This week I've read contributions to the public debate by Paul Keating and Bob Ellis. Keating resigned his post as Chairperson of the Banangaroo design review panel after the Planning Minister, Brad Hazzard, told him to shut up and stop denigrating people who disagree with him. Ellis wrote a relatively nonsensical piece about the death of Osama bin Laden.
I don't think anyone would deny that these two men know how to write a sentence. They're both incredibly articulate. Witness this passage from Ellis' article:
Clearly they feared the sight of his widow, wounded in the fire-fight, at the graveside of him and his dead son, and the sight of his grieving daughter and his other sons would humanise him in an inconvenient way. Clearly they feared his grave would become, like that of Karl Marx or St Thomas a Beckett, a pilgrim shrine for apostles yet unborn.
It's great prose. The unfortunate thing about both Ellis and Keating is that their contributions are well... shit.
Ellis' last two big articles on The Drum have been terrible. Offensive, disjointed, poorly thought out and clearly written in half an hour over a bottle of red. (I have no idea whether Ellis even drinks - you get my drift).
Keating, meanwhile, has been slagging off people who oppose his development vision for Banangaroo. Or I should say the development vision he bullied Kristina Keneally into accepting. Not with a substantive rebuttal of their arguments, but with pithy put downs.
Now of course the media will report on or print the comments of famous people with a reputation for causing a stir. That's fine. I imagine for The Drum publishing Ellis is a necessary evil to drive traffic and justify the continued existence of the site.
But I beg them to think about whether they should publish them. Jonathan Green, editor of The Drum, should've sent Ellis' article back to him and asked him to edit it. I mean it had a four paragraph P.S. at the end. And it was crap. I wonder whether the SMH should be putting Keating's shenanigans on the front page. Sure, he was once Prime Minister, but the happenings on the Banangaroo design review board don't strike me as front page news.
As these two men age, they are becoming less relevant to Australian public life. The fact they're still willing to mouth off about their opponents doesn't change that.