For The Byron Echo, March, 2005

At Beazley's rousing book launch of Curtin's Gift last Friday I recalled the many finicky dullards who've claimed his greatest speeches are the ones he gives when he loses elections. 'You think that,' I always grunt, 'because those are the only uncut Beazley speeches you ever see.' I then abjure them to watch him strut his stuff at any public meeting. Some have, and have come away agog. 'Brilliant,' they say. 'I never knew.'

No television image shows the impact of his physical presence. Head up, big shoulders, jabbing fists, spread fingers, his voice, as Tynan said of Olivier, 'like the neigh of a battle-maddened charger', he evinces leadership and charismatic opinionation and intellectual ardour the way an athlete evinces physical power. His big, abrupt share-misery laugh, the world's a mess, comrade, but we'll do what we can, shows a town-hall politician becalmed, perhaps, and bemused in a shallower age.

Will he make it? Well, he might. Unique among live politicians (a dead one, Mick Young, had the same quality) he has no foes on earth who actually hate him. He's not just admired but liked, and loved. And everyone who meets him pretty much votes for him. He has the intellect, the charm, the name recognition, the ticker (he's battled polio, the New South Wales Right and the silky scorn of Paul Keating) and now, for a change, the time. Whatever his misjudgements over Tampa (he chose not to lose Kevin Rudd's seat and ten others and so perhaps would I in his shoes), his party has again, at last, at last a candidate.

How Is 'Condi' Doing?

How is 'Condi' doing? Does she have the incisiveness of Margaret Thatcher, the gravitas of Madeleine Albright, the Presidential glow of Hillary Clinton? Or does she seem more like a girl from the typing pool out of her depth in the Great World, forever beset by the stifled guffaws of Downing Street, the House of Saud and the Forbidden City? Is it thought moreover in weary, lewd Old Europe that she is the President's bint? Her famous fluff, 'I was saying to my husb...I mean, I was saying to the President...' is hard to interpret in any other way, especially since she has no actual husband or visible partner. Her body language walking beside her employer or behind him evokes a domestic familiarity between them that may -- at least once -- have crossed that intimate shadow-line.

That apart, is she any good at her work? I can think of no impression other than querulous defensiveness, thinness of intellect and policy confusion she has given me. Her high schoolgirl's voice, her big edgy smile, her starveling slenderness, her plaintive loyalty to the moron she labours under day and night, her failure to emit, in more years than JFK was President, a memorable phrase, imply a Cinderella story gone wrong. Chirac, Schroeder, Sharon and Mushareff must be rocking with merriment behind their hands. Unlike Rumsfeld, she doesn't even seem dangerous. Unlike Powell, a truly Shakespearian presence darkly aglimmer with his tragedy of conscience, she seems like an amateur from the Pymble Players essaying Lulu or Medea. She hasn't the stature, wit or decisiveness, and that's about it. I look forward to four more years of her prickly, jaded mediocrity.

If we are in a War on Terror where are the war widows' pensions for the fallen dead in Bali? How was it twenty thousand people milled round the unprotected Mike Rann at WOMAD? How is it Beazley spoke on wartime strategy in a room anybody could enter? Why are trucks not stopped and searched before they enter the harbour tunnel? This is a war we are in the thick of when Howard finds it convenient, and far away from when he doesn't. Mostly Australians 'are not being specifically targeted'. But sometimes they are, by 'evil people who envy our freedom and happiness'.

In Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four the War is always there offstage and fulminating, and must be always there offstage and fulminating, though the name of the Great Foe varies from year to year, in order to justify -- with patriotic sacrifice -- the people's poverty. In 2005 it is likewise always there, to test-drive the weaponry whose manufacture is America's second biggest export racket after Hollywood. And to keep the people poor of course, poor and glum and jobless enough to join, at wit's end, the army.

But its addled warlords never quite got the story straight. If Terror is potentially everywhere there should be body-searches of every customer of David Jones and Hoyts and the SCG. If the war is truly unfinished there should be war bonds, blackouts, air raid drills and conscription. But none of these narratives occur. It's all just another bogeyman scare like the Red Menace, the Downward Thrust of China, the war with China that Menzies called 'inevitable' by 1954, and the nuking of New York that so engrossed the nineteen fifties.

Bogeyman politics work, and will always work so long as the yetis of Greenway, Ipswich and Aston stay stupid enough, and stuffed with sufficient greasy food and American religion, and keen to believe it's the immigrant poor, and not the cash-glutted Howard government who are keeping them humiliated, jobless, downcast and quaking in fear.