In any event, the policy announced this week neatly exorcised the ghost of WorkChoices, thumped the corrupt and extremist wings of the trade union movement and proposed some modest steps towards flexibility which no one could reasonably oppose, as they are within the present legislative framework.

In total, the announcement answered the public demand for a clear policy and at the same time avoided the whole election campaign being dragged down the side alley of industrial relations where the labour machine is lying in wait to start another hysterical, fear-mongering campaign against workplace reform.

This is not an election on labour law; it is an election on whether a bankrupt government should be allowed to continue with its reckless spending, incompetent administration and total failure to secure the borders of this country. All debate should be directed to that end.

Now that the industrial relations policy has been launched and put to bed, the opposition should be able to concentrate on those really significant issues. For this we have to thank Abbott and his able shadow minister Eric Abetz.

An extra bonus from this exercise was to see Bill Shorten, the minister responsible, squirming on television like an over-earnest schoolboy, struggling to repeat the lines he had learned by rote, trotting out clichés and clearly not even knowing that the government’s own review of the Fair Work Act had proposed the same modest reforms as the Coalition’s policy. It was a dismal performance and proved that there is not much life left in the anti-WorkChoices issue. It also made me wonder why Shorten is regarded as such a wunderkind. If you ask me he is mediocre, and the present issue shows that if you keep the pressure on him, he will crumble (which is what the opposition should be doing to the brazen but vulnerable Senator Conroy).

But there remain a few loose ends to tie up, and the most important of them is to prevail on friends of the Coalition to limit their public demands for more radical reform. Every time one of them decides to pontificate on industrial relations, it inevitably gives more airtime to WorkChoices, implies division in the ranks, suggests some right-wing plotters are lurking in the wings and makes it harder for the leader to present a united team and a coherent policy.

I know it looks good if others are demanding more extreme reforms than Abbott is prepared to give. In one sense it helps him to be presented as a moderate. But, again, this is not an election for taking risks and the opposition would be better advised to stick to the declared policy and to present a united front in support of it.

Of course, Shorten is typical of the new class skewered by Nick Cater in The Lucky Culture. I went to its launch at a function of the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne the other night. Rather than the traditional launch, the event was a lively Q&A with the author and the ever-perceptive Professor Geoffrey Blainey, but mercifully without the ABC’s lynch mob as an audience. I was struck by several features about the event. What a thrill it is that we live again in times where we have lectures and debates on public issues to exercise our minds; I thought they had disappeared. Second, what a success the new-look IPA has become; its functions attract hundreds and are guaranteed to be stimulating, provocative and a welcome relief from the political correctness and tedious recital of left-wing triumphs that so much public debate has become. Third, there was a palpable feeling in the room that we are living under the thumb of such a woeful government that the coming election is our last chance to stop our decay as a country and to start building for something better.

Anyway, the book. One of its themes is that members of the new class of political apparatchiks have never had real jobs and are consequently out of touch with the mainstream of citizens they are supposed to be governing. As the theme was developed during the discussion, it reminded me of my time as a parliamentary delegate to the United Nations in 1976. My ALP colleague at the General Assembly was the old firebrand Clyde Cameron, recently sacked by Whitlam and still rather sore about it. During a brief respite from the usual UN pastime of attacking Israel, I asked Cameron what it was really like in the Whitlam cabinet. He told me that at its first meeting in 1972, Whitlam had said it was the most highly qualified cabinet in Australia’s history. Why, he exclaimed, they had several BAs and diplomas in social work and even a few PhDs . Cameron claimed that he interjected: ‘That’s wonderful news. We wouldn’t want any drongos like Chifley or Curtin in the cabinet, would we?’ The people had to wait three years to get rid of that hopeless government before it could bankrupt the country; fortunately, there are only four months left to get rid of the present geniuses.

The post 18 May 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

There is also something distasteful and uncomfortable about both proposals in that neither has been presented as an area of real need which can be identified and rectified. It seems the money is a symbol of good and evil and that if you are against the mass expenditure proposed, you must be against education, children or the physically or mentally handicapped, and probably a disability denier. So after all the drama, the polls remain exactly where they were.

But compassion and concern still win the day and Jeff Kennett’s intervention this week shows there will always be enough of it to provide fodder for any new scheme that comes along. Kennett has discovered for us another psychological condition, this time anxiety (depression having had every last drop of value wrung from it). Anxiety is the new blue; apparently, unbeknown to us, anxiety stalks the land and has taken a terrible but silent toll. What we are now to have is an anxiety awareness campaign.

