hmm…

“conversationalists”

and shit hot belle-lettrists too.

Look Luvvie John, just fuck off. You’ve completely worn out your welcome just about everywhere online, except among your clique of “Harried Hermonine”, “Kage”, “Leftist Queers” and all your other imaginary friends.

The best of the blogosphere is based on people who steadily acquire attention and respect by being consistently interesting and entertaining posters, commentators and conversationalist.s

As opposed to the dull and disruptive like you who think they’re entitled to a large audience just because they exist. With nothing to offer beyond their own heavily self-stroked solipsism. Just like a classic luvvie basically.

Like the craven fawning MSM during the Keating years, this photo was not a concoction of Rudd or his people. It has been seized on by The Luvvies as a visual oracle from the Messiah that Rudd is in fact “one of them!” Gawd, the puking has begun already.

How on earth do you reconcile your hots for Tex Perkins with a penchant for a zooby like Kev? Hmmmm?

I have catholic tastes.

I like the way Keating didn’t do the common touch willingly and I agree with Jack that the matey mate thing is naff because it is often a hypocritical load of old cobblers. (Nicholas, I want a CEO role in cliche management or is that mismanagement?)

The Lord hates the arrogant, so we are told, (even though he’s not supposed to hate anyone), but isn’t it generally the single-minded individual with the strength of personality to see his vision realised who actually succeeds and is able to make lasting changes in the world? Often such a person is I’d guess, accused of arch arrogance. Perhaps he needs to be. It does not seem to be the populist, trying to be all things to all people, or in Howard’s case all things to the ‘right’ people who generally manages to succeed in achieving anything of lasting worth.

Keating made no bones about wanting to leave the Bankstown mileu behind as far as his social/intellectual aspirations went, and I think that was honest and as such, commendable. Insulting for some perhaps, but honest. I think Rudd sitting on the floor was honest too, but he’d never have done it were there anyone there he felt he needed to impress, (besides Cate) so maybe it was contemptible too?

As Nick suggests (re: Dunstan) it’s a rare individual who can splice the Grand and the Mundane successfully for any length of time. I do think that Treasurer Keating managed to do so – thrive in grinding legacy-policy terms but also, thrillingly, in an aesthetic sense – because of the element of Tragicke/Masochistic Destiny inherent in his banal task: wrenching the Australian economy (with the weighty millstone of ALP ismic and cultural history attached) into the modern era. Keating sank his teeth into selling us that transformation, via the journalists (to whom the sacrificial quest element also appealed, I think), with the kind of death-grin hellfire-relish that knights once went after dragons. I think the task of fitting up the True Believer in a silk pinstripe appealed to the god-fearing bog-Mick in him: talk about a penance! And such is his elan, his zest, his rich humanitry and humour, the joyful ferocity of his intellect, that he not only sold the unsellable, he even made Economics sexy. With luck a decade of Costello followed up by a few years of Swan will kill off that bit of PJK’s legacy, but.

I think Pavlov’s Cat is right about that photo being unstable. You’ve probably got a point about Rudd being the source of many a masculine confusion just now too, Doc. Let’s call it the sour grapes of the loser. Still – does Rudd really have to be the next New Man template against which the rest of us poor aging white bastards have to measure ourselves? Man, I was just getting the hang of fucking Metrosexual Man, now it’s Technocrat Man? C’arn, Pav, play fair. How on earth do you reconcile your hots for Tex Perkins with a penchant for a zooby like Kev? Hmmmm? Talk about him messing with our heads…Oh, look, Kev’s PM and I’m a mite on a grub in the bit of poo on the shoe of one of his bag carriers. He’s Alpha, I’m one of those squiggly never-used symbols six function-presses on past Z. I’m entitled to be rude and sour and sulky and petulant. And to me, in that snap, he looks like Kermit the Frog: smug, superior, loathsomely passive-aggressive, the little smart-arse teachy’s pet who’ll snatch the smoking Peter Jacko back from that stooge prep kids’ hand the moment Miss Trigge’s moved on. Not half as smart as he thinks he is, the little bastard. Go on, get up off the ground, Noddy…sitting on your little log with your little banjo and your little certitudes, wooing your Miss Piggy with your platitudes about your Rainbow Connections…I never liked that frog. Never did. No I did not.

