This is the full transcript of an address Rear Window columnist Joe Aston delivered to the Sydney Institute on Tuesday May 21, 2013.
I just want to acknowledge two people in the audience tonight:
The Premier. And the thing I like about Barry is that he's cultured and well-read without being Bob Carr.
And my Mum – the only person other than Barry I'd happily trust with the state's finances.
I'm excited – and nervous – to be addressing the Sydney Institute.
I am excited because I greatly admire what Gerard and Anne Henderson have done, over more than two decades, for public ideas and discourse in this country.
I am nervous because I suspect that guy at the back of the room isn't filming this for posterity.
Just the one decade ago, I was straight off the plane from Hobart and I turned up in this very room for a talk by the late journalist Matt Price. If I remember correctly he turned up with his golf clubs. Matt surely was the best sketch writer of his generation. I was never fortunate enough to know him personally, but as an HSC student loafing in the school library and laughing aloud at his column in The Australian, I felt like I did.
Later, it was for the Institute's annual dinner in 2008 that I purchased my first tuxedo – a formative moment in any boy's transition to manchild. I thought I cut quite the figure in my Zegna ensemble. Yet, during proceedings, as I strode innocently towards the restroom, one guest cruelly mistook me for a waiter, clicking her fingers and hollering at me for a glass of red. That was a low point.
It's not only Catholicism that I share with Gerard and Anne. I'm not sure how widely it's known but, like myself, Gerard cut his teeth in Tasmanian politics. His first gig as a staffer was in the Launceston office of the Liberal member for Bass, Kevin Newman. So you could say that Gerard and I both learned to count heads the same way.
And I know Anne too, has a special place in her heart for the Apple Isle, having authored the seminal biography of a Catholic, Tasmanian Prime Minister named Joseph.
Can I just say: I'm not ruling anything in or out.
Vain, selfish and lazy
To those of you who are not lawyers engaged by Fairfax, thank you for coming.
And what a rag-tag crowd this is:
I see Paternalists, Colonialists, Jingoists, and Drunks;
Capitalists (or should I say Disciples of the Vertically-Integrated Military Industrial Complex);
Anglocentrics, Phallocentrics, Heteronormatives, Meat Eaters and Right Handers; And the Housewives up the back, presumably blogging.
All in all, I like what I see. My kind of crowd.
People really hate me until they get to know me. I'm the reverse of Kevin Rudd.
I want to start with George Orwell.
"All writers," he said, "are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery."
Vain, selfish and lazy is how I came to be a gossip columnist. The mystery is why I like it so much!
But here's how I'm going to explain my motives:
Firstly, how I really came to be a gossip columnist.
Then: how I see gossip columnising today.
And that I'll do in two parts:
Gossip's canvas – being public life; and
Gossip's brush – being the tools of the trade: silliness, prurience and sedition.
Getting my own back
Orwell knew he was destined to be a writer by the age of six. He said:
"I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life."
When I was six, I wanted to be Hulk Hogan. But eventually I came around to George's worldview; one where my facilities – and wrestling was not one of them – would compensate for my failures.
Sadly, there was nothing mythical or heroic about my childhood.
I wasn't a baby in the bulrushes;
I didn't grow up in a brown paper bag; or the back of a car;
I didn't float to Australia on a stick of spaghetti.
I didn't overcome enormous obstacles, only to come good in the end. All of which should really disqualify me from giving speeches like this one.
When I was seven, we left New South Wales so Dad could work in the Tasmanian health system. Initially we lived on the sweeping grounds of the infamous Royal Derwent asylum in New Norfolk, 35 kilometres from Hobart. So I can talk about a sheltered upbringing with a fair bit of authority.
And if cause or effect is attributable in my case, this is probably where I developed such a warped appetite for the morbid and for the absurd.
Then I became an altar boy. My memories of church are happy ones because they remind me of a time when I still preferred bread over wine.
At some indeterminate point, probably in high school, another strange thing happened: I woke up one day furnished with a curious certainty that I was vastly smarter than my parents, my teachers and, indeed, the world's leaders. That was neither a happy, nor true, realisation.
Nevertheless, and rightly or wrongly, this was probably when sedition entered my repertoire.
In the student newspaper I railed against the headmaster, calling him a "spineless jellyfish" which at that age I thought was quite droll rather than an embarrassing tautology.
