Robert Doyle is a fucking cunt

This morning on a certain social media site, I wrote, “Hey Robert Doyle. You’re a fucking cunt. That is all.” I did this because I think Robert Doyle is a fucking cunt. I also did it because the idea of addressing this information to him directly was pleasing, even in the form of a mock address. Various people immediately unsubscribed from receiving my updates (‘unfollowed’, if you’re in the know). The interesting question is how such people came to be following me in the first place. If someone is a) a Robert Doyle fan, or b) offended by phrases like ‘fucking cunt’, they probably shouldn’t be around my conversation at any time.

If you by chance are a Robert Doyle fan or offended by phrases like ‘fucking cunt’, then you’re a bit late, because I’ve already said ‘fucking cunt’ six times including that last one. And have linked the phrase directly to Robert Doyle. But you should probably still bail out now, because although I haven’t written it yet, I have a feeling this article will contain further instances of both these things.

If you’re not a) a Doyle fan or b) offended (i.e., if you are a reasonable person) then on we go. Of course, you may still want to sidetrack this into a debate about whether using ‘cunt’ as an insult is terribly sexist and cetera. Eric Dando’s  wonderful short story ‘Beautiful Useful Things’ contends that since cunts are the beautiful useful things of the title, the word should be high praise. (Some parts of the story are online here.) I tend to agree, and try using it in affectionate contexts as often as possible. Still. As TISM told us, there’s a big difference between a cunt and a fucking cunt, and this morning, I couldn’t think of any pithier way to describe what Robert Doyle is.

Here’s why. Robert Doyle is the mayor of Melbourne, and a failed human being of the highest order. His mediocrity in all pursuits is so impressive as to almost elevate him beyond the bounds of mediocrity. But not. His inherent ability to suck draws him back down. So Robert Doyle is not a fucking cunt in the way that someone like Phillip Ruddock was a fucking cunt. Phillip Ruddock was awful, relatively powerful, and dangerous. Robert Doyle is a useless fucking cunt.

I would say that “Robert Doyle first came to our attention in…”, but… he didn’t. He didn’t come to anyone’s attention. That’s something he’s never been able to do. Robert Doyle fell arse-backwards into the role of Victorian Opposition Leader for the Liberal Party back in 2002. Jeff Kennett had lost the previous election, spat the dummy like the petulant spotlight-hogger that he was, and quit. Lots of senior Liberals went with him, recognising that their days were done for quite some time. Only the dregs remained. Dennis Napthine then put in his bid to be the creepiest Liberal leader ever. He looked like a shifty cayman that had just discovered pomade, and no-one could listen to him speak for more than fifteen seconds without breaking out in hives. The fact that Napthine was even a contender showed what an awful state the party was in. Really he was the sacrifice, the Brendan Nelson, the guy to cop the damage of the previous loss, then be replaced. When he inevitably got the arse before the next election, there were still no other decent contenders. Enter the dullest man in politics, Robert Doyle.

Doyle was so dull he could have been captain of the Dullard Dulcimers Dullball team from Dulwich Village, Dullshire. Except captain would have been too interesting. He would have been the substitute who never got a game. At the time, my friend Rabbi and I were toying with the idea of starting a satirical newspaper. This never got off the ground, due to our alcohol intake and The Chaser emerging as a far better version of the same idea, but we did come up with some good content. Impressed by Doyle’s anonymity, one was the Liberal overthrow article titled “Napthine replaced by some guy.”

“Even deposed Liberal leader Dennis Napthine didn’t know who his replacement was. ‘I’ve never heard of him’, said Napthine. ‘Apparently he was some guy. That was enough to sound better than me. I voted for him.’”

“After speculation today that the new leader may have been Robert Doyle, even Robert Doyle denied knowing who Robert Doyle is.”

(This was probably my second-favourite piece we came up with. My favourite was when we reported, post-Tampa, that the Sri Lankan cricket team had been detained on arrival for a Test tour. “Australian vice-captain and wicketkeeper Adam Gilchrist questioned the move, saying that detention seemed a harsh reaction to Muttiah Muralitharan’s suspect bowling action. Mr Ruddock later responded, saying ‘I don’t care if he’s got a correct action or not. He’s bloody well black, and he’s staying behind bars until he learns better.’”)

