In many ways, Matthew Flinders typified the best characteristics of the Enlightenment, seeing the knowledge gained through exploration as an important end in itself. But Rob Mundle, who has written about this era before, acknowledges that Flinders was also keenly aware of the mercantile opportunities that the Empire presented. His spirit of adventure was sparked by an early reading of Robinson Crusoe, although as a junior officer sailing under first Cook and later Bligh he quickly realised that the exploration business required a set of skills ranging from stellar navigation to effective leadership.

And a solid knowledge of boats and ships. When Flinders (as a passenger) and a number of other men were wrecked on a sandy reef, their response was to build a new boat from the wreckage and sail for help. These were not people who sat around complaining about their plight. These were people who did something about it.

Mundle, himself a sailor, notes that many of the ships sent to Australia were in poor condition to start with (the newer, sturdier ships being put aside by London for various wars, especially with France). None of the ships that Flinders commanded were top of the line, and he soon found that the Investigator was barely seaworthy: amazing that it made it out of port, let alone around Australia. Flinders wrote in his logs about the constant need for running repairs and the continuing effort of pumping out the water that flooded in through rotten planks.

Mundle’s use of Flinders’ journals gives the book a sense of personal depth, turning his subject into an individual of blood and flesh rather than a historical character. He also adds material from other people, both the important and the humble. He has an eye for the human detail, noting that Flinders’ career was almost catastrophically upset when his new wife, the ever-patient Ann, was found to be ‘seated in the captain’s cabin without her bonnet’ by a puffed-up official.

And of course there is Trim, who must go down as the most intrepid and well-travelled cat in Australian history, going around the country (and around Tasmania) and around the world. There is a statue of him with Flinders outside the Mitchell Library in Sydney, and another in Flinders’ home town of Donington in England. Flinders penned an affectionate essay about Trim and his adventures, and the little moggy pops up repeatedly in Flinders’ accounts of his journeys. If the official portraits of Flinders make him look rather stiff, Trim reveals his softer side.

Flinders, perhaps following the example of Cook, appreciated competence: intelligence honed by diligence, education and experience. He was particularly careful in his making of maps, so much so that they were used until modern times. On his regular excursions inland, he also took note of features of possible economic value, such as the coal deposits in the Illawarra area. He missed a few points, such as the bay on which Melbourne now sits, but given the limitations of his equipment and resources, this is understandable.

He seems to have genuinely cared about the men under his command, doing his best to keep them fit and healthy. This was a stark contrast to the conditions of the French vessels of the time. When Baudin’s ship Le Géographe — which Flinders had previously encountered near Kangaroo Island — struggled into Port Jackson in 1802, virtually the entire crew was afflicted with scurvy or some other ailment. Despite the tensions between the British Empire and Napoleon’s France, the colony did everything possible to assist.

It is this that makes the penultimate chapter of Flinders’ life seems pointlessly sad. On his way back to London, he was captured by the French at Mauritius. Britain and France were at war at the time, although there was a treaty about helping each other’s scientific and exploration ships. Apparently, Flinders inadvertently offended the island’s governor, Général Charles Decaen, on a minor point of etiquette, although there is evidence that Decaen saw the incident as a way to further his own political ambitions. Flinders was charged as a spy and placed under a harsh form of house arrest, a period made even worse by the loss of the faithful Trim. He was released after nearly seven years, probably through the intervention of Napoleon.

But his health was shattered and he never fully recovered. In captivity, and later in Britain, he wrote a massive account of his major expedition, A Voyage to Terra Australis. It was published in 1814; Ann (in another touching detail that Mundle recounts) put on his chest the first copy of the book as he lay on his deathbed. He was just 40.

From Mundle’s account, Flinders did not see himself as a man of greatness, but there was a streak of it in him. He had a sense of can-do pragmatism and a healthy scepticism. Somehow or another, perhaps those virtues seeped into our national character. So it is appropriate that his story should be told in such an honest, authoritative way. It is a story which, in the end, should be remembered.

The post Terra nullius appeared first on The Spectator.

This massive but unauthorised biography of Gina Rinehart — daughter of Lang Hancock and the Western Australian girl now reputedly the richest woman in the world — takes a bit of digesting. Everything about it is big.

It is easy to forget that in the early 1960s iron ore exports from Western Australia to Japan were banned (the early Hancock slogan ‘Wake Up, Australia!’ was understandable). While discovering the iron ore of the Pilbara was one of Lang Hancock’s great achievements, perhaps his more significant contribution to Australia’s wealth was to get federal and state embargoes on iron ore lifted.

Adele Ferguson points out that this took years of lobbying. Given the almost unimaginably vast deposits of iron ore, such delays seem inexcusable today. But Hancock and his partner Peter Wright eventually transformed not merely Western Australia but the entire national economy.

The most striking thing about Gina Rinehart is that she did not exactly walk into a fortune and an effortless life as a rentier. By the time she inherited, her father had run the family fortune well towards bankruptcy. To rebuild the Hancock empire seems to have been an almost superhuman feat. But Gina, an only child, grew up as hard as iron ore when necessary. Michael Wright, who knew her as well as anyone, commented:

Gina has always been a strong-willed individual. As a child, she displayed a single-mindedness and sense of purpose which we found impossible to deal with. When it comes to empathy she’s indifferent. I don’t think it worries her that you get upset because of what she says or does.

Hancock had at least one colossal thing going for him: using aircraft, he had discovered the vast, fantastic extent of west Australia’s iron ore deposits, and he thought big. It has been a long time since there was a strategic vision of this magnitude in Australia, or probably anywhere else.

