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| South Coast, NSW, Australia |
"Nevertheless it looks as though he will end up a journalist... he will sell his soul for less than its real price, or go away thinking that there is nothing for him to do but harden himself into a mercy-bullet for the sick conscience of the age."
Which was all very well, except first Jeremy Wolfenden had to get there:
"On mature consideration it is a good thing. It forces me to do what I had long lacked the courage for - to distil what I want..., abandon the rest, and proceeed deracinated. And since at the time he has heavily undermined my home life, I am more of an emotional nomad, a nationless, mercenary intelligence, than ever. So be it."
There wasn't any way out but through, as he had said at so many different times in his life.
But here, now, against a grinding, merciless nature and a kind of abject abnegation, a loneliness of the soul, he couldn't find any clear way to come back. To sort through all that had been. To know, in confidence, what the next step would be. To walk into open arms. To have someone happy to see you. To shrug off the lingering impacts of bullying, be free of the past, bold of the future, confident of heart and limb. Romantic notions. "I want a certificate for random lust in an aging frame," he said to the senior politician's wife, as they discussed gay marriage, the latest attempt by the hounds of conservatism to corale gays into images of themselves.
Just as once the most conservative of all, the most passionately royal, were aging queens who in reality had been marginalised at and jeered at by the culture they so roundly, so conspicuously championed; so the left had decided to make gays into orthodox little couples living out their lives on ordinary, orthodox little streets.
What did the state have to do with any of it?
Why were politicians in people's lives and people's bedrooms in the first place?
Deracinate, debug, get the hell out of our lives. Just stay away and let people be whatever they are.
But they couldn't leave any one alone.
The dead hand of socialism, the Tory whip, corporate greed, bureaucratic expansionism, political correctness and whatever else you could think of had combined in a perfect storm to destroy what used to be a worker's paradise, and a reasonably fun place to be...
THE BIGGER STORY:
KEVIN Rudd's final departure from parliament will intensify the revisionism and rewriting of history already under way about who is to blame for the failed and toxic Rudd-Gillard leadership and the destruction of the Labor government.
With two former prime ministers and serried ranks of supporters free to churn out speeches, books, documentaries, newspaper articles and even a movie or two, the battle to create competing truths about the seven years of the partnership of Rudd and Julia Gillard will rival the achievement of the film Gallipoli in establishing myths about Australia's history.
At the heart of the competing versions is the question of who is to blame for the self-destruction of the ALP's grand achievement, following a remarkable return to government after more than 11 years in opposition.
Gillard's early argument is that she didn't plot to bring down Rudd and was a victim of misogyny.
In the argument there is one agreed fact: the destruction of the Labor governments of 2007 and 2010 lies with the removal of Rudd as a popular first-term PM without explanation to the people of Australia.It is here Gillard's argument is at its most ingenious; she argues she didn't actively move to replace Rudd and was simply the right person in the right place at the right time.
But Gillard, like someone watching a man drown but failing to act to save the floundering colleague, is as culpable as those who threw the man overboard.
Gillard can argue until the cows come home that she did not actively work against Rudd, but her problem is she ensured she was in the right place as others shifted him into the killing zone.
Gillard did not act to defend or save her leader when she knew others were working to destroy him, even when his self-declared most treacherous colleague, Wayne Swan, was working to protect him.
There is no defence, be it misogyny or incompetence, that excuses Gillard as a deputy prime minister working, actively or passively, against her leader; nor can she be excused for failing to declare the obvious truth, from very early on, that the Rudd government was dysfunctional.
Gillard ensured she was - without blood on her hands - the only alternative to Rudd in 2010.
Rudd, of course, points to the removal of a prime minister "elected by the people" at the hands of factional leaders, union bosses and the "faceless men", as the singular moment in Labor's destruction.
The facts are that Gillard was watching the polling at the time more closely than previously acknowledged, she was prepared to be drafted if Rudd fell over, and did nothing to defend her leader from mutineers. Even Swan, maligned as he has been, sought to head off the removal of Rudd in the last sitting week of June.
On Wednesday an emotional Rudd conceded he had failed in some areas but, in defiance of criticism from colleagues about his arrogance in declaring he had been elected PM "by the people", continued to make the point:
"I would also like to thank the people of Australia for electing me as their prime minister. To have served as prime minister of Australia has been a great honour afforded to very few in our country's history," he told the "friend and foe ... spread equally across both sides of the chamber".
- See more at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/how-julia-gillards-ambition-destroyed-kevin-rudd-and-alp/story-e6frg75f-1226761414074#sthash.jFTVB2Ak.dpuf
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