It was in office that Doyle’s predisposition to fucking cuntery began to make itself known. The guy was the definition of a windbag: huffing, hissing, complaining, a sheen of sweat constantly precipitating on that giant round head, like a big meat-balloon straining at its seams, sprayed down half-hourly with a solution of glycerine. Look at a bratwurst in a pan, greased and spitting and straining to split its skin – that’s Robert Doyle’s speaking face. He was haughty and irritating. He thought he knew better than everyone. It came as no surprise  to learn he’d been a teacher and administrator at Scotch College: he looked and sounded exactly the kind of dull disciplinarian who harked back to Tom Brown’s Schooldays for a simpler age when a bit of forcible buggery was what showed you the difference between boys and men.

He ran the Liberal Party into the ground, in a way that makes the Gillard government look sturdy and on course for victory. In the one election Doyle contested, the Libs won 17 of 88 seats. His approval rate as leader was polled at 15 percent. He was replaced, and quit after the next election loss in 2006.

Just the kind of stand-up guy that you wouldn’t want to lose to politics, right? So in 2008 he decided to contest for Lord Mayor of Melbourne. It was a hilarious portrait of an abject failure determined to try to claw out some kind of restitution, to find some balm for his abraded ego. He didn’t understand that Lord Mayor was a pointless ceremonial position that had been filled for years by a comedian using the alter ego of ‘John So’. Doyle took it seriously. It had ‘Lord’ in the title. It had robes and chains and shit. Finally he could be king of a crappy little castle.

And somehow – presumably because no-one thought to pay it the slightest attention – he won.

Since then, Doyle’s predilection for experimenting with various modes of fucking cuntaciousness has been expressed to its fullest extent. He’s like a washed up sprinter who, having failed at Olympic selection, and AIS selection, and state selection, and the university aths club, then gets in a drunken 100 metres challenge in the car park at the Mackay races and wins against two wasted cane-farmers and a blind kid, then runs around town for the next seven years yelling “Champion of north-eastern Australia!” He likes to think that he’s now important. He likes to think that we’ve all forgotten his burst colostomy bag of a career. Actually we mostly have, because nothing about him is memorable. But Doyle has not forgotten. His past burns at him like a superheated grass-burr lodged in his haemorrhoids. With every act and every word, Doyle is trying to compensate for the vividly-coloured tapestry of failure that is the conversation piece in the lobby of his life. He is shaking in a corner, rocking back and forth, masturbating furiously and whispering, “I’m important. I’m important. I’m important.”

So he struts about Melbourne like it’s a personal fiefdom. He comes up with stupid plans to get attention, grand visions for the city that apparently didn’t occur to him when he was… you know… in Parliament. He proclaims what kind of  people should and shouldn’t be allowed on his streets. He spends stupid amounts of money on marketing and new logos, while cranking up parking fines and enforcement to try to keep more cash coming in. And he talks. By god, that motherfucker just talks.

But this last week, we really got to see him being… well, a massive fucking cunt. As the Occupy Melbourne movement set up their protest in the city, he took it as a personal affront. Melbourne, you see, is his now. I’m the Mayor! I’m the LORD fucking Mayor, bitches! Look at my faux-fur! Look at my leopard spots! Look at my pendants! Yes, I look like a pimp out of a mid-90s ghetto movie send-up. Lick my stockings! Tell me I’m your Papa!

So how dare people who live in Melbourne and such, use the streets of their city as though they had a right to?

Now, I haven’t been in Australia the last couple of weeks. I’m following this from overseas. I don’t really get what Occupy is all about, and I’m not advocating for it. Personally it seems like yet another annoyingly amorphous protest movement, the same sort of thing that so royally gave me the shits at university. You’d walk past a rally against WorkChoices, and it would be full of people saving the whales and Jabiluka and abortions and the spotted quoll. Activists are very good at presumption, assuming that if you agree with one part of their agenda, you agree with all of it. Your support gets co-opted.

It sounds like there’s plenty of that going on with Occupy Melbourne – people treating it as the noticeboard to tack their particular grievance to. It sounds like the nutbars are amongst it, as they generally are. But it also sounds like there are plenty of sensible, reasonable people there, taking advantage of this opportunity to say that yes, business is too dominant a priority in government decision-making. Yes, companies are allowed to get away with things that would be criminal for individuals. Yes, industry has too much influence in Parliament. Just look at the mining giants felling a Prime Minister, or the political campaigns funded by industries against any reform they don’t like. No, our situation is not as bad as it is in the States. But our situation could turn sour very quickly.

Anyway. Regardless of the right or wrong of the argument being made, people in Australia have the right to protest. They have the right to assembly. At least, they theoretically have this right, but find that right ignored constantly by police whenever it suits police to do so.

