Not for them the usual clear-cut majority government with its winner-takes-all outcome that Australia’s Lower House’s preferential voting system produces nine times out of ten, or that the UK’s and Canada’s first-past-the-post system produces about as often.

No, this crowd is fundamentally optimistic about what will transpire when political parties and independents who took different policies, platforms and manifestos to the voters before an election are thrown together to horse-trade and negotiate afterwards, when no party manages to gain a clear win. There’s a certain lovey-dovey, happy-clappy confidence that all will put away their own narrow interests and their core beliefs and values about how to advance the common good. Having done that they will come together to compromise and rejig and refashion, and somehow, in some in-effable and never explicitly detailed process of alchemy, they will produce policies better than those any individual political party or independent took to the election.

You might never have articulated your position in such terms if you were a supporter of the coalition government experiment, but at core you had to hold some such set of beliefs as that.

On the other hand, opponents of coalition governments, and I have always counted myself as a vocal opponent, prefer the back-and-forth of clear majoritarian politics in which there are basically two broad-church political parties, one a grouping of shifting interests on the centre left and the other on the centre right (no doubt with the ABC watching this all from further off to the left than either big party). And each of these big-tent parties, the in team and the out team, takes a moderately clear set of policies to the voters, who then pick between them. And more importantly still, the voters generally punish at the next election any winning parties who lie and do other than they signaled, or whose policies don’t work out, by shifting to the other big-tent party.

But with coalition governments under which policies are all negotiated and horse-traded for after an election, who exactly do the voters blame for failures and lies?

In the democracies of continental Europe that is a fundamental question with no obvious answer. You see, they have proportional representation voting systems explicitly designed never to produce one clear winning party with a majority of places in the legislature. So they always have this dilemma and this shutting out of the voters when it comes to what will and will not be agreed to in the bargaining that leads up to some grouping or other of small to medium-sized parties forming a coalition government. And so you have Italy and Greece and Israel and, yes, Germany.

As far as I’m concerned they can keep their awful voting systems that produce, that always produce, this terrible disconnect between voters and politicians and that insulates the latter from the preferences of those who cast the ballots.

But this is simply not the norm in Australia and Canada and the UK. As I said, our voting systems are designed to produce a clear winner with a clear mandate at least nine times out of ten.

Yet every once in a while that normal result does not transpire, basically because the election result is close to a tie. So in the UK, for instance, the Tories last election under David Cameron won not quite half of the seats in Parliament. And then the choice for the party leader was either to try his hand at minority government, daring the others to bring down his team and probably provoke another election, or to compromise and trim sails by striking a post-election bargain with, say, the small band of Liberal Democrats.

Of course this latter choice will be sold in the name of stability and certainty and the likelihood of running a full term before the voters are again consulted.

As I said, for lovey-dovey optimists this can be heady stuff. Who can forget the smiling photos of David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the garden of 10 Downing Street, oozing bonhomie and bromance after their coalition negotiations were successfully completed? And who can likewise forget the wild optimism (including in the pages of the Economist) with which this was widely received?

A few years on and it has all turned to dust in the UK, or so it seems to me, with a wretched economy, a debt that is going up even faster than it did under Gordon Brown, and a congenital inability to make hard decisions. All that compromise and horse-trading may well just deliver the worst of both parties’ policies, not the best. And it may make tough choices near-on impossible to implement. It may make one look back longingly and wish Cameron had opted for minority government.

All of which brings us to Australia. The empirical evidence, otherwise known as ‘the facts’, is now clear. Coalition government here has been a disaster, even worse (if that’s possible) than in the UK. The handful of rural socialist independents who signed up to the recent experiment and sold their constituents down the river will never again win an election or be taken seriously by anyone. And the Labor party seems to have destroyed its brand. That side of Labor which was actually a reformist party and that looked out for the interests of at least some of those outside its core constituency is gone. It was killed by Julia Gillard and her need to cater to this or that other-worldly Green policy or to some independent’s whimsy, or just her need to keep herself leader of her own party.

I suspect it will be a long time before Labor recovers. It may well be that the next Labor Prime Minister is not someone currently in Parliament, such will be the residue of the voters’ contempt for this debacle of a government. And with that will come that very rare thing in politics, the realisation that it was better not to have won the last election, or rather the post-election auction held by the Greens and rural socialist cabal.

As for those people who a few years back were keen optimists about the prospect of coalition government, I wouldn’t expect that many of them would today admit as much. As I said, the hard, cold facts, more than anything else, can make people change their minds.

The post The worst of friends appeared first on The Spectator.