Just why so many of Hancock’s plans, including a scheme to blast deep-water harbours with nuclear explosives, fell afoul of the Brand-Court state government and various federal governments is not entirely clear. What is apparent is that Rinehart, without the benefit of an MBA — indeed, with relatively little formal education in business management and handicapped by the eccentricities of her father’s final years — has shown literally world-beating financial skills. In July 2005 she was able to announce her ‘greatest victory’: a $1.5 billion joint venture with Rio Tinto. Rinehart, we are told, resents being called an ‘heiress’. After all, she has built up a huge empire by her own efforts. And like her father, she has unswervingly pursued a goal of turning holes in the ground into a great deal more. The consistent Hancock vision has been of northern Australia as something much greater than just a quarry.

Further, she has not born a paper miner or bond shuffler. Certainly, it seems, a large part of the secret of her success has been unremitting attention to head-spinning detail and an equally unremitting determination for litigation when she believes she has a case. She also learned from her father a business tactic that seems remarkably effective: always go directly to the top.

The author argues that the constant goal of the Hancock family has been to own mines and mills — perhaps to transform Australia — rather than being paid per truckload of ore.

After impressive, indeed overwhelming detail regarding both Rinehart’s business and family affairs (where did it all come from?), Ferguson’s book hits a more shrill note when describing her association with various conservative figures and her purchase of an interest in Fairfax Press. There is a gushing description of meeting the Queen which seems to have strayed from the Women’s Weekly on an off day; ‘Gina, head of the House of Hancock, met Elizabeth, head of the House of Windsor.’

Rinehart’s recent association with global warming sceptics such as Professor Ian Plimer and Lord Christopher Monckton is raised in a vaguely sinister context. Federal communications minister Stephen Conroy is quoted regarding the desirability of ‘stronger laws’ to curb her influence in the media. Lord Monckton is quoted as having told an ‘intimate’ group of people in Perth — actually, it wasn’t really intimate because I was there — of the need to spend the money to set up an Australian version of Fox News to counter the widespread greenish anti-development bias in the mainstream media.

Certainly she can be expected to take on governments enamoured of mining taxes, especially anything as perverse as the Gillard government’s Mineral Resource Rent tax. However, for Rinehart to now push the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald to the ideological right (especially in a crusade against taxation on mining super-profits) would be an extremely difficult task for a lone newcomer, however shrewd, without broad media experience. A distinctive sort of willingness to take advice would also be essential. Something is made of the newspaper, the Independent, which her father and Peter Wright started in Perth. This proved short-lived, of amateurish appearance, and probably had very little influence. Obviously, however, this extraordinary story is not finished.

The post The lady means business appeared first on The Spectator.

Australia is a ‘lucky country’, said Donald Horne in his celebrated book, ‘run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.’ By contrast, The Lucky Culture, Nick Cater’s counter-thesis, holds that we are over-influenced and over-analysed by second-rate intellectuals who are incapable of counting their blessings.

At one level, this beautifully written and perceptive book is a historical essay on Australia’s public culture. At another, it’s a personal reflection by a refugee from Thatcherism, now a born-again conservative thanks to the personal experience of life in this country observed and analysed with a newspaperman’s thoroughness.

Cater instantly fell in love with Australia as a land of opportunity, equality and informality; the very antithesis of the class-ridden Britain he was leaving. ‘Australians instinctively understand,’ he says, ‘that… to deny someone a fair go, to disparage lowly work, to bludge on your mates or to get above your station is to be un-Australian.’ This, he declares, is ‘the Australian contract’ to which he and millions of other migrants enthusiastically subscribed.

What he also swiftly assimilated was Australians’ no-nonsense, down-to-earth attitude towards making the most of themselves and their country. Australia’s luck, he notes, ‘did not fall from the sky. It had to be torn from the earth in a triumph of mind over muscle’. Naturally, he celebrates the classics of ingenuity that every Australian schoolchild could once recite: the stump-jump plough, the Ridley stripper, rust-resistant wheat, the Sunshine harvester and, above all, the Snowy Mountains scheme.

As befits a seasoned reporter-cum-senior-editor at the Australian, Cater garnishes this book-length editorial with pithy stories. Emblematic is the decision of the Victorian Railway Commission’s chief to christen the Melbourne-to-Sydney express ‘The Spirit of Progress’. It symbolised post-war Australia’s instinctive belief in the superiority of science over prejudice, reason over superstition, effortlessness over exertion, and modernity over times past.

As Cater sees it: ‘The spirit of progress is as strong in Australia as in America; the two cultures share the assumption articulated by Tocqueville “that man is endowed with an indefinite faculty for improvement… forever seeking, forever falling to rise again, often disappointed but not discouraged”.’

Today, of course, the most acceptable infrastructure project is the one that never actually gets built and the most acceptable new technology is the one that’s not actually being implemented. A celebration of this spirit of progress — and palpable frustration at those who would impede it — permeates the book.

As Cater sees it, there’s a powerful new commentariat, dominant in the media, academia and public administration, that is every bit as condescending as the aristocracy he left behind in Britain. In contemporary Australia, the worst snobbery is not directed towards people of lower status, he says, but towards people of different opinions. He thinks that this ‘my opinion must be better than yours’ conceit is putting at risk the egalitarianism that’s at the heart of Australians’ sense of self.

What distinguishes this group from every other influential sector of society is its unshakeable conviction in its moral superiority. Everyone who disputes its thinking is not just wrong, but inferior. Critics of the politically correct consensus are not just bad thinkers but verge on being bad people, as those who are cautious about gay marriage are starting to discover.