Then will come the demand for government grants, an anxiety centre in every suburb, conferences, new drugs, free drugs, more drugs, Anxiety Day with a coloured ribbon and the inevitable parade of footballers, politicians and celebrity chefs who will come forward clutching their packets of Kleenex while they confess: ‘I, too, am anxious.’

Then we will move on to the next cause to sap our self-reliance. My nomination: despair; the first certifiable case: me. I am bent double by despair about nonsense spending, government controls that threatens to engulf us, and the endless invention of schemes to stop us solving our own problems. So, is it is any wonder the latest phantasmagoria did not produce a bounce in the polls for Gillard? Hardly: people have seen through it all and treat it with the scepticism it deserves.

I spent part of last Sunday at a Catholic christening. The wonderful priest, who was well past retirement age, had three churches to look after as there was no one else to carry on his work of many years. I did not know the church did christenings in bulk, in this case five, and by the time you added the doting parents, godparents, friends and hangers-on like me, it made for quite a complement. In any event, the service went ahead and the five young charges were duly baptised. Services of this sort would be regarded as antique and meaningless by our sophisticated opinion leaders today and yet it was very clear that the ceremony was important to the participants themselves and not just empty ritual.

More particularly, it was clear to me that the priest’s homily on the strength of the family and how baptism was the beginning of a loving family relationship was widely accepted. Some would say that the family he invoked, based on a mother and a father, is itself a trifle antique, but as far as I could tell the congregation at this church did not think so, or that it was anything other than an invocation of the real family, built on the experience of centuries and drawing on the mutual strength that a man and a woman can each contribute.

Indeed, I reflected during the ceremony that if we came back in ten years, when same-sex marriage has been in operation for several years, as it undoubtedly will have been by then, the invocation of the strength of the family would not have the same richness of meaning and would certainly not mean as much as it did during the service last Sunday, at which every family had a father and a mother. I am not saying you should abandon the notion of same-sex marriage simply for that reason. I am simply saying that before abandoning traditional marriage, as apparently we are about to do, we should think about what will be lost and whether our society is ready to undertake such a rupture of its fabric as is proposed. I doubt it.

As the boycott of Jewish shops and Israeli institutions has been given another kick along by the feral ALP-Green alliance, I thought it was time to have another of my regular cups of coffee at a Max Brenner shop, the main target of the campaign. I do this as a personal act of solidarity. So this week, I went to the Brenner cafe in the QV Centre in Melbourne and read the real news in the Herald-Sun during my morning coffee break. (I was pleased to see they do not take the Age.) The coffee is not the best and the cakes look fattening, but that is a small price to pay to take a personal stand against anti-Semitism. Israel is not perfect, of course, and I am sometimes opposed to its policies. For instance, apologising to Turkey for intercepting the Gaza blockade-buster Mavi Marmara was wrong and will achieve nothing. Moreover, it implies there was something illegal about the blockade and Israel’s punishing response. Such an apology is a bad signal. But none of that is an excuse for anti-Semitism or for subtly undermining Israel’s standing by abusing the innocent Brenner company and those who work for it.

The post 11 May 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

Traditional ALP voters are starting to ask themselves if high taxes, decaying industry, threats to superannuation and looming unemployment are what a Labor government should be delivering. Greens and other dreamers on the left are ropable that she will not do their bidding on same-sex marriage and refugees. She has lost them all and people are now resigned to sitting it out in sullen silence until the election.

So it was welcome light relief to see an advertisement from the ABC announcing that it had established a Research and Fact Checking Unit. Naturally they could not employ just one fact-checker; there had to be a whole team with fancy titles like Social Media Producer and Digital Producer, with virtually all of them in Sydney, where apparently the need for checking facts is greater. It also seems odd that although the ABC has existed since 1929, it has not felt the need until now to pay any attention to facts. What have they been doing about facts for the past 84 years, apart from ignoring them or making them up? Moreover, introducing facts into some ABC programs might negate the charm of items that must surely be based more on fiction than fact. Nevertheless, we should give them the benefit of the doubt and express the hope that this is the beginning of a new era of accuracy and fact-based journalism at the ABC.

In that spirit, here are two suggestions that the new fact-checkers, having taken their oath of accuracy, might keep in mind. First, check the Refugee Convention and note that it is dotted with references to various refugees being ‘illegal’ and ‘unlawful’ then put the following notice in the tea room: ‘There is nothing factually incorrect in referring to refugees and refugee boats as illegal or unlawful. We have checked this out here at the Fact Checking Unit; it is a fact and it is clearly stated in Articles 15,17,18,19,21,23,24,26,28,31 and 32 of the Convention. So there.’ The second thing the Fact Checking Unit should do is note that if there is factual evidence for global warming, there is just as much factual evidence to the contrary, and this proposition and the facts on which it is based should be stated. Finally, the new paradigm of relying on facts will enable you to complain about some of the programs on a more substantial grounds than in the past: they are not based on fact.

