Quadrant dinner: Worse than the Sleaze Ball?

"All things considered, the Sydney Sleaze Ball last Saturday night was a more attractive affair than the Quadrant magazine 50th anniversary dinner on Tuesday.

At the Sleaze - I hasten to assure you that I know this only from the pictures on the internet - you have tribes of hairy men cavorting in very small scraps of leather and fat women shoving their naked, spangled boobs at each other, that sort of thing. It is a Saturnalia of fleshy narcissism, but with a certain trashy honesty to it. What you see is what you get.

Not so with the Quadrant fling. The orgy of mutual admiration appears to have been about the same thunderous volume, although without the display of bouncing pink bits, but what you got was the political right congratulating itself on being right with an intellectual dishonesty that was, well, sleazy.

This we can judge from the Prime Minister's speech, which had the usual media toadies stampeding to lavish praise upon it. A king hit in the culture wars, they assured us."

Mike Carlton, in full-flight and true to form in a superb column in today's SMH. Read it all here.

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