Cater gives us a potted history of the Australian higher education sector, along the way pointing out that its great expansion was started by Sir Robert Menzies, not Gough Whitlam. He provides a shrewd analysis of the human rights apparatus, citing Whitlam’s assessment that there wasn’t actually much racial discrimination to be tackled in Australia. The exercise, said the then-Prime Minister, ‘is not so much to correct present abuses… but to set standards for the future’. Cater gives a thorough account of the evolution of the ABC from news reporting to news interpreting, quoting former Howard staffer Grahame Morris’s pithy assessment that, for conservatives, the ABC is our ‘enemy talking to our friends’.

Much of the book is devoted to explaining how the Australian Labor Party’s focus has shifted from the concerns of rank-and-file workers to the interests of various protest groups. Over the past 40 years, Cater thinks, the traditional political order has been more or less turned on its head, with the Liberals becoming the party of workers and Labor representing inner-city intellectuals. For Cater, the most telling illustration of change was the 2004 election cameo of Mark Latham needing to sneak into a meeting of Tasmanian forest workers who subsequently cheered John Howard.

Happily, the book’s subtitle, ‘The Rise of an Australian Ruling Class’ is not entirely substantiated. Cater correctly identifies the cultural self-doubt verging on self-loathing that permeates much of our media and higher education. As he clearly demonstrates, though, most Australians are cheerfully resistant to these national and civilisational neuroses. Australians are even less deferential to the thought police than they are to the ones wearing uniforms. They routinely vote into office governments that those whom Howard labelled ‘self-appointed cultural dieticians’ would vociferously deplore.

Luckily, for those who think that a farming region is no less valuable than a national park, a mine an important contributor to prosperity (at least if it’s done right), and successful businesses just as necessary for civilisation as a human rights bureaucracy, politically correct critics don’t constitute an Australian ruling class at all. They are certainly influential and often have a corrosive influence on public morale, but they rarely seem to disturb Australians’ preference for facts over conjecture, actual experience over mere theory, and material progress over new class respectability.

Prime Minister Gillard may represent, as Cater thinks, Labor’s ultimate abandonment of workers in favour of union careerists and Green ideologues, but even here there’s hope. In resigning from Gillard’s cabinet, elder statesmen Simon Crean and Martin Ferguson recalled a Labor tradition that saw unions as just one element in a workplace partnership. Successful democratic politics is about capturing the middle ground. That’s why the next really successful Labor leader will end up fighting the Greens as surely as John Howard fought One Nation and Ben Chifley fought communism.

As Cater concedes: ‘Outside the inner clique that dominates politics, academia and the media, the Australian spirit remains strong. It’s not… the spirit of the frontier but the spirit of the front bar: pragmatic, personable and above all generous.’

The post Progress and its critics appeared first on The Spectator.

He has, in previous writings, expressed the view that the threat of global warming is so great as to override little things like democracy, and the same attitude is prevalent in Earthmasters. Hamilton purports to identify a new danger: geoengineering, or the attempts to ameliorate global warming through large-scale intervention in the biosphere. Like the priests of an earlier age, Hamilton makes a point of fusing fact with faith, selecting some bits of evidence and ignoring others.

An interesting question, given the strength of Hamilton’s conviction, is what he would make of the recent statement by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that there has been a 17-year ‘pause’ in global warming, and that this is likely to continue for some time. That is, the IPCC’s fundamental theory of a straight-line connection between carbon emissions and atmospheric temperatures is, at best, somewhat shaky. Presumably, Earthmasters was completed before the IPCC statement, but it is hard to see that it would have shaken Hamilton’s faith. After all, he criticises the IPCC in the book for being insufficiently alarmist.

Certainly, there is some interest around the world in geoengineering solutions. The ideas range from the brightening of clouds by adding moisture (thus reflecting sunlight) to fertilising the ocean with iron (thereby increasing its capacity to absorb carbon), with a lot of things in between. Some make some theoretical sense, some seem rather wacky. From Hamilton’s tone, one would think that we are about to see a whirlwind of activity, either from panicky governments or go-it-alone entrepreneurs.

But further investigation, and tracking down some of Hamilton’s references, reveals that this is not the case. Many of these ideas are only at the research paper stage, discussed in theory at various conferences. A couple have progressed to the drawing-board stage, and there has been one (unsuccessful) small-scale test of ocean fertilisation. But there is no guarantee that any of these will proceed much further, and all things considered it looks a bit unlikely.

One can accept the point that any intervention in the climate involves a high degree of risk, and should be considered very carefully. Changing one aspect of a system is likely to change others: that is the nature of a system. But Hamilton mainly seems to want to use the risks of geoengineering to attack companies for funding research into possible solutions, while criticising them for not doing enough
about global warming.

Parts of this book make one wonder if Hamilton really knows what he is talking about, on the technical side. For example, he glances at geosequestration (which involves converting carbon emissions into liquid and storing them deep underground) and dismisses it as impractical and untested. This will be news in Norway, where the Sleipner plant has been stripping carbon from gas and storing it, currently at the rate of about a million tonnes a year, since 1996.

There are other geosequestration projects successfully operating around the world, but closer to home there is a pilot/test plant operating in the Otways, in Victoria. It’s hardly a secret: there are regular tours, and a newsletter about it.

Instead of investigating these projects, Hamilton refers to a natural disaster in Africa in 1986 when a volcano released a carbon dioxide stream, poisoning the area and killing 1,700 people. A tragedy, yes, but if Hamilton thinks that it has anything to do with geosequestration then one must ask whether he understands the technology. He is either extremely misinformed or deliberately seeking to mislead people. Or possibly both.

