Just three brief comments/observations I intend to record for now...
Firstly, in what was one of my most memorable if hardly first education in how the seemingly omnipresent and supposedly omniscient - and even omnipotent - news media operates...
both while living in Brisbane (1990-91) and after then returning to New Zealand, I saw how a restless as media, tired of the known quantity that was PM Hawke, kept on and on tugging at Hawke's coattails and continually agitating on behalf of a potential challenge by then Treasurer Paul Keating...which - in one of the dumbest political moves in modern Australian political history - and have they witnessed some dumb moves or what - eventually saw Hawke deposed by the cerebral Keating, who admittedly did win one subsequent election in his own right - before being soundly thrown out on his ear by Prime Minister-Elect John Howard in 1996...which thumping victory I even recall watching while nurse aiding (in the wee hours) at Wakari Hospital, Dunedin in early 1996...
Secondly, my own dear Mum once met (I believe, then trade union leader) Hawke at some social work conference here in Dunedin (I imagine back in the seventies sometime)...recalling my own 'serendipitous' bumping into Hawke's contemporaneous kiwi Labour Party politician/Prime Minister David Lange... while attempting to get a few dollars or so out of an NZ Post (ATM) money machine in the later nineteen-eighties (while the infamous '88 Dunedin conference was entering high (or deepest) dudgeon)...
To the idle but entirely harmless, even fairly friendly 'harangue' of a male passerby that "you won't get any money out of that machine" (alluding to the way the selfsame had been completely run down by the then economically very right-wing, deregulatory 'Labour' Government)...
PM Lange responded rather irascibly, in what to this punter anyhow seemed an entirely uncharacteristic outburst - let alone un-self-controlled spirit - irritably snapping: "Fun-ny, ha-ha!"
One hardly needs a spin doctor informing one that that petulant reaction was hardly the way to win friends and influence people, eh...
And thirdly, I've little doubt whatsoever - just like innumerable Aussie commentators, no doubt - that his death just upon the eve of Election 2019 can only be a plus for the chances of the (unjustifiably) renascent Australian Labour Party...much as that of NZ's own David Lange just prior to General Election 2005 helped seal NZ PM Helen Clark's own otherwise increasingly fraught re-election chances...
...and in Bill Shorten's case for a party utterly bereft (admittedly much like its opposite, presently governing 'number') of a political vision, good old-fashioned ideals and principles...
but what else would one expect in modern-day Western politics, especially those of the Aussie variety!
Firstly, in what was one of my most memorable if hardly first education in how the seemingly omnipresent and supposedly omniscient - and even omnipotent - news media operates...
both while living in Brisbane (1990-91) and after then returning to New Zealand, I saw how a restless as media, tired of the known quantity that was PM Hawke, kept on and on tugging at Hawke's coattails and continually agitating on behalf of a potential challenge by then Treasurer Paul Keating...which - in one of the dumbest political moves in modern Australian political history - and have they witnessed some dumb moves or what - eventually saw Hawke deposed by the cerebral Keating, who admittedly did win one subsequent election in his own right - before being soundly thrown out on his ear by Prime Minister-Elect John Howard in 1996...which thumping victory I even recall watching while nurse aiding (in the wee hours) at Wakari Hospital, Dunedin in early 1996...
Secondly, my own dear Mum once met (I believe, then trade union leader) Hawke at some social work conference here in Dunedin (I imagine back in the seventies sometime)...recalling my own 'serendipitous' bumping into Hawke's contemporaneous kiwi Labour Party politician/Prime Minister David Lange... while attempting to get a few dollars or so out of an NZ Post (ATM) money machine in the later nineteen-eighties (while the infamous '88 Dunedin conference was entering high (or deepest) dudgeon)...
To the idle but entirely harmless, even fairly friendly 'harangue' of a male passerby that "you won't get any money out of that machine" (alluding to the way the selfsame had been completely run down by the then economically very right-wing, deregulatory 'Labour' Government)...
PM Lange responded rather irascibly, in what to this punter anyhow seemed an entirely uncharacteristic outburst - let alone un-self-controlled spirit - irritably snapping: "Fun-ny, ha-ha!"
One hardly needs a spin doctor informing one that that petulant reaction was hardly the way to win friends and influence people, eh...
And thirdly, I've little doubt whatsoever - just like innumerable Aussie commentators, no doubt - that his death just upon the eve of Election 2019 can only be a plus for the chances of the (unjustifiably) renascent Australian Labour Party...much as that of NZ's own David Lange just prior to General Election 2005 helped seal NZ PM Helen Clark's own otherwise increasingly fraught re-election chances...
...and in Bill Shorten's case for a party utterly bereft (admittedly much like its opposite, presently governing 'number') of a political vision, good old-fashioned ideals and principles...
but what else would one expect in modern-day Western politics, especially those of the Aussie variety!
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