I was recently in Kuala Lumpur teaching a course on international commercial arbitration. My fellow teachers, from all over the world, were quite bemused by the Australian government’s decision to prohibit the compulsory arbitration of disputes arising from foreign investment projects in Australia. It apparently comes from the fit of pique the government threw when the arbitration by Philip Morris was filed against Australia for the loss of its tobacco trademarks through Nicola Roxon’s plain packaging legislation. As they look at the increasingly chaotic actions of the federal government, changing the rules on every area of tax and investment, foreign investors are now wondering what recourse they have against Australia for compensation if the rules of the game on investment are changed yet again during the life of their projects by the cancellation of licences (banning live cattle exports, cancellation of the fishing trawlers’ licence), the imposition of new taxes (carbon tax, mining tax, new taxes for the disability scheme), corrupt tendering (the ABC’s TV contract) or the imposition of draconian laws (the attack on superannuation). Normally, such acts would be unthinkable, except in the more exotic South American countries. But people are beginning to think that it is not so unlikely here, with the Gillard government apparently so happy to change the rules during or after the game.

Amid the gloom about economic contraction and falling output, any figures that show things getting bigger and better are worth looking at. I have just noticed a great upsurge in international trade in at least one commodity. In 2008, the sale of Zimbabwean diamonds to Dubai was worth a mere $1.7 million. But the latest figures for 2011 show it has leaped to $408 million, not bad for recessionary times. The diamonds are ‘conflict diamonds’, so-called because repressive military regimes own or traffic in them and, like in Zimbabwe, siphon off the proceeds to the military to provide the wherewithal for murdering and repressing their own people. However, the increased trade is not due to improvements in productivity. It seems that Dubai has emerged as what the Zimbabwean elite call their ‘saviour’, for it is outside even the modest sanctions regime imposed on Zimbabwe and apparently has no scruples about whom it trades with and how much blood is shed in either producing the diamonds or disposing of their proceeds.

The post 4 May 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

Well, right on cue, we had an immediate in-depth analysis of the news that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder of the two bombing brothers, had been killed in a shootout with the police. You have to be grateful to the ABC for scouring the globe to find an expert to back the official line that is being developed on issues like this and, sure enough, they found one for us, an earnest spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Centre in Alabama, apparently a renowned seat of learning when it comes to questions of extremist Islamic terrorism. This gentleman was able to explain, which I had not realised before, that the real downside of the bombing was that it would unleash another extremist and hysterical campaign against Muslims.

The real lesson, it seems, was not that the bombings had killed and maimed innocent people, that Islamic terrorism is alive and as sick as ever, that it is still trying to kill adults and children of any religion or that we still have to live in a state of constant vigilance and maintain our defences and security laws at vast expense and inconvenience. No, the real tragedy is that people would blame Muslims and start complaining again that there was a campaign to introduce Sharia law. Well, I was glad the spokeman cleared that up. And it helped the ABC set the tone of not even acknowledging that Tsarnaev was a Muslim and apparently a murderer, which seem to me pretty basic facts about this tragedy.

The Age picked up the same theme: whatever you do, don’t mention the man’s religion. To some extent you can understand this coyness from the ABC: its worldview is that the West and its institutions are rotten and that extremism is the result of provocation and not simply evil, perpetrated by evil people. But the Age now makes a speciality of personalising issues and denigrating individuals and you wonder why they draw the line at calling someone a Muslim. After all, they refer to the Victorian Minister for Education as ‘Martin Dixon, a Catholic’, another public figure as ‘not a Catholic’ and always give a good run to their letter and opinion writers and cartoonists who smear Tony Abbott because he is a Catholic. That being so, it is at least odd that the Boston bombers may not, apparently, be referred to as Muslims.

It is hard to find anything amusing in the bloodstained events in Boston. But I have to award a prize for evasion, heavy irony, or perhaps an appropriate version of the Streaker’s Defence to the redoubtable Mujahideen of the Caucasus Emirate, with whom it was thought Tsarnaev might have been palling around. When asked by an journalist what connection there was between his band of brigands and the Boston tragedy, their spokesman was clearly hurt by the outrageous suggestion. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘we are not fighting against the USA. We are at war with Russia.’ Perhaps it was just that he did not want a drone missile hurtling through his living room.