In fact, the bogeyman seems be a recurring character in the book. About halfway through, Hamilton stops talking about geoengineering in favour of his preferred ground of seeking out denialist conspiracies. He appears to hate an awful lot of people: the Murdoch media, the corporate sector, US Republicans, geologists, Queenslanders (described as ‘backward’), conservatives in general, and so on. It’s a long list. He seems to think that any link, however tenuous, between a researcher and a resource company — or, even worse, Gina Rinehart — is enough to discredit them. It’s a bit like the Spanish Inquisition: nobody expects them, but there they are, with boundless self-belief and an ever-widening circle of enemies. Hamilton hints that the only way to deal with both climate change and over-zealous geoengineers is to set up a powerful UN committee to make sure everyone does the right thing. Can’t trust governments, after all: they’re elected, you know.

This foolishness is a shame, because the broad subject of geoengineering, and its inherent risks, is an interesting one. Fortunately, there are other books that provide a better picture. Jeff Goodell’s How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate is a good take on it; Goodell accepts the theory of climate change but his book is thankfully without Hamilton’s hysterical tone.

In years to come, we will probably look back and wonder how it came to this, how the issue of global warming metamorphosed into a witch-hunt for unbelievers. Indeed, it is difficult to escape the feeling that people like Hamilton secretly like the idea of climate change, insofar as it offers the opportunity to remake society along eco-socialist lines. Perhaps it is a case of remembering but not learning, a concept which, like this book, is not much more than silly.

The post Hunting for bogeymen appeared first on The Spectator.

Modern history tells us that what politicians say during election campaigns is a most unreliable guide to what they will actually do. The days of opposition leaders spelling out a detailed programme – and then trying to implement it – ended with Gough Whitlam in 1974. You can bet your bottom dollar than Tony Abbott will adopt a small target strategy until 14 September with a few key ‘talking points’.

That is why a book such as Future Proofing Australia is extremely valuable. The editors, (Liberal) Senator Brett Mason and Daniel Wood, have collected 18 essays about important socio-political issues affecting Australia. Although they insist that the book ‘is not meant to be a political manifesto or a party policy platform’, it is self-evident that many of the ideas traversed in it represent current long-term thinking within the Coalition. It is a sort of wish list.

The editors disavow any such intention: ‘there is no ideological or partisan thread that links all the contributors’. True, if one stresses the word ‘all’. Yet counting Mason himself and Tony Abbott (who has written the introduction), eight of the essayists are sitting Coalition parliamentarians. Two others (Ian Sinclair and Tim Fischer) are former leaders of the National Party.

There is nothing wrong with the book’s overall ‘liberal-conservative’ bias, as Abbott terms it. But it is puzzling that the editors seem loath to admit the fact.

At any rate, Spectator Australia readers should be pleased – even excited – by many of the policy prescriptions outlined.

Abbott himself promises ‘lower taxes, better services, stronger borders, and modern infrastructure’, though he does not explain how the latter three aims can be achieved concurrently with the first.  His Coalition colleagues provide more detail.  Scott Ryan and Kelly O’Dwyer champion the free market. O’Dwyer bravely admits that she is opposed to any ‘fair competition’ policies that amount to protection of ‘inefficient’ industries. Mason himself goes as far as saying that ‘Main Street’, not ‘Wall Street’, was to blame for the GFC. Presumably he is referring to the mum and dad homebuyers in the US who took out mortgages they were not in a position to service, leaving innocent banks with dud security when the property bubble burst.

The mining industry should be delighted.  Mathias Cormann not only reiterates the Coalition’s official policy to scrap both the mining tax and the carbon tax. He argues that even without these millstones there have been, in the past, ‘too many unnecessary roadblocks impeding [the] progress’ of budding entrepreneurs. Taxation of the mining sector should not proceed on the basis of ‘capacity to pay’, he says, because Australia cannot afford the mining sector to fail and ‘investment decisions are made over extremely long time frames’.

By this reasoning there would never be a correct time to tax mining profits any higher than at present. Indeed, taxes and other ‘excessive government regulation’ should be further reduced. (Anyone interested in a polar-opposite view might read Dirty Money by Matthew Benns.)

The ideas of the other author-parliamentarians should also be welcome to the Coalition’s right-wing base. Fiona Nash is against the indiscriminate sale of Australian agricultural land to foreigners, in the interests of our ‘food security’. Andrew Constance is against bureaucrats interfering in the decision-making of the well-to-do elderly as to where to live. ‘Incentives [should be provided] to home owners in their later middle years to encourage downsizing,’ he suggests.

Mitch Fifield would scrap the Gillard government’s Ministry for Social Inclusion.  He advocates ‘citizen-centred funding models’ in the provision of aged care services, and in the school system.  This translates to so-called ‘vouchers’ – the government gives the citizen money to spend on, say, his child’s education, rather than giving the money directly to schools. Schools must compete for the citizen’s custom and the fittest schools will survive.

I have focused upon the essays by the parliamentarians because their ideas are more likely to become law. That said, General Peter Cosgrove can probably be assured that much more money will be spent on the military. Gary Johns can be confident that an Abbott government will not endorse any amendments to the Constitution which recognise Aboriginal culture. Kevin Donnelly will get his wish (mine too) that school history curriculums be realigned toward Western civilisation and Judeo-Christian values.

(Donnelly will be disappointed, however, if he seriously hopes that a Coalition government will reverse three decades of number-crunching managerialism in education policy. Both sides of politics are to blame, and it may well get worse.)

Other contributors can also expect little joy. Cardinal George Pell’s essay on Christianity and Social Capital is heartfelt and well-written, but, sadly, it will scarcely affect the ‘amoral pragmatism’ of our politicians. Greg Craven and Ian Sinclair write in an accomplished way about the vagaries of federalism and the disgraceful shambles that is the House of Representatives, but (call me a cynic) any meaningful change appears unlikely.

