I am not usually inclined to watch the press conferences of politicians. I tend to regard politicians as a necessary evil – democracy being a better system than any of the alternatives, but still laden with insincerity and demagoguery. So why validate the individuals any more with attention than they already get?

I did make an exception yesterday, to watch the federal Attorney General The Hon. Christian Porter MP make a press conference to disclose the worst kept secret of recent days, that he is the Cabinet Minister accused in various documents of being a rapist in 1988 of a woman who recently killed herself.

He was very tearful during the press conference, and expressed sorrow for the bereaved parents of that woman. He also denied any wrong doing.

We have a legal system which has a strong commitment to the presumption of innocence and due process of the law. I was disappointed that he, as Attorney General, did not make that point as clearly as he should have. He should have said: “In our legal system, we are all protected by the principle that we are presumed innocent until proven guilty.”

That, at least, would remind people of how the criminal justice system operates, without having to refer to reruns of Law & Order.

He did also express dismay that no one (ie journalists, I suppose) had put the allegations to him in a way in which he could have replied to them.

I do consider that a self serving observation on his part. How does he feel that allegations should have been put to him? In a request for comment in an interview or in a letter? Or in a formal record of interview under caution against self-incrimination?

A considerable amount of the previous public record about his character, including observations by former prime minister Turnbull, does not present a particularly flattering picture of this chap.

But I think the measure of the man is not so much in this incident, but in his former role as Social Services Minister.

Let’s look at some of the public record on Robodebt:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-31/robodebt-federal-government-christian-porter-no-apology/12304672

https://www.notmydebt.com.au/porter

Many of the most vulnerable Australian citizens were served with notices of debts to the Commonwealth issued by an automated system which relied on a spurious methodology, and with limited right of appeal. Essentially, in an administrative (rather than criminal) sense, they were considered guilty until proven innocent. And Mr Porter was a major player in this, with very limited sympathy for those people.

Whether or not Mr Porter did what he is alleged to have done in February 1988, he will be measured by the court of public opinion against his entire conduct and character and his ability to display genuine empathy, including not only the nature of his denial yesterday but also his denial of wrong doing in the Robodebt tragedy.

Despite my usual voting sympathies, I do not see a place for him in public life in this nation. He should go.

In the golden age of exploration, when Dutch ships came home to Europe laden with spices from the Far East, the Netherlands became a place of great and somewhat unexpected wealth. A large middle class, keen to enjoy its newfound riches, emerged.

The recently introduced tulip, a beautiful and fascinating flower (I personally am more fascinated by begonias) became a status symbol, and quickly became a luxury item amongst the nouveau rich.

This led to a futures market where prices for tulip bulbs grew at exponential speed. I say futures because a lot of the tulip bulbs had not been grown yet, and that, as I learned in childhood, it can take between 7 and 12 years for a tulip bulb to grow from seed.

Of course, along the way, speculators got into the action. If the price is constantly rising for something, then Fear Of Missing Out kicks in and people start pushing the price upward in the hope of making a packet before the price collapses.

As happened in 1637.

And now we have Bitcoin.

I have always been skeptical about cryptocurrency. It is backed by nothing, except a community of computer nerds. Bitcoin started out as next to worthless, and rose to about $2000 a year or two ago at what seemed like an all time high.

And now, recently, it has gotten to about $50,000, as various more respectable investors and financial institutions have gotten onboard.

I do not think this is going to end well, particularly for those who are now piling their cash into Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies at these prices. Bitcoin will crash eventually, just like tulip futures in 1637, or junk bonds in 1987, or Dotcom stocks in 2000, or all those supposedly premium bonds in the GFC. The thing with this is that unlike junk bonds or the GFC bundles, there is no sleight of hand or duplicity by bond traders or other financial brainiacs – Bitcoin is obviously as worthless as magic beans.

Yesterday, I surmised in my posting that the alleged rapist who is now a Cabinet Minister was from NSW, given that the rape did occur in NSW in 1988. I conceded that it was a long shot that it might be someone visiting NSW.

Information has now come to my attention that the long shot might now be quite so much a long shot after all, and that one non-NSW current Cabinet Minister was in Sydney for a debating contest in early 1988 – the sort of event beloved of a certain type of competitive private school kids.

