Spotted just up the road from my place:

I'd just like to say I'm not in anything with Ben Lee.

A free plug for an advertiser

One of our Google-selected sponsors (thanks Google, thanks sponsor) promises the following as their opening gambit:

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If that's not world class I don't know what is.

Peter Garrett is world class

There's no doubt the ex[*]-Midnight Oil frontman is the stuff of dreams and nightmares for many in the Australian polity. Similarly no-one can doubt that the Sydney Morning Herald's interviews furnish fewer insights than the average ladies magazines' coverage of a celebrity divorce.

In other news six athletes from Sierra Leone have sought asylum in Sydney from the Dame Edna-infested Commonwealth Games closing ceremony in Me!bourne.

[*] Everyone's an ex-<something> these days. I read that to mean either people aren't doing anything anymore or history is full.

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Apparently it is still not too late to catch a flight to Me!bourne for the Commonwealth Games, where it seems they have rounded up enough English-speaking foreigners for a few games of hockey and netball. If you're quick you just might catch a glimpse of the teflon suits, Tony Blair and John Howard, engaging in some mutually enjoyable backscratching.

Coonan achieves what the Victorian Right could not

As usual, the hard righties of the north show the southerners how it is done. Michael Kroger, ex member of the ABC board and sometime lofty chieftan of the anaemic Victorian blue-bloods, famously failed to correct the devious and covert bias of the "for all of us" national broadcaster, although he did manage to piss off a lot of lefties, so it wasn't all bad.

Compare with Coonan, however; not only is she in the business of doing business on a Government letterhead (around the time our mate Michael undertook the Herculean task of cleaning the A(ugean)BC stables), but she found time to both not fill two ABC board positions and eliminate the staff position! (Oh yes, and monkey around with the media laws, how could I forget.) Her logic is again of the John Howard school of the impeccable and infallible:

As the staff-elected director has been elected by staff rather than appointed, there have been claims that the position creates uncertainty about accountability.

If I were running a university philosophy department I would be madly sacking staff so I could afford to bestow honorary doctorates on both the PM and Ms Communications for such beautiful and original contributions to that staid old discipline.

Howard delivers the kiss of death to Melbourne

Melbourne's world class "news pictorial" the Herald Sun — coincidentally the most popular brand of toilet paper in the country — makes a lot out of one of John Howard's minor pronouncements at the Commonwealth Games this weekend. Our esteemed leader obviously misspoke, uttering "Sydney" when he meant his city of non-residence, Canberra, which is clearly so much more aggregated (bleached) than either of the others.

Some malcontent writing for The Australian has tried to intellectualise it, cataloguing some of Sydney's successes and claiming them to be failures. He obviously prefers the supine civic pride of Melbourne, and has a need to boost his self-esteem by siding with the public statements of the big boys.

While muttering about some Abbott-sanctioned cleansing of the gene pool, a nameless Trashograph hack took out the Dictionary of Cliche and did Sydney the disservice of attempting a defence. Being nowhere as keen as the Mexicans on the subliterate tabloids, we Sydneysiders really should retain our self-satisfaction through silence, as no-one has so far pretended to do more than pulling an opinion out of their arse. Heh, move along, nothing to see here...

The PM, a long-term Sydney resident, obviously prefers disaggregated urbanity over flying trams and community cohesion, and there are several million other Australians who have a similar unfamiliarity with the warm hand of friendship. We've got a world class police force up here that knows all about the plot, so what do we care for all this comparative nonsense? It is but the whine of those who don't yet know they have lost.

Those world class Commonwealth Games

Truly the gold diggers of Ballarat must be distant relatives of Sydneysiders, for they have seen the light.

There's just too much world-class activity at the moment, this country is really going off.

Mt Druitt, taking one for the team

Mr Melbourne, showing his beret-sympathiser credentials, clearly does not understand the grand Sydney tradition of taking one for the team. If he were to live here he'd comprehend just how much Sydney suffers in order to gift just one world-class locality to this great nation. Instead he is off drinking boutique microbrewed beer in some trendy bar in Richmond enjoying the products of our city's hard labour.

The people of Mt Druitt know just how important a rosy red sunset is to the people living on the coast and are therefore prepared for the minor inconveniences of a shorter life and longer commute to work. Once again, we work as a team to deliver on our world-class potential - some get all the benefits, and others pick up the tab, just as God intended. Mr Melbourne harbours some passe twentieth-century socialist agenda, wondering why the ALP cannot get it up anymore, while Sydney just gets on with it.

The new media laws have the potential to bring Uncle Rupert's world-class touch to every city in Australia, not just Brisbane and other unmentionables. Our beloved leader has already scotched the advertising-on-the-ABC line, using that clever politico-logical brain of his:

And there is an argument, of course, that there's a limited pool of advertising dollars and if they are spread further around then it makes the position of the commercial TV stations, well, it alters their position, because they don't get any public funding.