Tim Fischer suggests 12 major new transport projects. Most sounded sensible to me, but there seems little prospect that any would be implemented by a low-tax, low-regulation federal government. (Fischer’s idea for a congestion charge on ‘vehicles in all state capital city CBD zones’ is specifically rejected by Senator Ryan.) Also unlikely to be adopted are the ideas of Roger Kilham about healthcare, Professor John Langford about water conservation, and Professor Peter Doherty (a Nobel-prize winner) about increased investment in science and technology.

The two biggest optimists are Langford and Bernard Salt.

Langford cautions that ‘the spectre of climate change cannot be ignored’. Salt advocates much higher levels of immigration and a generous approach to refugees. Each utilizes essentially conservative arguments, but there seems a snowflake’s chance in Hell that either will be listened to.

Spectator Australia readers will, I expect, have disapproved of my tone. That is by the by. This is a worthwhile and important book as a guide to 2014 and beyond.

The post Coming attractions appeared first on The Spectator.

The amount of virtual ink spilled by Australia’s bloggers and tweeters is truly astonishing, especially since it is by no means clear that they have achieved much. As Greg Jericho notes in this interesting, if flawed, study, a key problem in talking about the blogosphere is that it is an amorphous creature, a moving labyrinth stretching from informed, careful contributors to wacko conspiracy theorists, with a lot of mediocrity in between.

Jericho is, these days, a blogger for ABC Online’s The Drum. Previously, he wrote a blog under the pseudonym Grog’s Gamut, while working as a Canberra public servant in the film policy area. He started blogging, he says, because of his ongoing interest in politics, especially from a left-wing perspective. He was ‘outed’ by the Australian as part of an ongoing spat, and, indeed, spends quite a lot of the book trying to score points from News Ltd. It’s amusing, in its way, although if Jericho was trying to write a serious book it was probably not the right way to go.

A major point in the quarrel was that Jericho was hiding his real identity, a common practice in the blogosphere (although there are many professional journalists who blog or tweet under their real name, as Jericho does now). Jericho believes that anonymity is fine, although his reasoning is not easy to follow. He argues that most bloggers are simply doing something that they like to do, and mainly it’s all just a bit of fun.

But he also argues that blogging constitutes a real and necessary alternative to the mainstream media. He notes that much conventional political reporting, especially during campaigns, is so driven by spin, pomposity and unspoken alliances as to be almost useless, and much of what he says here makes sense. He cites a few examples of bloggers breaking news or providing genuine insights, although compared with the huge amount of regurgitation, venom and general silliness, those cases seem fairly minor.

It raises a key question: is blogging serious or not? Jericho, and a lot of other bloggers, seems to want it both ways. On the one hand, they see it as an important activity and worthy of the legal protections enjoyed by professional journalists. But then they say that anyone who takes a blog seriously deserves all they get, because a blog is, well, just a blog. In other words, freedom without consequences, privileges without responsibilities. No, it doesn’t work like that. You can be serious or you can be whimsical, but not both — not at the same time, anyway.

In this context, Jericho misses some crucial cases. Several of his Drum colleagues have made some remarkably insulting comments about Coalition figures, saying that one should be raped by a dog and another should contract an STD, for example. It would be interesting to know what Jericho, had he examined this sort of thing, would say. Hey, it was a joke? Or, you’re allowed to say nasty things as long as your target is a conservative politician? Or, what are you going to do about it, anyway?

Well, here’s a suggestion: if there is a change of government in September, the writers involved should be clearly and personally asked by the new ministers how they can possibly be trusted to do their jobs fairly and professionally, given the opinions they have expressed. Yes, actions have consequences. Grow up and realise it.

Jericho is on safer ground when he looks at the way that blogging and tweeting have been adopted by mainstream journalists. A few journalists have built large online followings, but most seem to see it as a supplement to their hard-copy work. It does have the advantage of being fast, and that was important in events like the knifing of Rudd. Some journalists specialise in live tweeting of media conferences, although the purpose is not entirely clear. To feed the addicts, presumably.

Several politicians are prolific tweeters. Malcolm Turnbull led the pack for a while, and was willing to enter into technical discussions about his portfolio (in 140 characters or fewer). He was overtaken by Ed Husic, although Husic seems to say a lot about not very much. Several politicians use social media to distribute speeches and propaganda, although there are occasional attempts to engage the virtual public — with mixed results, it should be said. The broad view seems to be that doing so takes a great deal of effort and offers little real return, and it is becoming ever more difficult to cut through the static. And the idea that any public figure is fair game for people who hide behind a childish nickname must be grating.

It is odd that some politicians, even when familiar with the drawbacks of the blogosphere, are very sensitive to the campaigns of organisations like Get Up! Ministers who would probably dismiss a paper petition snap to attention when an online one is presented to them. Perhaps they are simply enthralled by the technological immediacy. Perhaps they think that caving in will translate into votes. Unlikely, really: there is no hard evidence that any of this stuff shifts votes at the moment, although it might reinforce existing biases.

Jericho insists that blogging and tweeting are here to stay, and the political system will have to learn to deal with them. Maybe, or maybe the whole thing will eventually sink into a self-indulgent quagmire of twitspits and poor punctuation. Nevertheless, Jericho has broken some interesting new ground. His book should probably be treated with the same wariness with which one reads a blog, but it should not be ignored.

The post Talk is cheap appeared first on The Spectator.

This book, by former Labor leader Mark Latham, is schizophrenic. Although not very comprehensible as a blueprint for the future, the first half of it has many eminently sensible suggestions which either major party could well adopt.

It appears to owe much of its economics to Kevin Rudd’s very special bête noire, Friedrich von Hayek, and many of its passages could be seen in a paper of the Austrian or Chicago Schools of economic thought — or the Bert Kelly Society or the Institute of Public Affairs — without evoking surprise. Some passages seem to come straight from Bert Kelly or John Hyde.

