The Costello Memoirs

By Peter Costello
Former Treasurer of Australia



Peter Costello to boy:
"I also succeeded in putting in place capital acquisition programs which actually allocated money to specific programs. We discovered, for example, that in listing projects for capital acquisition Defence never allowed for deprectiation or repairs!"

Boy to Peter Costello:
"I got a lollypop."

**


Here's an anecdote about a time when he was spending a lot of late nights with Finance Minister John Fahey, working on some revenue committee thing and putting in a lot of hours.

Are you ready for this? Alright, here it goes...

"At the end of the process, after months away from home, John said to me one night, 'I haven't seen much of Colleen (his wife) lately. And I guess you haven't seen much of Tanya. In fact, we now spend more time with each other that we spend with our wives...' I cut him off. "I'm getting a little uncomfortable about where this conversation is heading, John!'"

Did you catch it? Did you see it? Because there it was, the only gag in 385 pages of memoirs.

That was it! A kinda gay joke! That was fairdinkum the most funny thing in the whole book, and it wasn't even funny, at all.

Then again, I did laugh a few times in the book, but only at parts I wasn't supposed to be laughing at.

**

Look, it's easy to bag this book, and Costello himself, and don't worry, I intend to, but, let me start with a few positives, some of them controversial amongst my left leaning friends.

First of all, if anyone was to be the Treasurer during the Howard years, I'm glad it was Costello. For starters, he LOVES taxation law. The most vibrant passages of the book, where his personality seems to come to life and what meagre charm he posseses jumps up from the page, are all to be found when discussing economic mechanics. There were chapters and chapters where he goes to great lengths explaining how the IMF works, what GDP is, and how Treasuries, banks and taxation laws all come together. Like over 100 pages was just explaining how stuff works (obviously to then give merit to the decisions he made - the extract above with the picture is a typical sentence). But really, the only people who would be vaguely interesetd in any of it would be budding Federal Treasurers. For the rest of us, it was stuff that belonged in an appendix. Even so, his enthusiasm was admirable.

But another reason he made a good treasurer was because I don't think he made one economic decision based on politics. Every economic decision he made seems to have been made on an economic level - in that it had economic, not political justification. Whether he made wrong or right economic decisions is neither here nor there, the point is, he left politics out of it somehow and on that level, he was a worthy treasurer. In fact, he even used economics for good instead of evil at one point, when squeezing Indonesia over the East Timor issue. It's a long story, but basically, he helped Indonesia fix some economic problems in return for getting the fuck out of East Timor.. which is more than Keating ever did (I loved Keating, but on East Timor, he failed me).

Costello would also make a fine husband and father. Reliable, devoted, and mentally sound. That comes through in the book too. He seems a nice enough guy, and if he had to pick you up from footy training, he would be there on time. Good on him. Also, he's a Blackburn boy, and I'm originally a Mitcham boy, so, you know, he gets a point for being a boy from down the road, even though he went to a toffee private school and I went to Mitcham 'Igh.

A final positive... his view of Howard is hilarious, unintentionally. He presents Howard (who, by the way, he constantly refers to as 'Howard') as this vague, shadowy figure who sometimes crawls out of his ivory cave to ask how things are going, then crawls back into the cave, leaving the real people alone to do the work. After reading this book you get the impression that Howard never actually made a decision about anything, or ever actually did a day's work. He was just a mouthpiece for Costello and all the other hard-working Ministers who made the decisions and did all the work. But you know what, Costello? I think that's a better system. I don't want my Prime-Minister bogged down until 3am wading through economic data. I want him or her to be fresh in the morning, fresh to lead. And that's one thing Howard could do (rightly or wrongly) and you can't do. Face it Costello - you were the worker, he was the leader, and that system kept the two of youse in power for more than a decade.

The biggest problem with the book (aside from it being boring as batshit) is that it proves that Keating was right when he said Costello was 'all tip, no iceberg'. Try as I did, in 385 pages, I still don't know what this man believes in, aside from God. Which, by the way, grant me this aside. He believes in God too much for my liking and should be prevented from holding office. His wife had a brain problem and nearly died. Costello writes "...medical assistance and, in my view, divine intervention saw her recover..." Divine intervention? You're kidding me? God, as a sole and sentient entity personally healed your wife with the assistance of doctors? Fuck off idiot.

