Plato's Conclave

The world learned a new Pope had been elected seconds after a seagull regurgitated part of a Vatican street rat for its chick, white smoke curling through the scene like the mist that conceals the organic horror of Skull Island.

Before the elder gull vomited the mangled corpse of rattus papa the commentators from select live feeds watching the Sistine Chapel chimney had been best pleased by the presence of the baby bird. This was a symbol of rebirth; new life had anointed the stage from which new life would soon emerge.

The same commentators had much less to say about the symbolism of the very much dead rat when it was disgorged into view.

Of course, neither thing has any particular allegorical flavour except what we give it. Fish gotta swim, bird gotta eat and what have you. And besides, electing a new Pope hardly qualifies as rebirth and new life. It's like choosing the new CEO of a franchise Mexican store. Sure, the burritos at any given outlet may vary in quality but you're still getting Guzman y Gomez or, heaven forbid, the protestants over at Mad Mex.

Even the smoke itself is largely symbolic. Cardinal electors have had their ballots burned since the early 1400s^[1] give or take, but the Sistine Chapel didn't even have a chimney for another almost half millennium, presumably giving the latter portion of any conclave before that date the asthmatic ambience of a speakeasy.

There white smoke didn't arrive until 1914 and even then the Vatican party planners had to include a ringing bell because some people got confused about the shading. Following the bells, the protodeacon – not to be confused with pterosaurs, the clade of flying reptiles that spanned the Mesozoic – takes to the balcony and gets to declare in full Latin: habemus papam.

For reasons I will never be able to adequately express, I am have never in my life been able to hear that phrase without immediately conjuring the 1993 California Milk Processor Board advertising campaign Got Milk?

Things are not so dissimilar here, although announcements are made by national protodeacon Antony Green before one man, feeling the weight of the moment, takes to the balcony to reckon with what has been bestowed upon him and asks the masses to join him in feverish prayer.

While it is true we typically only elect men, he is not a Pope. Still, the nation's pundits and political class are as apt to read the electoral tea leaves (or the entrails of the chicken, if you're Jane Hume) here as any papal commentator.

Much of it is nonsense and self-serving, though it is endlessly fascinating to see what it is that other people are willing to see. How telling, for instance, that both Labor and the Coalition had kinder words to say about each other than they did about the Australian Greens.

Lord, please don't make me defend the Australian Greens. I certainly won't defend Adam Bandt's sudden need for a remedial preferential voting class in the seat of Melbourne^[2]. My guy, that's how it works and it is good actually. But the insistent desire to paint the national result for the minor party as a referendum on their support for the people of Gaza against total destruction or including dental in fucking Medicare is wild. Hey, those are the things you won't do! Is this really about you? The old refractory endorsement trick; perceived punishment of the ones who say they will do what we won't is a positive assessment of our position to not do them. I need someone like Green to track the preference flows in that statement.

But hey, only God works in mysterious ways. The Australian electorate, however, is wholly intelligible and communes, conclavically, to arrive at a singular and unified position in making its choice across 226 lower and upper house seats. The rationale behind that choice is whatever you want it to be, by the way, as long as you only choose one thing.

For example, the Liberal and National parties have suffered concussive head injuries and both come to the conclusion that Peter Dutton, a man who ignored medical advice to evacuate suffering and dying asylum-seekers in offshore detention for political purposes, was too cuddly for their purposes. What the voters wanted, according to the ossified parliamentary wing of Sky News Australia and their executive, was for Dutton to really take the belt off.

I suppose we did miss some of the signs of the Great Softening, like during the campaign when the chimney of consequence overshadowed regular dad PD just trying to help his son by digesting several houses from a sprawling property portfolio and have him beg for the leftovers.

Having decided the balloon factory needs more naked flame, the Liberal Party leadership is now being contested by Angus Taylor and party defector Jacinta Nampijinpa Price as leader and deputy while coal-face (but never coalface) Nationals Senator Matt Canavan is going to challenge David Littleproud for leadership of the allegedly country party. As an alternative to Taylor, you could choose Sussan Ley^[3].

Price defected from the National party room the moment she saw an opportunity to have a stronger voice. With irony so rich, is it any wonder Rinehart has staked a claim?

Now the Coalition faces its own great schism. And God, it seems, has deserted them. So it's back to the conclave for them, to watch the shadows dancing on the wall to see what fantasies might spring forth.

