Don Watson, MTL founding father. (The Age)

MTL regards Don Watson, along with George Orwell, as a founding father.

The man who wrote Death Sentence, one of MTL’s sacred texts, has a new book on the perils of managerial language, Bendable Leanings: The Wisdom of Modern Management.

Publicizing the book, Watson wrote an op-ed for the National Times which blamed managerial speak for compromising the clarity of the warnings issued by Victoria’s Country Fire Authority during February’s Black Saturday fires.

“One CFA manager described the business of telling the public as ”messaging”; ”communicating the likely impact”; ”to communicate the degree of the circumstance”; providing ”precise complex fire behaviour information”; ”to communicate more effectively in a timely manner not just that it is a bad day, but other factors as well.””

Here’s footage of Watson giving a radio interview to Radio National’s Fran Kelly.

Watson is careful not to directly blame Black Saturday’s horrific loss of life on the neologisms of modern management, but you can’t entirely dismiss his take on the decay of public language as the grumblings of some pedant.

Watson’s point, like Orwell’s, is that language and thinking are inextricably linked:

“Implicit in the recruiting of wordsmiths to the political and corporate cause is the notion that writing is an activity from thinking. In fact every writer knows that it’s in the writing that many ideas are formed…The phony separation of the two facilities might rescue public language from the absolute pits, but it leaves the travesty untouched and spreading.”

Death Sentence

MTL wonders what Watson would’ve made of the announcement last Sunday of Australia’s new warning system for catastrophic bush fires.

Australians must now acquaint themselves with the term ‘Code Red (Catastrophic)’ during bushfire season.

Rolling out Australia’s new fire danger rating system, Victorian Premier John Brumby defined Code Red:

“A Code Red (Catastrophic) day will also carry the warning that: people may die or be injured; thousands of homes or businesses may be destroyed; and well prepared, well constructed homes may not be safe during a fire,”

While authorities can’t force residents to abandon their properties, a Code Red (Catastrophe) day urges them to evacuate and effectively scraps the ‘stay or go’ policy in place during the Black Saturday fires.

MTL thinks Watson should be pleased. Revisiting the words of the CFA official he cited in his op-ed – ‘to communicate more effectively in a timely manner not just that it is a bad day, but other factors as well’ – we feel an update of definitions is in order.

For ‘bad day’ read ‘Catastrophic’

For ‘other factors as well’ read ‘people may die or be injured; thousands of homes or businesses may be destroyed; and well prepared, well constructed homes may not be safe during a fire,’

Mark Arbib (SMH)

When Mark Arbib was made a parliamentary secretary in late February there were murmurings that a much anticipated meteoric rise was finally underway.

In the June reshuffle Arbib was given another promotion, this time to Employment Participation Minister and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Government Service Delivery.

Arbib is an ALP careerist. He was General Secretary of the NSW branch of the ALP in 2004. A year later he became the national convenor of the party’s right-wing and in 2007 he ran Iemma’s successful election campaign.

You remember, the one where an incumbent government practically admitted to its own ineptitude with the campaign slogan “More to do but heading in the right direction”.

Morris Iemma, a former teacher, adds a comma.

It didn’t even come with a comma.

Arbib’s the type of operator Paul Keating once described as one ‘those kind of conservative tea-leaf-reading focus group driven polling types.’

So, how’s he doing now that he’s been moved closer to the teacher’s desk?

Mark Arbib, take a seat (SMH)

Here he is rolling out the Green Jobs initiative, a policy centre piece at this year’s ALP national conference:

Thank God for David Spears.

Now here he is being asked by the ABC’s Samantha Hawley whether the putrid reputation of NSW Labor could potentially damage the federal brand:

“SAMANTHA HAWLEY: Alright well is the New South Wales Labor Party damaging the Labor Party brand?

MARK ARBIB: Well people and the community understand distinction between federal politics and state politics.

SAMANTHA HAWLEY: Do you think they do? Do…

MARK ARBIB: At the same time as that they understand that the Prime Minister and the Rudd Government is doing everything possible to support jobs and business during the global recession.”

Ummm, what?

See, here MTL was thinking Ms. Hawley was pursuing a coherent line of questioning, but then Arbib goes and injects some hideous, ham-fisted non-sequitur about the government’s conduct during the global recession.

What, exactly, is supposed to connect Mr. Arbib’s first response to his second?

The Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Government Service Delivery can’t even deliver a message.