I have been thinking a lot about the Greens lately, as their welfare worries me a lot. The first thing I have been thinking about is that they seem to get an inordinate amount of coverage on the ABC. I know I should not be surprised about this, as the ABC has steadily emerged as the Greens at prayer and it is only fitting that the state-owned propaganda machine should give more than a fair share of coverage to their acolytes. But you would think they would tone it down a bit so that it did not look too blatant; at the moment, Senator Hanson-Young only has to shed a tear over a refugee to be all over the TV screen and the airwaves for days on end.

You would also think that the ABC hierarchy, with a change of government in the offing, would stop this over-exposure of the Greens, even if for no more noble a motive than self-preservation. The second subject of my Green reveries is that I have been wondering why they get so agitated at the amount of government money that goes to private schools; after all, most of their supporters seem to be the progeny of the guilt-ridden rich who give their children names like Tarquin and Tao, send them to posh schools with big handouts from the government and then on to study environmental science or media rights, after which they slip into a government job and go and live in Collingwood or the Glebe. The third area of my concern is their coming fight with the forces of Julian Assange and the Wikileaks party, masterminded from its world headquarters at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. The final Senate seat for Victoria and NSW cannot be won by both the Greens and the Assangists, so the battle should be bloody and wondrous to behold as they seek to outdo each other in love and concern. It doubles my resolve, although I am not a member of any political party, to work on a polling booth on election day, say in Fitzroy, to watch the ALP, the Greens and the Assangists slug it out.

The post 27 April 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

The Left are all too ready to accuse people with whom they disagree of being racists, misogynists, deniers or big polluters; take your pick. But where was our feisty Prime Minister when her Foreign Minister was so courageously defaming the dead? She is always ready to promote herself as the innocent victim of some imaginary misogyny, but apparently happy to stand by while another woman is abused — if she is on the other side of politics, of course. The outrage of the Left is also so selective. Gough Whitlam, for example, called our previous wave of refugees ‘fucking Vietnamese Balts’. Can you imagine the outcry if I called him a racist?

Margaret Thatcher, like Churchill, is best remembered for those little vignettes that encapsulate her personality and philosophy and, of course, her position on so many contentious issues. One in particular helped formulate my own convictions. It was in 1981 at one of the early Menzies lectures at Monash University. It was a wild night, and as one of my old professors used to say, ‘The students were revolting; more than usual.’ Perhaps it was because of the combative atmosphere on the night that Thatcher wound up her speech by saying: ‘In all the great movements of history, very few people would have rallied to a flag that had inscribed on it “I stand for consensus.”’ In other words, stand for something, articulate it and don’t compromise; you might win the argument, but even if you don’t, people will respect you for having the courage of your convictions. This was Margaret Thatcher’s most basic principle and she followed it through on every issue. The sinking of the Argentinian warship General Belgrano in the Falklands war was a case in point. Thatcher argued that if you were at war, you fought it and you sank enemy ships in the course of your right to self-defence, no matter which way they were facing. Would that we had more conviction politics of the Thatcher type since the 1980s, instead of policies determined by focus groups, opinion polls and what feels good. But in 30 years we seem to have gone from Margaret Thatcher to Grouch Marx: ‘These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.’

I admired her immensely because she stood up for British principles, less government influence and control, putting individuals before organisations and giving people from humble origins the first chance in their lives to buy a council house or invest in a privatised company. I am told that it was a wonder to behold her in full flight at meetings with the Confederation of British Industry. Previously these gatherings had been an annual plea for industry handouts and subsidies; under Thatcher they were an opportunity for her to give the boys a talking to on private enterprise, using their own initiative and acting like real businessmen. She was also the last to think she should be seen as a woman rather than a person and despised the insult to women that takes the form of quotas and affirmative action. But the Left will never concede that it was a monumental achievement for her to become Prime Minister of Britain; they just cannot forgive the conservative forces for being the first to entrust that noble office to a woman.

Thatcher would also be the last to suggest we should go into mourning at her death. She would rather we told a few stories about her ruggedness, even when taken to extremes to make a point. My favourite is the one about when she took her all-male Cabinet to a late-night dinner during the Falklands war, looked at the menu at the only restaurant they could find and said to the waiter: ‘I’ll have the beef.’ ‘What about the vegetables?’ the waiter asked. ‘They’ll have the beef as well,’ she replied.