Being a self-appointed genius, I also failed to grasp why I wasn't more popular with my peers. What a surprise that I'm still grappling with that problem!
Then came university. And the big city. My first journalism class at UTS was comprised of 11 wannabe TV stars whose aspiration was to host Getaway and three or four Emos eagerly writing urban affairs stories about the lesbian milieu in Erskinville. They all went on to join the federal bureaucracy.
I went to Whitlams concerts but I still couldn't get that angry about John Howard. I liked his pocket handkerchiefs.
Contrarianism is surely the only way to explain why I went to work for Joe Hockey, then minister for WorkChoices. It was like selling cancer.
Here was that seditious inclination again:
We were two months from electoral doom when John Howard refused to step down for Peter Costello even though Cabinet had effectively asked him to. The very next day, Queensland Premier Peter Beattie retired. The announcement came through to Hockey's ministerial staff on email. Fatefully, I clicked on 'reply all' and wrote: "Funny how Labor leaders know how to go out on top." When the PM's senior adviser Jamie Briggs got his hands on this correspondence, what came to pass closely resembled all the worst parts of the Book of Revelations.
After that election, I went to work for Qantas. What I quickly learned – and I'm talking about the entire private sector – Is that big business is even more rife with cant and farce than politics. And that generally speaking, there is no correlation between executive capacity and remuneration. Indeed, the two may be inversely proportionate.
In 2010 I switched airlines to Etihad and did a year-and-a-bit stint in the Gulf state of Abu Dhabi. You really couldn't make that place up. A comical Atlantis. Vegas without the fun.
Unlike our Lord, who usefully transubstantiated water into wine, the Emiratis transform oil into water – via desalination – and use it to grow plants along lush median strips on innumerable freeways to nowhere.
I am certain that in 500 years, explorers will stumble upon its ruins in the sand and be completely unable to comprehend what it was and why it was there.
Which brings me to now, and to Rear Window. When, in December 2011, my long-suffering friend and boss James Chessell floated my name for the job, our editor in chief Michael Stutchbury simply said: "Good idea. At least when he flames out it'll be entertaining."
I haven't flamed out... yet – but I've come pretty close. With Orwell's intent, but sadly not his faculty: getting my own back for my failure in everyday life.
Folie à deux
So what kind of "fresh hell" – to borrow a Dorothy Parker-ism – does a gossip columnist have to work with today in Australia?
If you're looking at a mass conflagration of voices that comprises some kind of public discourse, then two things stick out at me:
A lack of plain speaking and a lack of clear thinking. Right across public life:
Political Porkies;
Corporate Jargon;
Grammatical Fascism;
Art Wowserism;
Opponent-Labelling;
All of which are debasing ideas and debate.
There used to be a kind of bar that our leaders had to get over. Now they just limbo dance under it.
I was in Canberra last week for Wayne Swan's final Budget. It's been a roundabout journey to the Treasurer's sixth consecutive deficit. The Government unequivocally promised more than 200 times, and for three years right up until five months ago, that there would be a surplus.
Swan fell almost $18 billion short. He didn't even blush. And the nation didn't even blink. Why would there be any meaningful correlation between his utterances and his actions? We've been conditioned to expect no different.
Not just of politicians. CEOs have taken their lead. Where ministers have staffers, bosses have management consultants.
The sign of a successful corporate speech is the complete absence of a single word not in the approved – and meaningless – lexicon.
There are obvious consequences for public discourse when language is debased and words lose their meaning:
People stop listening. Original thinking can't cut through. And if you don't have the language for new ideas, you can't formulate them. Let alone satirise them.
At Gerard and Anne's annual dinner last month I was chatting with one guest after Amanda Foreman's address. And this captain of industry was most exercised by the fact Dr Foreman had used only masculine pro-nouns ("he" instead of "she").
I had missed the big take-out from the speech. It wasn't about leadership. It was about women – ironically – emasculating themselves, and each other, through grammatical solecism.
It was 40 years ago – around the time Neil Young was singing A Man Needs a Maid – that political correctness first began to affect public thinking, as an unfortunate by-product of otherwise laudable movements – civil and gay rights, and the multicultural and feminist projects.
PC has peaked and troughed along the way, but here and now, it is flourishing.
