‘There’s disputes about what the nature of the Chinese affront to the Uyghurs are. There’s a dispute about that.’
‘If you’ve got 15 of the things [submarines] at sea, how in the God would knocking one out matter? But if you knock one of the three nuclear subs out, it really matters.’
‘Remember this all happened after Marise Payne–the great non-Minister of our time–went on the Insiders program and said we’re going to have weapon inspection, weapons-type inspections of Wuhan to find out the cause of the virus. It was out of that that came all of this.’
‘Remember this, the Allies succeeded in Normandy because… because… as a maritime assault, because there was an industrial state 21 miles away, Britain. There was no radar; there was cloud cover.’
‘I’ve got a brain. Principally. And I can think. And I can read. Y’know. And I read every day.’
If it weren’t for the Australian reference, these rambling, incoherent utterances could easily be mistaken for quotes by Donald Trump. But they aren’t. These are quotes from Australia’s former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, when he spoke to the National Press Club earlier this week.
What captured the Australian political media’s attention this week was less the rambling, incoherent nonsense, and more the highly personal vitriol that spewed out of Keating’s mouth towards political journalists. As soon as Keating started calling well-established media figures psychopaths, the game was on. Journalists would tut-tut an attack by a political figure on the incredibly-important-to-democracy Fourth Estate, and the Drips on Twitter would cheer on Keating’s invective.
Australian political culture is so vapid that anything that apes the aesthetics of higher order thought is confused with actual intelligent thought. We let Todd Sampson make silly little documentaries because he frowns and speaks assertively. Several columnists write bland, centrist, ‘both-sides are bad’ takes, and we inexplicably let them get away with it. If they think that George Orwell wrote about ‘Tiny Tiny Train World’, we allow them to be hired as ministerial speech writers. And–in the strangest case of all–we let Chris Uhlmann reach the height of political commentary in Australia despite the fact there is absolutely nothing but void behind his eyes.
And so it was that the sheep in sheep’s clothing started producing their vapid takes on the Keating-Fourth Estate skirmish. The skirmish had distracted us all from the real issue: that Paul Keating was actually correct and had important, serious things to say.