But just as often, the war against freedom is carried on by fostering a climate of opinion in which the centrality of the right to freedom of speech, as one of our society’s core values, is increasingly being questioned in a way which was unthinkable even a decade ago. Be in no doubt that this is a conscious, systematic attempt to change the culture, so that freedom of speech and expression is degraded among our public values, in place of other newly-imagined rights, like ‘respect’, whose very vagueness conceals an ideological agenda as illiberal as anything this country has seen in the political mainstream. Intolerance is back in vogue; indeed, if you are a social engineer or left-wing activist of a particular hue, then intolerance of those whose thinking does not conform to your agenda is not a defect; it is an emblem of righteousness. It is not the spirit of Voltaire which informs the thinking of this Labor government and its ideological avatars; it is the spirit of Robespierre.

I have never had a lot of confidence in Labor governments to defend freedom — although, in decades past, it was economic freedom rather than political freedom which was mostly in their sights. What is more disappointing is the indifference of those for whom the defence of freedom should be second nature. Shamefully, that includes many journalists, particularly those in the Fairfax stable, who were frankly pusillanimous in response to Conroy’s media regulation bill; some universities, whose commitment to intellectual freedom apparently does not extend to respecting the rights of Liberal students; and even the agency of the Commonwealth government established for the very purpose of upholding our rights — the Human Rights Commission — which was missing in action during the debate about freedom of speech which has raged since the Bolt case.

What is most striking about the freedom debates today is not just the fact that the attacks upon freedom have come from the radical Left, but the almost complete absence of those of the moderate Left in freedom’s defence. For left-liberals and progressives, freedom of speech is not the passionate cause it once was. And increasingly, that means controlling what people may say.

Historically, parties of the democratic Left championed liberty — civil, if not economic — as well as equality. They preached the fairer distribution of mankind’s resources, but they also preached emancipation. Today, it is the self-styled ‘progressives’ of the Left who want to ban things. In particular, they want to eliminate the expression of opinions which they find offensive. Sometimes this takes the form of overt prohibitions, of which section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act is an egregious example. But more often, the censorship is more subtle. The key technique here is to control the language, because the Left have learned well the lesson George Orwell taught us: that if you want to control what people think, then control what people may say. It is no coincidence that one of the great prophets of the New Left, the American writer Noam Chomsky, began his career as a professor of linguistics, whose groundbreaking work was in the study of the relationship between language and the cognitive structures of the brain. As Winston Smith discovered, there is no distance at all between speechcrime and thoughtcrime.

In the path of such attempts to control social behaviour by controlling the language stands freedom of speech. It is for that reason that freedom of speech has not just ceased to be a cause of the Left, but has come to be seen by many of the Left as an obstacle. And so, in the course of perhaps the past quarter-century, the democratic Left in Western nations have abandoned their liberalising instincts, or at least subordinated them to a kind of secular moralising, which seeks to refashion society not by arguing its case, but by silencing those who differ.

In parallel with that development, we have seen the emergence of a new moral righteousness. The advocacy of the Left’s favourite causes — be it climate change, gay marriage, the treatment of asylum-seekers — ceases to be an ‘argument’, in the traditional sense of the word. Rather, it becomes a series of declarations of civic virtue, in which the alternative view is not just disputed, but treated as morally flawed. Think of any random Q&A audience and you’ll see what I mean.

And so, the moralising new secular Left has come to resemble the moralising old religious Right, united by their shared assumption that since they know best how people should live, their unique insight gives them the privilege of dictating what people may do, what they may say — even what they may think. This might seem to be a paradox, but it isn’t really. All arguments for censorship have an essential commonality: that I may make choices for you, but you may not make choices for me.

And this leads to a further paradox. For, as the Left abandoned their commitment to the most important of all the civil liberties, freedom of speech, they began to walk away from their commitment to equality as well. The idea that there is a certain section of society, to whom has been vouchsafed an appreciation of moral truth on controversial social and political questions which is inaccessible to the masses, is a profoundly inegalitarian one. It leads ineluctably to the emergence of a new, self-selecting caste which considers itself to be above the rough-and-tumble of the democratic fray, in which all ideas and opinions should be equally entitled to a hearing.

There is no doubt that the current Labor government — and its Greens allies — have encouraged these developments. Their mindset reflects a wider and more concerning movement, in the attitudes and strategies of parties of the Left during the course of the past quarter-century, which not merely condones but defends the narrowing of political discourse in the service of other ideological ends. It is a profoundly dangerous development, and we have seen it reach its culmination during the time of the Gillard government.

The post The freedom wars appeared first on The Spectator.

