Look Back in Mystification-2010 Style.
By Michael Grelis.
“May you live in interesting times" So goes the old Chinese curse, which may indicate why Australia last week had its metaphorical brow blessed with a particularly Confucian swipe. Apparently though, as the freshest polls disclose, the news is not all bad for the Government. Not bad at all.
Possibly, just possibly, this is news they were waiting for, allowing quite a few of their supporters to retrieve their vote from the carpark marked "Green"; slip behind the wheel and get in out of the weather and home by the fire.
It had been coming of course for quite some time, not that the Commentariat saw it. The distaff side of that game still bang on about nice girls not carrying knives, and things girlish and twee, frissons of UST, and other silliness. This will not do. Not for Australia, not for the 21st Century, and particularly not for women.
Witness the unedifying sight on Friday, of a screeching chorine, microphone at the slope, tottering on clacking footwear, in pursuit of a pouting pneumatodon named Pamela Anderson. "Have you got any advice for Juli...." and that's as far as she got before the target skedaddled into the night, thoroughly, and understandably, more confused and gormless than usual. Yep, you heard correctly. Pamela Anderson, if you can believe it? Advice, for cryin’ out loud. Cripes ladies, if one adds that cameo to the already sexist and pettifogging angles some women journos are running, regarding the Gillard ascendancy, one can surmise not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, that women are their own worst enemies
.
My last immediate supervisor was a woman, a Filipina in fact, and her boss was female also, I believe of Dutch heritage, in an organization whose senior management was largely female, and the Capa di Capa was also a woman, ironically now, for me at least, of Welsh persuasion. We all got along famously, despite their thinly disguised refusal to promote me because I was too old. The only thing I was, and am, too old for, is bearing grudges. Bless.
The drift to women in charge has been on for some time, if you haven't noticed. Interestingly, a drift the other way has not. Not yet anyway. If more and more women are seeking, and obtaining the stratosphere of Management, Executive Office, and Alpha Female status, then who is filling the positions that traditionally went to women? Nursing, Teaching, Social Welfare, that sort of thing. My local Catholic primary school has a staff of some 30 odd teachers, of whom only one is male. If men aren’t filling the void, and women have got the itch to wear the big hat, where will it end? My hunch is that it will divide on class lines, not a consideration that previously has had much truck in Godsown.
A definite upper middle class will emerge, mainly women, who will do to glass ceilings, what Whelan the Wrecker did to Collins Street in the sixties. Those who want children will have them earlier than is the case now, early twentyish probably, as soon after graduating from University as possible, leaving them in the care of Stay At Home Dad or amenable Grandparent, and, in their thirties and forties, get on with the business of running the country, building empires, driving companies and making decisions, legislating, judging, and banking. All the important stuff. And one can have it all.
Hopefully, they will be identified by not kissing men, or allowing themselves to be kissed by men they have just met. You don’t see blokes doing that, a simple handshake suffices. One noticed that neither the Governor General nor the Prime Minister offered their cheeks or lips to each other after each had contributed to the swearing in ceremony. All very right and proper, and that should be de rigueur in all professional dealings. In these days of equality one hopes never to see Clive Palmer and say, Barnaby Joyce, engaging in anything more than a quick reassurance that neither is going equipped to do harm, echoing the origins of the handshake.
One would also hope never to be confronted with a Mark Latham/John Howard style greeting involving two women either. Imagine, Bronwyn Bishop meeting, say, Crown Princess Mary in such a fashion. A diplomatic incident surely, which would result in Ambassadors being called in, and, at minimum, a dislocated AC joint for the Royal poppet.
Less ambitious women and gentler men will nurse, teach, drive trams and trains, make hats and manicure nails. The Nurturing class, if you will. Poor male Window Dressers and female Boilermakers will always be with us, so opportunities to express oneself through work, will, ahem, straddle class lines, and remain in place.
There must always be a Working class who will labour in the trenches, barrack for Collingwood, lose their teeth in bar room fights, and generally provide salt of the earth. If society has a working class, the other end of the spectrum has to be a polar opposite-Bludging class, for want of a better description. What they will do, or what they are for, will not be readily apparent, but was it ever thus? One supposes they’ll just carry on, doing pretty much what they do now. Bugger all really. Fail Philosophy, Arts/Commerce or Engineering, go ski-ing and spend Daddy’s money.
The old order is changing all right, and some of us who have fought the good fight and reached the autumn of our years have no problem with it, no problem at all.