What’ll happen when we get to the service bit?

The Dispatch Boxes

The lecture proceeded like this – with drollery and bathos – for nearly thirty minutes.

Possibly only fifteen of those minutes were genuinely sincere.

After our guide had finished, I assumed the fun had too. So I began preparing my face for its furrowed visage-of-deep-thought, a mask that when pulled allows me to seem engaged to an onlooker while actually sleeping. The secret is to cover at least half of your face with one of your hands, Phantom of the Opera stylz.

Lately, there has been much ado that Question Time is about nothing.

The government takes too long, whine the Opposition; the Opposition are misogynists, counter the government.

After a particularly shambolic session in September (see Fairfax’s highlights package here), Speaker Harry Jenkins was moved to remark,

Harry Jenkins, Speaker of the House (ABC)

“Not one of the greatest moments of the house, this question time,”

This is a view that MTL has largely subscribed to, but in the interests of upholding journalistic ideals like fairness and honesty (to be found in MEAA Code of Ethics, I’m reliably informed) MTL decided to experience the phenomenon first hand.

A disclaimer: the sessions of Question Time that sparked the heated debate over its relevance occurred in federal parliament.  Unfortunately, due to MTLs monkish (at least when compared with politicians’) travel allowance, I could only make it to the NSW State Legislature to watch the maligned ritual take place.

Interior of the Legislative Assembly Chamber, NSW Parliament House (NSW State Parliament website)

Still, if what we’re searching for here is Question Time’s lowest common denominator, the very bottom of the barrel when it comes to the traditions of our parliamentary democracy, then you couldn’t do much worse (which is to say much better) than the Question Time of the NSW State Legislature, currently the most contemptible State in the federation.

Under the eyes of William Wentworth, at 2.15pm precisely on Thursday 24^th September, MTL was treated to the most entertaining hour and forty-five minutes of his week.

Everything you might go to the footy or cricket for is here.

Except the toss. On the pitch they call ‘the bear pit’ the Government is always batting, always receiving serve, its backline deep in the in goal waiting for an Opposition’s kick and chase.

You know the basic rules already (or you pick them up pretty quickly), and for some of the finer points you can always hit-up your (in my case gorgeously droll) tour guide.

You’ll see one on one match ups like when Brad Hazzard tried to needle the Minister for Planning, Kristina Keneally, over the influence of legendary ALP fixer Graham Richardson.

There’s the set pieces. Just like the first over of an innings, the Opposition wants its first question to the rattle the opening batsman. This time Barry O’Farrell, off a short run, tried to generate some inswing with his question to Finance Minister Joe Tripodi about funding for a community group that gave off more than whiff of political favour:

“Mr BARRY O’FARRELL: My question is directed to the Minister for Finance. Did the Minister know when he met Rolando Atienza and agreed to use his influence to have funding reinstated for the Philippine-Australian Society for Senior Citizens that the organisation failed to meet any of the department’s criteria for funding, as revealed by this leaked document?”

Tripodi was back and across his stumps, keeping the question out.

“Mr JOSEPH TRIPODI: The suggestions that came from the Leader of the Opposition in this House yesterday of extraordinary pressure on the Minister for Ageing are completely and utterly misleading. If writing a letter is extraordinary pressure—“

But if you weary of all this bitchy, micro, hand-to-hand stuff, try some big picture strategy. Robert Commbs helped the government let the clock run down and exploit a weakness in the Opposition’s first –grade side (the Federal Opposition) by bringing a motion which highlighted the divisions over climate change that have wracked the Coalition.

Strange then that a nation which places as much importance on watching sport as playing it should be deaf to all this theatre.

MTL appreciates that there are many like Jamie Briggs who feel that QT should be reformed and made theatre light, oversight heavy.

But, as Bernard Keane notes in his Crikey column, QT has always been made a mockery of.

Keane reckons that if you want greater accountability in our parliament, then look elsewhere.

“Strengthening the Parliamentary committee system and FOI, and insisting on more prompt replies to written Parliamentary questions, will do far more to strengthen executive accountability than anything happening in the daily pantomime at 2 o’clock.”

Keane also suggests, among other things, that if the Coalition wants to truly reform QT it should switch of the cameras.

Over MTLs dead body.

True, TV has gobbled what marrow remained in QTs bones; the Dorothy Dixers are more confected, the gimmicks more undergraduate:

QTs true pleasure, for MTL, has always been the one-liner, the barb, the ‘snap’ from the dispatch box.