Talking of our shared British inheritance, my Bangalore correspondent was wandering through the Bangalore Club recently and it took his fancy to have a look at the members’ unpaid bills. It is the greatest humiliation to be posted as a defaulter so he had a peek to see who was vulnerable. Lo and behold, he stumbled across an unpaid bill for Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill in the grand sum of £13 incurred in 1899, the year when the young subaltern was in Bangalore on his way to the North-West Frontier. The bill was probably for whiskey, of which he was then an aficionado. In My Early Life he refers to Bangalore as a ‘third rate watering place’. Apparently, over the years the club has had many offers from visiting Brits to pay the bill, all politely declined, as it is now worth more to the club as a curiosity.

The post 20 April 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

Moreover, there is nothing that can be done to avoid the potential loss of property: if the law is changed and you marry, then you are married and at risk of losing half your estate when the probable day of separation dawns and the fight starts about who owns the cat and the Whitney Houston records. In any case, whatever you want to arrange to lessen the risk, can be done under the current law. The gay community will rue the day when this change (another so-called ‘reform’) comes in, as it probably will. It will lose its freedom and  slightly revolutionary edge and there will eventually be a backlash from the community  against those who have brought about this substantial change to society which will not achieve anything except the hollow victory of having brought down another institution. But it will be good for lawyers.

A tragedy, followed by acts of heroism, happened in Melbourne the other day. At 3 PM on Thursday 28 March a brick wall collapsed at the old brewery site in Swanston Street bringing down an avalanche of seven tonnes of bricks on innocent passers-by, including students from two of our universities. Initially, two people were crushed to death, a young man named Alexander Jones, 19, and a young lady from France. That two young people could die in such a horrible way and when such a disaster must have been preventable, is a tragedy. But when the wall collapsed, the crowd of passers-by leapt at the pile of rubble in an act of selfless heroism, hurling the bricks away in the hope of finding survivors. One of the injured victims was Alexander’s sister, Bridget, 18 and it soon emerged that he had been killed shielding his sister from the deadly cascade. Tragically, she too has now died. The whole tragedy has, again, shown that the best in the human being shines out in times of crisis, that the individual has enormous reserves of strength and passion to help others and that we still have heroes.

The Hawke reforms in industrial relations are now being praised as if they were part of a long-lost golden Elizabethan era. But one of his actions, never mentioned, is that he abolished the then Australian Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. If we remember history and use it in arguments, we should remember the whole of it and not selective parts. Hawke wanted to get rid of the left-wing curmudgeon, Justice Jim Staples, and as Staples would not budge, Hawke put on a Solomon-in-the-temple act and brought down the whole edifice and all its works. Then he reappointed the entire bench of the old Commission to a newly created tribunal – all of them, that is, except Jim Staples. I mention this as it is one, as yet unrecognized, way that the incoming Abbott government will be able to solve some of the industrial relations scandals the Labor Party will leave behind. It is also, because of its provenance, an unanswerable precedent. In any event, Rudd abolished the tribunal again, so Mr Abbott will only be following their illustrious example.

The ludicrously named Fair Work Commission is now stacked with union lackeys, its mission is to give trade unions whatever new powers they want and, moreover, any connection between its decisions and the economic advancement of the country is purely coincidental. Mr Abbott could usefully abolish it, restore the old Commission and re-appoint the whole of the present bench, except for all of them. The main qualification of the new appointees will have to be that they have never had anything to do with either side of the industrial relations establishment. Another advantage of this reform (everything these days is a reform or an initiative, unless it is a vision) is that a recalcitrant Senate will not be able to stand in its way: it will not need a new law. The legislature may pass laws, but the executive pays to have them implemented, or not. As the Scarlet Woman said: ‘no money, no honey.’

Don’t waste your money on seeing Hyde Park on the Hudson. It is about a visit by King George V1 and Queen Elisabeth to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at his country retreat in 1939. It tells you nothing of value about FDR and falsely depicts the King and Queen as chinless, affected snobs, sneering about the wallpaper in their bedroom, the uncouth Americans and hot dogs. (‘I say, where does one put the mustard.’).The King’s stutter is exaggerated to make him look like a moron and FDR is so lecherous he is Dominique Strauss-Kahn in a wheelchair. It is all too ridiculous for words, completely inaccurate, unfair to its characters – and boring.