Hamer Hall was full to the brim and they had come from everywhere. Jan Minchin, the art curator, Mary Clark, the historian of the Loreto nuns, Bill Henson, who shares a number of literary enthusiasms with Humphries, who, in turn, admires his work. Jonathan Upfal, the doctor who is inventing a new scientific method of brain training in the meditative tradition, and his friend Laura Ingram. Peter Hollingsworth, the archbishop John Howard made Governor-General, only for him to fall victim to the same sort of witch hunt that terrorised Bill Henson, and Barry Jones, the man Paul Keating was never game enough to make speaker of the House of Representatives. It was an extraordinary evening, partly because it recalled a lost tradition of crossover music that was liable to steal away the soul of anyone who likes showtunes or jazz but was also — as Humphries said elsewhere — sometimes like hearing Duke Ellington crossed with Mahler.

Our compère was clad in a variety of smoking jackets — dark green and midnight blue — as well as some silk black pyjamas for his duet with Meow Meow, and he succeeded in giving a semi-straight narrative of his enthusiasm for this Berliner spiel (which he had discovered as a schoolboy at Melbourne Grammar) from the viewpoint of the persona we so rarely see, his own. And the rather grand gentleman who said once that he was ‘not an Australian. I’m a Victorian’ ever so often betrayed a passing family resemblance — always remote and refined, of course — to both Edna and Sir Les Patterson.

Meow Meow was superb whether she was belting out ‘Pirate Jenny’ or melting her way through ‘Surabaya Johnny’ or enacting a wonderfully articulated set of exclamations for Schulhoff’s ‘Sonata Erotica’.

Barry Humphries’ Weimar Cabaret was a suburb entertainment and it managed to be a form of Tognetti’s sumptuous, modish marketing while also adhering with some grandeur to a cultural schema that was all at once lush, rigorous and seductive.

The actual design of the show with its beautifully modulated lighting, its restraint within mayhem and its combination of cabaret and big-event concert was directed by Rodney Fisher with a stylishness that was beyond praise.

This was a model of what a popular concert should be performed by a very talented and co-ordinated group of musicians in the vicinity of a great comedian (in mufti as himself) and a superb actress/singer, strutting her stuff with just the right balance of restraint and excess.

The audience was composed of serious Melbourne concert-goers, many of them older and a discernable fraction of them Jewish. It seemed appropriate and it tallied with Humphries’ emphasis on his place of birth having the greatest number of holocaust survivors outside Europe.

There was something very moving about this — and it was at the same time compatible with everything that was louche and slinky and in love with the bitter-sweet, the raunchy and rough of this hymn to a vanished culture that flamed for a moment in some Melbourne boy’s eye and also (out of pure vitality) will live forever.

Somehow the residual comedy of Humphries’ narration, the way his mother made Mitzi, from Vienna, who designed her clothes, into an honorary member of the Church of England, and the way in which he intimated the repressive tolerance of a long-ago suburban Australian anti-Semitism stopped the show from being sentimental. So too did the constant reek in the music of sex and sarcasm, the one bolstering the other, then deflating it. If Tognetti and Satu and their company looked too swish for words, that made sense as well in terms of Humphries’ vision of an Isherwoodian Berlin which was mighty in its artistic defiance but up against it, insecure, panting with desire but at the edge, as often as not, of despair.

But this was a special evening, infatuated with Europe and very Australian at the same time: Barry Humphries with no mask, but the enchantment of his long-ago youth.

The post Ich bin ein Berliner appeared first on The Spectator.

I met him for the first time in 1998 when Wallpaper magazine asked me to write a profile of him. Tyler Brûlé, the magazine’s legendary founder and editor, gave his writers tight deadlines. I had a week. Seidler was in Vienna working on the biggest commission of his career, a mixed development of some 1,000 apartments and public and commercial buildings near the UN complex. A call to his office and a faxed request was eventually agreed to: Mr Seidler would be returning to Sydney on Sunday evening and he had consented to see me for precisely half an hour at 5p.m. the following Monday.

Warned that he would be contemptuous and dismissive of anyone not ‘knowing their stuff’, I asked around. The short answer from nearly every architect I contacted was that Seidler was arrogant, dismissive of Australian architects and architecture, in short could make himself an arsehole when he wanted to. The only architect who sang his praises was Glenn Murcutt, who had not yet won his Pritzker Architecture Prize (2002). What Seidler didn’t know at the time was that Murcutt and the Italian architect Renzo Piano (who was completing a project in Sydney) had passed up an invitation to jointly deliver the annual Lloyd Rees Memorial Lecture in favour of Seidler, who was celebrating 50 years of practice in Australia that year.

At any rate, I arrived at the appointed hour at Seidler’s Milsons Point office and penthouse, above Luna Park, stepped out of the lift and almost bumped into the man himself, standing at a reception desk talking with his personal assistant, wearing a Chinese-style grey jacket he almost always wore when in the office, the breast pocket stuffed with pencils. We stood side by side; he, barely acknowledging my presence; me, announcing that I was there to see Mr Seidler for Wallpaper magazine, at which point he turned and walked off. The PA waited a suitable moment, picked up her phone receiver and announced that Joe Rollo was here to see him.