Whilst the name of the latest lead suspect has not directly made it onto any of the various discussion threads online which I have been looking at, I do notice that some bloggers are indirectly suggesting whom it might be by calling out the unusual silence of this person on the matter. Quite a few cabinet ministers, including the one I originally suspected, have come out with their own opinions in the past few days about how the matter should be handled.

Such allegations are serious, and there is nothing to laugh or gloat about. A woman has taken her own life, presumably because of a violent event that has scarred her adult life. Virtue signalling or political gain is inappropriate (and I doubt that any political party wants its own laundry looked at too closely). The matter cannot be tested properly in a court of law, only that of public opinion. Yet despite all else, I believe the worst of the minister in question.

Someone who behaves like this, and is able to then go on to have a highly successful public career, is a dangerous sociopath. Sociopathy will manifest itself in other forms of behaviour, to other victims, and the power that ministers have is far greater than that of a sharklike teenager. He needs to be stopped.

Two major news stories over the past few days have gripped Canberra.

The first is the alleged rape two years ago, in the office of a government minister in Parliament House, of Brittany Higgins, a junior press secretary, by another employee in the ministerial office, after some major social occasion.

Since then, two other women have come forward to claim that they have been raped by that same man, and another has claimed to be sexually harassed by him. It seems, on the face of it, that a serial rapist has been stalking the corridors of power in Canberra in the guise of a rather junior (but apparently obscenely well paid) political staffer.

It took me a couple of minutes of internet searching to find the identity of the alleged rapist online. I am not going to sensationalise things by revealing it. Presumption of innocence and due process are owed in this case. [If you really want to know, visit the blackly humorous http://www.clownworldau.com who have been discussing this case at great, and somewhat inappropriate length.]

The main issue I see is whether or not the office of Minister Reynolds (and perhaps the Minister herself) sought to protect the rapist (and the government which was about to face an election) from the consequences of his action by pressuring Ms Higgins into not making a formal complaint to police.

If that is the case, then Minister Reynolds should go, and probably some of her staffers involved in the cover up as well. I am unsure as to whether charges relating to perverting the course of justice might be appropriate, as well as contempt of parliament (covering up a rape inside the ministerial wing of Parliament House seems like contempt to me). My uncertainty is not because I am not a lawyer (lawyers are always going to give you the answer Maybe to any question), but simply because we do not really know all the facts of the case yet.

However, the matter is probably not that simple. I believe that what happened is that the Minister and her Chief of Staff initially felt that they were dealing with a breach of security by two drunken (and possibly randy) staffers after a party, and were going to deal with it on that basis as a disciplinary matter.

I expect that, after they discovered that there was something more to it than that, they would have gone through the explicit motions of going through with recommending Ms Higgins go to the police. For all that Ms Higgins believes (and I believe that she believes) that she was pressured into dropping that matter to keep her job, I doubt that anyone is going to find evidence that explicit pressure has been laid on her, regardless of what she feels implicitly happened.

Now that Ms Higgins has gone to the police, albeit 2 years later than she should have, we will see what happens in court. I expect that in this case, her testimony, various elements of security footage and the sign in registers (she was not carrying her pass), and the testimony of the security staff who found her not long afterwards, would make for fairly compelling evidence.

[As an aside, I think Minister Reynolds needs to go anyway, regardless. Defence Minister is a serious position – if we were at war, we would need whoever is in that job to be able to cope with huge amounts of stress. However, at the slightest twinge of stress, she runs and hides in hospital. She fails the stress test, and therefore her continued presence as Defence Minister puts our nation at risk.]

The other major story is that allegations have now emerged that a serving Cabinet Minister committed a rape over 30 years ago prior to his political career.

What we know about this case is that the alleged rape occurred in 1988 in NSW, when the victim was 16, and that she has recently committed suicide.

A lot of people are now scratching their heads as to who of the 16 male cabinet ministers in the Morrison government could be this alleged rapist. Whilst I have not been able to find a definite name floating around through my internet searches, at least one discussion thread on Reddit has narrowed it down to three, possibly two, people.

Process of elimination means that you can narrow it down considerably. The suspect probably was at least 16 at the time, and to be in contact with 16 year old women to that extent, probably was no older than 22. Which gives a birth year of 1969, give or take three years. The suspect also was in NSW in 1988, so you probably can rule out those people who were living interstate or overseas (although it is possible, albeit less likely, that the person was a visitor to NSW rather than a local).