Latham’s attack on various federal governments’ featherbedding of the car industry, to take one example, is impeccably ‘dry’.

He writes: ‘The problem, as in so many areas, is rent-seeking trade unionism. [Labor’s] only answer is a throwback to McEwenism: preferment, protectionism and subsidisation.’ Many of his statements could be taken up by the Liberal party in the election campaign, and aimed at all major parties as well. ‘The spread of globalisation has only made McEwenism a bigger mug’s game.’

There are numerous very sensible passages like this, mainly at the beginning of the book: ‘Markets are supposed to foster a competitive struggle among suppliers. Yet in the 1950s, under the Country party leader John McEwen, selected industries were afforded tariff protection and subsidisation. Large parts of the Labor movement supported this policy, an accommodation between the captains of industry and trade unionism.’

But then — and this too will not surprise anyone who has followed Latham’s writing — the book drops into wild toxic raving, powered apparently by a blind, insensate hatred of an ill-defined ‘Right’, and carried along on a tide of insults and abuse. Writers for the Murdoch press are particularly loathed and animalised.

Ordinary truth seems ignored: Rebecca Weisser, of the Australian, is described as a ‘cut and paste compiler’. In fact she is the features or opinion editor, responsible for commissioning and accepting both freelance and in-house features.

Gerard Henderson, another member of the ‘authoritarian Right’, also leads a ‘narrow, miserable existence’. In fact Henderson’s Media Watchdog specialises in recording mistakes in predominantly left-wing media: a fairly transparent occupation. However he seldom mentions Latham’s name without also mentioning the enormous, index-linked pension which Latham draws for minimal Parliamentary service.

Tony Abbott’s alleged misogyny is brought up, without the slightest evidence, as well as totally mystifying passages such as, ‘How can a true conservative be unpopular with women?’ The idea Abbott is unpopular with women is backed by no evidence. As far as divorces go, the score is Latham 1, Abbott 0.

Some of Latham’s own descriptions of women are unprintable here, putting him in the Slipper league. This is a feature of much of his writing.

We are told: ‘The Liberals have breached convention before. Most notably in the dismissal of the Whitlam government…’ The dismissal was unusual, but no one with legal training, including Whitlam himself, has been able to argue it was illegal, and Abbott, then aged 18, did not enter Parliament until 1994.

‘When Abbott breaks a convention, it stays broken,’ we are told. Would that be like a taxi driver’s arms, Mr Latham? Abbott has also, he claims, ‘hunted down dissenting points of view’. This is rich considering Latham’s own obsession with images of violence, sex-scatology, treachery and boasts of his power to hate. His brief time in Parliament (never a minister), his landslide rejection by the electorate and his post-parliamentary experience seem not to have brought him self-knowledge or powers of self-control. It seems unbelievable that the man who wrote these later passages could have also written some of the eminently sensible ones at the beginning of the book.

The Australian Press Council is praised as ‘the body funded by Australia’s newspapers under self-regulatory provisions’, which sounds like a desirable step towards that Light on the Hill of government control for those papers that don’t play along. It seems it should be used against Latham’s enemies, and the fact that Andrew Bolt has criticised it is ‘an act of stunning arrogance’. Bolt had also allegedly claimed that it was ‘pushing a political agenda on to journalists’, ‘abusing its power’ and ‘punishing conservatives’. I don’t know how things are now, but some years ago a journalist friend of mine (working as it happened as a token conservative for Fairfax), fell afoul of the APC. I followed the matter to its end and came to the conclusion that APC members at that time knew as much about natural justice, double jeopardy and the presumption of innocence as your average feathered frog. In any case, the APC was set up reluctantly to stop Whitlam doing something worse.

Weirdness abounds. The man who took schoolboy dirt to a new level in Australian politics (‘hanging out the backside of the Queen’) wonders sadly about the quality of public debate. He claims Keynesian economics had a beneficial effect during the Great Depression. In fact it is widely agreed that Keynesianism prolonged it, especially in the US.

Mocking and sneering at political opponents such as Tony Staley, over being desperately injured, permanently crippled and nearly killed in a car crash (can one see Curtin or Chifley doing this?), suggests Latham (and Paul Keating too, with whom he shared this practice), doesn’t understand ordinary Australians either, or that many find such behaviour disgusting. Some still respect women for that matter, and dislike Latham referring to them with foul terminology.

It is amazing that this man, like Dr J.F. Cairns, came within measurable  distance of being Prime Minister. It reminds us that Australia has certainly been lucky in dodging many, if not all, the bullets aimed it

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One always approaches the memoir of a retired politician with a certain trepidation: such books can often devolve into a parade of excuses, self-aggrandisement, paybacks and complaints. There is an aspect of all these in this book by Steve Bracks, Victorian premier from 1999 to 2007, but thankfully not so much as to make it unreadable. Maybe the assistance of Whinnett, deputy editor of the Sunday Herald Sun, kept the book free of the confected antagonism that seems to motivate many in the ALP, and likewise the accounts of the labyrinthine manoeuvres of the party’s factions are kept to a minimum. Essentially, Bracks is simply not a hater but more of a technocrat and administrator.

If anything, the problem with the book — some might say the problem with the Bracks period of leadership — is that it is not about very much at all. Bracks describes himself as a fiscal conservative and a moderate social progressive, and that seems to be pretty accurate. Indeed, it is no surprise to learn that his first academic qualification was in accounting. His government was very much about balancing the books first and doing some other stuff after that.

He also had the good fortune to arrive at the right time. While he lambasts the Kennett government for cutting budgets and services (he neglects to mention that this was because of the disastrous fiscal position that it inherited), the truth is that Bracks came to office with the state’s finances in good shape. The flow of revenue from Canberra, via the GST, was also a boon. Politically, he was faced with a series of Liberal opposition leaders who were, putting it frankly, simply not up to the job.