This is not unlike watching sport either, except that in sport the witticism is hurled by a member of the crowd, whereas in QT the verbal punch is thrown by the player. There’s no need to ‘bring back the biff’, it never went away.

And now, out of sheer indulgence (many thanks to Swanny), three rounds of the Muhammed Ali of QT:

Last week there was an announcement about the Australian economy that, if this were any other country in the world, would’ve been cause for celebration and vaunting.

Can you imagine the fear that gripped some poor staffer, charged with making their way to Rudd’s office to deliver the ‘good’ news from Treasury that the budget was in deficit by $5 billion less than previously thought?

The staffer could’ve copped one  of Rudd’s F word peppered tirades previously reserved for Qantas hosties.

When our treasurer announced that he had an extra $5 billion up his sleeve he was quick to follow with this:

“However, the effects of the global recession will be felt in Australia for some time, with ongoing impacts on the Budget and further rises in unemployment.’

What a difference a couple of months make. You’ll remember when the budget was released in May and that the  government placed the word ‘billion’ in lockdown. Thanks to mjcompton for this awesom edit.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the government might actually want to start reinstating the ‘b’ word, you know, as in we’re $5 BILLION in pocket.

Alas, no.

Peter Hartcher, in his funniest column to date, has likened Swan to Eeoyre the donkey in the Winnie the Poh books.

“Like the permanently pessimistic donkey from Winnie the Pooh, the Treasurer just refuses to cheer up, no matter how good the news…

Three times this week we heard important pieces of news about the improving outlook for the economy and for the national debt. But the Treasurer wasn’t having any of it.”

Why?

Because the Global Financial Crisis, the event that gave this government a narrative, has now passed.

Although much of the world is still in the process of shaking off the effects of the GFC, Australia has managed to avoid even technical recession.

For a government that has undergone definition-by-crisis, no news is good news, but good news is bad news.

As Hartcher points out, now that everything is coming up Australia, Rudd and Swan are obliged to start winding back their emergency measures for the economy; stimulus spending in particular will look increasingly like profligacy.

They have to move from a fiscal war footing to an economic Pax Australiana.

But while the government mourns the loss of its favourite crisis by pretending its still exists, the Opposition is still engaged in some denial of its own over man made climate change.

The next stage in the Kubler-Ross model of grief is ‘Anger’.

Malcolm, you have been warned.

As American Live TV confessions go, this is probably as good as it gets: it’s not as earnest or as teary as Mark Sanford’s, it’s less perfunctory than Eliot Spitzer’s, and it’s not downright misleading like Bill Clinton’s, as far as we know.

And this mea culpa is actually funny thanks to self-deprecation, the most attractive form that self-laceration can take.

But this last point comes across more flippant than I intend. Letterman, who has gotten more than his fair share of comic mileage out of politicians’ wayward sex lives (especially Clinton’s), had no option but to make light of his predicament.

To not have done so would’ve risked being seen as a hypocrite. He’ll just have to weather the run of jokes that colleagues will inevitably make at his expense.

Of course, there’s a few glaring differences between the Letterman case and the media trials of these three other figures.

First up, Letterman is not an elected public official.

Second, despite the fact that you may find them laughable, the Governor of South Carolina, the former Govenor of New York and the former leader of the free world, are not professional comics.

Third, Letterman did not disclose when these sexual dalliances with women on his staff occurred, leaving no room for anyone to accuse him of infidelity.

Lastly, Letterman had a home ground advantage in confessing on his show. The only microphone in his face was his own and he didn’t field questions from the live studio audience.

So, does this comparison still stick, given that the only things all four parties seem to have in common is that they all had sex, they’re all in the public eye and they all confessed on live TV?

Well, yup, that’s enough to go on for MLT.

What the Letterman comparison gives us, by way of contrast, is a rough guide on how the modern American politician ‘negotiates’ that most modern of political routines: the sexcapade conference.

Stand By Your Man.

Absent from Letterman’s confession was his wife.

The role of the devoted wife in a sexscapade conference requires a politician’s spouse to juggle sympathy for her philandering husband while muting understandable righteousness over her own victimhood. All this in front of a media scrum. It’s enough to make Meryl Streep nervous.

Eliot Spizter’s hard-nosed press conference is, depending on your point of view, either saved or damned by the variety and tenor of Mrs. Spitzer’s gazes.

