By Paul Daley
NEWSPAPER editors have sometimes had good reason to be enormously suspicious of celebrity “guest” columnists.
A former editor of mine loved to regale people, usually over several thousand drinks during Christmas in July, how, in the late 1970s, his old paper had commissioned an internationally acclaimed Australian novelist to write a series of columns on national identity or some such.
David Rowe cartoonCredit: David Rowe
The first column was all set to be an absolute ripper. The writer was going to give both barrels to everyone on the left and the right and foreshadow his decision to leave, once and for all, these culturally, intellectually and politically bereft shores.
On the day the novelist's first column was due to land . . . nothing. The news desk waited anxiously. The editor paced and smoked, paced and smoked. Down in the bowels of the building, the presses sat idle while the compositors, by then perilously late for the pub, threatened a stop-work meeting unless the white hole on the front page was filled forthwith and the paper put to bed.
The chief-of-staff's phone rang.
The copyboy was dispatched to deliver the bad news to the editor.
“Excuse me Sir, but Mr (name of famous novelist – who never did leave Australia – omitted in case story apocryphal) telephoned to say he won't be sending in his column this evening because he's got a terrible case of writer's block.”
The editor quickly penned an eloquent letter suggesting the author try strong laxatives. If that failed, he wrote, the writer should jam his typewriter in a place from which it would require surgical removal.
Meanwhile, celebrity columnists – be they acclaimed writers, academics or politicians – were banned from appearing on the pages of that particular organ.
If that was the low point for celebrity columnists in Australia, could it be, I must now ponder, that Kevin Rudd has brought a new respectability – or at least reliability – to that collective? He has, after all, raised the bar immeasurably – certainly in terms of length and punctuality . . . if not quite content.
Look at the facts. He files like clockwork, on the dot, at perfectly spaced six-monthly intervals and usually at the very tail end of the school holidays, when we're just beginning to think about returning to the grind. And there's never a hint of writer's constipation about him.
Indeed, it's quite the contrary. When our PM writes, nothing is left in reserve. He lets it all gush forth.
It is equally true that on the page Kevin may not always be, as my old editor liked to say, “long and strong”. But he is always, invariably, inevitably, long.
So very, very long (6100 words last time) in fact that some are doubtless thankful that he only does it half-yearly.
Don't get me wrong. Size is important, for sure. I'm a columnist; I understand that. But surely we must measure a man – any man, even a prime minister – by more than just the centimetres of his column.
For it is, after all, not just the number of column centimetres but how a political leader wields them that really counts.
Which brings me to the point; Kevin, despite all those words, buried the lead unforgivably in his most recent 6000 pearls. There it is, so close to the end that you could almost miss it – if, in fact, like me you actually got that far.
It's right there in the very final column of that two-page spread in The Sydney Morning Herald under the heading that says Difficult Adjustments Flowing from a Recovery.
This was the bit about how, as the world begins to inch away from the rigours of recession, some Australians will still feel just a little pain. (See most of the remaining 5600 or so words to find out how the globe's sensible big-spending centrists turned economic orthodoxy upside down to bury the luddite neo-conservatives – and save the planet. And never mind that the Howard government was anything but neo-con when it came to financial deregulation and re-regulation.)
Yes, it was almost at the end of that section where he reminded us that, despite the anticipated recovery, the official unemployment forecast remains 8.5 per cent by 2011 and interest rates will almost certainly rise well before then. Add to that petrol and grocery price rises, and the fact that the punters will have well and truly forgotten the stimulus cash handouts and recent tax cuts, and you're staring into what could be a fairly ominous political landscape.
One senior Labor man summed it up pretty concisely when he said: “The recovery is going to be the hardest part for us because that is when people are really going to be feeling the pain. If the Liberals have their act together, we could really feel some heat come election time.”
Which makes a poll early next year – well before the Liberals get their act together – a live option, even if Malcolm Turnbull's Opposition supports the Government's emissions trading legislation; another double-dissolution trigger is easy enough to confect.
That final part of the PM's essay read to me like a caveat – a little bit of an uncharacteristic qualification on his part – in relation to the efficacy of the recovery strategy as outlined in the rest of the essay.
The rest of the essay presented a whole range of policy directives, many of which preceded the international financial meltdown. This was effectively an exercise in policy repackaging as part of a newly formulated strategy to deal with the crisis.
“Spin,” the Opposition calls it.
Sure it is. But governments since Billy Hughes have been moulding their messages and policies to shape and surf the political zeitgeist, and none was more proficient than the Howard administration – no stranger to repackaging and reannouncing the same policy initiatives.
Meanwhile, Turnbull – a bloke wearing the mad stare of the Australian rules half-back flanker at the moment due to the mighty siege he's under from within and without – has indicated he'll be penning his own essay.
“Whether I'll tax their readers with 6000 words or not . . . I think often brevity is the soul of wit,” he said. So bring on the gags, Opposition Leader.
And keep your nerve because long doesn't necessarily mean strong.