Tony's In The Hood - But Not In The Lodge.

Interesting few weeks. Since the last Arsegravy update the house-poxing preferences of the voting public have brought the first Greens member to the House of Reps & planted quite a few more in the senate, chipped off a parliamentary barnacle whose nickname should've sobered up his supporters years ago, shifted unprecedented power & attention onto 3 independents & really pissed off the powerbrokers of the 2 major parties. In short, & for those who came in late, it's a hung parliament.

I could happily rake the coals at tedious length, but everybody else has beaten me to it, so I'll keep it quick.. ish. The Green thing makes me reasonably happy because they're among a tiny few left in politics here that don't sound like robot versions of Humphrey Appleby. They also don't seem to give a toss about the spin priority of being On Message - which is to say, abandoning all the detail of an argument & endlessly parroting the line you wish to slap on the evening news, even if it means never once answering a question & sounding like someone with the memory-span of a below-average goldfish. Highlight examples in this campaign include Julia's "Moving Forward" & Tony's "Stop The Boats", as well as "Stand Up For Real Action", which unfortunately for him was easily misheard as Rear Action. Perhaps he was hedging his bets. Anyway, point is the Greens often tend to say the things I've been thinking. Long time since anyone in the majors did that.

Two more little but noteworthy items - first, the demise of Iron Bar. Yep, after 30 years Wilson "Iron Bar" Tuckey is no longer a Liberal MP. When he arrived in parliament in 1980 it was already more than a decade since the incident that earned his nickname. The story goes that as a publican in the 60's, he beat an Aboriginal man with a length of steel cable. While the guy was being held down. Other career highlights include boycotting the apology to the Stolen Generation, claiming that terrorists were among "boat people", blaming environmentalists for bushfires & using his ministerial position to try to get his son out of a driving conviction. On conceding defeat, Iron Bar described the victorious National Party candidate Tony Crook as "a nobody". Colleague Joe Hockey was once moved to describe Tuckey as the Liberals "mad uncle".  Keating preferred to go with "criminal garbage".  Clearly he will be much missed. Exit Wilson Tuckey, finally beaten by nobody.. but himself.

Second, it's official - Bill Heffernan is the devil. Might not sound like a newsflash, but it's now confirmed by Bill himself. In the last couple of weeks all the players involved in negotiating the necessary number of seats to rule have made "stable government" their absolute proviso. So when appealing for the desperately needed support of 3 independents, Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan thought the best approach would be to ring up one of them, Rob Oakeshott, and tell the woman who answered the phone that person calling was "The Devil. Ha ha ha." Later the Senator defended this by saying he was not aware he had been talking with Mr Oakeshott's wife - he thought it was one of Oakeshott's children.

Now that's stable.

As it turned out Gillard got there - just. Given their already ideologically watered-down state, Labor's obligation to now work with independents from all over the political spectrum seems likely to mean we're in for a few years of extremely middle of the road government. But I confess it is a big relief not to be looking at 3 years of nasty neocons. This morning on ABC's Insiders show, old Howard mate Gerard Henderson felt it necessary to very gravely point out that while Mr Abbott had been called The Mad Monk by some media, in fact he was neither of those things. He was not mad or a monk. 

Sure, it was weirdly funny at the time, but Henderson's plodding deadly seriousness is not just the pitiable condition of one sad-o - while not confined to the Coalition, there is an intense concentration of Takingyourselfwaytooseriousliosis in their ranks.. (Maybe with the exception of Barnaby Joyce, but that's a whole other story.) To me that means there's a major lack of self-reflection, and that's an ailment that makes it way easier to do very shitty things to other people. Combine that with the personalities of Tony's whatever-it-takes henchmen - Eric Abetz, Philip Ruddock & Nick Mintion to name a scary few - and it does make me feel like the hanging parliament actually represents the public's dodging of an electoral bullet. Maybe I'm getting Waytooseriousliosis myself. Better stop.

So to finish, here's a few recent sightings of Tony, the boy in our 'hood.