So I am pretty convinced now that I know who it is who is accused.

I am also inclined to believe the allegations. Much as my voting sympathies lie with the coalition, I also feel a personal dislike and aversion to most Liberal politicians. Most of the ones we see on TV or read about at the moment seem very hypocritical and self-serving, with frequent accusations of looking after their own vested interests.

However, how can these allegations ever now be tested? The victim is now dead, and her testimony is probably, after 31 years, the only evidence which still existed.

And much as the Labor Opposition is calling for this unnamed Cabinet Minister to be stood down, they are not exactly pure as the driven snow on such issues either. In August 2014, the then Opposition Leader Bill Shorten went on record to deny the allegations that he had raped a 16 year old at a Young Labor camp in the mid 1980s. The evidence there, in terms of a living victim, is more compelling than in the current case and yet was considered insufficient to support a police prosecution, let alone be tested in a court.

But it is not the court of law where these matters are tested. It is the court of public opinion. With an election due this year, this matter is not going to go away, and I expect that the Prime Minister is going to be carefully considering the felicific calculus of what is going to hurt his reelection chances the least – either trying to brazen it out or to proactively stand down the alleged rapist.

I also think that the Labor Party needs to think about whether their own alleged rapist should remain on their front bench, or whether he should also finally look at retirement – Shorten was able to lead Labor to two elections after the rape allegation emerged, without any concerns that perhaps he really was guilty of that act. Right now, I think that the mood of the community has rapidly changed away from one where unproven or untested allegations can be swept aside, the way occurred 7 years ago,

I have been working from home most of the time the past 10 1/2 months, with the occasional day each week in the office until the hard lockdown was suddenly imposed in late July, and not too many days back in the office since then.

Now we are easing back into what semblance we can of what was our old routine, that is, the rat race commute into a city office every morning.

I have never been particularly interested in working from home before, but I must say that it has grown on me considerably since the start of April.

There are plenty of positives:

. a one way journey to work from my home (or vice versa) usually takes between 55 and 65 minutes, provided everything runs smoothly. Staying home saves me 2 hours each working day.

. a new routine of lunch at my mother’s home most week days, combined with bringing whatever groceries she might need.

. ability to sleep in til 7.30am and still be logged on earlier than I would if I had grabbed the 7.20am bus from the corner.

. wearing jeans and polos every day, instead of chinos and business shirts (I think ties seem to have mostly gone out of fashion sometime between 2010 and 2015).

. being able (and this truly is my peasant side coming out) to completely wear out all my oldest and most tatty casual clothes at home before tossing them in the bin.

. saving on public transport – a daily myki fare costs about $9, and perhaps $45 if you buy them as a weekly pass. Not travelling all that way is a big saving.

. missing out on the discomfort of the commute – the sad mix of harried office workers, apprehensive (little do they know what is in store for them) uni students, and upstart private school kids being sent to the other side of town to schools far posher than the lives they are used to and which their parents can really afford. [Not only is it usually standing room all the way from Essendon or Footscray station, but where do you usually catch the winter sniffles? I did not catch a cold at all last year.]

. no more social coffees in the morning in a cafe at the base of the building. Each day, on average, a coffee is going to cost about $4.50.

. and how could I forget fire drill! We did one on my second day back in the office last week, and as I am the sort of officious type to volunteer to be a fire warden, I had the pleasure of marshalling all twelve of the people who had showed up on my floor that day and leading down about five hundred steps to safety. My feet are recovering from that experience.

Against that, perhaps there is all the lost social interaction. But with What’s App, Skype, Zoom etc, what social interaction are we missing?

With Labour Day (or Moomba, as I used to understand it to be when I was a child) this all will come to an end. We are meant to be in the office all the time from then on. I must say, after 30 years as an office worker, I am going to miss working from home.

The news today that counterfeiters in Communist China are making fake bottles of Penfolds wines to rip off the gullible locals with more money than sense is unsurprising. It has been going on for ages.

The cringeworthy new faux-premium labels based on the Penfolds font are named ‘Penfunils’ and ‘Benfords’.

