Not that you’ll have noticed, what with Hari Raya and your having, I trust, a life to live outside of politics, but I completely failed to come up with a column last week.

But I have a couple of good excuses for this lapse from my duty to columny and calumny, the first being the start of a new semester at Sydney Uni, in which all my lectures and tutorials are scheduled in the front-end of the week, thus making it almost impossible for me to meet my long-standing Tuesday-night Malaysiakini deadline.

My second and far more compelling, indeed extremely welcome, excuse for my week’s absence was the all-too-rare presence in Sydney of Malaysiakini co-founder and editor-in-chief, Steven Gan, and the chance of an evening of makan and sembang with him.

I’ve long been somewhat dimly aware that Steven, like his partner in Malaysiakini, Prem, long ago lived and studied in Australia for quite a spell.

But until last Sunday when we got talking while by rights I should have been at home writing, I hadn’t realised how radicalising this experience had been.

In fact, as Steven told me and also an audience of Global Bersih members on the following Friday night, his stint in the architecture faculty of the University of New South Wales turned him into such a fervent and eventually full-time activist that he finally forgot about his studies.

In other words, architecture’s loss has been journalism’s gain, and the rest is history. Or will be, as we all fervently hope, when Malaysian ‘mainstream’ journalism and all the rest of the nation’s civil institutions are finally free from the death-grip of the dire BN regime.

Which, of course, was one of our initial topics of conversation when Steven and I met that evening, as it was my first chance in all the years I’ve known him to pick his brains and seek his opinions in a relaxed atmosphere away from the office.

And it seemed highly appropriate to be having our conversation about BN-regime prejudice, repression and racism in the very heart of multiracial, multisexual Sydney, Oxford Street Surry Hills.

At the very same restaurant, in fact, where on a night out with my wife a few weeks earlier I had met some very different Malaysians, two stunning Mak Nyahs who live and work in Sydney, but said how much they were looking forward to balik kampung to celebrate Hari Raya in Klang.

Despite such vivid reminders of Malaysia and my pent-up eagerness to hear Steven’s informed views on the current state of play there, his reciprocal interest in Australia inevitably turned the conversation to the forthcoming federal election down here.

As I recall, however, I had regrettably little to say on the subject beyond expressing the all-too-obvious fact that the incumbent Labor administration and Liberal-National coalition opposition are pretty much of a muchness.

In fact they strike me as so equally good or bad, policywise, that I’m personally intending to vote for the Greens. Not with even the slenderest of hopes that such a minority party can now or even ever achieve office, but with considerable hope of its achieving the balance of power in the Senate or even the lower house.

Far from clear-cut scenario

But I felt that my response to Steven’s questions about Australian politics had been so unsatisfying that I’ve been thinking about them quite a lot since.

Without achieving much more insight into things, however, as compared with the stark choice in Malaysia between the criminally corrupt and incompetent BN regime and something - anything - better, the situation in Australia is far from clear-cut or compelling.

So much so, in fact, that on further rumination about the election that’s now just a few weeks away, how I feel about it is much like what I imagine a cow or sheep might be experiencing as it mindlessly munches away on its cud: not much taste or novelty, just lots of deja chew.

NONERudd (left) reincarnated or rather recycled, but looking so much less like the revvin’ Kevin of ’07 than the fuddy-duddy has-been of ‘013 that his only hope lies in the fact that his opposite number, Tony Abbott, is widely considered quite as much of a dud.

Even by the majority of Liberal-National coalition supporters, who consider him a rabbit compared with the prime-ministerial candidate they would vastly prefer, Malcolm Turnbull.

And in keeping with the way their dudd and dudder leaders double-heat in the undesirability stakes, the two main contenders’ policies are almost utterly, or if you’d prefer the Australian pronunciation, udderly identical, especially when it comes to their cruddy treatment of refugees.

Though, now that I come to think of it, Labor is on balance looking cruddier than the Liberal-Nationals in the honesty and probity department, due to a string of corruption findings against members and cronies of the now former Labor government of the state of New South Wales.

And the wheels of justice are yet to grind out their findings on whether a federal Labor member was justified in putting visits to brothels on his union credit card, or whether, as he has consistently claimed until recently, someone else mysteriously ‘borrowed’ his card several times and misused it.

But as fervently if not violently anti such corrupt crud as I am, and as Rudd has been at pains to try and show he is too, there’s an even cruddier side to politics in Australia than a few bent politicians and their ‘businessman’ buddies: the gudder press.

The gudder Murdoch-owned News Corporation press, that is, with its (shudder) 70 percent share of Australia’s newspaper readership and its now years-long vendetta against the federal Labor government.

Throwing any semblance of the ethical distinction between news and opinion to the winds with a relentless campaign of smear, innuendo and spin against first Julia Gillard when she was prime minister, and now against Rudd-led Labor that recently reached what surely must be its nadir with the Sydney Daily Telegraph headline ‘Kick this mob out’.

Commentators are undecided about the motivation for such cruddy so-called journalism. Some put it down to typical News Corp commercial self-interest, specifically in this case antagonism to Labor’s ongoing high-speed National Broadband Network project for fear it will hurt News-owned Foxtel.

But whatever the agenda might be, coming so soon since the UK phone-tapping scandal that for once and for all rendered the News Corp name mud, maybe even some of its mug readers in Australia have started realising it’s nothing but a load of crud, and thus a dud that could well help rather than hurt Rudd.

DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia', ‘Even Madder about Malaysia', ‘Missing Malaysia', ‘1Malaysia.con’ and ‘Malaysia Mania’.