or Russia.

I can’t see anybody lecturing Singapore about privatising Singtel or Singapore Airlines.

Yes I know the economies of some of those states aren’t going well at the moment, but the most communist of all, China, is growing real quick. These societies have developed successfully and quickly from extremely low bases into modern industrial societies, and they didn’t do it by bending over.

Flashback number four was weighing myself and seeing I am now 93kg, despite eating well, not drinking too much, and jogging and swimming over the holidays. I was very well behaved and I still weigh sodding 93kg!

There is no justice in this cruel world.