The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
- W. B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’
Well, here we are, talking like this for the last time. How has it been for you, the last ten years? Actually, Eureka Street has been part of my life for 14 of its 15 years: Morag Fraser asked me to help out with the proofing in 1992, and I’ve sort of stuck to the place like dried Weet-Bix ever since.
March 1996 is so distant now, it was a different cosmos. The Labor government in Canberra was just about to lose the election after deciding to shaft its environmental voters, stop annoying big business and go after the demographic now known as ‘Howard’s battlers’. (Good move, fellas. You showed us. And where are you now? That’s right, say it loud and clear—IN OPPOSITION. FOR TEN YEARS. Just so you know, because we are all thinking that MAYBE YOU HAVEN’T NOTICED.)
What else? Well, a computer hard drive was about half a gig, and mobile phones were about as big as Maxwell Smart’s shoe-phone. And no one had heard of that ballroom-dancing chip-shop woman who made racism not respectable but just bloody shameless.
As the first Hughes Watching Brief was being written, John Howard was already telegraphing the future by refusing to go on the ABC to debate the then PM, Keating. He wanted Ray Martin and Kerry Packer’s Nine, and he got what he wanted because, as we now know, Howard tends to get what he wants. The events that followed have a curious inevitability about them, as we look back on the decade of wedging, dog-whistling and weasel words. I find myself wondering time and again, ‘How the heck did we let that happen?’ I don’t think I’m alone, but we wonderers don’t seem as organised, ruthless or determined as the people we are wondering about: Yeats said it all up there at the top of the page.
When Howard was elected he slashed the budget of the national broadcaster that he had so feared as a host for his pre-election debate, and installed as boss Jonathan Shier to run the organisation into the ground. It’s all the more credit to ABC employees that news and current affairs have continued at all. And as we now go to press with Eureka Street’s last print issue, Communications Minister Helen