Australian Notes

Saturday, 4th February 2012

The Canberra riot will have a few favourable consequences. It mandates at long last the removal of the ‘Tent Embassy’ from the Parliamentary triangle. It will ensure the defeat of the ill-advised constitutional referendum. It will sharpen public suspicions of the dirty tricks department in the Prime Minister’s office. It will above all reinforce public support for progressive Aboriginal leaders such as Mick Gooda, Noel Pearson and Warren Mundine, all of whom condemned the rioters and their media advisers — the caterpillars of the commonwealth.

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Bob Carr ridicules the riot as ‘a lovely day out for the local anarchists and Trots’. It illustrates, he says, ‘the bankruptcy of old Left culture’. I am not sure this is right. Aboriginal protests on 26 January have not always been leftist affairs. The first great protest was during the 1938 sesquicentenary celebrations of the First Settlement. The Aborigines’ Progressive Association named 26 January as a Day of Mourning and called on ‘all full-bloods and half-castes’ to boycott the white man’s celebrations. For six months in 1938 it published the newspaper Abo Call which mocked missionaries and anthropologists, exposed massacres and serialised Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia. Its spirit was caught by the Ian Mudie poem it published in August: ‘Damn it Jackie/You know it too./The whole damn country belongs to you.’ The paper was published, edited and largely written not by a leftist but by the infamous if irrepressible fascist P.R. (‘Inky’) Stephensen, who hoped to win over the Aborigines for his campaign against ‘the British garrison’ in Australia and for closer Australian ties with those well-known friends of the Aborigines, Hitler and Emperor Hirohito. Stephensen died in 1965 but his wild and reactionary spirit still flourishes among ‘the local anarchists and Trots’ of the Tent Embassy. It shows little sign of spluttering out.

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By the time James Bartholomew, the English author of The Welfare State We’re In, met Prime Minister Thatcher, she was already a legendary leader. She had floated the pound, privatised nationalised industries, pushed featherbedded businessmen out into the real world, curbed the unions, defeated the Argentinian fascists, begun to see off the Soviet Union and forced the British Labour party to give up socialism. But she was well aware that she had not taken on the other scandals of modern Britain: the welfare establishment, the socialist health services, the comprehensive school system, the radical universities and the lefty BBC. It is all very well, she said to Bartholomew, to show that Britain has worse health services — with longer waiting lists and more premature deaths — than France or Germany. All very well to document the failure of the state schools to limit illiteracy. But how do we fix it, she demanded of Bartholomew — without losing elections? He had no convincing answers for the impatient Prime Minister. He knew then, he told his audience at the Centre for Independent Studies last week, what it must have felt like to be a junior minister in the Thatcher government. But she had given him the theme for his next book. Almost every country in the world has become a welfare state, even those like the US whose national ideology is self-reliance. Bartholomew is now examining as many welfare systems as he can to see how some of them avoid the problems of Britain. (Look up his website about his recent visit to ‘the San’ in Sydney.) Swedish free schools and Swiss hospitals are among the successful models for reform. Spanish unemployment and French ghetto housing are among Europe’s great failures. When Bartholomew finished his first book on the welfare state, he had a devil of a job getting it published. The lefty publishers of England did not want to know about his dreadful anti-socialist ideas. But since then the mood has changed. His forthcoming book will have no trouble finding a publisher.

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ASIO’s director-general, David Irvine, put in an hour last week explaining his policies to the Sydney Institute and answering questions. His big theme is that in the decades since the Hope Royal Commissions of the 1970s, ASIO has been reformed, regulated and made accountable. It now balances its necessarily secret monitoring of threats, from terrorism to cyber espionage, with a commitment to human rights. It publishes an annual report and is subject to Parliamentary scrutiny and the statutory Inspector-General. It is also, he said, successful, although he could not go into detail. In the discussion afterwards, Gerard Henderson, chairman of the meeting, wondered whether, in the director-general’s acknowledgement of the great importance of the Hope Royal Commissions in reforming ASIO, he did not somewhat diminish the achievements of the pre-Hope ASIO of the Cold War. Henderson noted that in his book The Family File, Mark Aarons agreed that the pre-Hope ASIO generally got the facts right, at least about the four generations of his centrally important communist family. Irvine said that The Family File is ‘an absolutely fascinating read’. He also agreed, perhaps a little reluctantly, that in the years of the pre-Hope ASIO, ‘there were some spies exposed’. But the organisation was unregulated and unaccountable. Hope’s ‘outstanding achievement’ had been to put a democratic framework around ASIO. Irvine’s tribute to Hope is clearly justified, but there is surely more to be said about ASIO’s first decades — its successes (the Wally Clayton network, the Petrov and Skripov cases) as well as its failures (Yugoslav bombings, the KGB mole). No doubt much will be revealed when David Horner publishes his official history of ASIO from 1949 to 1978. It will cover all the pre-Hope period. It is due out in about three years.

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