I could've sworn that the Feds were pumping dollars into propaganda at a rate that the ALP could never dream of; heck, my old mate Tony Abbott got $60 million for anti-abortion noise-making just for losing the RU486 "conscience" vote. One may also recall that Michael Duffy claimed:

It can even be argued that businesses have the right to reach the educated middle class through broadcast media, which the ABC's near-monopoly largely denies them. Fairfax and The Australian certainly suffer from being unable to advertise on 702 ABC Sydney or Channel Two. (Incidentally, under the existing legislation the ABC could run paid commercials now on its very successful website and its podcasting.)

in the truly world-class Sydney Morning Herald, no less. It is just so incredibly grandiose to be that concerned for Uncle Rupert's bottom line, and only a hard righty could see so far through all the left-wing bullshit surrounding any mention of the ABC.

So the short story is that the advertising budget in Australia is of a fixed size, even though the economy is growing, and that the ABC should not be allowed access to that budget as it might harm the export of AUD to those in more need of them than us. Everyone clear on that? Great!

Time to pay some attention to that meddling Simon Crean from Victoria... everyone knows Kim is doing us all a favour as the ALP leader, so just shut up and wear it. God this rightwing shtick wears thin.

The Green Light

Sydney gives world class green lights but this time we have to share the glory around.

Not satisfied with mere substantially unchecked power, another world class product of the town of pomp, ceremony and German vineyards, Nick Minchin, has revealed that the Feds think one half (the unwashed half, naturally) of the industrial relations equation need no longer bother to show up to the table. It's bloody awesome, Howard for life, and all that — before long we'll have the sweetest little world-class benevolent dictatorship in full swing out here, and everyone knows that's as efficient as things get.

World class Labor Party

Only in Melbourne could such a pyrrhic victory be so feted. An attempt to head off further speculation about the absence of hard righties of gold digger stock has gone horribly wrong, and the Lefties are again backs-to-the-wall, balls-in-the-mincer. Really, their political platform makes as much sense as living in St Kilda, and everyone knows the Left is too pure to ever sully its hands with power. Hence the Greens.

Those boosting Ms Gillard are kidding themselves, and even if she were the hottest thing of the political moment (a position I have already categorically refuted), she's been dating the boys from the wrong end of town. Whilesoever the world class NSW hard right ALP machine is standing behind the world class political genius Morris Iemma it is clear the Feds will be saddled with Beazley. KRudd might be a goer if he can remember where the knife is and how to use it.

As always, Gerard Henderson unleashes his razor wit in an us-versus-them tirade of pure logic. Of course "Howard-Hater" is a perfectly reasonable word choice, for what else could drive someone away from John and Jeanette's beneficent egalitarianism? It simply must be unreasoning hate, most probably by those envious southerners. Through careful application of selective quotation and a most astute insistence that Labor continue to lug their whale around well after the Japan-sympathisers of the ALP have had their way with him, Henderson once again proves he has everyone's best interests at heart... but falls short of perfection. It is bleedingly obvious that Keating is still to blame for it all.

Sydney is the Queen of Australia (and proud of it)

Mr Melbourne appears to be hung up about the relative sizes of Mexico City and Sydney when this nation federated. What's that go to do with anything? Sydney has always been world class, even back when the Aborigines were running around trying to avoid the business ends of the friendly muskets of Captain Cook's welcoming committee.

Clearly Sydney's sister-city arrangements were formulated to make the other city feel better about itself, unlike Melbourne's, which look like the door list of a Smith Street methadone user's group. Once again, Sydney is playing a different code of football to the rest of the nation, and no, it's not gridiron. (Who could conflate the American with the aerial ping-pong? Ah, a Melbournian!) The Kiwis are happy, having given up most of their armed forces - Sydney has taken a benign interest and they know things will work out OK. It is the way of all things.

The Sidney Myer Music Bowl? Does anyone apart from the CIA know where that is? Most would probably take it to be an incomplete tennis court, likely to be named "The Lleyton Hewitt" in honour of all the people who emigrate from Adelaide. It's one of those migrations that improves both places.

The cold dead fact-machines of the south have clearly fed Mr Melbourne a dud line: The Australian has always been published in the ACT by Australia's finest export, Rupert Murdoch. Truly Sydney would hug him to her bosom if only the Packer family left any of it free. The rumour is that James will be weaned in the coming weeks, and once that Herculean task is done we might see what we can do.

I am bored with this trivia. Another key facit to the world class act that is Sydney is the performance of it's universities. Whereas the University of Melbourne must write its own rankings to make it appear to the uninitiated that it is comparable to ANU, the Sydney univerisities know they are beyond compare and resolutely refuse to play this game. There seems to be some confusion in Melbourne that the aim should be quality, which is ridiculous when one considers all the under-employed over-educated people giving the city a bad name. Heck, without the annual Comedy Festival there would be millions dying in the streets from a lack of income, or charity, as those who've been know it to be.

Sydney, of course, has had a bums on seats, or more correctly, bums on stairs / floor / corridor / door policy for a long time now and it's working out great - we have the best Asian chicks in the country.