It says plenty about America that the wronged wife never publicly considers leaving her husband.

My fellow Idahoans.

Letterman never actually apologizes in his address.

The blackmail attempt that frames and provokes Letterman’s confession allows the comic to use his admission to go on the offence in the court of public opinion. Thus Letterman says that he feels he needs to ‘protect’ his family, himself, the women he has had relations with, without apologizing to them.

The politician’s mind works differently. As Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, remarked earlier this year, ‘You never want a serious crisis got to waste’.

In 2007 Larry Craig, a Republican senator from Idaho, was busted in the men’s toilet of Minneapolis St. Paul International airport for lewd conduct.

Sgt. David Karsina, the officer who arrested Craig, said he recognized the ‘wide stance’ that the senator used in the cubicle ‘as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct.’

Craig pleaded guilty but denied he was gay. He later gave a press conference in which he said he regretted pleading guilty to the offence. He took the time in front of the cameras to apologize to the usual suspects as well as, of all people, his fellow Idahoans.

MLT is not sure exactly how Mr. Craig’s ‘mistake’ places ‘a cloud over Idaho’, but presumably it has something to do with the old ‘bringing the office into disrepute’ line.

If that is the case, then Craig is accusing himself of committing a kind of perjury.

Sanctity of public office is one of the most powerful weapons the press may wield, but it can result in hypersensitivity when it comes to the private lives of politicians. Witness the credulity straining lengths the Daily Telegraph went to in trying to make a public interest case to justify breaking the John Della Bosca sex scandal.

Must give us pause…

MLT thinks you’re well within your rights if you find parts of Letterman’s performance insincere.

Yet there’s that moment when he speaks of the anxiety he felt testifying in front of a Grand Jury, having to admit the ‘terrible things’ he had done, and the audience laughs.

Letterman, dropping his armour of irony, appeals: ‘Why is that funny?’

He actually means it.

The curious thing about Governor Mark Sanford’s sexscapade is how heartfelt the whole affair was. And by affair I mean his actual extramarital affair, with the other woman.

After watching this press conference it’s not possible to conclude that this was just about the sex. Mark Sanford is in love.

While he mentions his family only in passing, his narration of that ‘whole sparking thing’ is invested with more detail and feeling than his wife may care to admit.

What does all this mean?

Politicians, especially in America, have gotten good at spilling the sexual beans. MLT is slightly concerned that there appears to be a template for such ‘matters’.

We may yet see a time when the sex scandal becomes so ubiquitous that it turns into a campaign set piece. After all, Kevin Rudd’s admission that he attended Scores night club in New York did him no harm at all.

Perhaps there’ll be an amatory version of the pecuniary interests register, detailing names and numbers. A very big black book indeed.

Not Happy Backbenchers

Just when you thought the dust had settled from Rudd’s on-air s— storm earlier in the year, the PM has pushed the button again and this time he’s dropped the F bomb.  So what was it exactly that moved our usually measured PM to explete again?  Bad news about the global economy? Worse news about climate change negotiations? Not another incompetent Qantas flight attendant.

No. The recipients of Rudd’s latest scatological outburst were a bunch of back benchers who wanted to complain about the government’s plan to slash MP’s printing allowances by $25,000 a year in response to a report by the Auditor General.  According to Glenn Milne’s story, the PM demonstrated a sophisticated grasp of the F word’s protean grammatical properties:

He used it as an agent:

“I don’t care what you f—ers think!”

Deployed it as a verb against Senator David Feeney:

“You can get f—ed”

He even picked up extra points by slipping it in a rhetorical question as an adverb:

“Don’t you f—ing understand?”

David Mamet would’ve been proud.

Yet after the story broke, there wasn’t an avalanche of calls from the elderly regaling listeners on talkback radio with stories about how in ‘their day’ a PM would’ve been dismissed for such an offence, nor was there a spokesperson from some obscure moral majority action group – Alliance For The Preservation of Clean Discourse – voicing their outrage on behalf of concerned parents everywhere, there weren’t even any members of the Opposition who were prepared to take a shot at Rudd.

This is because, as the Foreign Minister put it, all of us engage in swearing from time to time.

Still, the government trotted out a variety of defences, the most inventive of which was Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese’s line that the public would be comforted in the knowledge that Prime Minister was beholden to no faction in the ALP.