He came out of his office, hand outstretched, soft handshake. ‘So, what is it you want?’ he asked in that pseudo soft-American accent of his. I said I was there to find out what was the trouble with Harry and we sat down to talk. The agreed-to half-hour turned into nearly two hours, until his beloved wife Penelope came in to remind him that he was required next door in their apartment for a cocktail party.

We ran through his career and works: the Rose Seidler House, Australia Square, MLC Centre, Grosvenor Place, Shell House (Melbourne), the controversial Blues Point Tower. He was peeved that he had not been awarded a single project for the Sydney 2000 Olympics. ‘They could have at least given me a bus shelter to design.’ And he was unrelenting and unapologetic in his criticism of Australian design talent. ‘Australian architects don’t measure up in international terms,’ he said. ‘I only measure success in those terms. There’s nobody and nothing here that sends the blood pressure up. It’s a backwater, a provincial dump in terms of the built environment.’ Pressed to name one great Australian architect, Seidler hesitated and finally came up with Glenn Murcutt, and a subtle slap: ‘He does fine houses,’ he began. ‘I only wish he would take on big buildings.’

After the publication of the article, I had occasion to call Seidler several times and he nearly always played what I came to consider his game. He knew precisely who I was, but on each occasion the patter followed the same pattern.

Me: Hello Harry, this Joe Rollo.
Seidler: Joe who?
Me: Joe Rollo, Harry. Remember me? I interviewed you for Wallpaper?
Seidler: Joe Rollo? Joe Rollo? Oh yeah!

I next met him in late 2003, while researching my book, Concrete Poetry — Concrete Architecture in Australia (2004). I wanted to include the house he and Penelope designed for themselves in the northern suburb of Killara in 1967. His first reaction was for me to get it out of books it had been published in. ‘It’s been published everywhere, you have my permission to get it out of the books.’ But he finally relented when I insisted upon seeing it firsthand. We made a date. I suggested 9a.m., he insisted on 7a.m.

The day of my visit followed a night of violent storms, bringing down trees and powerlines. My taxi could only bring me so close to the house and I picked my way through downed trees and branches to reach it.

I found Seidler wandering through his garden picking up branches, and then came a total transformation. No longer brusque, he invited me as a guest into his home, insisted on my having breakfast with him (cornflakes with milk) and apologising for Penelope’s absence (she was in the US).

Because of the rain, he gave me a lift in his car, stopping off at one of his early butterfly-roof houses in Mosman, near the Spit Bridge, which he was remodelling and refurbishing for its owners. He wanted to check a concrete pour and the time he spent on site was not as the fearsome Harry Seidler, arrogant architect, but as a softly-spoken designer there to check on the work.

When we eventually got back to his office at Milsons Point it was still raining. I said I would walk to the train station to catch a train across the Harbour Bridge. He said I’d get drenched, I said never mind. He reached into the back of the car and handed me a cheap folddown umbrella and said ‘Here, take this.’ I said I’d return it. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said.

The post Harry Seidler’s umbrella appeared first on The Spectator.

Could it be that the legacy of Julia Gillard’s own chaotic period in office will be (apart from an ALP torn asunder and an economy in tatters) a permanent transformation of the Right in Australia?

Over the past few weeks, we have seen behaviour from those who should be the standard-bearers of conservatism and fiscal prudence which suggests a regrettable flirtation with the devil-take-tomorrow populism of Rudd, Gillard and Swan.

A new Medicare levy, a ban on gambling ads on TV, a broadband network owned by the state, a ludicrously generous paid parental scheme, a union-friendly education splurge on the never-never and support for gay marriage: between them, are Abbott and O’Farrell the New Lefties?

Tony Abbott’s decision to support the DisabilityCare Levy was a political masterstroke, denying McTernan and his handbag hyenas the opportunity to besmirch Abbott as being ‘against’ the disabled. Although it was the right decision on so many levels — it slayed the image of ‘relentless negativity’ once and for all, gave Tony a populist podium to stand on, and clearly wrong-footed the Prime Minister and her hapless deputy — it was, unfortunately, wrong in principle.

A hallmark of modern Labor is subservience to Richo’s infamous ‘whatever it takes’ doctrine; namely, no principle should ever stand in the way of a favourable spike in the polls. At a time of crushing debt, deficits predicted for well into the future and still no sign of strong recovery on foreign shores, the Australian government has one key task that overrides all others: stop spending money we don’t have.

