For the Bryon Echo, April, 2005

The laws of politics suggest that Benedict XVI will fail. It's not because he's a bad man or a bad administrator or the Anti-Christ or unintelligent. It's because John Paul the Great's three protective heat shields -- his assassination, his Polishness, and his big brave role in the 'defeat' of Communism (though 1.2 billion people still live under it, more than democracy, and a further hundred million want it back) -- aren't, alas, bequeathable or otherwise available to his disciple Ratsinger, who can't, like him, hide behind them from his daft infallible policies.

For hide from them was much of what the great ground-kisser did. South American poverty? Listen, don't worry, children die all the time. AIDS? Forget the condoms, just abstain. Women priests? I've told you, women are inferior, and I've told them too. Radical, socialist priests like Romero? Better off dead, I say, gunned down in the cathedral. Priestly pederasty? Who says? Who says? I don't believe a word of it. Married priests? Are you out of your mind?

This is quite a list, but Wojtyla's heroic sufferings -- under Nazism, Communism, assassination, Parkinson's Disease, incessant bumpy air travel and overfrequent labial contact with tarmac -- diverted too many dim and pious minds from the abominable viciousness of his beliefs. Ratsinger has no such recourse to his freedom-fighting smoke and mirrors (though I guess some other Hitler Youth once brutally pulled his ear) and he will have to say, plainly and loudly, sorry we buggered so many choirboys and propped up so many murderous dictators, or look like a shoddily steam-cleaned whited sepulchre. Will, in fact, Mother Church survive the pederasty? It can't. Nobody wants to be a priest any more and that, I fear, in a few more years, will be that.

Time to Go

When it seemed there was nothing worse John Howard could do he turned Gallipoli into a carpark. Or, more truthfully, he failed by whingeing and pleading to stop Johnny Turk from doing so. There can be no better evidence of the impotence of this government or the uselessness of its big brash bullying friend America. If America's armed might can't protect our most sacred site overseas from desecration, defilement and the Turks' free market impulse to dig up our heroes' bones even though it has great armies nearby and enough bunker-busters to level Ancora, what use is it? What use is this alliance? Why are we losing friends and trade and tourism for it? And, incidentally, Anzac Cove?

And what use any more, while we're up, is John Howard? The Muslim world detests him for helping murder or imprisoning thirty thousand of their children, the South-East Asians think he's pathetic for threatening to bomb them without warning, the Pacific nations think him racist for depriving a titled black legend of his shoes and Europe, when his name comes up, mostly snicker behind their hands. And Australia's old soldiers now think he's a moron as well. Time to go, I think. The Governor-General, an old soldier, could sack him. He could do it tomorrow.

The Fox News of Statistics

Unheedful of my criticism Newspoll on Tuesday, April 19, showed signs of insanity. Under the headline Broken promise dents PM's satisfaction rating it showed 800,000 Australians suddenly losing confidence in the Prime Minister and in the selfsame fortnight 220,000 Australians suddenly deciding to vote for him. Though it was the 'worst drop' in Howard's popularity, from 58 to 49, according to the indefatigable Dennis Shanahan, since 'his visit to Washington in February 2003 to prepare for the Iraq war', his party's vote, pleasingly, went up.

His own popularity went down, explained Shanahan, because he broke his 'rolled gold' election promise and 'raised the threshold of the Medicare safety net'. Yet his party's vote simultaneously went up, a phenomenon hitherto unknown, I suspect, in world history. 220,000 Australians, in short, said, 'I wasn't voting for John Howard last month, but now that he's also gravely disappointed me on Medicare, I've decided I will.' (Do you know any of these people?)

So this, according to what some would call 'the Fox News of statistics', means that only once, on April Fool's Day and the day after, did Labor's vote outstrip the Coalition's in Newspoll, by 51 to 49, or not quite enough to form government. And now the Coalition, phew, is ahead again. This is in contrast with the Herald-Age Poll which shows Labor leading by either 54 to 46 or 52 to 48 for eight weeks and the Coalition's future in sorrowful disarray.

How is one to put this delicately? Let me try. Sol Lebovic's Newspoll figures, showing a million voters seized by insanity, are very, very unlikely. They are, however, the figures Rupert Murdoch would have liked in the present circumstances to have seen on page 2 of his flagship newspaper. Newspoll's principal client is Rupert Murdoch. Nobody likes losing clients...You write the last sentence.