But I'll betcha Friar Antoine has.
The aforementioned Greens also must be ruing how the week panned out. The vacancy of Lindsay Tanner’s seat caused a glint in their eyes when all polls earlier in the saga had Rudd freefalling into opposition. At the same time Abbott boasted that he had a grasp on power, a thoroughly undeserved Prime Ministership his for the taking. The light went out as quickly as it came, and a Hayden/Hawke scenario did for the mad monk what it did for Fraser all those years ago. More tears before bedtime.
Disappointment will always reign when one depends on disgruntlement and failure elsewhere, to coat tail into office without exposing a policy, or assuming the electorate has a short memory.
Does the Coalition really intend to go to the people with the opposition front bench made up of Mesdames Bishop, Bronwyn and Julie, Phillip Ruddock, Kevin Anderson, Christopher Pyne, Barnaby Joyce etc, after having subjected them to the rigors of a nasty campaign, where more than one of them, not to mention their leader, is bound to crack?
Do the Greens really think that an albeit now marginal, Labor constituency, will send more of their number into the lower house in the full knowledge such a result will do nothing for them, and probably only serve to irritate the Government?
With a majority now on the cards for Gillard’s Government come August or October, Greens would be better off being a burr under the Senate saddle, rather than celebrating the capture of a lower house seat and becoming irrelevant.
Better, too, to be on the cross benches with the despised likes of Family First honcho Steve Fielding, than be at the mercy of whiplash and razor tongue in the more boisterous rough and tumble of the snake pit. An arena which very soon would make going to work a trial, and the rising of Parliament for Winter and Summer, a refuge devoutly to be wished. How much more preferable and soothing would it be to sink into the carmine leather of the other place and be flogged by wet lettuce, accompanied by all the acrimony and viciousness of Sister Mary Hypocritica’s confession.
The Victorian Government will go to the electorate after the 150th Anniversary of the running of the Melbourne Cup, after John Brumby has played host to Her Gracious Majesty the Queen of Australia, who, half way here already for the Commonwealth Games, and rendered stultified by the drenching humidity of Delhi, will probably act on her express wish to be in the stands to watch the great race. After numerous photo opportunities for both Royalty and Aristocracy, Meritocracy and the Hoi Polloi, all will be well with the world for another four years. Her Gracious Maj. will depart, leaving her southern realm safe in the redoubtable hands of the other Alpha females, Vice Regal and Parliamentary. (This prognostication proved wrong, wrong, wrong. Tired Ted rules by a whisker.)
All will be well, indeed. Saving and except another night of the long knives. To Parliamentarians, such evenings are an occupational hazard anyway, unavoidable, and taken in stride like mesothelioma in an asbestos pit. Ms.Gillard has a more finely tuned ability to sniff the wind than Rudd ever did. Like Brutus, Lady Macbeth, and the last Plantagenet, those who wield a mean axe develop a bit of a sixth sense about these things. No midnight thief will catch her napping. After all, the sword of Damocles is but Christmas tinsel to that lot.
The Plutocracy will have to hang up the budgie smugglers for another day, because by the time we sit down to our Christmas dinners 2010; and reflect on all that has gone before, we will grudgingly acknowledge that, never mind the Speedos, what Julia and her cohort brought to the table would have the comparatively capacious confines of a Clydesdale’s Chaff bag bursting at the seams.
And the Commentariat? Dennis, Piers, Michelle et al; Oh they’ll still be essaying on about all the signs they saw way back when. Pretending they knew it all along, having one believe they have the ears of the great and the good when plainly they do not. Look to your laurels ladies and gentlemen of the press. You could start by asking closed questions in the Gallery. Insisting upon a Yes, or No answer, refusing to be mollified and not giving up until you get either. You might not get them before you as often as you might like, but I’ll guarantee they’ll run when they see you coming if they have previously fed you a line of flannel.
Nose to the grindstone ear to the ground, shoulder to the wheel, finger on the pulse, eye to the keyhole. Those are your hallmarks, your stock in trade, and when whispers, Chinese or otherwise start up, will not let you down. As Ms Gillard has said “Time to get back on track.” Listen to the lady; you’ve got weeks, not months.
c. Michael Grelis 27/06/2010.
Michael Grelis is a Melbourne writer and humorist who usually confines himself to the art of the short story, and poetry. He is preparing his first novel for publication.