And Robert Doyle, with that twitch in his pants that any school disciplinarian can’t resist, had another opportunity to have power over people. You’ve got detention. Your shirt isn’t tucked in. You’re going to get bashed on a public street by officers of the law.

So Doyle called in the cops, and told them to clear the protest out. One, he had no right to do it in the first place. Two, he didn’t bother trying to negotiate a compromise. Three, he knew it would get violent. Indeed, the whole purpose of it was to get violent. He wanted a show of force. He was spoiling for a fight. Four, we ended up with about 400 police, including riot squads and horses, to disperse less than 100 protesters.

And like a disingenuous tricky little cunt, he used the Queen’s visit as an excuse for his actions. Well, get fucked. This is our country, and this is what is happening in it. Why should the Queen be shielded from the reality of life in Australia? She is our head of state, after all. She really should be the first to know what’s actually going on.

The protesters, from the vision I’ve seen, behaved admirably. The police response was execrable. If you don’t believe me, try this clip from the bastion of socialist activism, The Herald Sun. 

In it, protestors passively sit or stand, arms linked, and refuse to move. Police hunt in packs, three or four of them charging someone, then dragging them out of the group by their head, neck, and arms. They drag them across the ground, injuring and frightening the hell out of them.  They do it to women as happily as to men. Tell me, if someone did that to your mate’s girlfriend on a night out, what would happen? Outrage? Yep. Punch-on? Probably. Press charges? No doubt. But because the assailants are acting under orders, it’s suddenly ok? The media reports include factoids like “two police were injured”, without mentioning that they were injured by their own pepper spray, being used on people who had not committed a crime, could not legally be arrested, and were not resisting.

This is police-state bullshit that has no place here. And yet it will be tolerated, and there will be an investigation, and some moustache will say “the officers were found to have behaved appropriately”, even though there are dozens of videos right there on the internet that show this is not true. The police will be allowed to get away with it because the police always are, and until that changes, all this talk of our freedoms is police-horse-shit.

“The time has come for us to return City Square to the people of Melbourne”, said Doyle. Hey Cuntcillor. Those are the people of Melbourne. That’s their city square. The city square being the place that for thousands of years has been a meeting place and a rally point, an exchange of information and ideas. Using that space is one of their basic rights. Your approval of the way they use it means three-fifths of jack-shit. Then there’s the other Doyle line: “there comes a time when you say okay you’ve made your point, time’s up.” Again: bullshit. There is no time limit on civil rights. How do you know what point they’re making? You haven’t even been willing to speak to them, to engage in the democratic process of which you are supposedly a part.

It’s the lack of outrage that’s the outrageous bit. The general reaction seems to be, hey, everyone has the right to free assembly and to protest. Oh, except that it’s a bit inconvenient when you do that, because it kind of gets in the way. So you have that right as long as you’re not in the way, and you have less of that right if we think you’re just a bunch of lefty ferals, and if you insist on that right then we have the right to get you roughed up and intimidated and hauled off by cops, even though we won’t charge you, because you haven’t broken any laws.

The real clincher, the sheep’s eyeball on the sewage sundae, was the vision of Doyle peering down from his office window at the chaos in the street below. The chaos he had decided to inflict. He looked for all the world like some wannabe French nobleman, watching his soldiers quell a peasant uprising. Not prepared to engage with the reality, but happy to watch from afar. Knowing he was safe and warm in his office as people were injured in the arena. What a cunt. He would do well to remember what happened to a lot of those French noblemen when the crowds in the street could no longer be quelled.

That image tells us everything we need to know. The violent response to Occupy is all about a man with delusions of grandeur. It’s a way for one crap official to get territorial about something he thinks is his. It’s a chance for Doyle, the most pathetic failure in Australian politics, to suddenly swing a fat salami around and imagine it’s his cock. Briefly, ever so briefly, he can pretend. Of course, we all know it’ll fade. We all know that he’ll come to his senses, in that post-climax pit of self-loathing, and see himself as he really is: a grotesque caricature of a man, corpulent and swollen, petty and pointless, standing naked in front of the mirror with some choice Don smallgoods hanging greasy from his mitt, no longer shielding him from the grim fact of his own inconsequence. He knows it too. That’s why he’s so bitter. That’s why he’s so desperate. That’s why for as long as his lungs hate him enough to let him keep on breathing, he’ll keep taking it out on the world by being the biggest utter fucking cunt he possibly can. And that’s why I wanted to tell him.