Really, they needn’t have bothered.  For himself, Rudd tried to locate his F bomb fit within that venerable ALP tradition of getting f—ked off and letting people know about it:

“I think it’s fair to say that consistent with the traditions of the Australian Labor Party, we’re given to robust conversations.”

For Hawkey, we suspect that swearing came just as easily as boozing or crying. Keating had to have sworn; his legendary vituperations at the dispatch box were probably censored versions of his inner monologue.  Obversely, what does all this mean for members of the Liberal Party?

Howard’s language has been derided by his demeanours as the dry, qualified prose of a suburban lawyer. His prose could take an emotionally fraught issue, like border security, and sterilize it to within in an inch of its life:

John Howard and Angus Houston

‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.’

You got the feeling that Howard probably did swear, but never in front of Jeannette and only at Peter Costello.

But the media consistently takes Rudd to task over his language – be it bad, boring or otherwise.

This has to do with the nerd-in-chief persona Rudd cultivated before the 2007 election, a projection that Bill Clinton affirmed in global forum that the charmer-in-chief hosted in New York .

In our very first post MLT suggested that Rudd’s Channel 7 s—storm was probably confected to combat the impression that the PM was an out of touch policy wonk, a sort of spin-by-slippage manoeuvre to Hawk-ify Rudd. The obviously forced ‘fair suck of sauce bottle’ episode during a Sky news interview lent greater credence to the idea that the coarsening of Rudd’s language was calculated.

There will, of course, be the odd Mr. & Mrs. Worthy in the Letters pages who will think that Rudd has sullied the sanctity of his office.

But the ranks of the Holier Than Thou brigade can only form a moral minority on this issue: the idea that swearing is a cultural taboo is anachronistic and the attempts to excuse the PM in this instance by appealing ALP tradition or larrikinism are too cute by half.

Swearing is cultural go-zone, even for elected officials.

So, after treading in s— and f—ing up big time, the obvious question is what four letter word will the PM drop next?

OK, fair enough, you’ve got to draw a line somewhere.

Godwin Grech

A good political euphemism should enervate the seriousness of the actual deed. In this case, that deed is forgery.

Here is GG, telling us how he didn’t forge the email from Rudd economic adviser Andrew Charlton, which was meant to substantiate Malcolm Turnbull’s now hyperbolic demand that the PM should resign for misleading the parliament:

Rather than preparing a note for file recording the discussion I had with Barrett, including setting out what I thought the Charlton email contained, I decided to create a record of exchange as an email that set out what I recollected the original email contained.

Although the email was not an original, I thought that it would help having a record in the form that it appeared if or when the original could be located.

Ah, right.

As far as euphemism’s go, ‘record of exchange’ is a brave attempt to wriggle free from blame.

It ranks alongside John Howard’s ‘undertaking’ to Peter Costello in Decdember 1994 that he would hand over the nation’s highest office to his Treasurer after two terms.

Costello and Howard

But unlike the email in the Grech case, Howard’s ‘undertaking’ was undertaken in the presence of third party:  Ian McLachlan.

Ian McLachlan.

McLachlan jotted down Howard’s promise on a piece of paper that his wallet suckled for 10 years.

The 'Undertaking' released from Mr. Lachlan's wallet on 11/7/2006

We all know where that ‘undertaking’ got Costello: impending unemployment.

Grech looks like he’ll get just as far without the piece of paper.

‘Record of exchange’ is to fake what ‘undertaking’ is to promise.

Actually, he WAS a crook.

During the dark days of its reign Americans must’ve grown weary of the word. Yet when the time came for it to depart the political lexicon along with its master, journalists couldn’t bear to let it board the chopper that waited for Nixon on the Whitehouse lawn.

Thirty years on and over 100 media-anointed scandals later, the once damning –gate suffix has been seriously devalued by inflationary pressure.

To rehabilitate the practice of ‘–gate construction’ we need to redefine the suffix as more than just shorthand for any old scandal.

I’ve spent tens of hours downloading and re-watching Frost/Nixon in order to devise a General Theory –gate Construction (Applied).

Therefore, when attempting to –gate-ify a scandal, you must satisfy these four conditions:

1. The scandal must involve an elected official or individual in public office.
2. It must involve a crime of a serious nature.
3. There must be evidence of a systematic attempt to cover-up that crime.
4. The construction itself must be elegant.