ABC TV ran a puff-piece on Julia Gillard this evening, somehow ignoring Bronwyn Bishop's righteous claim to being the hottest babe in the Australian Parliament. Those from the Insular Peninsula know she looks great in a bikini on a surfboard at Narabeen, and vote accordingly. As with Jeanette, the plebian postcodes just can't feel the love.

A Parthian shot indeed. The slings and arrows of an over-educated Mexican trouble not the scions of the mighty Rum Corps. Whereas he can only martial cold, dead facts, we have many, more universal, themes at our disposal, and we will decide who expounds them, and the manner in which they are expounded, as is clearly the sovereign right of the world class.

First cab off the rank: for all its pretence to culture and civilisation, where is Melbourne's riposte to the Opera House? It's been forty years now and... what's that? Federation Square? Clearly this reflects the lack of vigour in the southern reactives, who are too busy getting Tanya'd to pay attention to the main game, which is most certainly not the AFL.

This ceaseless amassment of inconsequential ephemeral verities rings hollow in the face of realcity rhetoric. As always, it comes down to who has the bomb, and that would be us. An ex-honcho of the Sydney tertiary circuit had a grand vision of a nuclear Australia (where we would be able to identify the "real" Australians by their friendly glow, dang those pesky newcomers), and while his vision is yet to be fully realised - blame it on the soft-right Sussex St machine, they know not what they ought - it is a vision that could only be concocted in this world-class city. The pup at Lucas Heights surely has the capacity to produce enough fissile material to be consequential, whatever piddling medical applications it is wasted on currently. Again, Sydney demonstrates its greatness by taking one for the team, half of whom are off-side and passing the ball forwards while sporting the biggest wedgies in history.

A claim that Toorak even rates as a suburb shows how deeply disturbed our Southern friend is. Far it is from the rolling green hills of Kirribilli and Admirality Houses, from which Janette benignly surveys all that is good in our grand country. Those who are far from her gaze cannot comprehend the feelings of warmth and predation that a 1950s housewife can radiate, and the overwhelming desire of the populace for them. Truly she sends a stronger signal than the nearby SBS transmitter, and the best the ladies of Melbourne can do is... get Costello to squeak on their behalf.

The wise and strong base commander in Dr Strangelove was right to be worried about his precious bodily fluids, and it was for similar reasons that Sydney removed the blight of efficient public transport from its streets. That Melbourne retains its trams bespeaks of a primitive socialist instinct in the people, a lack of will to be real individuals and simply drive everywhere. Until Melbourne has world-class traffic jams it is quite obviously not world-class.

As for all this flummery in the gutter press: the Mardi Gras is ample evidence that Sydney not only provides a world class gay experience, it is indeed world leading. No other part of the country even comes close. All that other noise merely provoke "whos?" and "whats?" from the people with enough brains to know where to live.

Sydney is a world class city, but unfortunately Canberra is not. The reason that the capital of this righteous nation is set in acreage previously held sacred by both Aborigines and sheep farmers is that Melbourne simply could not accept Sydney's self-evident preeminence.

Melbourne's crime against Sydney has since compounded into a crime against humanity; to require 300,000 world-class bureaucrats to reside in that cultural wasteland clearly beckons United Nations intervention. Give it back to the sheep, shout the people of Sydney. As the UN has never bothered to fill it's Viagra script, we invite the Scandinavian countries to invade the ACT and absorb it into their Volvo ("To Roll") world-class aesthetic.

The celebration of ten years of John Howard PM has been truly world-class. The mere fact that Janette has journeyed to Canberra to be with the big man at this triumphant time of world-class achievement speaks for itself, not that the non-members of Sydney society could recognise such sacrifice when they saw it. She who has made Dame Edna, the Melbourne suburban superstar housewife, so thoroughly redundant, deigns to be seen in a plebian postcode, and moreover converse with the unwashed. The First Lady goes well beyond the call of duty and still the press wants more; is it not enough that she has brought Tim up to be an unthinking reactive? People in those other unmentionable parts of the country are so impossibly gauche.

Clearly the mark of a world-class city is the quality of it's right wing politicians. Melbourne has not managed to crack a hard-righty since the mighty Jeff was unseated by the colourless Bracks, whereas Sydney is a veritable factory. Tony "if offence was taken, it was withdrawn" Abbott, master of the retractable dog-whistle (I do hope he patented that) is a case in point. The kicking he got from undiscovering his son last year has been completely forgotten, and he didn't even get a chance to break the arm of the ex-flatmate who concocted the prank all those years ago. Such restraint is truly a world-class demonstration of a sense of humour and humility that one could only learn in a Sydney seminary.

...and not only do we furnish Australia with it's most rabid supporters of the beautifully coherent radical-conservative-neo-con-centre-right political platform, we also pay those other states to hang out with us in this world-class Federation! Such largesse is truly something that only world-class Sydney could afford.

Adelaide has a free-hold on world-class pomposity, but that is only because the other cities stopped competing in 1856. Indeed, I believe some geneticists (from Sydney, naturally) are studying the Downer strand of humanity in the hope of isolating a restorative for the future monarchs, to counteract some of the effects of fierce inbreeding.