As I said in #42 above, our side of politics has to start getting used to contemplating a Rudd government. On election night I’m pretty sure we’ll see a gracious John Howard concede not only the government but also his own seat with a great amount of dignity, in dramatic contrast to the abject behaviour of Malcolm Fraser on election night 1983.

From a personal perspective I wish Howard had retired last year, but that’s history.

I liked Kerry Packer’s famous quote “You only get one Alan Bond in a lifetime and I’ve had mine”. Similarly I reckon you only get one Hawke ALP government in a lifetime and we’ve had ours. History is often a series of three steps forward two steps back. We’ve had four great steps forward and we’re about to embark on ? steps back. Just imagine unprecedented Labor government in all States, Territories and federal, as well as probably an ALP dominated senate! There will be no rebel Barnaby Joyce, no rebel Petro Georgiou and friends in the Reps to balance things. The Unions will rule. One false step and you’re expelled.

The outlook really is depressing. Democrat President and Congress in the USA, left-wing “conservatives” in the UK, never-ending gloating from the likes of Parish, Gruen, Sheil, Bahnisch, Quiggin, Dunlop, Ramsay, Clive Hamilton, Ross Gittins, Jaspan and friends, Kerry O’Brien, Mike Carlton, SMH letter-writers, et al, et al.

Julie Bishop for opposition leader!!

Don’t see how the above fact or anything you said undermines my overarching point, however. Or how being a lead singer in a band automatically equates to political leadership smarts. I know what Peter Garrett said and did throughout his musical career (on stage and off) better than most defending him here, which is why I feel so confident in my analysis of his longer term political prospects.

Whyisitso has a point. Is that all ya got, Chris? Disappointing. No – pathetic.

Garrett has gone from being a singer/activist in a lefty rock & roll band to a responsible frontbench member of the ALP.

That’s mindboggling, apparently, just mindboggling. I think James should write the definitive Garrett biography which proves to the world that he really is a rotten cad, if only everyone would just realise it before it’s too late. He could read it to Whartootzi.

What is that?

Heaps of pollies have backflipped, many have been wrought through the ‘sphere for it – but with such feeling?!

Turnbull on a Republic issue I imagine might get up there, close to this, but this connectivity to commitment is very interesting.

What is this?

Ok to ask these questions, given Garrett’s history? Do some songs resonate? Why do they resonate?

Times a changing? Oops, he’ll do it again?

…. and that we are so moved, what are we looking for, in our MP’s, at least?

Not that he ever would’ve, but imagine if the late, great Milton Friedman became a big-government neo-conservative and went to work for the Foundation for Defence of Democracies think-tank.

I wonder if we’d see Chris Sheil defending the fictional (and unrealistically stupefied) Friedman’s right to a pluralistic identity, or maybe Ken Parish justifying the about-face on the grounds of organisational solidarity.

Ha. My arse they would. They’d be pointing at all the things he said in his past, noting his current contradictory position and laughing at him.

What’s sauce for the goose, guys…

that it

The Australian public — the most ultra pragmatic mob going round — knows exactly why Garrett joined the ALP and they completely agree with him, otherwise independents and minor parties would get much bigger votes in this country. The confected dudgeon from the right is laughable and the indignation from the left will only make the slightest difference at the very marginal edge of the margins in the election.

And its old news anyway, most of the heat in the issue played out when his candiacy was first announced.

Folks might roll their eyes, crack a joke about his dancing and then get back to the real world of completely not giving a shit until the weekend before polling day. The people who grew up with the Oils and have the most emotionally invested in him for that reason are also finding themselves in middle age and will more than likely sympathise with the issues of how you deal day to day with your history and “the travellin’ hands of time.” He will be cut a lot of slack by most people.

The backroom just needs to come up with some lines on it to feed the chooks with and .. end of story.

As for the rest, you may well be right. Still, as you noted in the earlier post, the door remains open for future troublemaking around this issue and I do think the sheer volume of comment on this topic here and elsewhere suggests his signal wasn’t clear to all that many.

Anyway, it’s of no great moment. My desire to see someone challenge the prevailing idiocies is in all likelihood overriding what commonsense I have.

I thought Ken made a neat point.

It’s a vacuous point Ken made, Chris. Garrett’s built a reputation around his uncompromising opinions and moral certainty as the frontman and leading songwriter of Midnight Oil. This came in handy when he signed up to the ALP – just the sort of celebrity candidate any party would embrace in an effort to disguise the grubby business of politics with some integrity. However, this puts Garrett in an extremely awkward position, because he either has to:

*break party discipline, which will promptly see him out on his ear

*explain why he’s changed his mind on things like US bases and logging – though this is probably not an option because if it were he would have done it already

OR

*look like he’s selling out his principles to get ahead in the ALP.

The latter would be the kiss of death for someone like Garrett – voters expect their politicians to at least display the outward appearance of moral certainty. And someone like Garrett, who built a reputation for integrity on the back of a loud, unwavering moral certainty, would be an absolute laughing stock – and rightly so.

I think that it

Now Geoff, that’s a little bit glib, if I may say so. I don’t hold a strong view against what Ken and you are saying but PG was not the kind of performer Donna Summer and Tina Turner are. His political activism lay at the heart of his music and his music is a clear indication of what his politics was/is.