There is no question that the NDIS is long overdue, nor that a civilised and prosperous society should make it a priority to care for the least fortunate. Stories of disability are horrendous, and understandably melt the hearts of even the flintiest bean-counters. The question has never been about the merits of such a scheme. The sole question is where it fits into our other priorities. We can’t have it all, so what are we prepared to give up in order to pay for it?

Yet another fingers-crossed back-of-the-envelope plan is unacceptable. The 0.5 per cent levy won’t come anywhere near paying for the scheme, so who will? Indeed, no one is even sure who benefits from the scheme and for how long. Tony Abbott was right to make his acceptance conditional on the details being explained, but will he really stick to that threat? Details? From this lot? It is highly unlikely, as his destiny at the ballot box approaches, that Abbott will be able to do anything other than sign off on whatever sleights of hand the government pulls. He has already said ‘yes’. There’s no way he can now say, ‘Er, hang on a minute.’ The principled reply would have been to say: ‘We approve of the scheme, but only if others are abandoned, such as Gonski, the NBN, paid parental leave, action on climate change, baby bonuses, and on and on until every dollar of this new permanent expenditure has been reasonably accounted for.’ In other words, make it a priority over less important commitments.

Fresh from the warm inner glow that backing the levy must have generated, Abbott popped up promising to ban gambling ads on sports TV. ‘We are natural deregulators … but when you’ve got a significant social nuisance it’s important for government to at least be prepared to step in,’ he claimed. Huh? Social nuisance? Again, a key conservative principle (less government red tape) has gone out the window in favour of a populist position that does not bode well for an Abbott prime ministership. If banning such activity is OK because it’s ‘unhealthy for our kids’, then why not ban junk food ads? Or fizzy drinks? Or Game Boys? Once you accept the principle that governments can decide on a whim what is or isn’t ‘a nuisance’, there’s no logical cut-off point. Worse, once a precedent is set, it becomes impossible for a government to resist further calls for regulation of our freedoms. Tony, meet Nicola and Stephen.

Of equal concern is the Coalition’s embrace of the NBN. For precisely the same reasons (not to be seen as negative) Abbott has allowed Malcolm Turnbull to indulge in the sort of Labor-lite nonsense that this former Liberal leader is by instinct inclined towards, best summed up as ‘We’ll spend your taxes inefficiently, just not quite as inefficiently as the other mob.’ The foolishness of ‘owning’ a $20 billion debt for what will clearly be a dog of a network, rather than simply dumping the mess onto the private sector from day one (as will eventually occur), will come back to bite the Coalition.

Barry O’Farrell’s take-up of Gonski is equally lacking in any credible conservative principles, being retail politics at not only its grubbiest but also its most surreal. This is the stuff of Labor dreams. O’Farrell knows full well the country has no money to pay for Gonski, but is prepared to play along with Labor’s flights of unfunded fancy supposedly ‘in the best interests of NSW’.

O’Farrell has locked the nation’s premier state into a leftist exercise in money-churning and union-pandering (not to mention decimating our universities) that has no guarantee of raising the education standards of our children, while denying them the opportunity for genuine grass roots (i.e. conservative) reform.

The depressing conclusion is that the Coalition have learned from Labor that you can get away with airy-fairy figures if your emotional argument overrides a rational counter-argument. Terrified of losing the unlosable election, Abbott risks focusing on popular political positions at the expense of conservative principles, reluctant to challenge what Joe Hockey famously described as ‘a lot of spending by government which many voters see as their entitlement’. Looking to the next election, O’Farrell is already pandering to Labor’s traditional inner-city elitist base. No doubt he’ll soon be donning a bicycle helmet.

Although Tony Abbott is demonised as a conservative because of his antipathy to the carbon tax, on many issues (such as WorkChoices) his background suggests his sympathies are more centre-left than right. There is no longer a firm promise to return to surplus within the first term.

By flirting with Labor’s spending on the never-never, Abbott, O’Farrell and Turnbull are schooling future conservatives to believe, like Labor, that principles are only principles to a point. As Tom Dusevic wrote last year in the Australian: ‘Abbott is neither the ideological and religious-freak terminator progressives fear; nor is he likely to satisfy the pro-market, small-government urgers. On many aspects of social policy his heart is softer than his confreres, Labor-ish even, and infinitely more practical.’

Julia Gillard’s legacy may already be bearing fruit. Welcome aboard the New Lefties.

The post Big-government Liberals appeared first on The Spectator.

I found this startling. Had I blundered into an alternate universe? I live in Tasmania, and here, as everyone knows, our progressive government is poised to take us further down the path towards an ultimate goal of ‘women’s health’: that’s the term for free and unrestricted choice about taking whatever measures a woman deems appropriate for her own unwanted tissue.