Bracks had always seen himself as destined for big things, although he is careful to avoid any Hawke-like suggestion of charismatic destiny. He planned his career trajectory fairly early, and after a stint as a teacher set off on the usual ALP path of adviser positions and party committees. He says remarkably little about the pivotal campaign which put him into the big chair in 1999, although he notes that he was not surprised at the result. All part of the plan, presumably.

Control was one of the hallmarks of the Bracks premiership. The other was spin: a constant flow of ‘announceables’ — though Bracks did not try, Rudd-style, to crowd everyone else out of the spotlight — and a marked tendency to deny any possibility of bad news. The book strikes a similar tone. Reading it with no other knowledge of Victorian politics during the period, one could easily conclude that nothing bad happened at all.

The emphasis on avoiding controversy is illustrated by Bracks’ decision to not re-appoint the respected governor, James Gobbo. Gobbo had occasionally been a guest at a function club where Liberal donors sometimes met. Bracks says that he did not re-appoint Gobbo as governor because if the issue became public it would have caused controversy. So Bracks simply told Gobbo that he would not be re-appointed, without giving him a reason, and later even ‘rubbished’ (Bracks’s word) media questions on the issue. The approach was: if there is never any controversy, the media will have no choice but to focus on the government’s good news stories.

Applying the same approach to the book means that there are surprising gaps. There is no mention of the public transport ticketing system which inexplicably took years to implement and chewed up huge amounts of money, for example. The Wonthaggi desalination plant, now widely seen as a white elephant, gets half a line. Bracks attacks the Kennett government for a lack of accountability, but his own government had a pattern, especially in its later years, of obfuscation, evasion and stonewalling over issues such as planning decisions and police corruption.

In the final chapters of the book, Bracks makes an attempt at Big Picture vision but to tell the truth he is not particularly good at it. Especially on party matters, there is a sense of ticking boxes: the party should connect more with communities, focus on growth, govern for the whole electorate rather than special interests. Yes, this is all good, but hardly new, and would sound entirely logical coming from a Liberal.

Bracks doesn’t like the Greens much, seeing them as interlopers and opportunists. He makes the interesting suggestion that they should be referred to as the Green party, to counter their strategy of depicting themselves as above party politics. It’s not a bad idea, but hardly earth-shaking.

Which says it all, really. All things considered, Bracks was not a bad premier, and by some criteria even a good one. But there is a lingering sense that the Bracks era should have been better, left more of a legacy, expressed a vision, been more willing to upset some people if that is what it took to take a leap rather than a few small steps. It’s the same with this book: not a bad piece of work, but not particularly exciting either.

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Here is another great door-stopper of a book on Australia’s role in the Pacific in the second world war. The Duke of Wellington once warned a hopeful historian that he could never write an account of Waterloo. It was too complicated. If that is the case with a single 19th-century battle, the task here is of a different order of magnitude. The book is rich in detail, drawing on innumerable previous histories, but cannot make a coherent narrative: some details are over-elaborated, some omitted altogether.

An important positive aspect of the book is the author’s refusal to write a political tract: Curtin, Menzies, MacArthur, even Blamey (highly unlovable, though competent) are portrayed warts and all, but are also given credit for their achievements. They emerge as human beings rather than ideological heroes and villains. More attention could be given to the work of the War Council.

The book is apparently taken entirely from secondary sources, and there are a number of myths and errors repeated. We are informed on the fifth page that Churchill repeatedly claimed Australians came from ‘bad stock’. In fact, this claim’s only source is the memoirs of his (unethical) doctor, Lord Moran, who seems to have retailed an outburst by a desperately strained and weary man. In fact Churchill’s memoirs are full of praise for the Australians.

Perhaps the biggest omission is the 1944 Commonwealth Prime Minister’s Conference, at which Curtin and Churchill discussed the embryonic idea of a British Commonwealth nuclear force.

Churchill and Curtin, we are told, were both alcoholics. This is generally taken to mean someone so continually drunk as to be incapable of functioning, which applies to neither Churchill nor Curtin. The Japanese did not use Bren Guns. Was the 27th Brigade really ‘ravaged by disease and mental illness’?

Another myth is that the big guns at Singapore pointed the wrong way and were incapable of being trained to fire inland. An important part of the real problem was that they had only armour-piercing ammunition, which buried itself uselessly in the mud. (The question of who was responsible for this could have been usefully investigated.)

The fall of Singapore is attributed to ‘Churchill’s folly’ — and Churchill’s staff had indeed been negligent in not looking to its land defences. (Though since Churchill had become Prime Minister during the retreat to Dunkirk, it is understandable that the British government had had other things on its mind then, such as survival.) It might also be worth mentioning that Singapore did not have all-round defences because pre-war Australian governments had refused to contribute to the cost, and had done nothing since. Anyhow, it is debatable that Australia ever faced an existential threat once the Americans began arriving.

It is taken for granted here that the Japanese intended to invade Australia. This is typical of the simplistic manner in which complex and nuanced issues are dealt with. In fact, some sections of the Japanese Navy did want to invade, but the Army thought it was beyond its resources. Others, as the academic specialist Henry Frei has pointed out, wanted Australia reduced to a condition of ‘subservience’, so it could not be used as an American base. The claim that the British were ‘evicted from the Indian Ocean’ is more than doubtful. The Japanese sank some ships in a raid, but that is far short of ‘taking control’. After one raid, they never came back.

