The Kelly, Turnbull and Grattan lament

1. evan jones says:

   24 August, 2012 at 9:34 pm

   Gee’s crystal-balling on MT could prove to be visionary, ahead of the pack. His star fades in the firmanent each passing day.
   As for Kelly, a sad demise, but painfully long in coming.
   His pontifications excruciating.
   His introduction to his book on the Hawke/Keating era, ‘The End of Certainty’ glimpsed key elements of 20thC Australian history, but ultimately it failed as history. The bad old days gave way to enlightenment, thank you. Thus his intellectual base for everything he wrote since then has been impoverished, his demeanour marked by condescension, a paternalistic weariness at the seeming impossibility of his audience to see the light.
   As for Michelle Grattan, she excelled herself prior to the November 2004 election. Some tidbits:
   “The scary thing for Labor is that it knew before the election its weak spot was its economic credentials and it put a lot of effort into trying to shore up these. Yet it still failed to convince the public.” (24 October)
   “[Wayne] Swan and [Stephen] Smith have no easy task: making Labor credible with the big end of town.” (27 October)
   The big end of town? As I wrote at the time: ‘Our Michelle has evidently never listened closely to a CEO speech, perennially centred on an incoherent blend of third hand big picture generalisations and naked self-interest.’ As Exhibit A for the prosecution, we have Mike ‘Piggy’ Smith, ANZ CEO urging ‘welfare reform’ to get more dole bludgers into WA resources jobs – and Fairfax opts to put this blather on page 1 (22 August).
   Grattan’s coverage of the 2004 election campaign was contemptible.
   Grattan once co-authored a book on economic policy with the overblown ANU economist Fred Gruen (Managing government: labor’s achievements and failures). It was utterly pedestrian. That was in 1993 and it’s been downhill ever since.

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