No, aside from God, there's nothing I could find in here. There's a few things he doesn't believe in, like, left wingers, and Brian Harradine (who, by the way, fucked the Libs on the GST by asking for the removal of some gay safe-sex material from a Government publication - Costello thought that meant Harradine would support GST, but he didn't), but there's nothing that I could put my finger on when it came to what he actually wanted in a society, aside from canny taxation law and 'law and order'. Even his dislike of the left is lame, as it was developed in his Monash Uni days when he encountered some extreme-left anti-semites, but jesus, I don't dismiss all conservative-leading policy just because Hitler existed, so I can't see why he refused to acknowledge anything from the left just because of some militant arsewipes he came across at Uni and in the Union movement.

When it got to the Pauline Hanson bit, I thought maybe he'd be able to let loose, but even then it was a pragmatic but gutless response. He backed the decision to "...not attack Hanson personally... (but to)attack her policies in a logical and analytical way." I recall that backfiring even then, but he still supports it. She was using emotional language and she needed to be fought on that level, as well as a 'logical' level. But it came to me then, reading that - that's his whole political life, this Costello man. Take God away, and all he has is 'logical and analytical', and that's the 'no iceberg' quip in a nutshell. That's why he can't lead the country. Not enough heart. Brains and dignity aplenty, but no heart.

I also found him disrespectful to the ALP leaders. He seemd to like Beazley as a man (not as a pollie), and thought Crean had a brain, but from Hawke to Rudd he seems to think anyone on that side of politics was some yobbo buffoon. I know I know, there are plenty of yobbo buffoons on the left, but jeez, what's Wilson Tuckey then? Buffoonery crosses the political divide.

But I digress. Actually, there's not much more to say. He had one shot at this memoir business and he fucked it up. It had no guts, no substance, no balls. Just like Ian Thorpe and Brodie Holland* I ask, "Where's the cock? Where's the cock? Give me some cooooooocccckkkk!" There's just none. This book is a document, not a memoir. It's a timeline. There's not even anecdotes! No bon mots! No gossip! No insight into his feelings or any indication that he can be moved by art, or nature, or anything apart from God and family. Mark my words, this book will be in the $2 bin by now. It has nothing to offer to the world or arts and letters, or hell, even the world of politics or Australian History. Economic historians might take a fleeting interest in it (luckily for Costello I did Economics at Uni so I took a little interest in some of it), but that's it.

Look, maybe there is something to him, and he just thought it was none of our business. If so, he shouldn't have bothered writing memoirs. Either you give it your all, or not bother. There is no audience for this book. It's a waste of paper.

I give it an E.

Divine intervention... FUCK. OFF.

Superstitious idiot.

PS: He mentions me, accidentally. Talking about Ron Walker's influence, he refers to the Commonwealth Games 'flying tram into the centre of the MCG' (landing on a Melway map of Melbourne) which I came up with, proposed to the Government, was rejected, but they did it anyway and someone else got paid for it. I HAVE THE DOCUMENTS TO PROVE THIS! (Note: They were legally entitled to take my idea... it was on the tender contract). Yes, 9 years later it's still a sore point.

* Rumour and innuendo. I'm not saying either are gay, I'm just saying that's what I hear on the grapevine.

Night

By Elie Wiesel

This is Part Two of a three part series of reviews sub-titled 'Apocalyptic Mess'.

It is also Part One of a series of five reviews of books I purchased for only $5 a book at the wonderful Book Grocer.



This is an account of the writer's time in a Nazi concentration camp.

I am not Jewish, or religious. I am not German, or Polish. I am not an ethnic supremacist, or belong to a persecuted minority. I am not a child of war, I have not lived in a war zone, I have not been sent to a war. I have not lost any member of my immediate family to a violent death.

Who am I to comment on this story?

I can only understand the holocaust in either political or philosophical terms. And of course by 'understand' I mean 'not understand'.

I'm just another voice who in exasperation, at the loss of anything else to add just says, "Lest we forget."

In my review of Blood Meridian I complained that, "It describes an implausible humanity, so detatched from the land and the laws of existance that it fails to inspire any form of reminisce. It is unrecognisable as coming from Earth. It is not our story."

That's why this book is so horrible. Because it is our story. It comes from Earth. People reasoned a genocide. They used the word 'solution'. Unlike the cartoon directionless psychopaths in Blood Meridian, these people had a reason for their actions. Some people, in time, made a reason for genocide.

I can't score this book. I won't.

This is not a book to read because you want to, it's a book to read because you have to.