The post 6 April 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

The person is Senator Stephen Conroy, the genius who devised the proposed changes to the media law and the masterly timing of their introduction into the parliament that threw the Government into a seething mass of intrigue and self-destruction. He is, of course, now exposed as utterly discredited, completely incompetent, with no political sense and with, at best, a superficial knowledge of the industry for which he is supposed to be responsible. Moreover, he has a nasty touch of the class war authoritarianism about him that is rapidly becoming the hallmark of the Gillard government. His smart aleck remark that: “If I tell media owners to wear red underpants on their heads, that is what they will do,” was so typical – and he meant it. But it is not only that. He has emerged from the chaos as the most obvious candidate for the opposition to target in pursuit of a ministerial scalp and, assuming the campaign against him is conducted properly, I would be very surprised if he were not forced to resign in a few months. After all, the raw material is already there, as there are three major issues he has created all by himself and they are all live issues: the botched contract for our overseas TV service, given in dodgy circumstances, to the ABC; the abysmal failure of the NBN, which is starting to make the crystal set I built as a teenager look like space travel; and the still unresolved issue of the so-called media reforms, withdrawn from the parliament on the Government’s ignominious surrender. If those three issues are pursued vigorously and Conroy’s ministerial responsibility for all of them is emphasized, it will not be long before the press take to branding him the “beleaguered” minister, which is one step before a minister decides he “wants to spend more time with his family”.

The principle that the crisis threw up emerged from the bizarre notion that, instead of having an equally bizarre, single Public Interest Media Advocate, we could have a panel of three of them and, moreover, to choose the three, we could have a panel of eminent persons (celebrity refugee lawyers, Malcolm Fraser, contestants on MasterChef, that sort of thing) like the Committee of Public Safety from the French Revolution. Finkelstein had a similar proposal for appointments to his News Media Council, appointed by a committee of independents (celebrity refugee lawyers, Malcolm Fraser, contestants on MasterChef, that sort of thing). Both proposals foundered, mercifully, because it slowly dawned on most MPs that this sort of slight-of-hand was not what they were elected to do and that they should not be abrogating responsibility in this way. I think they might have learned now that MPs are elected to make decisions and not to concoct ways to avoid responsibility by shoving it off to unelected, unanswerable and unreviewable pseudo-bureaucrats with an axe to grind. If the media, like anything else, is going to be controlled, the elected parliament should do it, so that our representatives can vote for or against it and we can vote for or against them at the next election. At least that principle now seems to be established.

The election theme that emerges from the crisis is a good one and Tony Abbott is already on to it, as you would expect. He has skillfully announced that there will be a co-confidence motion moved when the parliament resumes in May and, as a consequence, the political establishment and consequently the media and the public will now talk about little else for the next six weeks. Thus, the theme of no confidence has emerged over the last few weeks and it should now be thumped for all it is worth: no confidence in Ms Gillard as a person, whatever she says, no confidence in her government’s competence when everything it touches turns to chaos, no confidence in her mediocre ministers and no confidence in a government that lives for debt, deficit budgets, new taxes, ever expanding government control and more trade union power. A pretty clear theme.

On the sidelines, an interesting little issue has been gathering strength. As you know, members of the top echelon of the Bar are known as Queen’s Counsel (hem hem, like me). In recent years, and as part of the mad rush to dump our inheritance and tradition, leftie State governments have made it compulsory for new members of the meritocracy to become SCs or Senior Counsel, which everyone sees as downmarket, sort of common and not in keeping with the dignity of our tradition. The Queensland government has wisely put a stop to this republican nonsense and reverted to Queen’s Counsel for Senior Counsel who wish to take it. Now, the fear among the profession in the other States is that clients will think that only Queensland has top drawer barristers and will direct their work north instead of to Victoria or NSW. A grass-roots movement in Melbourne has started to agitate to have Victoria adopt the Queensland rule and has two thirds’ support from eligible barristers. Their argument is that this reform will be good for business and is not being promoted as ideology. But in my view there is a lot to be said for ideology and, if the reform goes through, it will be a pleasant change to undo a piece of republican tinsel and restore the Queen to her rightful place in the administration of justice here in Australia.

The post 30 March 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

Speaking of muzzling the press, I do wish that the commentariat would stop referring to Conroy’s proposed changes to the media laws as ‘reforms’. A reform is by definition an improvement or the removal of an abuse. Conroy’s changes are neither. How can it be an improvement on anything to stifle the press and appoint another failed, broken-down social worker as a one man Department of Truth, with unchallengeable powers, censoring what newspapers can print and what we can read? Every time the public hear the word ‘reform’ in this context, they must think that, although the government is trying to improve things, the forces of darkness are trying to stop them. It reminds me of the disturbing speech I heard not so long ago by a Liberal MP who was railing against the mining tax and the carbon tax and described them as ‘initiatives’. They are both as poisonous as taxes can be and neither of them can by any stretch of the imagination be described as an initiative, which by definition is a first step deserving praise. So I wish that people would remember that words are powerful and that with a moment’s thought you can add to the power of what you are saying just by choosing the right word.