Exhibit A: Bernie Brookes. The boss of Myer was howled down earlier this month for daring to suggest that raising the Medicare levy could undermine discretionary consumer spending.
Bernie broaching the economic effects of a tax increase was not a statement of fact from a CEO whose obligation is to maximise the value of his business for its shareholders. No. The mob decided it was a callous repudiation of those for whom that revenue is intended – in this case, the disabled. Again, I had completely missed the point.
Twenty years ago Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr wrote of how "the moralism of the Left" had "blinded it to the legitimate source of middle-class anger." And that the revolt against a growing tax burden was "not an expression of selfishness" but simply "a reaction to the difficulties of maintaining a middle-class standard of living."
Clearly, the Twittersphere has mobilised the Outraged Class. The movement is typified by a nauseating moral smugness and almost Eastern European levels of humourlessness. What they share is a Lust to Take Offence – often where none was given. And its objective is the total immolation of the white middle-class male.
I hesitate to frame this as a Left versus Right battle. Certainly the elite, or what I call the Rich Left, are PC junkies.
One media commentator thundered that I was a "dick" for referring to her as a "mummy blogger." Another accused me of hating women.
Sexism is one of the PC brigade's favourite cheap shots. Just ask that misogynist Tony Abbott.
But questioning the validity of a woman's argument, or poking fun at her foibles, does not chauvinism make. By this absurd reasoning, I am an anti-Semite for mocking David Gonski or a racist for laughing at Noel Pearson.
This is now a regular tactic used in public debate: when you disagree with someone, you divert from the substance of their argument and stake out the moral high ground by slapping a dirty label on them.
As Gareth Hutchens put it so aptly in The Sydney Morning Herald last month, "it's a 'straw man' argument. It works by attacking a position your opponent never held."
But as I said, this is not a purely ideological battle. Not even mostly. To cite the late Robert Hughes: Left and Right are "now locked in a full-blown, mutually sustaining folie à deux, and the only person each dislikes more than the other is the one who tells both to lighten up."
Hughes was a legend, and not simply because he was a white European male. Upon his death last year, his nephew-by-marriage, Malcolm Turnbull, gave a rousing speech in the House of Representatives, in which he briefly made reference to the deceased.
I kid. Presumably Hughes heartily approved of Malcolm rallying against the furore which broke out on his Right flank over Bill Henson. When it came to Henson's art, we had Kevin Rudd decrying it, and Malcolm buying it!
Nobody has better satirised art wankers and wowsers than Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word:
"If the moralists are yelling for the blood of any poet or performer whose work doesn't accord with 'family values' and might raise hackles in some golf club in Tulsa... just turn... towards stuff that nobody could quarrel with: Hmong needlework, coastal sea-grass basketry, south-east Alaska native dance, American Indian basketry and woodcraft, Pacific Island canoe building, and Appalachian banjo playing."
There are many more infuriating examples, but I better move on...
...to the tools of the trade.
Silliness, prurience and sedition
The New York Daily Mirror's Walter Winchell was arguably the original gossip columnist. "Gossip-writing," wrote his biographer St Clair McKelway, "is at present like a spirochete in the body of journalism."
Really it's a modest inconvenience, in my line of work, to be likened to syphilis.
McKelway said this 70 years ago, during the Second World War. I shudder to imagine what gruesome ailment he'd use to describe the craft today.
Some think that what we do is a blot on society; nothing but vile schadenfreude.
Not true. Our corner of journalism does serve a purpose and a public good.
Quite simply: to identify and illuminate all forms of public humbug: hubris, cant, sophistry, hypocrisy, absurdity, orthodoxy and sanctimony;
A mongrel breed somewhere between sketch, comment, news, satire and polemic;
Necessary to present a comprehensive and fearlessly accurate telling of the news.
And to entertain.
Sammy Davis Jr sang that tune "What Kind of Fool Am I?" Well my job is to tell them.
As far as I'm concerned, I have only three masters:
Those who pay me;
Those who read me; and
My conscience.
Obviously I'm not married.
As I've flagged in the topic of tonight's talk, the three pillars of gossip columnising as I see it are:
An unhealthy regard for the absurd;
A curiosity for all matters of sex; and
A preparedness to take no account of authority.
I'll start with silliness.