So by what possible stretch of credulity can one cope with a world in which governments fiercely protect unborn babies from the baneful effects of smoking while also allowing — and even funding — the destruction of unborn foetuses?

Let me be frank. I am a Catholic of orthodox views and I hold that abortion is an absolute wrong, always. But I also hold that good women may be induced by harsh circumstances to view it as the lesser of two evils, and I have come across cases such as that of a young Muslim woman who went weeping to the abortionist, fully conscious in her own mind that she was about to commit a grave sin, but fearing for the alternative: the shame and hostility of her family and community. I trust that God will forgive her.

But this is not my central point. Rather, I want to insist that opposition to abortion is not an exclusively Catholic hobbyhorse. The atheist Dominic Lawson, once editor of The Spectator, presented as fine a defence of unborn human life as I have ever read in his article ‘Ivan Cameron and the meaning of life’ (Sunday Times, 1 March 2009). He is by no means the only unbeliever to express such views so persuasively and powerfully. True, such people don’t speak of sin and evil as religious people do, but what we have in common is a sense of outrage at the feeble and vacuous subjectivity of those who value human life only in terms of its worth and importance to themselves.

I am outraged by the mere fact of abortion. But I have to confess to being even more appalled by the self-centred callousness of the subjective thinker who thinks that he alone can bestow life and impute value: objectively foetuses and babies are exactly the same thing, but to the subjective mind a baby is defined by being wanted and longed for, while a foetus is not. If it’s loved it’s a baby; unloved it counts for nothing at all.

Those who think as I do have an unlikely ally in Peter Singer, who has no quarrel with abortion but also believes that post-natal infanticide is justifiable in certain circumstances. I might take issue with his morality, but his logic is impeccable. It is patently obvious (at least to Singer and myself) that the moment of birth cannot rationally be taken as the point at which the unborn foetus acquires humanity. Singer would, I think, agree with the Romans, who took the view that the newborn creature became a member of the human race when his father, the paterfamilias, raised it with his arms and accepted it as his son or daughter. If he declined to do so for any reason — perhaps he might have doubts about its health, its gender, its paternity or even its looks — then the infant could legitimately be put to death, usually by exposure.

In our crazy modern world such ruthlessness would be rightly scorned, yet the only difference, surely, between that and late-term abortion is that the latter deed is unseen. And there is something deeply disquieting about the kind of simple mind that disapproves of evil only when it is seen to be done, like the child who enjoys eating meat but cannot stand the sight of a butcher’s shop, or those who lived in the neighbourhood of concentration camps, perhaps suspected the true nature of the deeds done within, but preferred to look away.

It is absurd to regard the moment of birth as the boundary between human existence and non-existence, between ‘women’s health’ and murder. In decades past it might have been possible to pretend that the unseen foetus is not a human child. However, advances in embryology, particularly photography and ultrasound, make it perfectly clear that unborn babies, especially in late term, behave like babies. So let’s call it what it is: abortion is nothing other than pre-natal infanticide.

More hypocrisy. In Tasmania the Premier and many others have been shedding crocodile tears over the presence of schoolchildren in the demonstrations against the proposed legislation. Yet every political demonstration I have ever seen, of any political colour, gladly admits children (even toddlers in strollers) to its ranks. It seems that the Left are happy for children to march for whales, but not for the unborn, even if those children are clearly well informed and articulate.

Why do I talk about a deed that dare not speak its name? Because of the hardest truth of all: so many families have been affected by abortion. Women who have themselves had abortions are certainly not the only ones. Boyfriends, husbands, mothers and fathers, grandparents, aunts and uncles, sisters and brothers have been touched. Some, like the Muslim girl I spoke of before, have a sense of shame and loss; others consciously refuse to acknowledge that they have done any wrong at all; many more (perhaps the majority) are deeply disturbed but remain in denial. They look away, hoping that they acted rightly, fiercely reactive to any suggestion that it could be otherwise. So much hurt needs healing, but honesty must come first. Let’s avoid weasel words like ‘terminations’ and ‘women’s health’.

And my final word to governments? Please don’t cry for unborn babies unless you really mean it.

The post The deed that dare not speak its name appeared first on The Spectator.

Already I had been inspired by Cricket Australia’s curious choice of venue, the historic Sydney Mint built at the beginning of the 19th century. It is usefully, if inadvertently, metaphoric. From it will flow an array of script-lines that double as sledges: Australia is no longer the cricketing gold standard; the game here is in recession; its currency has been devalued. Harsher still, will this inexperienced Ashes squad even be worth the paper it is printed on? The oldest public building in Sydney’s CBD, the Mint also dates from the era of Captain Cook.

