My bespectacled eyes gaze up toward our regal, amber-lit Treasury building, its palm trees still and damp amidst a sheen of freezing chill. Upon the outskirts of a city that hasn’t yet pulled itself out of bed, a tram clacks and rumbles - the only sign of life short of a lone Sri Lankan courier on the other side of Spring st. He’s got baked goods. I want baked goods. He could be from Bangladesh. Possibly India.
It occurs to me that this is not important.
I twist my scarfed-to-the-hilt neck up to my right. At the top of the treasury steps, puncturing the darkness, luminous rays of showbiz light drench a familiar looking political-type in a suit. It appears to be Kev Rudd, cock of the walk, the people’s man, the bloke who would be Prime Minster conducting a live to air interview. I stare up at Rudd’s manboy face and out of the blue am hit with an irrational urge to conduct a Benny Hill style noggin slappin’ and/or wedgie of the atomic persuasion on our would be PM. I ponder how an electorate might warm to Rudd being blinded on national television from to Y-fronts being stretched from the back of his ass to the hair of his chinny chin chin. I refrain. I kinda like Rudd, and in many ways I have no choice but to like him, because ultimately I really, tremendously loathe the alternative.
Since his inception as national leader John Winston Howard has always found himself firmly up my goat, and recently I’ve forced myself to examine exactly why this is. Sometimes it’s all too easy to find yourself adrift in a conditioned state of loathing for this particular rodent. Perhaps it’s to do with a lingering feeling of disappointment from that night in ’96 when PJK’s Zegna-panted rear was turfed from office, replaced by a pragmatic, unconvincing and unlikely goose. Though a young lad of just 12 years, i dug Keating’s charismatic sass, his gall and chutzpah and soft spot for the Arts. Understandably I was duely unimpressed with the stale, regressive alternative, and it’s something I’ve never been able to shake. Howard managed to get away with branding Keating an arrogant elitist for having a greater picture and sense for the truth than him, and this I failed to dig.
For over decade now, a plethora of reasons for me loathing this rodent have amassed and congealed into a thick, hearty anathema for which he shall never be rid. The extinguishing of Native Title, castration of a Reconciliation process and the election-stealing lies about refugee children being thrown into the sea began to sow the seeds of my discontent. Then came the refugee detention camps, Iraq, our unquestioned suckholing of the American establishment and a myopic, ideological drive to embed our once humanitarian beacon of a nation into the United States’ imperialist, warmongering agenda. For using fear to control a populace, for using race to divide, for lying and lying when caught out about it. We may be governed by a government of many but the leader is responsible for setting the measure and tone of a nation. It is here where the man’s true colours have shown. A measure too short, a tone too mono and a colour too white.
For these reasons and more I chose not to atomically wedge Kevin Rudd on national television. I think we're going to need him.
The other alternatives have come and gone throughout the years. Beazley’s one and only moment of glory arrived and went when he ate a whole chicken in Question Time after using it to debunk Howard’s GST proposals. Crean was…Crean. Latham never eased enough squeeze for my taste, though anyone who candidly describes John Howard as an ‘arselicker’ and his cabinet a ‘congaline of suckholes’ deserves a partial credit for audacity. So it comes down to our man Rudd. Cock of the walk, or just a cock? And would voting for a sprightly cock be any better than voting for a fatigued goose?
This self-asserted pundit argues a fervent ‘yes’. And when the day finally arrives, a newly toned and measured country may sigh a fresh breath as the rodent and his congaline are sent packing, dancing back into the white dust-lined annals of history.
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