I don’t have a problem with PG stepping up and taking part in the big game and I don’t wish to see him pilloried for cabinet solidarity but it is problematic.

You see this is the problem I have with activist art and activist artists. They should stick to art and art is above petty things like war, apocaplypse and injustice. OK there is Guernica but there is truckloads of shit too and the Dead Heart is now what it always was – a cool riff and it needn’t have tried to be anything else.

Still, I can’t quite escape the sense that this kind of viewpoint may be too bleak, that it builds on a particular view of human nature without allowing much room for grace or the better instincts. Naive as it may be, I believe that at the very least a significant minority are truly hungry for plain speaking, for someone to defy the tiresome conventions of our self-referential, constipated polity.

Nicholas, I think you’re absolutely right that Garrett’s “status” should have given him leverage on these matters unavailable to the average MP and that his failure to use it casts doubt not only on his judgement but also his ultimate usefulness as a politician who might have shifted the dynamic a little. In a way, it’s a great shame but I guess a man can be no more than he is.

I’m still unconvinced, though, by the view that he has already done what I think he should. In insider code, certainly, but doesn’t this simply ensure, as you say, that the material exists for later inflation into a drama du jour while doing nothing to clarify the confusion — and disappointment — that so clearly exists in the community? Strikes me as a lose, lose.

I think I’d distance myself somewhat from the darkness of Ken’s observations and his quote. I think you do have more of a choice than that – at least if you have talent that the party will wish to draw on. (I’m not sure Garrett does have mainstream political talent by the way, that’s why I find the whole thing so strange). I think Garrett could have told the party that he was not going to bag the Greens. That he did says quite a bit about his confused state I think.

However I also think that he has done exactly what you say he should do. He’s made it clear that his views have not changed and that he’s not prepared to respond like a parrot whenever asked exactly the same question again. He’s done it clearly but in such a way that it’s under the radar.

Well at least for now that is. Of course the farce of it all is that at some stage the PM can get up in question time and refer to his comment that his views haven’t changed and then say that this shows that Rudd is gutless and the party is hopelessly divided etc etc etc. Then it is a matter of whether the media pick it up as the bubble du jour. If they do within a few days a ‘crisis’ develops. “Will Garrett continue to defy the party” or will he clear the air with some clarification.

All of this will be manufactured out of nothing – out of what we know now.

Precisely this sort of thing happened to Stephen Conroy a few years ago when he admitted something along the lines that you couldn’t spend more and have a larger budget surplus without taxing more – or some such bromide – and within a few days a ‘crisis’ had developed because somehow this statement of simple arithmetic made his parties lies of the time seem a little thinner than normal.

The sad(?) reality of party discipline in the 2 major parties is that it simply isn’t open to a new junior shadow minister to behave as you suggest, at least if he wants to have any but a very short career path. Garrett is required to do and say exactly what the Leader’s office tells him, and that would not include the sort of eminently reasonable stance you suggest. Moreover, the leader’s office is sadly right too. My own experience as a politician (albeit only in the NT) is that neither the media nor the general public understands anything but the most clearcut message on something like this, devoid of nuance, subtlety or qualification. They would certainly portray any such response of the sort you’re suggesting precisely as Nicholas says: “Labor split!” or Garrett defies Rudd!!!”. Defying the conventional wisdom of the media and commentariat might be a good idea if the public ever got to hear what the defiant politican was actually saying in its full context, but they don’t. All they get to hear is the edited perspective the media deems most newsworthy i.e. “Labor split!” or Garrett defies Rudd!!!”. It was one of the aspects of practical politics that I found most depressing.

Moreover, the same point is worth making in relation to Jeremy Sear’s earlier condemnation of Garrett as having “sold out” for opportunistically condemning the Greens over their preference deals in last year’s Victorian state elections. As a then new backbencher with higher aspirations, Garrett was undoubtedly required by Beazley’s staff in the Leader’s office to deliver this message. He didn’t have a realistic choice but to do what he was told. Politics is not a nice, polite game and the tender soul with an inflexible conscience (on any but critical issues) usually doesn’t last very long.

In this respect at least, Jeff Sparrow over at LeftWrites seems to have a rather more realistic appreciation of how the ALP (or Coalition) actually works. In a recent post titled The Passion of Peter Garrett he wrote:

I mean, of course

Anyway, once he’d made a statement along the lines I suggested, his answer to further badgering would be simple. Namely, “We’ve already been through this. If you want to amuse yourselves, feel free, but I have no further comment.”

Folks, I think this represents a dummy-spit by your ill-tempered former blogger of Back-Passage, who simply can’t abide being successfully challenged.

You’ve got to keep it simple for these guys or they crucify you. As Ken pointed out and as I noticed too when I read the story, Garrett did have a little sotto voce disclaimer for those that were listening. His views are clear and haven’t changed. That says everything you want without spelling it out to enable the press to spin off it. (Well it doesn’t but it minimises their appetite for it).

On the other hand I think Chris Lloyd has a point. Garrett has got himself into this sitation and he’s looking like a bit of a shag on a rock (as Whyisitso might observe about Cheryl).

(This reminds me of a cow on my Mum’s farm who was always breaking through fences only to get into paddocks with worse grass. They called her Cheryl. But I digress).