If I did not own shares in the owner of Penfolds, Treasury Wine Estate, I would find this rather funny.

But as I do have a dog in this fight, albeit only 1000 out of the 740 million shares on offer in TWE, I do take this mildly seriously.

But it does cause me to segue into whether I actually have much enthusiasm for Penfolds or other TWE owned wines.

Back when I spent the better part of 1999 working in Canberra (my longest period outside of Melbourne, which did convince me that Melbourne is home no matter what opportunities might come up elsewhere), I started to get more sophisticated in my wine drinking. I went from just drinking whatever red was available to reading books about wine appreciation and to spending time studying the wines available in bottle shops. I very quickly went from drinking the Rosemount Diamond Label Cabernet Shiraz (now part of the TWE portfolio) to drinking Penfolds Bin 28.

And Bin 128, 389, 407….

They were much cheaper then. You could find a Bin 28 or 128 for under $25 in a bottle shop, and similarly a Bin 407. Bin 389 could be found for about $35, and a St Henri, once the in house rival for Grange, did not cost much more than $40.

Now, those wines cost double, if not triple that price, depending on which particular Bin you are looking at. The growth of the market in Communist China has caused the price of Penfolds wines to spike considerably in recent years.

Are they worth it at that price? You are buying predictable premium quality for the price, but predictability is one of the most boring and unromantic things about wine. The variation from vineyard to vineyard, vintage to vintage, even from bottle to bottle, is one of those things which makes wine drinking fun and exciting and whimsical.

I have at least one empty Grange bottle sitting around at home somewhere (FYI, Grange is great, but is it really worth paying more than $80 for and treating like an investment), a souvenir of a third date with a happy ending from a long time ago. It is sometimes interesting to see whether I could fill it up with garage wine (I have heaps of that in plastic drums in the shed), cork it manually, and cover it with a red jacket tightened by a heat gun, and then proffer it to the gullible.

But I am too honest for that. Vir Probus Sum, as the Romans would say. But if anyone were to make me an offer for that empty Grange bottle, I would be interested to know what the price is.

This is way too funny not to share.

I have always been rather skeptical about Crikey, a subscriber only alternative news website which has been in existence since around 2000.

It was originally started under the name ‘Jeffed’ (a verb which came into being in late 1992 to describe the various unpopular decisions newly elected Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett was taking) in late 1999 by its founder Stephen Mayne, a former Kennett government media advisor who became disillusioned by various of Kennett’s actions and decided to try and put a stop to him. He announced his intentions to run as an anti-Kennett, pro-Liberal, independent in the state election against Kennett in his seat of Burwood. (Due to some technicalities around his electoral enrolment, this did not eventuate, but his campaign did take on a novel dimension online.)

Since that time, Mr Mayne has undertaken various ’tilts’ as he calls them (possibly intentionally Quixotic in his reference, although I am unsure whether he has either read Cervantes or seen the musical) with varying degrees of unsuccess – for state parliament, various local councils (he did manage to get elected to the Melbourne City Council once, if I recall correctly), and the boards of numerous publicly listed companies. He also has a hobby which has more or less become a job (gotta do something you love after all) of grilling company boards at AGMs.

He also was able to sell Crikey to a new owner for a tidy sum fairly early on in the piece (2005), so his early ’tilts’ have paid off handsomely.

Whilst his apostasy to the Liberal cause might lead some (possibly even me – although to be honest I am not too sure) to have a degree of skepticism about Crikey and its motives, I am more critical of Crikey because of some inherent hypocrisy within its smug commentary. Not too long after its creation, it referred to an acquaintance of mine (a friend of a now former friend) as a ‘serial pest’.

When I read that, I thought that it was a rather smug throwaway line from a website lacking in some self-awareness, given the many enthusiastic ’tilts’ by its founder rather eclipsed anything my rather quirky acquaintance (a rather unique top hat wearing devotee of Ayn Rand) had been doing to merit the title of ‘serial pest’.

Well, as I am not chairman of a publicly listed company, I cannot find Mr Mayne’s love of attending corporate AGMs to be an annoyance personally (except for when he started asking politically correct questions at a Foster’s AGM well over a decade ago – Foster’s used to have an hour of free booze after the AGM was officially closed and I was keen to get stuck in asap!).

