If only Abbott were a blackfella…

The psychologist and author Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a very strange piece of work indeed, famously broke down the business of death and dying into five distinct stages, the last of which is a resigned and peaceful acceptance of the curtains coming down for good. In addition to advocating that the still-healthy spend a night a two in the company of corpses, just to make the Reaper’s general acquaintance, she also advocated the spiritual embrace of physical degeneration in those last and final days — burying the hatchet with Mine Enemy the Tumour, if you will. Kübler-Ross was thinking of individuals, but it seems her wisdom also applies to failing corporations, one of them in any case.

Fairfax Media, having seen its long decline strip The Age and Sydney Morning Herald of fairness, rationality, reportorial vigour, intellectual consistency, full disclosure and competent sub-editing, now takes pride in hosting a sideshow website, Daily Life, devoted to matters of concern to the modern woman. Surprisingly, most of these interests are of the traditional variety which has sustained ladies’ magazines for decades — fashion, salads, handsome fellows, more salads, children and domestic life. The “modern” bits appear to be a general animus toward men and the elevation of partisan caprice to a virtue.

Alecia Simmonds, a very modern woman, writes for Daily Life when not otherwise engaged in embodying the benefits of an advanced education at UTS, where Wendy Bacon inculcates newsroom hopefuls and Media Watch researchers with the skills and perspectives that have done so much to make contemporary journalism the remarkable thing that it is. Several years ago, Ms Simmonds had this to say, “We live in a culture that normalises the relationship between masculinity and power”. This was by way of observing that Julia Gillard was being criticised while then-Opposition Leader Tony Abbott “is loping towards Kirribilli like a maniacal Neanderthal who has only just learned to use cutlery.”

A rude, rough man, that Prime Minister-to-be, whose rise to power could only be the product of a diseased and deeply sexist culture.

More recently, Ms Simmonds has re-examined the role of “culture” in political life, the catalyst for her deeper thoughts being what she deems the unfair treatment of Queensland Labor MP Billy Gordon, whose own mother once took out a protection order against him. Unlike Abbott, who is thought by some to have punched a wall (but never a woman), Gordon is an Aborigine and that, apparently, makes a huge difference (emphasis added):

Billy Gordon may also be a product of a racist society where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are poorer, sicker, more disadvantaged than any other group in Australian society seems to have escaped us. In our rush to pronounce upon his character we have strangely forgotten about his context; one where one in every 43 Aboriginal adults are in prison and Aboriginal people are eight times more likely to be taken into police custody.

It’s hypocritical for us to ask Aboriginal politicians to redress their communities’ problems and then be shocked when it turns out that they have experienced those problems. Or, in Gordon’s case, that they are living examples of them. Many, like Gordon, may come from what he calls a ‘troubled and fractured past.’ And his past is our own past; Australia’s ‘troubled and fractured’ history of colonisation.

There is much more of the same as Simmonds’ oily rationalisations for dual standards — a harsh and accusatory one for gentlemanly conservatives and a benign leniency for two-fisted black men — ooze down the page in a sludge of po-mo cliches and passionate incoherence. Some might call that dual perspective a case study in patronising racism or, more pointedly, plain, old-fashioned, foul and stinking hypocrisy.

In the brochures it distributes to prospective advertisers, Fairfax extolls Daily Life thus: “By placing your brand on Daily Life you will be connecting with informed, social, fashion-concious (sic), brand-aware and educated professional women who interact with aspirational and engaging brands.”

So Kübler-Ross might indeed have called it correct: The dying really do try to make a virtue of the tumours that are killing them.

 

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