Addenda

1. ANUSTART

The Australian National University is alone among public, tier one higher education instutions in this country in that it also receives a large national grant every year and is actually a Commonwealth statutory authority. This makes it the only university in the country subject to federal budget estimates, and even then it has only been called before the process four times since estimates began in the 1970s.

Imagine what little we would know without the AFR's higher education reporter Julie Hare (a friend and former colleague), or senate estimates, to hold the blowtorch at the feet of some truly strange management decisions. I dipped my toes into the water this weekend after several very revealing documents were released following some prolonged battles with Freedom of Information law. In short, the university has embarked on a $250 million restructure which began life just 17 days after the new Vice-Chancellor Genevieve Bell started in the job. She was appointed under a process led by Chancellor Julie Bishop, the former Foreign Affairs Minister, whose own consulting staff work part-time for her privately and part-time for the ANU supporting her as Chancellor, all from the same $800,000 refurbished office in Perth paid for by the university.

Bell and her executive team have had to scrub entire answers provided in written form, and after much consideration, to the senate estimates process after they were found to contain outright false information. Notably, that her signature restructure at ANU was concocted in-house. It wasn't. Despite denying consultants were used in devising cost-saving and restructure plans we now know that some $3 million in contracts were issued to Nous for exactly that work. Nous happily emailed work on papers that were due to be given to ANU council, reminding the Provost, Chief People Officer and Chief Operating Officer that they would, of course, change all the figures over to ANU branding.

It does not seem that Council was ever told about the involvement of Nous.

I write in The Saturday Paper:

Documents released under freedom of information this week show that Nous responded to Bell directly ahead of a project kick-off meeting in early April 2024.

“Phillip also mentioned that, in addition to those case studies, you would like a sharper focus on the question of ‘how does the sector achieve margin in its activities?’. We have attached a short paper on that topic,” one Nous principal, whose name has been redacted, wrote.

“The first section takes a rather ‘commercial’ view on university financial performance and the second section walks through the range of tactics across academic delivery, professional services, and non-labour costs. We also cover tactics to pursue targeted high-margin growth.”

After an April 8 meeting with the Nous team, Bell noted an “excellent” discussion and that she was “already looking forward to our next meeting”.

And for what? Part of this enormous restructure, a small part but a part nonetheless, is a proposal for a centralised library system and for that centralised system to buy fewer books. Buy fewer Nous! Whatever would an academy dedicated to research and the pursuit of knowledge even need with books anyway.

It has to be said, the person who wrote this course outline for a new undergraduate course at ANU appears to have gone to the Slim Dusty school of libraries without books. Though the course outline contains hundreds of individually reconisable words they are assembled in such a way as to precisely defeat comprehension, the way the hollow panels on the outside of a submarine are designed to confound radar.

Like, I genuinely cannot tell if this is an excerpt from a real university course or a Scientology brochure:

AATD3001 - SoCIETIE Initiative at 3000-level

The 3000-level course is specifically for students who are in their final-year and preparing for the next stage of leadership in their studies or career; however the selection of KNOTs^[4] can be tailored to explore topics of interest and develop skills in a flexible way, and there are no limitations on the activities and opportunities that AATD3001 students can engage with.

As Kevin Rudd once said: this fucking language.

Hughdaimonia

I was driving Mum to the airport this week so she could catch her flight to the northwest edge of Queensland to see her grandson, my sister and her partner Jake. It's always nice to have a moment of focus with Deb, because it tends to bend her mind like a beam of light through a prism and I can see its many quirks in all their strata.

At the bottom of the hill near where we live, she spotted a trio walking up and thought she recognised one of them. 'That's old Mr what's his name,' she said before letting herself trail off for moment and then correcting course, 'no, it can't be. He's dead.'

I agreed that this likely ruled him out as being the man striding up the hill and then she laughed until she wheezed.

Later, as we neared Ipswich, we passed a horse being unloaded from a truck at a property and Mum declared: 'Of course they're horse people,' she said. 'Their garden is shit.'

With apologies to horse people everywhere, though I confess to immediately seeing the profound clarity of the statement. God damn, she was right.

But, to more important matters, she made it to Clonkers (Cloncurry) and Hugh had an almost out of body experience when he first saw her. Was she real? The nanny from the video calls? He hugged her gently and then stood on his toes to give her a kiss.

And then came my turn for a FaceTime chat and we had a blast, as you can potentially tell.

I was making myself dinner while this call took place and almost ruined my sesame chicken for the guy. But that, as we know, is love. Take all the sesame chicken, and give me my Hugh.