A Death In The Sanchez Family

By Oscar Lewis




On the liner notes to Talking Heads' album Stop Making Sense there is a line which reads (from memory) "Rich people will spend lots of money to look at poor people."

Likewise, many authors have made a lot of money by writing about the poor. Pearl S. Buck, Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, George Orwell (though in George's case, at least he had a shot at living amongst the poor for a while as recorded in Down And Out In Paris And London - an odd little book if ever there was one, for we knew all along that he, at any time, could get some cash).

I guess it's because we like reading about 'the unknown'. A guy I met once had a theory that the reason mafia films, prison films and gangster films all do well is because we, the audience, aren't in the mafia, a prison or a crime gang so we're fascinated to know what it's like. Same goes for the poors.

This book is interesting, without being entertaining or marvellous or anything. Oscar Lewis, who I've never heard of, travelled down to the slums in Mexico and just interviewed people about their daily lives. Slowly, a book took shape. He came across some siblings, two brothers and a sister who were faced with the death of their aunt and her subsequent wake and burial. The book is wholly in their words, and it's a real downer. They are so poor (they consider the sister the rich one because she eats breakfast sometimes and can afford to go on the bus).

There's Manuel, the eldest, who takes most of the responsibility for family matters. He sells trinkets on the streets, and can sometimes afford to buy juice. Then there's Roberto, the middle sibling, who is out of jail and is also a street vendor. He has children, but they were taken by his younger sister Consuelo who was worried about their welfare. He hasn't asked for them back as yet. Consuelo herself is an uppity go-getter and a show-off because she, unlike every other character mentioned in the book, is not an alcoholic and has a sewing machine. Most of them live in one room slums with up to 8 people. They sleep on straw, on the floor.

To raise the money to bury their dear Aunt (who they suspect was murdered by her abusive alcoholic boyfriend - not that the cops would bother investigating because she had cancer anyway), they are forced to beg, borrow and steal from people as poor as they.

Some of the comments they make are stunning, and some of the scenes heart-rendering.

Consuelo, arguing the point that Mexicans cope with death well, says: "There's nothing charming about death nor is it something we have become accustomed to because we celebrate fiestas for the dead or because we eat candy skulls or play with toy skeletons."

Ah, that line could be re-worked to apply to each and every culture and belief.

Manuel adds: "The living get the chicken, the dead get the hole."

The boyfriend who they think killed their aunt (who was 30 years her junior) allegedly "....was a son of a bitch who hit her and who wanted to fornicate with her in front of people even when she was sick with a cancerous fistula." Nonetheless, Consuela wants all her Aunts belongings to be left to him regardless, on the grounds that she never left the guy even when he hit her, so, he may as well inherit her things. It's another world.

The worst scene is the funeral. She's placed in the poor person's section and they actually dig up an old plot to bury her in. Manuel says, "I saw leg bones still inside stockings and a skull that seemed to be smiling sarcastically at the other body about to go in." Meanwhile, the Priest won't give a service unless he is paid 35 Pesos, an amount they manage to raise but at the expense of eating food for a few days.

Here's my problem. I'm immune to it all. I'm western imperialist scum, or something. I'm a chardonnay sipping socialist in my comfy armchair beside a pot-bellied stove reading this book with extreme detachment. "Bah," I think, "Zola did this shit much better."

Talking Heads were right. Rich people spend good money on looking at / reading about poor people. We read about them with the same detachment that we have to the mafia... "This is not about me, or anybody even like me."

The plight of these Mexicans has, unfortunately, only one effect - my mild entertainment, purchased for $5 in a second-hand bookstore, soon to be lost in the bowels of my bookshelf.

I give it a C.

5 Reviews

Well isn’t this value blogging? Five book reviews for the price of one.

I shall review the five books I have read in recent weeks in order from worst to best.

Countdown. Countdown. Countdown. Bdrdrdrdrdrdr... Count DOWN!

At Number 5, Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen.

I have an old book of his short stories called Side Effects and it’s hilarious, and being that he hasn’t made a decent film since Crimes And Misdemeanours I was looking forward to this new collection of stories. It was a complete dud. It lacked all the humour and brilliant situations of his previous work and these were replaced with clever wordplays, amusing anecdotes and characters nobody could possibly identify with. I can get that sort of stuff out of Radio National for free if I want but this book set me back $24.95. There was one funny story near the end that echoed the magic realism of his previous short stories, but it came and went in under four pages.

I give it an E.

At number 4, How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton.