The main shortcoming of this book, like many populist Australian histories of the second world war, is that the author gives the impression that the Pacific War was the only war going on. The fact that the major allies decided to ‘beat Hitler first’ was, it is suggested, faintly ridiculous. In fact, it was important to beat Hitler first. Again, the loss of India would have been a disaster for Australia. Given that the Australian population suffered less than almost any other belligerent power, allied grand strategy gave Australians little to complain about.

The author sounds scornful of the fact that only seven Japanese planes were shot down in the raid on Darwin, ‘leaving 181 to fight again’. (Actually 242 took part in the raid.) However, it is worth remembering that the highly-trained Japanese carrier pilots were irreplaceable, and those seven missing, plus those lost when they continued on to attack British ships in the Indian Ocean, meant the Japanese were worn down by attrition by the time of the climactic Battle of Midway, where every plane would count.

Looking up ‘strikes’ in the index, one finds about half a page devoted to wharf strikes, and, earlier, about half a page on a coal strike. In fact the number of days directly lost to strikes — on wharves and in vital industries — was, according to the Commonwealth Yearbooks, something like six million (perhaps a grimly appropriate figure), with the number lost indirectly being a multiple of that. The Battle of Milne Bay, for example, was fought without heavy allied artillery because striking watersiders refused to load the guns. US aircraft being unloaded from ships were deliberately destroyed by watersiders, ship repairs were often sabotaged and under both Curtin and Menzies coal and other strikes had been continual — one reason the defences of Darwin were in a poor state when the Japanese struck, and probably a reason why John Curtin died prematurely. Curtin’s close friend and WA Labor Premier Philip Collier said, ‘They broke his heart, the strikers.’ All this is surely important enough to merit some attention in a book claiming to be comprehensive.

No one could disagree with the author’s portrayal of Labor MP Eddie Ward, skilfully sawing away at Curtin’s psychological vulnerabilities and virtually orchestrating the betrayal of Australian servicemen, as probably the most disgusting figure Australian politics has ever produced. It is an interesting detail that the dying Curtin asked for Robert Menzies to be one of his pallbearers.

The book is a worthwhile addition to the library of anyone seeking details of the Pacific War, but pinches of salt are needed.

The post The will to survive appeared first on The Spectator.

Daley, a long-time denizen of the Press Gallery but originally from Melbourne, acknowledges that Canberra is a deeply odd place, and in this book about the city — one of a series about Australian capitals — he happily veers between defence and criticism. He acknowledges that there is no escaping the city’s purpose, dating back to the Federation debates in which neither Sydney nor Melbourne would allow the other to be the seat of national government. So a chunk of paddock roughly between the two was chosen, and the local Aboriginal tribe was shuffled aside. If Canberra is an entity rather separate from the rest of Australia, that is because it was designed to be. On 12 March 2013, it will be 100 years old.

For a city with a good share of monuments, there can be a strangely temporary feel to the place. Maybe this is because a significant part of the population leave after a few years, or perhaps it is because the elected politicians — who are, after all, the purpose for all this — usually have homes and allegiances elsewhere. Oddly, for a town built on politics, politicians are not much liked here; many Canberrans see them as not much more than an impediment to smooth, unquestioned administration.

Daley accepts that by and large the place has always been run by public servants, which helps to explain the proliferation of rules small and large, such as the prohibition on front fences. Many people think that Canberra was designed by Walter Burley Griffin, but Daley points out that only the bare bones of his plan remain; as much as possible, the city planners simply went their own way, building facts on the ground. There are a few Griffin echoes (aside from the lake); some of the avenues are peculiarly wide because Griffin had planned for Melbourne-style trams, for example.

Daley has an eye for strange details. For a city that is supposed to run according to schedule, there is a long history of things going not quite right. One story: for the opening of the (provisional) Parliament House in 1927, there was meant to be an Air Force flyover. Except that one of the planes lost control and crashed, near the site of the current National Library. There’s a plaque at St John’s Church, apparently.

Nevertheless, for those who choose to live in Canberra on a permanent basis, it can offer a very nice lifestyle. These days, there are some good restaurants and entertainment venues. You have to look for them, though: Canberra has no real social centre. There is, one might say, no there there. Or maybe good things are kept a bit secret, on the basis that Canberrans simply don’t like tourists from, you know, Australia.

It is also a very left-leaning city, in a parochial, tin-pot socialist sort of way. The ACT government has a marked fondness for social engineering and boutique gestures, although the mini-ministers often find themselves bogged down in demands for more bike paths and fewer potholes. Strangely, Daley makes no real mention of the farcical ACT election of 1989, the first to elect an executive government. It saw a load of jokers and whackos on the ballot paper, including a number opposed to the idea of self-government, several of whom won office. This is a crucial omission, for the event says much about Canberrans’ attitude towards democracy: basically, they don’t care that much for it. Yes, there is an underlying culture of public service in Canberra, but equally there is an idea that government is something done to the country rather than for it. It is as if Canberra fell in love with Gough Whitlam back in the early Seventies and never quite recovered. No wonder that the city doesn’t like conservative governments; no wonder that the feeling is mutual.

Daley has a good time linking the city’s history to its social attitudes, but it must be said that he misses a number of important issues. Away from the pleasant eateries and government departments, the city has a morass of social problems: homelessness, drugs, youth unemployment, the despair that comes with nothing to do and no reason to do it. Not everyone can work in one of the shiny buildings, and being shut out in Canberra often means being shut out for good. Maybe Daley, ensconced in Parliament House for a living, has no reason to see those outside the magic circle. But the result is an oddly lopsided book, as if a couple of chapters were lost along the way.

Will Canberrans’ view of Australia ever change, and will people in the rest of the country ever embrace their peculiar capital? Daley suggests not. Canberra is now a self-perpetuating system of public servants breeding public servants, and the rest of us will just have to learn to live with it. Which doesn’t mean that we will ever have to like it.

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