While I am on my high horse about words, I did not know whether to laugh or cry when I read that the law school at the University of Melbourne had conferred a Doctor of Laws degree on the Governor-General. I have nothing but the highest regard for the Governor-General and I am sure that her degree was richly deserved. No, it was just that I reflected how odd it was that an LLD would be awarded for services to ‘human rights, equality and the advancement of women’. The first and third achievements are of course fine ideals and should be rewarded. But equality? I have never believed in equality as it means dragging everyone down to the same level and negates the commendable human motive of wanting to do better than others. Promoting the debilitating notion of equality simply discourages anyone who wants to do better and achieve more. Moreover, it is regrettable that my 50 years in the law have seen it drift far beyond the means of most of the population and become available only to well-off companies, the very poor and public interest groups whom taxpayers probably do not know they are subsidising. An odd thing for a law school to be promoting.

Although the federal opposition has railed against the dodgy contract given (yes, given) to the ABC for Australia’s external TV service, it never actually got around to saying that, if elected, it would undo this corrupt arrangement. I promoted this with Malcolm Turnbull’s office as a reform, as well as an initiative and, lo and behold, the news has now come through that it is indeed opposition policy. This is good news. Now, another matter must be quickly attended to, to make sure that this initiative is followed through. Just in case the ABC gets any fancy ideas of claiming compensation for loss of the largesse handed out to them by a corrupt government, they should be put on notice that neither the ABC nor anyone dealing with them will be compensated and that they should make no commitments on this matter before the election.

The flood of public money at state and federal levels has now reached such a torrent that it must surely be alarming to most people, even the recipients. The government has embarked on an orgy of spending, the test of which is not whether it is necessary or desirable, but whether it will be enough to seduce the lucky recipients into voting for the government. The size of the handouts is breathtaking. No longer does a million-dollar program have any impact; programs are now measured in the billions. We have left far behind the traditional job of government to spend money on essential services and individuals who cannot look after themselves, and are into the second phase, when we pay for schemes and fashions that simply encourage people to lean on the government. The pernicious third phase is when the people’s money is used to promote and prop up private interests. The Melbourne Grand Prix is a good example. We waste $60 million a year on the private hobby of a small clique and pump up the commercial interests of Bernie Ecclestone and the car, airline and alcohol companies. Will it ever stop?

The post 23 March 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

We live these days in such a world of excessively polite and increasingly meaningless speech that when someone actually tells the truth it comes as a great shock. I felt like that the other day when I read some remarks by the US Ambassador to the United Nations in charge of management and reform. (His title alone is such an oxymoron that it reminds me of a bright young UN employee whose job description was ‘to bring peace to the world’. Sir Owen Dixon asked him if he liked his job and he replied ‘Well, at least it’s permanent.’) Anyway, apparently the US Ambassador took it upon himself to ask his colleagues to stop turning up drunk at meetings of the management committee. He added that if they continued with this inebriated behaviour, the US would ‘respond accordingly’. That probably filled the room with visions of drones poised over certain foreign capitals while fingers played idly with the buttons at Langley; it also brought forth the admission that on one notable occasion the committee’s note-taker had collapsed at his post in a drunken state. At least this exposé should get Their Excellencies’ minds off Israel, with which they seem myopically preoccupied. Perhaps it’s the drink.

The cat is now out of the bag that there is a powerful, secret society in Victoria, the membership of which consists of former federal and state Liberal MPs. It meets once a year at anonymous venues to avoid terrorist attacks, for if our enemies knew that they could knock out the cream of the political establishment with one blow, you can imagine what chaos would ensue. It has no name, no office bearers and keeps no records. A meeting was planned for 6.30 p.m. last Wednesday and the venue was signalled to members by a means still secret, but which I can now reveal was the Liberal party room at the State Parliament House. We were part-way through our secret rituals when the word came that our nominal hosts, the current MPs, had been summoned to a special party meeting at 7. Some of us exchanged winks and knowing looks, for we knew the time was up for Ted Baillieu. Later, the news filtered through, but some of us did not need to be told. One day the real story behind the resignation will be told, but, reluctant though we were to see a good man go, sometimes hard decisions have to be made in the long-term interests of the state and the nation and done swiftly and silently. And now, someone called Rudd has been trying to get in touch with us.

