Why would you?

Paul Kelly is giving the National Press Club address on 8 September:

"The March of the Patriots"

Paul Kelly is Editor-at-Large of The Australian. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of The Australian (1991–1996). He is the author of The Unmaking of Gough (1976), later titled The Dismissal (1982), The Hawke Ascendancy (1984), The End of Certainty (1992), November 1975 (1995) and Paradise Divided (2000)..."

Why would you pay to be lectured by a man so obviously biased against enlightenment?

As a fully paid-up whore for the Murdoch/Neo-Liberal project, his irrelevence should disqualify him from participation in the general public discourse.

Not here in Murdoch-controlled Australia!

We think you'd be better off spending the money on subscribing to a community radio station or shouting a couple of struggling journalism students a counter lunch and your words of worldly wisdom.

But if you do go to this event, I dare you to work the following into a question to Mr Kelly (even though Bob Ellis is completely hopeless in so many ways, he does make a valid point or two now and then!):

"Time presses. Extinction approaches.
And Paddy McGuinness is dead.

How is one to explain yet another hairy, boozing, bulky Leftie who became a grumpy obese neofascist colonel Blimp who still called his Balmain acquaintances 'comrade' and still somehow meant it?...

And now he was dead, and twenty hours later still dead.

How many such stories are now approaching their end. Of honourable, able journalists of once good conscience like Ray Martin, Mike Willesee, Jim Whaley, Laurie Oakes and, amazingly, Paul Kelly serving the Dark Side for decades in return for sheaves of money. They start out believing they will do it for only a couple of years. Then they start out believing they will do it for only a couple of years. Then they say they are going, and their salary is doubled. Then they convince themselves the compromises they will henceforth make (like going easy on Howard and hard on Beazley) are not significant, and have no influence, really, on history and if the people are that influenceable, fuck them. Then they have expenses - a divorce, a villa in Tuscany, a brood of racehorses - that require a few more years. And then they turn sixty-five, and feel they should continue, for just a few more years. And soon that adds up to a life..."

('And So It Went: Night Thoughts In A Year Of Change', Bob Ellis)