To steer you in the right direction, here’s a few scandals I believe shouldn’t have been -gated.

Nipplegate

The actual denuding of Janet Jackson’s left breast by Justin Timberlake during the halftime show of a Superbowl is neatly covered by the euphemism ‘wardrobe malfunction’; the construction ‘Nipplegate’ refers to the public reaction that greeted the incident and speculation that it was staged.

‘Nipplegate’ falls over at rule 1., but that’s boring, so let’s delay the inevitable and work our way up in reverse order.

‘Nipplegate’ is a delightful little neologism which distinguishes itself as the only -gated scandal to be fused with a part of the human body.

To succeed at 2. and 3., however, we either have to argue that entire exercise was a cynical ploy to entrap the sensibilities of middle America or that Janet Jackson’s left boob is a serious crime which Justin Timberlake exposed in the interests of the public’s right know. Decisions, decisions.

Gatesgate

Henry Louis Gates mugshot

The arrest of the black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates by Sgt. James Crowley for disorderly conduct after police mistakenly took Gates for a burglar in his own home presented America with the first –gateworthy moment of the Obama administration.

Despite drawing a few laughs at a press conference, Obama compounded the problem by saying the policed had acted stupidly.

Regrettably, Bill Clinton was too immersed in preparations for a ‘private’ trip to sunny, Stalinist North Korea to be on hand to help, so Obama turned to page 2 of Diplomacy for Dummies and arranged a Rose Garden pissup.

Gatesgate is a fine example of a  –gate in search of a scandal.

The term itself, a near tautology, is beautifully symmetrical and very smug. Yet the crime at its heart turned out to be a misunderstanding.  Far from there being a cover-up, both parties made a concerted effort to get their sides of the story straight, and there was an urgency from the misspoken Obama to conspicuously fence mend.

Obama’s tact in dealing with a potential media storm is decidedly unNixonian but no less deceptive: dressing a boozy lunch up as a peace summit is the real scandal. But if it works Obama will trot out Oktoberfest to solve health care.

Utegate

The release of the Attorney General’s report into the Ozcar affair in late July cleared our PM and Treasurer of any wrongdoing and robbed Australia of its best federal political scandal since playing ‘1 degree of Alexander Downer’ and ending up at Saddam Hussein (Wheatgate, for those keeping score).

Not so fast. The federal police have yet to release the findings of their investigation into to the matter, so the Potterishly named Godwin Grech may yet see his surname forced into unholy linguistic matrimony with scandal’s suffix of choice.

The dyspeptic civil servant has already admitted to faking the email at the heart of the scandal and it now appears he also scripted the Coalition’s Question Time interrogation of Rudd and Swan. Pity he was burned before they got around to Carbon Trading.

We must respectfully junk ‘Utegate’. Nice try Malcolm, but before you get the facts straight, they have to be facts. Be that as it may, it gives me great pleasure to introduce into the vernacular this country’s latest, accredited (it passes all four tests) political scandal: Men and women of Australia, I give you ‘Grechgate’.

Godwin Grech

There is a polite noun reserved for people who bitch about language usage: pedant.

There’s a less civilised adjective as well: anal.

You might’ve had a high school English teacher or parent who would tut-tut you for a misplaced conjunction, a stray apostrophe, or, if you were particularly unlucky, pull you up for a split infinitive. At least that last one sounds remotely violent.

For the most part these people keep to themselves, seeking each other out at book launches or poetry readings so they can have their little  hate-ins where fellow travellers  bemoan the ever imminent Death of The English Language.

Pedants notwithstanding, you must know that languages matters.

Geroge Orwell in his remarkable  ‘Politics and The English Language’ said:

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.

As it was in Orwell’s day, so it is in ours. We now have a name for the practice that Orwell describes: spin.

How odd, then, that Kevin Rudd, who we’ve come to know as our essayist-cum-PM , fluent in mandarin and diplo-babble, should break covententional political convention and put his spin cycle in reverse:

If that appeal to the lowest common trope offended your sensibilities then block your ears,  we’re about to descend into the sewer:

Rudd’s attempt to get back to the blue-collar roots of his younger years when he worked the callouses ridden jobs of diplomat and senior public servant are so ham-fisted that they were seen through immediately, no thanks to Mike Monroe’s mock outrage.

Still, it’s good to know that the spin cycle works both ways.

This circle will be complete when Pauline Hanson pens an essay for The Monthly.