Paul Keating once said to me: "I don't think much of silly columns in serious newspapers. The test should be: would it belong in the FT."
He sounded like the Earl of Chesterfield who in the 18th Century reckoned "there is nothing so illiberal and so ill-bred as audible laughter."
Now PJK is my hero – his portrait even hangs above my piano at home. But come on! This is a guy who called the Senate "unrepresentative swill" and the Opposition Leader a "perfumed gigolo." He'd be home at the Lodge listening to Mahler in his pyjamas at 10am instead of down at Parliament roasting some bureaucrat. And we loved him for it because he was plain speaking and he was wicked.
Other than Mark Latham, which Australian politician would have made a better gossip columnist?
There are a lot of public figures in Australia who take themselves too seriously. Captains of industry get hopping mad about the nicknames I use for them. Apparently they're too important to be ridiculed. Doesn't that prove exactly why I'm doing it?
One subject of caricature even called me to complain that I was being inaccurate.
I said she lived in Mosman but she lives in Cremorne Point.
I said she drives a Range Rover but she drives some other gas-guzzling European car.
I said she's friends with Anne Summers, but she's friends with Mike Carlton.
Again, it's called caricature. Will we also demand that cartoonists like Bill Leak and David Rowe draw Abbott's ears and Gillard's nose to their exact proportions for the sake of accuracy?
The best kind of silliness is directed at oneself. After all, you can't let the job go to your head.
The former Title Deeds gossip Jonathan Chancellor told me last year: "you're such a brilliant columnist you remind me of myself." And that told me everything I needed to worry about.
The moral here is simply that we all need to take a regular chill pill; that for the most part, our careers and our reputations are not matters of war and peace. To quote Prospero from The Tempest:
Our revels now are ended
Are melted into air, into thin air...
And, like insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind.
Now to prurience.
It was apocryphally Oscar Wilde's view that "everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power."
Sharri Markson may have taken orgasms off the cover of Cleo but I suspect women are as interested in them as they ever were. Next they'll be banning fast cars from Top Gear.
It's simply fact that people are hard-wired to enjoy sex and to talk, think and read about sex.
Sex in the media isn't just important for its literal implication as a window into the bedroom. Its coverage is a metaphor for human relationships, frailties and raw emotions.
Whether it's Olivia Wirth and Paul Howes, or Greg Combet and Juanita Phillips, or Richard Pratt's mistresses or Craig Thomson's prostitutes or Tim Mathieson's small, female Asian doctor...
Allusions to the bedroom fascinate people. And there is often genuine news value in the implications of people's sexual behaviour.
Finally, sedition.
Shakespeare wrote of "art tongue-tied by authority."
And Silone's Essay in the God That Failed defined liberty as "the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying 'No' to any authority – literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social, and even political."
The core of good journalism is curiosity and skepticism.
And the bedrock of gossip writing is absolute, unadulterated, terrifying fearlessness.
That's what people want to read. Except about themselves.
In the past five days, I've been character-referenced four times in The Australian and once even in the Daily Telegraph's Sydney Confidential.
That tells me two things:
One about the sorry state of the news cycle.
And two: that my column must be working...
I'd rather make a wave for 10 minutes than toil away safely for a lifetime. Sure there are days when I overclub – even by my standards.
But the day I shrink away from writing something that's true and in the public interest is the day I hope Stutch, my editor, taps me on the shoulder and promotes me to the landscape gardening round.
Social suicide? So be it
So whichever way you look at it, ours is a tough beat.
I have told you tonight only what I aim to achieve each morning when I crawl forlornly out of bed, not what will actually happen after six bottles of Piero, two double gins with one ice cube and a schooner of limencello with Richard Wilkins at Machiavelli.
"Look back through this essay," Orwell said, "and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults that I am protesting against."
I'm as imperfect as the public figures I lampoon and I half expect my ruination is only around the corner.
I think of Truman Capote, whose unflinching account of his own friends in New York high society, La Côte Basque, spelled his social suicide.
But in this game you have to know who your real friends are. And you cannot care what the rest think of you.
As the late San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen said: "columnists who make friends lose readers."
Maybe, thus, it's inevitable that I'll have the same turnout at my funeral as Winchell did:
Two people – If you include the priest.
So be it.
Thank you.
