No discom-Bob-ulation here

BOB “Bridget” Carr has written the political comic of the year. His Diary Of A Foreign Minister will probably never sell as many copies as John Howard’s best-selling biography Lazarus Rising but it will certainly win the prize for historical revisionism, egotism and wackiness.

Even Carr’s rationale for abandoning Julia Gillard, who gave him the foreign ministry he had dreamt of, in favour of Kevin Rudd, is fabulous — in that it is obviously a fable. His latest work, released this week, reveals that three months before Gillard’s prime ministership was ended last June, he wrote. “The media package, and how it was adopted, has destroyed any confidence I could have in her office and instincts. “They had been dumped on the cabinet meeting — without warning — and adopted,” Carr writes. “We are committed to a wholesale war with the newspapers. In that pre-election phase when we should be friends with all.” To borrow a line from the Aussie movie The Castle, tell them they’re dreaming. Carr has attempted to hoodwink readers of his book into the belief he suddenly became aware of an anti-media agenda and that he was righteously appalled at this attack — more for reasons of political pragmatism than any defence of freedom of the press. Let’s be perfectly clear, Gillard was at war with the media — particularly the non-government and truly independent News Corp print media — a year earlier than Carr’s moment of enlightenment. Let me refresh Carr’s memory, should the former NSW premier elect to publish a footnote if his selection of flawed recollections runs to a second edition. Gillard fired the first salvo in August 2011 when she started calling John Hartigan, the then chairman and CEO of News Ltd, to complain about the coverage her dysfunctional government was receiving from various columnists, notably Andrew Bolt and Glenn Milne, both of whom had made references to the brewing controversy about Gillard’s relationship with former AWU boss Bruce Wilson. History has shown that the attacks on Gillard and her administration were more than justified and the royal commission into trade union slush funds which began this week will inevitably explore the allegations. But at that time Gillard was on the offensive. Chris Mitchell, The Australian’s editor-in chief, who was asked to ring Gillard over a column written by Milne, said later he had been on the end of verbal sprays from Paul Keating but “they were nothing compared to this”. Less than a month later Gillard and her communications minister, Stephen “Red Underpants” Conroy, gave former federal court judge Ray Finkelstein a loaded brief to inquire into the media industry’s regulatory framework. Predictably, Finkelstein’s central recommendation the following February was for government-controlled regulation of news reporting. Yet if you believe Carr — a former ABC and Bulletin journalist — he was apparently oblivious of Gillard’s fatwa against the media until well after he had accepted his trophy foreign minister’s job. Given Carr’s own ­observations, it would seem he was more interested in the perks of the ministry than the substance of the policies the Gillard government was pursuing. Carr’s diary is a distraction, an amusing one, but a distraction from a number of events that more scholarly diarists will not fail to note. As Eddie Obeid’s serial appearances before ICAC should remind us, Carr was one of those who defended Obeid when his character was first questioned, and he gave Ian Macdonald his first ministerial position. Carr gave oxygen to rorters in a rotten government. In his memoir he comes across just as grasping as the rest of his team. In his mind, he may be a modern-day Metternich, flying around the world, organising votes for Australia’s bid for a UN Security Council seat, but in reality he was worried about whether he would be issued free pyjamas when he was forced to fly business class and he was concerned with the lack of subtitles on the in-flight broadcasting system’s opera series. Never lacking in self-confidence, Carr is repeatedly scornful of Gillard — of her policies, her judgment and even her accent. In an entry from November 2012 he writes: “At 3.30pm, back in my silent, empty Bligh Street office, I take a phone call from the Prime Minister. ‘I’m just settling back with a peppermint tea,’ she tells me, the ‘I’ enunciated as a perfectly shaped ‘Oi’ in her trademark broad Aussie vowels. “I tell her to keep cool as she plans her defence in parliament about the latest blow-up of the AWU scandal.” As for his own performance, he found in June 2012: “Actually I am the best chairperson I know — well, Gillard is pretty good — and suffer the lot when trapped at meetings with slow-moving and uncertain people in the chair.”