Seven survivors of the Christmas Island boat tragedy will travel to Sydney today to bury family members. Among them, Madian El Ibrahimy will bury his eight-month-old daughter, Zahra and Hussein al-Husaini will lay to rest his three-month-old son Sam.

Both men’s wives drowned, or are missing.

The opposition immigration spokesman, Scott Morrison, yesterday attacked the government for flying 21 detainees from Christmas Island to attend the Muslim and Christian funerals at Rookwood and Rouse Hill for victims of December’s horrific boat crash.

Family members of 12 of the victims live in Sydney and requested they be buried here.

But Mr Morrison said transferring detainees to Sydney raised security issues and showed the government ”doesn’t understand the value of the taxpayer’s money”.

Mr Morrison told radio 2GB: ”If people wanted to attend the funeral service from Sydney, for example, who may have been relatives of those who wanted these funeral services, well, they could have held the service on Christmas Island and like any other Australian who would have wanted to go to the funeral of someone close to them, they would have paid for themselves to get on a plane and go there.”

Scott Morrison, a crusted cum stain on the fabric of the universe, this bloated, block-headed bucket of thrush from out the communal washbasin of a heizel, a kuppe drek, this plyoot karger, this farkakte proster chamoole, it k’vitsh’s “Tzufil!!”, “Too much!! Too costly!!”, the money we spend to bury the children of these “niggers” from across the sea, these invaders, these illegals, their foreign ways they bring to these pristine white shores where pristine white people go about their pristine white ways, and now we, the “taxpayer”, we pay our shekels to bury their rotting dead?

“Gai feifen ahfen yam!” it whines, such a yatebedam it thinks it is, such a man, counting our pennies for us, counting, counting, counting, bed bugs I have seen with more character than this yukel, this shtunk, this fat-faced tamaveter with its crooked beaver teeth, its dead man’s eyes, a feier zol im trefen!! … Such a grober is this boy, this shtik drek, his words are like the loose bowel movements of crazy old grandmothers that carry on the breezes that brush over a field of unburied corpses.

Kish mir en toches, groisser potz!! Me ken brechen!!

…

Feh, fuck him, his testicles are sultanas, his penis is a noodle.

Scott Morrision, zolst zein vi a lomp-am tug sollst di hangen, in der nacht sollst di brennen!!

Gai trenz ich, Morrison, gai trenz ich!!!

…

…

Farshtaist?

It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

Six o’clock – news hour. Gillard’s just been handed power. Weep and cry,
goodbye, Tony Abbott doesn’t lie. Love his budgies, bible study, pity that his
budget’s rubb’ry. Every issue escalate. Garrett should incinerate. Light a candle,
light a votive. Vote cast, no motive. Gillard’s heels crush, crush. Uh oh,
Brown’s here, Tone feels queer fear. Bum’s rush, steer clear! A tournament,
a tournament, a tournament of lies. Offer him solutions, offer him alternatives
and he’ll decline.

It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine.

And I feel fine.

Lifeline Australia. 24 hour crisis support. 13 11 14
beyondblue. The national depression initiative.

Acme Firearms.

'Robin, what's that ringing noise?'
'Holy smoke, Boatman, I think it's the boatphone!'

I care who wins the election. I care about health policy. I care about education policy. I care about environmental policy and transport policy. I care that millions of Australians – mostly Indigenous – live in poverty. I care that there are children who can’t read. I care that commited couples who want to get married can’t.

But what angers me the most is that each passing day of this election campaign I seem to care less and less.

With each day that goes by I feel more anger, that passes into dispair that passes into apathy. My disillusionment with politics is almost complete, my apathy almost final. Election campaign 2010 was the culprit; the final nail in the coffin of my passion for politics.

I guess it was naive of me, and I should have listened to the people who were much older than me when they tried to warn me. But I genuinely believed that government could be a force for the betterment of society. I believed that passionate people could show leadership and inspire a country to make itself better. Use the tools of government to make life for all people in Australia fairer and more equitable. My optimism shown to be completely foolish by the 2010 election campaign.

It was pretty tragic to see a sitting Prime Minister outed by his own party before the end of his first term. Rudd had lost his ability to sell, and there was no doubt that was causing problems. But I suspect Rudd was being frustrated from within: bad advice and wavering internal support for his policy positions would have made his job very difficult. The whole affair was made all the more tragic when he went public earlier this week to defend his achievements. Kevin Rudd made the most concise and convincing attack on Tony Abbott that has been made for the entire campaign. His appearance on Late Night Live filled me with something akin to joy. Finally someone from the ALP was articulating what needed to be said.

But it was short lived. The media turned his appearance into a soap opera. A will they/won’t they saga between Gillard and Rudd designed to play out in prime time news bulletins.

And all once again seemed hopelessly lost.