More sassily, Cricket Australia has summoned two Baggy Green legends, Steve Waugh and Mark Taylor, presumably to remind sceptics of the dangers of underestimating the Aussies — ‘players of a vintage coinage’, to carry on my theme of day. As I remember vividly from my youth, both were stars of the 1989 side led by Allan Border, written off as one of the worst ever to leave these shores. It ended up claiming the famed terra cotta, and its charred remains.

As the news conference gets underway, I find myself seated alongside the great Jim Maxwell, who has exhausted his quota of questions by the time the circulating microphone reaches me. ‘Ask them about Mitchell Johnson,’ the veteran ABC sports broadcaster whispers in my ear, the journalistic equivalent of suggesting to a menacing fast bowler at the start of his long run-up to lob down a gentle full-toss. No, my sleeping nation expects. So, too, do my BBC masters in London. They will want to see Michael Clarke placed firmly on the back foot, or, better still, struck on the helmet.

Noting their meaningful presence, I begin by politely paying homage to the greats in our midst. For all the misery they have inflicted over the years, Taylor and especially Waugh are greatly admired in England. Then I pose the question that any self-respecting British reporter would ask: is this not the worst Ashes squad in decades? The affable John Inverarity, who seems a little too kindly to be the chairman of selectors, takes it in his stride. So, too, does Clarke, who delivers what sounds like a rehearsed response: ‘I’ve heard that every toowure,’ he says.

So it comes as something of a surprise to see the reaction afterwards. ‘The Pom Verdict: the worst in decades,’ blasts the Sydney Morning Herald. Fox Sports News also gets a headline of out of my ‘plummy-toned bouncer’. For its evening news, the ABC wants me to deliver my question afterwards in soundbite form. My pleasure. Ken Sutcliffe of Channel Nine also opts for some playful on-air Punch and Judy, where we both ham it up. I leave the Mint, then, a contented man. Though it happens to be my wife’s birthday, it is I who is being showered with presents.

I wake up early on Anzac Day, and click on my iPad to watch the dawn service on ABC News Breakfast. Rather than the sound of the bugle, however, I am startled to hear my own name. On the sports bulletin, they are talking still about the press conference from the day before, which is starting to feel like the gift that never stops giving.

At the start of this most sacred of days, I am reminded again of the conflicting requirements of being both a Pommy journalist and also the parent of two young Australians. Though our two-year-old is way too young to know of war, still less understand its meaning, he should get to experience his first Anzac parade. Much like the Ashes, Anzac Day not only brings to the fore some old antagonisms, but also is a reminder of what unites the land of my son’s birth and mine. On the battlefield and sports field, we have a common heritage.

From the raspy sound of marching bands playing ‘Waltzing Matilda’, your rightful anthem, to the sight of young people holding framed sepia photos of old Diggers, I find it a profoundly moving experience. I am also surprised at how quickly the tear ducts open up. The day before I had taken enormous pleasure in typecasting myself as the ‘professional Pom’. Today, I find it harder to uphold the stereotype of the stiff-upper-lip Brit.

If the ranks of ageing veterans remind us of a bygone Australia, the strongly multi-ethnic crowds reveal the changing face of the new. A commemoration sometimes criticised for not being especially inclusive would appear, from this turnout, to have broad multicultural appeal.

This, alas, will be our last Anzac Day for a good while — which perhaps explains some of my teary wistfulness — for I am about to take up a new BBC posting in New York. Honour-bound as I am to raise an Anglo-Australian, we will have to find ways of marking this country’s national days in the Big Apple (Australia Day in the snow?). But I confess to arriving with a more urgent priority: finding a way in that cricket-starved land to watch England retain the Ashes.

The post A Pom’s Notebook appeared first on The Spectator.

Yes, we are in the middle of turbulent political times, and the Gillard government may be perceived as dysfunctional, but basically the system is not broken nor are those elected to serve us significantly better or worse than before. Every parliament has had a small number of questionable characters and, equally, a majority of hard-working, talented and ethical representatives.

Yet Australians, led in large part by the media and special interest groups, seem hell-bent on demeaning all of those elected representatives and the system to boot. It is widely accepted that never before has the view of Australia’s national political scene been so toxic. Politicians are regarded with disdain. Canberra is viewed as a foreign city, its inhabitants out of step and out of touch.

Our bureaucracy is exceptional. Rarely, if ever at a national level, do we hear about corruption, fraud or even the most minor misdemeanours in the public sector. Sure, there are issues with processes and time, but given a task public servants generally execute it.

What about the political environment?

On a series of policy issues, the Gillard cabinet has given the impression that it is governing through envy. But despite some questionable judgements, Labor ministers and the majority of its backbenchers, just like the vast number of those in the Coalition and on the crossbenches, should not be treated as incompetent. For every Craig Thomson or Peter Slipper, many more Members of Parliament seek to make Australia a better place. Our MPs and Senators have done something that very few people do. They have pursued public service; often at a private cost and generally with the best of intentions.

