December, 2003

Over the New Year break Latham Labor's Newspoll vote will fall to 35 then rise to 41 when voters come back from holidays. Latham's youth, vigour, self-made self-image and contained anger (one can imagine him in the Brando role shouting 'Stellaa!' in Streetcar) will make Howard seem old, shallow, feeble, dazed, past it and, frankly, cissy, and as a wrinkled as a spent condom hanging over a fence. Latham Labor two-party preferred will be 54 by May and moves, too late, begin to replace Howard with Abbott till a scandal -- the present plight of his adopted son perhaps -- removes Howard's crisp athletic dauphin from leadership contention. Abbott's Dirty Tricks Fund will work long hours thereafter on Latham and may strike pay dirt. The August federal election, fought as usual by Beazley and Howard, will be close.

Like everything else in Iraq, the US and their accomplices will stuff up Saddam's show trial too. His counsel, Geoffrey Robertson QC, will call the dictator's old friend Donald Rumsfeld as a character witness and make much of the women and children tortured by Americans to ascertain his whereabouts, the sixty thousand people killed in quest of weapons that were not there and his client's truthfulness in this important matter, and the several public perjuries of Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Blair and Straw, which should each in a just world attract a sentence of twelve years in gaol. 'Abraham Lincoln killed seven hundred thousand of his own people,' Robertson will haughtily add in his lordly, ringing tones, 'and was acclaimed and put on Mount Rushmore. My client killed no more than forty thousand of his own people in what he also regarded -- rightly or wrongly, m'lud -- as another civil war, against Kurds and religious dingbats, yet unlike Abe now faces the gallows. And, oh yes, you do well to remind me, he killed as well four hundred thousand Iranians in a war with the Ayatollah Khoumeini, with massively destructive and chemical weapons supplied by the US who judged this cleric an evil barbarous fanatic and his followers demented. Should we have cheered on Saddam or Khoumeini in this war, your honour? If Saddam, why curse him now?' Saddam will be hanged live on Fox News and his courtly Christian deputy Tariq Aziz despite his friend the Pope's late eloquent squawks for mercy hanged five minutes later.

Tariq's empurpled, gasping death struggles, live on television, will hurt George Bush's ratings and so will calls from Howard Dean that he be breathalysed each morning for traces of Old Crow and a march of war widows to the Washington Cenotaph wailing 'Why?' Dean's choice of the southerner Bill Clinton as his proposed Vice-President and the southerner Al Gore as his proposed Secretary of State and the war hero John McCain as his proposed Secretary of Defence plus his muscular performance in the Debates ('Why, Mr President, did you give millions in reward to the greedy turncoats who betrayed Saddam and his sons and not one penny to the brave soldiers who in mortally perilous firefights apprehended them?') will assure the defeat of Bush and celebratory fireworks, as usual, over Baghdad.

Nicole and Russell will win Oscars and The Return of the King be named best film, but the Best Support Actor award to Gollum will end in court on the grounds that toys are ineligible, a contention Peter Jackson will argue is 'racist'. John Howard will abolish the Australian film industry, preferring to sell the Americans meat. Michael Jackson will be acquitted on all charges and yet, in the usual punishing Californian way, deprived of the custody of his children because of his 'frightening appearance'. His fellow innocent O.J. Simpson (a knife? come on) will play Othello in Watford amid wide uneasy praise. The knife he cuts his own throat with will be auctioned each night after the performance.

The Hutton report will call Tony Blair a 'lying warmonger'. The pale, cross-eyed and unrepentant Prime Minister, pleading virulent inoperable cancer, will resign and live for forty more years in Kent, avoiding neighbours, kicking his poodles, refusing to practice law, 'reordering my memoirs' and plucking by moonlight a sad guitar. His wife will have a fling with Mick Jagger 'to see what the real thing was like'. Cathy Lette will write a roman a clef on her adventure. Gordon Brown at Number 10 will heal the nation, re-establishing socialism to much decorous middle class applause. Ken Livingstone will be re-admitted to the Party and made Deputy Prime Minister by acclamation and The Red Flag echo in the House of Commons once more, as it did in 1945. Sir Paul McCartney's anthem to Osama bin Laden, The Once and Future King (to the tune of The Long and Winding Road) will win an Emmy. The ailing Pope will comfort the faithful while lying face down on a skateboard.

Rupert Murdoch will be prosecuted under the Patriot Act for defaming, prematurely, his President Howard Dean and spreading pointless panic among the American people. Fox News will ask the question Should Rupert die by firing squad or lethal injection? on the night before it is, by Emergency Presidential Decree, closed down and News Limited, worldwide, forbidden henceforth to trade. Dennis Shanahan's memoir, My Ten Years With The Prince Of Darkness, will be remaindered because of the author's 'repulsive moral cowardice'.

Howard Dean will die unexpectedly while eating botulistic pistachios in Martha's Vineyard in June 2005 and Bill Clinton, humbly succeeding, appoint Hillary Clinton as Vice-President and himself then resign, and spend her two terms at Writers Festivals talking softly and gallantly to wide-eyed young female first-novelists and playing saxophone in smoky dives in London and Paris, with Woody Allen on clarinet, to much informed acclaim on 2MBS-FM.

John Howard, by contrast, will find his phone curiously silent, his mailbox empty of invitations to go anywhere. His thin memoir, Happy Occasions with the Queen Mum and the Don, will sell eighteen copies, nine of them to the Sydney Institute. The nation will wake up blinking, wondering how it all happened. Peter Costello will quit Parliament, return to the Law and get on the sauce. Geoff Kennett will stand for his vacant seat. Prime Minister Beazley will double our troop commitment in Iraq. Gough Whitlam, assisted by Freudenberg, will write a book, 1001 First Nights. Bob Carr between meetings will master Sanskrit in order to read The Baghavadgita. Gerard Henderson will be fired by the CIA 'for being so bloody obvious'. Montezar Bakhtiyari will play soccer for Australia, and be offered his own teen show. Philip Ruddock will be arraigned at The Hague for crimes against humanity, Geoffrey Robertson mounting the case against him. John Howard will be sued for libel by the entire crew and passenger list of the Tampa, for 362 million dollars. A benefit concert to cover his legal fees (Kamahl, Smokey Dawson, Dick Smith on banjo, Tony Abbott on punching bag) will sell eighteen tickets, nine at a reduced price to the Former Sydney Institute and three people, all Howards, will turn up.

In October 2005...But I'm getting ahead of myself. Happy New Year.