The media. To the pack of journalists (sic) who get paid to follow the candidates around, it’s not about you. It was never about you. The tax payers fund your junket. Politicians might occasionally not answer your questions. Sometimes they might run a little late, change their plans at the last minute and sometimes you might not get a policy document in advance. This may inconvenience you a little bit, you may have to work a little bit harder before filing. You may even get tired from standing up all day. Deal with it. Politicians aren’t there to make your job easy. They are trying to get reelected and sometimes journalistic scrutiny isn’t what they want.

So when you do get to ask them questions, you should scrutinize their policy. The tax-payer doesn’t fund your Australia wide travel so you can ask questions about why Tim isn’t campaigning with Julia, your there to ask questions of their policy, after all one of these people will be the leader of the country.

When Tony Abbott says. “Stop the taxes” you ask “What taxes? How will you recover the money?” when he says “Stop the waste,” you ask “To what waste are your referring, Tony? How much money is being ‘wasted’ and how do you propose we stop it?” and when he says “Stop the boats” you ask him “How do we stop the boats and why should we stop them?”

When they announce a policy you don’t ask them why their boyfriend isn’t there, you ask them about the policy.

Don’t complain about how this campaign has been dominated by distractions then report only on the distractions. You shouldn’t be making it harder for politicians to talk about issues. You should make it harder for them to be distracted from the issues.

Mark Latham is not an issue. Tim Mathieson is not an issue. Cabinet discussions are not an issue. The calluses on your feet are not an issue. Your boredom with the campaign is not an issue. Julia Gillard’s earlobes are not an issue and nor is what the Internet thinks of them.

Journalists of the press pack, editors, news directors and media moguls: political discourse in this country is broken and it’s all your fault.

So yes, Gillard is pretty uninspiring. Yes, Tony Abbott just scares me. The ALP and the Liberal Party look more and more alike. But that’s not it.

I think I lost faith in politics because of the media. Because ultimately, if anyone was in a position to raise political discoure in this country, it is the media. The media asks the questions. The media reports the news. All political discourse is mediated, the media can raise the level of this discourse.

I want to make this country better. I want those who are disadvantaged to be helped. I want those who do not have rights given rights. I want preserve the planet on which I live. But it’s all starting to feel a little hopeless. The whole system just isn’t working.

I’m not really angry, I’m not even surprised anymore. I’m just disappointed. I thought it could be different.

The timing of the work on that story couldn’t have been better. It coincided with Negus interviewing Malcolm Fraser, who Negus claims had him sacked from his job at the ABC in the 1970s (he later thanked Fraser for that because that led to his plum job on 60 Minutes). I had the pleasure of sitting in the studio watching these two great foes of Australian media and politics come together for a very enlighning chat.

News that Fraser quit the Liberal Party last December would come as no surprise to anyone who saw that May 2004 interview, in which Fraser outlined his discontent with the direction of the Liberal Party, particularly over asylum seekers and the Iraq War.

There are some interesting insights in this the interview about Fraser’s idea of what the Liberal Party should stand for and why he became a Liberal - the full transcript can be read her, but here’s a a few grabs. Be awesome if someone can find the video of it.

GEORGE NEGUS: Why… why a Liberal?

MALCOLM FRASER: Probably because I was at university in the late ’40s, up to 1951. I saw what the Labour Party was doing to Britain. I saw the nationalisation of British industry. And I really believed that they weren’t advancing Britain as they could, as they should’ve. I liked the idea of Menzies’s Liberal Party, a party where big business couldn’t tell the party what to do, where he quite deliberately divorced those who might provide funds from policy making.

GEORGE NEGUS: ‘Cause it was quite deliberately called the Liberal Party, wasn’t it? Not the Conservative Party.

MALCOLM FRASER: Well, Liberal because we’re willing to make experiments, we are determined to be a progressive, forward-looking party, in no way reactionary, in no way conservative.

…  We were the first Western government to start saying, “Governments can spend too much money. We’ve got to spend less.” We established the Galbally Inquiry into post-arrival services for migrants, which, if you like, was the real substantive beginning of a multicultural Australia. This is a large country. We do have boundless plains, which our national anthem says we should share. And four or five thousand boat people a year would have been easily accommodated. The policies we put in place in relation to refugees from Vietnam I believe should still be in place. They’re not. There’s a much tougher attitude.

It’s very easy to scratch the redneck nerve in people. It’s easy to frighten ordinary people about something they don’t know.

GEORGE NEGUS: Many people listening to you talk now would be amazed. That this isn’t the Malcolm Fraser they thought was prime minister of Australia. Why do people think that you wouldn’t say these sort of things?

MALCOLM FRASER: Well, I know we had a party room debate…

GEORGE NEGUS: You’re flying in the face of your own party, flying in the face of John Howard…

MALCOLM FRASER: Well, I was flying in the face of my own party perhaps when I made sure that we opposed apartheid. From the very first moment I came into office, there was a party room debate and I saw a few people getting up, “Why are we not supporting our white cousins in South Africa?” And I was totally offended by the idea that a white minority should keep a very, very large black majority in a position of political impotence.

GEORGE NEGUS: Have you always been an antiracist, or have you become one?