I’m a big fan of this pompous baldy, but this was his first book and you can tell. It lacks purpose. Or rather, it lacks the result of its purpose, or something. I learnt a bit about Proust, but not much from Proust, which was the bit de Botton promised in the title. My life was not changed. I read the book, woke up the next day still single, still employed, all previous opinions on life and the universe wholly intact and the cat wanted her breakfast as normal. Somewhere, a fly buzzed. The only benefit I got from the book is that I can drop trivial facts about Proust at parties and sound learned.

Pity I don’t go to many parties.

I give it a D.

At number 3, After Dark by Haruki Murukami.

He’s the dude that wrote Kafka By The Shore which I really liked. This is his next novel, following on from that massive success. He should’ve quit while he was ahead. This book is as easy to read and as more-ish as Kafka, but lacks some essential ingredients... like, characters we admire, situations we’re interested in and a storyline. I suppose it’s an okay book, but next to his last novel it’s rubbish. Then again, I think the same of Abbey Road following on from The White Album.

It’s all set on the one night. There’s a young chick in a place that reminded me of Stalactites in Melbourne (24 hour restaurant, not McDonalds / fast food) who is joined by a young musician who she kinda knows. Meanwhile her sister is asleep, and has been for months. The sleeping sister is swallowed by her own TV. Then later on, a nerdy IT bloke punches up a Chinese prostitute and her pimps are angry. The young girl from the restaurant helps translate some Chinese to Japanese and then hangs out at the cheap motel where the hooker was bashed, chatting away with the landlady, a former weightlifter. Then she goes back to the restaurant and chats some more with the musician, then goes home and gives her sister a kiss (she has since been spat back out by her own TV). End of book.

The point? I dunno. Maybe it’s: A lot can happen in one night. Or maybe it’s: If we talk through our problems, many things can be solved. Or maybe it’s: Night brings out in us the kookiness, the genius, the sense of abstract we so rarely tap into during daylight.

Or maybe he was just under pressure to write another book.

I give it a C.

At number 2 is Shakespeare by Bill Bryson.

This is more a long essay than a book, but it cost me $29.99 so I’ll treat it like a book. Very, very interesting. It’s a clever idea. Rather than write a book, like so many others have done, filled with assumptions and guesses (even educated ones) about the life of Shakespeare, Bryson simply records facts. It is a book that details what is factual about the life of Shakespeare... as in, things we have proof of, records, statements and so on. What starts to sink in after about 10 pages is puzzlement as to why anybody would think somebody else wrote his plays. As Bryson himself puts it, “The only absence of contemporary records is not of documents connecting Shakespeare to his works but of documents connecting any other human being to them.” There’s an industry of thought that suggests someone else must have written his works but they have not one piece of evidence, or even a clue, or a hint (I nearly used the word ‘skerrick’ then... I hate that word. I also hate the word ‘horse’. Such a crass word for a noble creature. I suggest ‘Equinea’ or something. I digress). And yet, there’s plenty to connect Shakespeare to his works, you know, like records and evidence of him as being the author. Bryson concedes that after his death his works may have been edited, and that even in his lifetime, actors and producers and other writers may have changed lines and whole scenes even, and some plays may have been co-authored, but even this is loose conjecture. Shakespeare wrote the plays of Shakespeare. That’s just fact, and it was good to read a book that presented that fact so eloquently.

It’s a neat, tidy booklet that arms one against the whackos who love suggesting someone else wrote his plays. These are usually the same people that believe Jews run the world, we never landed on the moon and September 11 was planned by the Bush administration.

One other little curiosity he talks about is all the new words that Shakespeare came up with. Much has been written on this topic, but Bryson again concedes that they may not have been Shakespeare’s inventions as such – it’s just that his plays are the first to record many words that are now common in English. But one little gift he seems to have given the language of his own volition is the prefix un-. What was once, ‘Cannot be imagined’ could now become ‘unimaginable’. Add to that: Unknown, undress, undo... Undo – there’s a good one. “Undo your shoelaces” must have been something like, “Loosen and separate your shoelaces.” Apparently, he came with the suffix of un for reasons of rhyme and meter. I found that interesting.

I give it a B-.

Which brings us to Number One, and it is Number One by a country mile. Hell, more than a country mile. It’s number one by the length of the Nullarbor.

Essays by George Orwell.

I’ll mark it now. A++. Fucking fantastic.

His essays, roughly, fall under the following topics. Politics, English society, literature and art, history.