Is it a sickness to fume about a muppet?

Every commented view is compelling.

It could be pulled apart forever. And the context, too: a young PM both fresh and tired from a (long dreamed of?) world tour of and amongst the heavyweights, bought with countryfolk credit, back home (71%!) amongst his_brightest_and_best, a new nation as thoughtform shouting and jostling and singing in the great halls. Exorcism and Ecstasy, on a stick.

Or maybe he was buggered a mo’ and the seats just there were taken up.

Not only does it strike to gender, experience, faux or flourish, it strikes to age. What would your grandmother and grandfather think? Your teenage child?

Unsettlingly, and interestingly, this could well be Rudd not tamed by time. Hawke had the matey thing to the end, Howard the hard-done john.. Rudd, what, impromptu breakdancing somewhere a decade on? A browneye? “It was a joke”. Five days aloft at 40,000 feet with Branson: “Helps the nation for the PM to get a new perspective”.

Or maybe he’ll grow out of it.

A further question is: would he have done sat down if he were not Prime Minister?

On Howard and Keating. The pain of Howard’s actions and words and intentions from so many ‘hating’ accounts was for the nation, for people. These were born of so much one man’s objectives, and Howard rightfully copped it as progenitor of the crock. My bobs is that Howard himself was not hated, other than he was the natural focus for the reasons for the hurt; no, he was regarded with deep, deep sadness. Sadness on top of sadness, this precluded Howard’s good work from acknowledgement.

Keating was more than has been presented here. Clearly this blog post and thread is not an environment for his vision to be properly respected, or that what he did was to lay a visionary foundation upon which the future Australia will be and is being built. In so many ways. Hawke was matey, could mould one part with another, and from that less intrusive and confrontational, and hollow from more than one account by those who walked the walk with him, but Keating had prescience, and he had real, not manufactured, power.

Of course he failed, but failure does not define him.

For certain, like him or loathe him, what he did will play a role in structuring your thinking when holding in mind, even heart, what Australia is, what Australia could be, where Australia is going, and from whence it came – and howsoever that plays out a long time from now in your daily life or career.

This is not to defend the Keating failings, and they’ve here been fairly placed. But this is not a ‘centrism’ post and follow up by any means, other than it diminishes Keating as it does Howard. Nor is it a criticism of what makes that diminishment happen.

Maybe that’s an essential difference between Keating and Howard. Howard threw away the chance of better regarding his good work, whereas Keating’s good work lives on, through and beyond Howard.

Keating was PM for a very short time, and, for that effect, thankfully so. By the resolution of the Australian people, who’ve either forgiven or forgotten, or who’ve seen (for them) the greater evil (against the Keating background), the Australian future includes his effect. Howard vs Keating. It’s Keating, so far.

The voters sensed his rejection of them and repaid the compliment, in spades.

I’m starting to wonder whether that photo might not be a highly unstable (semiotically speaking) image. He didn’t look self-satisfied to me at all — I read that expression quite differently.

Does anyone know who the photographer was or whether s/he has said anything about it?

If that’s not a failure, I’m not sure what is. Whitlam failed similarly. I suspect people will read this comment as having a conservative bias, but it’s not coming from there. These guys were pretty incompetent at the nuts and bolts of day to day politics in Government – at least as leaders – Keating was excellent as Treasurer.

Unlike Howard, Hawke and my favourite Australian politician Don Dunstan. If you want to soar in politics, you must have some skill in managing the mundane. Dunstan did. Keating was perfectly good at that stuff as Treasurer, where he also soared. As PM he was all at sea, pretending to the great vision (around a bunch of things hastily cobbled together in areas he’d never cared for – women, aborigines), but it was spin for the Post Prime-ministerial martyr market. And he couldn’t attend to the details and he couldn’t keep people liking him. So he failed. And we all paid the price.