MALCOLM FRASER: I think I have, but, you know, in my early days I probably wasn’t aware of racist issues. Um… at Oxford, you start to be aware of them. I don’t think I was aware in Melbourne.

Self-indulgent Postscript – I made an arse of myself at the ABC studios that day. When I met Negus, one of my few idols, he immediately greeted me by name without anyone introducing us. My delight in him knowing who I was turned to horror when I realised I was wearing a name tag from a PR lunch I attended earlier that day, which said David Bonnici Melbourne Weekly.
Later, after Malcolm Fraser finished the interview I followed him to get a quick quote about Negus from him. As we were walking and talking West Wing style I thought we were heading back to the makeup department only to follow him straight to the toilet urinal.

We know he stands for action on climate change … kinda. Only enough so as to not piss anyone off. We know he stands for a more humane asylum seeker policy. Sorta. As long as that more humane policy doesn’t appear to be ‘weak’ on ‘border protection’. (How the right keep framing the debates so well will never cease to amaze me.)

And in being so careful not to step on anyone’s toes he has alienated everyone. And for what? The people he tries so hard not to offend were likely never to support him anyway. Instead he comes across as gutless, do nothing, and direction-less.

We know he hasn’t had the easiest Senate to deal with. Working with the Coalition would seem a lot easier than trying to get Family First and The Greens to agree to agree with each other, let alone the ALP. But it’s weak. It waters down their policy and closes the gap between the ALP and The Coalition even further, when there really wasn’t a lot of margin there to play with. Rudd has acted in government like he acted in a campaign. He has had three years to govern and he doesn’t really seem like he has done much of it.

The ALP loses credibility when discussing the issues and looks weak when discussing the process.

That said, I hope Labor gets a second term and an easier Senate to negotiate. The Greens holding the balance of power in their own right would bring the debate back towards the left, and I don’t think that’s at all a bad thing for the country or for the government.

With more certainty in the Senate, perhaps Rudd won’t fold so easily. A stronger ETS policy, more ‘revolution’ in their education and health policy, a genuinely humane approach to asylum seekers and real action on closing the gap with indigenous Australians.

If Rudd wants to win this election, he now has an uphill battle to fight. He needs to sell a vision, he needs to stop playing so ‘safe’ and sell a vision of Australia. Stop being so process driven, and chase after the policy and sell it to Australia. Of course, this assumes he has a vision that he’s struggling to sell. Which I am not totally convinced he has.

But if you’re running out of reasons why he deserves another chance and a second term, remember: he’s not the other guy. Worked for him last time.

But just quietly, I’m kinda hoping Julia books her ticket to Mars.

AN Abbott government would buy three unmanned spy planes to use as weapons in its pledge to turn around illegal boat arrivals.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said the Global Hawk surveillance aircraft – costing between $40 million and $100 million each – would provide early detection of asylum seekers.

Because that is the rational thing to do. Spend $300 million on planes to catch leaky boats. In fact why stop at planes? I think we need surveillance satellites, the full resources of the navy and the air-force and the army and while we’re at it LET’S BUILD A GIANT WALL!

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: What happened to political discourse in this country where refugees are talked about like pests?

This year will be the first federal election where I will be able to exercise my democratic right to decide if I’d rather a turd sandwich and a giant douche, and I feel like it is a really bad election to pop my voting cherry with. I would have liked the 2007 election. Government change, revolution, excitement. Howard lost his seat after almost 12 years. Sure, the man we replaced him with turned out to be a giant douche, but we didn’t know that for sure at the time.

But this year, we have Rudd vs Abbott. We have seen them both in government before and they both stink. Hooray for democracy!

Also in that same story: Abbott can’t think of any reason not to sell uranium to India.

This has the makings of a great elevator pitch to James Cameron:

TONY Abbott has proposed banning the dole for people under 30 in a bid to entice the unemployed to head west and fill massive skill shortages in the booming resources sector.

Imagine, Jim: Australia, 2012 – everyone under 30 has been enslaved and sent to underground mines in the desert. Only one man (Colin Farrell) has the courage to take on the system and live.

Next, I’d like to hear Tony proposing that we convert old people into a sinister but nutritious food product for an overcrowded world.

Anyways, which chilling vision of the future do you think the coalition should the Coalition should incorporate in their next policy announcement?

The Coalition is concerned by reports of a severe tropical storm that has devastated parts of India and Bangladesh.

Reports that more than 100 people have been killed and more than 100,000 homes destroyed indicate the severity of the storm, which will cause severe hardship for the people in the region.

The Coalition extends its sympathy to those affected by the storm and to any Australians with family or friends in the area affected by the storm.

Wow. Top stuff, Libs. But then I made the mistake of reading the next paragraph:

The Opposition urges the Rudd Government to offer its support and to provide any necessary assistance to family members living in Australia who have relatives in the storm zone.

Never let an opportunity pass to take a swipe at the government, even if that opportunity presents itself in the form of death and destruction; get in first with the compassion so you can implicitly charge the others with having less. Stay classy, Libs.