The takeaway from all this is that I do not take the journalistic integrity of Crikey all that seriously.

Which brings me to Jordan Shanks Esq, otherwise known as the Youtuber ‘Friendly Jordies’. His views on many things are rather different to my own (my views are best described, if you have not worked this out already, as being rather on the ‘Right’), but what I admire about him is that he has a deep intolerance of hypocrisy and dishonesty (both the actual and the intellectual variety).

He is also very funny, and I do not get offended by his constant use of a mocking Italian accent when discussing one of his regular targets.

Crikey recently made the mistake of nominating Friendly Jordies for the award of ‘Arsehat of the Year’. He then campaigned for, and apparently won this award (I am not definite about this as I do not waste my money subscribing to Crikey). He recently posted his acceptance speech for this award to his you tube channel, which has some 472,000 (as of today) subscribers. Do yourself a favour and have a look at it on this link:

Being some 20 years or so older than Mr Shanks, I hope that I have outgrown the desire for ad hominem attacks on people, but I must say that I find him very funny, and clever, and that I strongly suspect that the various journalists he savages (from Crikey, the Fairfax media, and Murdoch press) all probably have done something to deserve it.

And I wryly note, with 472,000 subscribers, Friendly Jordies has a much larger audience than the 17,000 subscribers Crikey purports to have.

Elvis Presley’s granddaughter Riley Keogh is an uberbabe. I first heard of her a few months ago when I first heard of an upcoming show she is to star in on Amazon Prime Video: Daisy Jones and the Six. She plays the eponymous character.

Daisy Jones and the Six sounded to me like it is all about a lead singer and her band, with all the sex, drugs and rock n’ roll of the 1970s. That in itself made it an appealing story to look forward to watching, when it finally does come out (hopefully soon). You would hope as well that the song writers on the series make the music really good, as that would add to the enjoyment greatly.

But I decided not to wait for the streaming TV show, and went out and bought a copy of the novel the show is based on a few months ago.

And, like the 80 or so books on my coffee table, it has been gathering some dust lately (I have an 8 year backlog of books to get through, and I buy at least 3 books for every book I actually finish).

Until last night. Realising that the battery on my iPad was running low, I decided to plug it in the charger and pick out a book to read. I don’t do that as much as I used to do anymore, given I can either stream on demand from Amazon Prime, Stan, Netflix, Apple, or Disney (spoilt for choice, no?), or fiddle around with my iPhone when bored.

So I started reading Daisy Jones and the Six. Much as the cover says that it is the sort of book you will stay up all night reading, I do not have that sort of stamina. I lay on the couch much of the day (it has been raining since before sunrise) listening to the rain and reading.

And no book is ever quite what you expect it to be from before you open it. For this one, my first impression is to say WOW! The narrative is not in the first person or third person, it is in the multi-person, in the form of interviews, decades after their break up in 1979, with the various members of the band, rock journos, producers and managers, friends and family.

From the prehistory of the act, when Daisy Jones is just Daisy Jones, gifted and beautiful child of neglectful but prosperous parents, and The Six are still just the two Dunne brothers arguing over who is to play their deadbeat dad’s guitar, the separate voices of the various interviews cut in and out into a mostly coherent narrative of the rise of two different rock acts, which then coalesce into the one story of the creation of a classic rock album and the tour which saw that act’s dialectically inevitable implosion.

There is love, loathing, longing, doubt, denial, drugs, hedonism, regret, anger and so much raw emotion that the narrative channels into the creation of their great album and implosion.

And of course, Sex, Drugs and Rock N’ Roll. But all unpacked and explained in a way which makes you think that perhaps people like Jimmy Page and Robert Plant had a lot more to them at the time they were throwing TVs out of hotel rooms than you might think.

According to the Worldometer website this morning, 100 million people have now been infected with the covid since the pandemic first broke out some 13 months ago.

I expect that by Easter (or not too long after that), this will double to 200 million.

I do not want to guesstimate when the current 2.1 million fatalities doubles.

The news that the vaccine will merely stop people from developing a severe version of the illness, and that vaccinated people may still spread the disease even if they do not develop the illness themselves, does not augur well for a return to normal life anytime soon.

I would not be surprised if this plague remains a problem for humanity well into 2022, if not longer.