The Politics of Beige

They're calling it the battle of the beige. NSW is facing an election, for the 24th if memory serves me correctly, and a very curious election it is. On one side you have Labor Party Premier Morris Iemma, the member for Lakemba and the replacement for Bob Carr, and on the other you have Peter Debnam, the leader of the NSW Liberal Party. He's pictured above. This event was him doing a taste test for water in the streets of Manly, the basic idea being to show the punters that there was absolutely no difference in taste between recycled water and Sydney tap water.

It's a wierd battle of who can be greenest, a race to the bottom, who can be the most humble, most unostentatious, most simple. Iemma held an election launch which tried to gloss over the fact that Labor has been in power for the past 12 years, most of it under the increasingly unpopular Bob Carr. Bob was an autocratic, almost aristocratic, oddity for Labor, a book worm who would rather die than be seen with a cigarette and a beer in his hand, lightyears from the working class or the dispossessed that Labor used to represent. I remember going on a three day bush walk with him once, when he was Environment Minister, and I can't say I warmed to him any more at the end of it than at the beginning.

But Bob had down pat the art of the press conference. He would sweep in, a busy and important man, make his announcement, pick the two dumbest hacks he could see in the pack and answer their questions in full, and then sweep out; off to another important meeting in his busy and important life. In truth he was probably just going back to his office for a sandwich, but like so many people stuck in offices, he had the art of looking busy down pat. Unfortunately when I'm not doing anything I look truly unemployed. On this occasion, trying to write something about an utterly un-newsworthy event, I asked Debnam whether they were launching anything, doing anything, announcing anything. No no no came the answers, we're just doing a taste test.

Labor would have put out a press release about them launching a series of taste tests in the suburbs of Sydney to highlight the vital issue of water and their strategies to avert a looming crisis, yak yak yak. But not Debnam. You should learn from the Labor Party and make ceaseless announcements about almost anything, I said to his young and clearly inexperienced PR hack. They make announcements and put out press releases every time they look sideways. No one falls for that crap, he said, and I looked at him, like, well have it your way. Because of course they do fall for that crap, all the time. Labor are constantly making announcements about committees being formed and strategies being developed and policies announced, all of which means absolutely nothing on the ground and rarely evolves into anything solid. But it gives the journalists something to write about and makes the politicians look as if they're doing anything.

After his taste test in Manly Debnam caught the ferry back into town with his wife, lining up for a coffee at a take-away cafe like everybody else and then buying a ticket, like everybody else. It was, well, unimpressive. A weak man, I heard one of the old girls on the ferry say, and that may be unfair; but I'm not sure that people want their politicians to be ordinary. Don't they want them to be familiar with the running of high public office, able to meet visiting dignatories, impel the attention of the world. He's appeared in front of the press in board shorts and diving gear and other such ordinary things; and instead of warming the cockles of the ordinary person's heart, it seems to be turning off the electorate in droves.

The latest Newspoll and AC Neilson poll both show that Debnam has gone backward during the campaign; and stands a snow flakes chance in hell of becoming Premier, with something like 58 per cent preferring Morris Iemma as Premier. Whatever Iemma's virtues or vices, the electorate is utterly fed up with Labor and the fact that nothing much actually works in this state and their billions of dollars in taxes have been squandered on pointless bureaucracy, not on trains that work and hospitals that deliver good service. But so resigned are they to this, and so unconvinced are they that Debnam can solve the state's problems, they're prepared to vote for the status quo. There have now been 25 state and federal elections since there was a change of government in Australia.

THE BIGGEST STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/indepth/featureitems/s1859155.htm

Remembering Billy Thorpe
By David Mark
At first it was his slick, stove piped suit pants and raunchy style that caught the eye.
Later it was the pigtail and laid back rock and roll.
Billy Thorpe was a quintessential Australian rock and roller.
He died in the early hours of this morning in a Sydney Hospital.
He was 60.
Thorpe was born in England in 1946 and shortly after moved to Australia with his family.
He started playing gigs in his home town of Brisbane at just 10.
By the time he moved to Sydney at 16, Thorpe was already a seasoned performer.
Bizarrely for a singer that later personified hard rock, he had his first hit in 1964 with a cover of Over the Rainbow.
But over the next decade his career transformed.
Rock historian Glenn A Baker explains:
"Billy was a teen idol. He went to Melbourne for a few years - well he only went down there for a few months, but ended up staying for a few years. With the help of Lobby Lloyd he completely reorientated himself and then turned Australian rock on its ear with a thunderous, polarising music."
With his band The Aztecs, Thorpe defined the hard, four-to-the-bar boogie that characterised Australian pub rock.
He soon took that sound to a bigger audience, culminating in his two performances at the Sunbury pop festivals in 1972 and 1973.
Michael Gudinski was Thorpe's booking agent:
"That very first Sunbury, I mean Billy Thorpe's gig there will go down as one of the greatest Australian artists gigs of all time. I mean he just absolutely had that place under a spell. It came at a time when, it was the first time you saw Billy Thorpe in a situation like that where he had everything on stage. You were playing into a hill, it could be as loud as he liked virtually and he had an audience of young people that didn't know much about the old Thorpie that embraced him because almost anything Billy could do then was gold."
Robin Jackson was just 17 when she saw Thorpe at Sunbury:
"You had this guy with long plaits who was doing his own thing in this intense way and we loved it, we absolutely loved it because every gig he did was huge."
Thorpe continued to write and perform, spending the next two decades in America.
In the 90s he wrote two best selling books based on his life in rock and roll.
His career had a resurgence this decade when he headlined and promoted a national tour based on the ABC TV series Long Way To The Top.