Sun Set
*
Feverish and indistinct it might have been, but sometimes everything came together and they were thrown back through time, into dusty little villages where nothing had changed in centuries, except now a television continued night and day in one corner of the dirt floored shacks. Banana leaves swept across the environment, marching sentinels. He remembered now, how utterly twisted they used to get in Asia all those decades ago; at the frontier, on the cusp of change, shamans dancing for a greater cause. There were always sycophants. There was always the sick. Time kept crawling past like an over hanging shadow; waits for no man. The evil hand kept rising and falling; the shockwaves had almost dissipated in the far night, the tuk tuk drivers were always waiting.
The girls hung off him like evil moths and he paid for their food, even though they ordered too much. He was happy with the way things went. He was not robbed. But it was easy in those twisting back streets to be confronted with anything, and everything. You want something, anything? the man asked, and the implication was clear. You didn't have to stick to the straight and narrow here. If he was going to be rescued, it wasn't here and now. If the old ghosts were stirring, it wasn't with remonstrance. They looked on and barely recognised the person he had become. The bar girls stayed for as long as the jugs of beer held out. They were wasted beyond any good reason. The sun set over the lake and time stood still.
It was easy to be a corporate suck. It was harder to sit here and be so dramatically precious, to cry deeply into beers and wonder why, why, the delusion of every alcoholic to drink normally, into the gates of insanity and death. That's what they said. But there were many theories, many options, many ways of viewing the situation. They couldn't just say you're stuffed and it's time to get yourself together. They had to bring God into it. Through prayer and meditation. If you want to see a group of truly self obsessed and self indulgent people go to a meeting. Man. They never shut up. He heard them out and remained quiet. Wild times were wild times. He was flying across the shadowed ground; the hallowed, dangerous lands between the real and the unreal, the gateways he had fought to make his own.
Money protected him from everything, even consequence. They were heading to the coast. Already the baking heat of Pnom Penh was picking up, the dust caked into the air, the glow of forth coming heat already lighting up the sky. Already the smoke and dirt, the snarl of the traffic, was beginning to build up. Saturday, and the construction sites were quiet. But here in the palace, in a place where a bar was called The Heart Of Darkness, there were other concerns. He was shattered and yet rebuilding. He traveled back in time and was a young man, doing the same things in the same bars amongst the same people, but now he had white hair and was expected to pay for everything. The shadows were at bay, just. Strangers stood watch on the outer perimeter.
The music began as the sun set. The lake was being filled in and major development was going ahead. Soon the ramshackle collection of old back packer guesthouses where anything and everything usually went would be gone, replaced by money and progress and charmless development; and the old Asia of which there were so few signs; and yet so many; would be gone. A brief moment in a flickering consciousness; eaten alive by passing generations, poor behaviour, a stubborn population, bribes and fear. Everything would go fleeing before the bulldozer; and waves of sickness would be upon them once again. No one could live forever. These were just silly endeavours; the recovery of lost moments; in a thousand bars, in a thousand places, amongst myriad strangers. He had sought oblivion and, briefly, found it.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/fight-on-the-election-starts-now-20100305-pot3.html
After copping a hiding from Tony Abbott for three months, this was the week Kevin Rudd finally fought back.
The Prime Minister overdid his apology last weekend, but his broad strategy to reboot the public debate has worked. Talk shifted from insulation to Rudd's self-flagellation, and then when that got boring, the government had the space to launch its election campaign offensive on education and health.
And for the first time since he took over as Opposition Leader, Abbott was not in the right place at the right time, but quite literally lost in the wilderness as the government began its attack.
What Rudd released this week was the broad framework of his health and hospitals plan. It is the first move in a carefully choreographed re-election strategy.
More details of the health plan are to come. So is the Henry tax review, which will explain in part how the government intends to pay for its promises.
Rudd has said the whingeing states should ''get with the program'' on health.
The premiers, not unreasonably, say they don't yet know what the whole program is.
The big revelation this week was the Commonwealth volunteering for 60 per cent of the dizzying increases in our national hospitals bill. That's a major incentive for the states to agree, since under the existing system they would have had to pay for most of it, and lacked any plausible means of doing so. It's also a big incentive for the federal government to get the system right, because if it doesn't, it will carry the cost.
We already know this promise means the government will need to find an extra $15 billion by 2020 just to meet the share of cost increases for which it will now be liable. Over the same period NSW will be $4.9 billion better off.
But with premiers it always comes down to the bucket of money, and our state leaders don't yet know the size of that all-important bucket - how much more Rudd is offering in the short term, over the next three years, which is the timeframe of immediate relevance to voters, state and federal.
We know there will be extra spending in the promised announcements about training more doctors and nurses, reducing the hours patients have to wait in emergency departments and also hospital waiting lists.
As a senior female minister likes to put it, the Rudd government is showing the states a bit of ankle first, not revealing its whole leg, and certainly not starting proceedings by ripping off its skirt.
More will be revealed as the prime ministerial courtship of the premiers continues in the lead-up to the Council of Australian Governments meeting on April 11.
And most of the premiers are wisely waiting for a clearer view of what they might be getting before passing final judgment.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/03/06/2838318.htm?section=justin
Labor preselectors in the New South Wales Central Coast seat of Robertson are deciding whether or not to stick with sitting member Belinda Neal or ditch her for a similarly-named rival.
Ms Neal's fate will be decided in a ballot of 177 Labor members, to be conducted today at the Country Women's Association hall in Woy Woy.
"I'm not taking anything for granted," she said.
"I'm working as hard as I can, but I'm quite confident that at the next election I will be representing the ALP in the seat of Robertson."
The Robertson MP has been embroiled in a number public scandals since taking office in 2007.
She hit the headlines in 2008 when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd instructed her to take anger management classes after she and her husband John Della Bosca were accused of abusing staff at a restaurant.
There have also been allegations of impropriety in this preselection battle.
But Ms Neal has denied the claims and says she has served her constituents well.
"There's an acknowledgment both in the ALP and on the Central Coast at large that I have been very effective," she said.
She has also been buoyed by the Prime Minister's support.
"I'll be very pleased to be part of his team at the next election," she said.
But Newcastle University lecturer Deborah O'Neill says she is the party's best shot of keeping hold of the marginal seat at the next election.
"People in this area want to vote Labor," she said.
