For the Byron Echo, July, 2005

What does Labor's electoral tsunami in the Northern Territory mean? That up there the good folk were unusually grateful that Clare Martin posed nude in four-inch heels for a worthy cause? That Dennis Burke, who may at this writing have lost his seat, was just too nasty, gross, half-arsed, enumerate and foul-hearted for even rednecks to vote for?

Something larger, I think. For the usual political rule, that you win office first by a big amount, and then by less, and then by less each time thereafter until you lose it, has been turned upside down by Carr, Beattie, Bacon, Bracks, Gallop, Stanhope and Martin who at each new election improved their initially narrow Labor majorities. This must mean that Liberal voters, whose average age is about sixty-two, are growing old and dying, and any Labor leader with a plausible personality and no 9/11 scare or big war to keep him off the front pages, will tend to win.

Is Beazley plausible? Oh yes. Were Crean and Latham? No. Crean looked like the night clerk in a temperance hotel, and Latham like a proselytising Scientologist in a pedestrian tunnel. Will Labor win federally, then? Some say not. But these are the same experts who said Carr, Beattie, Bacon, Bracks, Martin, Stanhope and Rann -- and, indeed, Bob Hawke -- would do well but not quite make it. Sooner or later the obvious happens, and the torturers of children get voted out of office and put on trial in The Hague. You wait and see.

The Rescue of Doug Wood

It now seems Doug Wood's 'rescue' was a brazen double-cross of the usual American kind: you turn up at the place appointed for the handover and then you start suddenly firing off weapons and shouting go go go and move it motherfucker to make the job look difficult, or heroic. Every story demands a Hollywood ending in these Murdochised hot summers, and a ransom paid to honourable men for a well-treated captive whom they then let go as a story lacks narrative tension, and feels, well, unAmerican, and must therefore be sexed up somehow, retrospectively.

What a hateful nation it is entirely. I also bet a the plane that 'crashed' on 9/11 in that Pennsylvania field was actually shot down by American fighters and the whole story of brave, angry passengers wrestling fanatical hijackers over the joystick was made up retrospectively likewise -- by, probably, the selfsame Hollywood discards that later sexed up Private Lynch; because the plain truth, that she was calmly handed over by decent, merciful, dedicated Iraqi doctors, wouldn't do as a headline and so was changed, because it said good things of the enemy.

It's probably worth noting, too, by those who think wartime kidnapping 'monstrous' or 'evil' that the first kidnappings in Iraq after Saddam's statue came down were done by the Americans -- in midnight house invasions and gunpoint 'arrests' of ordinary men and boys they then took to Abu Ghraib to be tortured, shamed, obscenely mocked and sometimes killed but more often let go without apology, explanation or compensation far from their home cities. How many wives and brothers waited like Doug Wood's family for 'evidence of life' and hope of release, begging American commanders for mercy in vain? Probably no more than sixteen thousand, but quite a few. We finally must get used to it, dear reader. We are the bad guys now.