I think every person who can read should read these essays, but unless you take an interest in at least three of the above four topics then you won’t get anything out of it. You go back to The Da Vinci Code or your Steven King books.

There’s no point trying to discuss individual essays in review form – there’s 41 essays in the book (Penguin, 2000) and the topics are wide and varied and really, every single essay could be reviewed on its own merits. But what I can do is list the reasons why I so admire the bloke and loved this book.

1. He wrote beautifully. So clearly, so concisely. In one brilliant essay entitled Politics And The English Essay written in 1947 he talked a bit about how businesses, journalists, governments and so on deliberately foul up the language with a lot of gobbledygook – somewhat pre-empting the current obsession with mission statements, weasel words and empty phrasing – but he fell short of praising his own usage of the language. I’ll do that for him. He wrote superbly, sharply. Rather than taking either the post-modern or ‘high-art’ options of making simple things sound complex, ol’ Georgey did what great writers are meant to do – take complex things and simplify them using sharp and effective sentences. Hemingway could do it as well. So could Steinbeck and recently, Raymond Carver. The beauty of Orwell though is his...

2. Relevance. Steinbeck and Hemingway touched on politics, but George Orwell dived in head first. Reading his essays now, in 2008, I find that what he is saying is just as relevant now as it was when we wrote them. So often, when discussing attitudes amongst the left-wing and right-wing groups of England I thought to myself, “If I change one word here, or even one name then that sentence right there could go into any publication tomorrow.” Here’s one example: He speaks of the writer Chesterton and says, “...when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing that he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini.” I thought of all the anti-Bush protestors that are vehemently pro-democracy in Australia, but for some reason support extreme fascists like Hezbollah, Hamas and Sunni insurgents in their fight against the US. That’s one example. There’s thousands scattered through this book of essays. But it’s not all politics. Orwell is quite often very...

3. Funny. One of the first essays I was pointed to concerns Dali. Orwell says, “One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other.” As a friend pointed out, we think the same of Shane Warne. Orwell wrote many essays about writers and artists and he obviously thought long and hard about what he had to say, but it’s obvious that he was having fun with these non-political essays. He let himself go, linguistically, and came out with outrageous statements, often controversial, but always playful. He even wrote one essay in defence of English cooking, and one other is devoted solely to the examination of how much time and money he’d invested in purchasing and reading books (with a note on the comparative ‘worth’ of the investment), and then providing tables and charts to compare these statistics with the time and money (and subsequent worth) he’d invested in cigarettes and beer. I wish I came up with that. He is also...

4. Brave. I don’t mean physically (though he did trot off voluntarily to the Spanish Civil War and fought), but artistically. He takes risks. 1984 and Animal Farm are the most obvious examples of this, but you can see that these two are not just freak occurrences at the end of his life. Right from the start he wrote bravely – writing about what he thought and believed, and challenging all accepted thoughts, and writing in a style that was very much his own. He took on the hard targets. Anyone can pick on Paris Hilton but who’s going to hold TS Eliot to account? Orwell. He’s not interested in soft targets or petty observations, or the minutiae of our existence (which all ‘serious’ movies and novels seem to be about these days – yeah I’m looking at you American Beauty). He didn’t care for the trifles that Good Weekend make a living out of capturing. He said, “Right, let’s look at anti-semitism.” He said, “I don’t think Dickens was that bright.” He said, “Let’s look at the way the English Language is dying.” He charges at big themes with guns blazing, lands heavily on grand platforms and shakes them, spends all day pondering not where his keys are but matters of global importance, and did all of this in a manner that I personally find quite often breath-taking. I’m a fan. Unashamedly a fan. Finally, he also manages to...

5. Make topics that I know nothing about seem very interesting. I never cared for toads, I've never read Swift's Gulliver's Travels or taken any interest in English cooking, but essays on these and other topics I know nothing about are still very readable and entertaining.

Whether you’ve read his novels or not, I recommend his book of essays. You’ll get something out of it. You can’t not.

In our English-speaking history, he is only below Shakespeare. He sits, for me, in equal second place alongside the likes of Hemingway and Lord Byron, and just above the likes of Carver, cummings, Hardy, Dickens, Lawson, Dickinson and Patrick White.

(If I include non-English writers, I might put Dostoyevksy, Zola, Mishima, Nabakov, Kazantzikas and Marquez in or around, or even above the same level. I’d have to think that out.)

To re-iterate. A++

Next up: EXODUS by (allegedly) Moses.