Our increasingly frivolous society, based on instant gratification, has made politics part of the entertainment industry. This is why the media demand a frequent change of cast, with leaders turning over like a rotisserie, and regular changes of scenery, from the sublime (Rudd at church, clutching his Bible) to the ridiculous (Gillard playing handball with Obama in the Oval Office). Some politicians enter into the swing of this unfortunate trend with such gusto that they now pose for photo shoots and intimate displays of their wardrobes, as I see Malcolm Turnbull has done for the current issue of Gentlemen’s Quarterly. Now I love, admire and respect Malcolm, but I really wonder if dressing up in M.J. Bale trousers ($899) and silk tie ($120), Herringbone jacket at a mere $599 or even a Gucci pocket square at $225 is really the image we should be promoting. I buy my clothes at the South Melbourne Market, where my stockist (I love that word) is currently offering a fetching line in jeans at $29.95, ties for $10 and business shirts for $14. I am therefore probably biased, but I am pretty sure that Gucci pocket squares (whatever they are) at $225 do not go down well on parma night at the Rooty Hill RSL.

The post 16 March 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

I admire Tony Abbott because he respects the best of the past, wants to preserve our institutions, will govern with a proper balance between muscular free enterprise and the hovering arm of government, and will not introduce any weird social experiments. I am fairly sure, for example, that when he becomes PM, Abbott will never propose a citizens’ assembly to tell him what he should do about climate change or anything else. But I have been wondering how the people whom Julia Gillard calls ‘working Australians’ see him. I overhear it on occasions, of course, in restaurants in the poverty-ridden slums of Fitzroy and Prahran where the huddled masses of Green voters pay $100 a head for a meal. But what about the wider population? The only way of gauging this, at least in Melbourne, is through the peoples’ paper, the Herald Sun. And there, last Sunday, I found the answer. It came from a preview of Gillard’s royal progress through western Sydney and what the people of that region actually think about her and her opponent. Comparing the two protagonists, one of the locals said of Tony Abbott: ‘I think he’s more of a stand-up person.’ Popular culture feeds into politics and shapes many of our views on issues and people, and the expression ‘a stand-up guy’ has taken on the cachet of the highest praise you can give a man in our increasingly sensitive world, even if you have to say ‘a stand-up person’. It means someone gutsy, not afraid of telling you the truth, loyal to friends, not giving a tinker’s curse if the ABC thinks you are vilifying refugees and someone who would not be seen dead at a focus group. And that is how they see him.

But it is sad that Gillard should be making a special trip to western Sydney without planning one to Melbourne. There are so many sights that figure in recent socio-political history. To help, I have worked up an itinerary I propose sending to John McTernan. The tour starts at 485 La Trobe Street, the offices of Slater & Gordon, where Gillard will catch the in-house lecture on ‘Creative slush fund documentation’, a talk drawing heavily on her own unique experiences, although the file is missing. After a quick swing by the Eight Hour Day monument to encourage the myth that she really is a Labor Prime Minister, we move to 85 Kerr Street, Fitzroy, the bijou workers’ cottage bought with AWU members’ hard-earned money and the scene of a prominent example of Melbourne’s favourite pastime, going to auctions, but usually with your own money. When night falls and it is time for some serious fun, there is a bus trip that takes us past some salubrious establishments where we hope to have Craig Thomson join us as a special guide.

The news from Melbourne has been the launch of the new, tabloid version of the Age, although ‘tabloid’ is the word that dare not speak its name when it comes to the new-look paper. Apparently the intense dislike of the ‘t’ word is due to the fact that it cannot resist nuzzling up against its favourite adjective, ‘downmarket’. A full-blown downmarket tabloid is to be avoided at all costs, as it quickly takes on the connotation of an even more repulsive concept, that of the newspaper that is popular, contains real news and, above all, is one that people actually want to buy. Judging by the first new-look issue, there is no immediate danger of the Age taking up vulgar popular causes if the article on teaching Ashtanga yoga in Californian schools is any guide. And do we really need yet another piece by Malcolm Fraser on the evils of the brutal policy against refugees and how, of course, this inhumanity all began with the Liberal party? Moreover, articles like the hagiographies of the Hamas leader Khalid Mishal and the hate pieces against Professor Marcia Langton for suggesting that mining has helped Aboriginal employment are unlikely to cause outbreaks of popular support. I think I can report that the Age is safe and that there will be no unseemly mobs jostling to buy it.

My Africa correspondent sends news from Zimbabwe that despite the poverty in that benighted country, Robert Mugabe celebrated his 89th birthday last week by launching specially minted gold coins carrying an embossed portrait of, guess who, himself. Fortunately, the joyous party was not derailed by the news that his party’s activists had just burned to death the 12-year-old son of an opposition supporter.

The post 9 March 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.