One failure that he can’t be blamed for – but which adds piquancy to the story – is that if he’d lost to Hewson we would have transitioned from left leaning to right leaning government in a much more satisfactory way – as we did in Victoria under Kennett. We would have been spared the nightmare of Hanson, and even if the incoming government would presumably still have continued Keating’s policy of mandatory detention, it would have been much more likely to have done it in a way that didn’t play to the worst demons of our natures. And it would have had a bit of an interest in policy – as Kennett did.

Jack said it beautifully: there is too much phony condescension in Australian politcal life and it’s not just aesthetically unpleasing, it’s gotten us into serious trouble on occasion. What I loved (not too strong a word) about Keating was that he didn’t suffer fools. A Prime Minister who does otherwise is a liability to the nation, no matter whether it’s good for his own political career.

Is this is stoush, then?

Nicholas, I think your 1st Law is elegant and deft and boy, is it apt in PJK’s case! Oft-remarked, he’d have been better as a Napoleonic general, a Romantic conductor, a Lutherian apostate, a Celtic Knight, a fighter pilot in May ‘40…one of the little remarked tensions inherent in human leadership in the Age of Democracy is the mismatch b/w the romantic narcissism (still) necessary to fuel the personal ambition underpinning the former, and the banal grind of consensus and policy-implementation that is the latter. Even on the global stage of US and UN politics incumbents are now largely administrative instruments, at best primus inter pares facilitators. But humility as a genuine trait demands that true power be truly relinquished, voluntarily, otherwise it’s mere personal piety, or disguised necessity, or a shallow pose.

So…what modern democratic politician anywhere is individually powerful enough to be humble, thus? None, I reckon.

When it comes to local would-be Charlemagnes like Keating – Gareth Evans, Whitlam, Turnbull – stuck in a provincial leadership backwater like Oz, in a ‘leadership backwater’ profession like politics…all that redundant Great Man energy must turn inward, eventually. Or fuel a ridiculous self-parody…look at Evans, FFS: flailing about on the quasi-global stage of a parallel UN like a spare rampant prong going at a closed quilt circle that’s steadfastly ignoring all the puppy-dog thrusting. From the sound of what you say Dunstan’s was a fair resolution of those tensions, between infinite political vision and the necessarily limited realm of the do-able-in-one-lifetime. I wonder, without being fey or flippant, how much his sexuality, and the mildly-amused Vidalian detachment with which it seemed to suffuse his public self, helped him reconcile that divide.

As a complete nobody (and increasingly experienced failure) duly free to indulge all manner of dewey-eyed, moon-batty dreamings I do pity those of our leaders who have a go at shackling their personal engine room to the ponderous giant piston that is the Art of the Possible. Gruen’s 1st Law be buggered, let’s have a Romantic go, anyway! I watched my dad grind himself and his idealism to bits just thus, across three unwinnable elections, tactically, for the sake of party strategy, the main game, perhaps the private recognition that even provincial politics needs to keep pretending that it’s worthy of Shakespearean selflessness and sacrifice…lest achieved reality turn really bad! In truth it wasn’t the leaders that got small, it was the art of leadership itself. Democracy’s now the proper business of grafters, hackers, spot-welders…bitsers and nudgers and inch-by-inchers. A good thing, too – thank you Adolph, thank you Joseph, thank you Mao. And Our Rudd’s nothing if not ‘of his time’; a paragon of the natural born plodocrat.

Which is why attempts at humility on his part – that silly photo – ain’t gunna wash. Nor Howard’s constant self-advertising of his own unimportance. Ha! My arse he was humble, too. Because our pollies just don’t have enough greatness for humility. They can’t – not if they’re doing their job well. So, sorry, Amanda, but you and I will have to differ on the whole photo-op thing: a la Meir, Rudd simply hasn’t got (can’t have) the stature in the first place to render his choosing to sit down on the job an act of secular-holy self-mortification. It matters that he doesn’t forget it, too; that we elected him because he is boring and efficient and incremental and non-descript and personality-free, by nature. He doesn’t need to lay it on with a trowel. He hasn’t got the chops for any kind of messiah shit, including and especially the terrified, anti-elitist, ‘I’m not the messiah’ brand so favoured by the mass-media-intimidated modern populist. But paradoxically and counter-intuitively it’s precisely that moment that a Rudd – oany holder of modern High Office – allows the mere reflected glow of incumbency to dupe them into thinking they need to remind their citizens how ‘ordinary’ they too are, that reveals how they’ve stopped thinking so, privately. Next thing you know, Your Humble Democratic Leader will be singing Kumbayah and invading Iran in the name of the Poor Darkie Kiddies, or some or other such cock-eyed, humanist, rational, Tony Blairian grand folly.

And boy – talk about the tragic arc of Gruen’s 1st Law personified, right there. Just empiricisin’.

To be honest though, Nick, I’m not sure that even religion remains a viable relief valve/hallelujah whistleblast option for the pent-up pressure that is Humanity’s perpetual hunger for Triumph Through Glorious Failure, anyway. Even an alleged Rotty of the Infallible Abstract like Benedict has taken to tap-dancing to the cadence of the materialist straighteners and workaday literalists of Plodostan. As for the big swinging dicks of the City…they’re even more hog-tied in biege – by Boards, by the tyranny of popular consumption, by the phantasmagorical complexity of international financial interdependency, etc, etc. Even Murdoch can barely buy a packet of Juicy Fruit these days without some Arcane Financial Product screen-nerd waggling a finger and telling him he better not, lest Brazil’s GDP disappear in a puff of prematurely clipped hedges, or what have youse…

Me, I just don’t think anyone on any material power stage is…erm, powerful enough to apply humility convincingly. M-a-y-b-e martyrdom in Art still offers a legitimate whiff of Nobility Through Self-Abasement, at an individual level. And any of us DWM’s who hanker for the good old days, when boys were forged into men in the foundries of humiliating defeat and grand cosmic reckoning…well, we can still rent some slapper to noose our balls with fishing line and paddle our bums with a willow blade, wot-ho! Genuine humility realised? Lasting grace? Possibly not. Better that than invading Iraq to get our psychological come-uppance, but.

And now, inevitably, I’m gushing nonsense. You really shouldn’t encourage me, Troppo. Tony T and Don, I’d best wave my willy your way a little later. Unless I’m run out of town first.

In fact, Id challenge anyone – even Patrick – to change their personality to meet a given situation

Twat. I’m the one saying how hard it is.

Keating’s actions in government, and as Treasurer prior, placed Australia on the road to economic strength. Something which the Howard govt failed to recognise and exacerbated with glad-handed tax cut after tax cut simply to ensure their political longevity. That leaves us today in a blended economic situation, somewhere between boom and bust, with financial distrust among major institutions hurting us all, just as the boom from increasing commodity prices and consumer ignorance adds to inflation, and by definition, interest rates.

Frankly, despite his all to blatant personality flaws, I’d much rather have Paul Keating as Treasurer today than Wayne Swan. Keating understands economics. Swan doesn’t appear to understand squat.

That is all.

Actually, no it isn’t; I’d just like to add that I’ve never seen a photo divide opinion so crisply by gender before. I’ve not spoken to one woman, on or offline, who didn’t find that photo totally endearing, whether it was staged or not (Amanda’s ‘Not convinced, don’t care’ response is typical).

Most women despise strutting, standover and bluster no matter who does it, but I think some blokes expect and welcome those things from the alpha bloke, and get very anxious and insecure when the alpha bloke so egregiously fails to do any of them and opts instead to look relaxed, absorbed, self-contained and harmless (hah). Dudes, he is messing with your heads.

That is all.

in summoning up some of the ghosts of a residual labourism Keating could make you feel as though the culture and principles of Labourism were not being dismantled by the ascendance of neoliberalism.

Whilst, of course, he was doing exactly that. Sharp as tacks, this kind of left. Which is exactly why, on a another thread,

I actually think that all governments should spend their first year (here) or eighteen months (in eg France with 5 year Presidential terms) combining caring and sharing speak with sharp cuts to structural barriers

.