That does not make them better people, but it does make them rare.

While we must always try to counter politicians’ excesses and expose them individually, just as we would in the workplace with executive indulgences, we should not let the abuse of politicians become the national sport it now appears to be. The current frenzy is for demeaning every elected representative and we need to say ‘enough’.

Deriding politicians in print (whether on paper or on the internet) has become par for the course. It has gone way beyond the satirical cartoon or the tabloid front page, both of which have their place in an open democracy. I have no problem with the portrayal of Tony Abbott as Dr No, Julia Gillard as Pinocchio or Stephen Conroy being lampooned as Stalin or Mao. All such images are in good humour. However, we need to understand when humour is replaced by clear malice and we need to stop that malice. Too often we portray our politicians as uncaring, vicious and vindictive when they are obviously not.

Of course, we might all have strong views about various policies, from the carbon tax to the recent media reforms. But since when have we become so critical?

In the mainstream and social media, we speak of politicians as though they were a race, not a profession. The public believes that they are in it for the money, which is a crude assessment of rates of pay in our nation. Public servants or those who run not-for-profit organisations are often paid more, but are not seen as after money. And given that the workers took the side of the miners too, it is not about aggrandisement by money.

Trust between the media and political classes has collapsed. This was happening a long time before the recent showdown over the government’s proposed media legislation. In large part, it comes back to the changing face of the media, which despite Senator Conroy’s efforts can no longer be defined as simply newspapers, radio and television.

No amount of government-imposed regulation can manage the modern media. The problem is not with media ownership, as more people own their own media now than ever before. A ‘tweet’ is considered news. It is generally superficial (by necessity, as it only allows 140 characters) and it is frequently nasty. We report on Facebook posts as though they have deep relevance. Contemporary research is Wikipedia, and little more. And the immediacy of social media means being first is more important than being accurate, even for our respected mastheads.

Then there is the self-indulgent effort of the mainstream media to become the news itself. A journalist talking to journalists in an effort to lead opinion, as though they are most informed, has been occurring now for some time. It seems to be accepted by those in media as interesting, yet I find few people who think it is. Sunday morning public affairs programs on Australian television are not so much as inside the beltway as inside the belt buckle. Ironically, as we are told social media encourages greater democratisation, ‘real people’ outside the world of media and politics appear to have become disenfranchised as the new world fails to cater for them less than did the old one.

Look no further than ABC1’s Q&A. It has its moments: the ministers’ and shadow ministers’ portfolio debates and solo appearances by the leaders are informative and often impressive. But in general the program has become the bastion of the educated urban elites, and the average episode is littered with political fringe-dwellers. Combine the knowledge of many of those appearing with the superficial tweets flying across the bottom of the screen and any attempt for the program to be substantive is undermined.

What works in media, you may ask? Four Corners remains exceptional, Media Watch is incisive and ABC News 24 does a good job with its continuous news coverage rarely straying into unnecessary commentary. Programmes like Channel Ten’s The Project (on which my wife features regularly) provide busy people in the suburbs or on the farm with something to digest without being patronised.

Underlining the fact that there are still great moments in politics amid the current policy chaos, a few weeks ago I sent a message to the Prime Minister’s office and to the leader of the opposition too, congratulating them on their efforts to push back against the relaxation of grog laws in Queensland and the Northern Territory. It was a great moment of bipartisanship, and well-intentioned. Politicians doing their job in the current hot-house environment rarely get the plaudits they deserve.

The post In praise of our politicians appeared first on The Spectator.

Any humiliating loss, or indeed any bloody disaster, will suffice. After all, the nation’s biggest party — which grows more popular, more extravagant and more festive every year — is in honour not of some extraordinary, against-all-odds military victory, but rather in memory of an unfortunate wartime manoeuvre that saw thousands of brave young men needlessly perish in order to achieve little of strategic value.

‘For god’s sake, don’t glorify Gallipoli — it was a terrible fiasco, a total failure and best forgotten,’ said the late Alec Campbell, the last surviving Anzac soldier, according to his biographer Jonathan King, who lamented in the Age recently that Anzac Day was turning into the Big Day Out, ‘packed with excitable fans instead of mourners’.

But perhaps it is simply that the great Aussie traditions of celebrating the underdog and paying tribute to doomed acts of heroism are what give us the greatest thrill. Or, at least, a good excuse to party.

Either way, here’s a list of upcoming celebrations for fun-loving Aussies to jot down in their party planners.

Gonski Week

Future generations of schoolkids will eagerly anticipate this much-needed week-long escape from the harsh rigours of modern schooling, in which gallant battalions of teachers’ unions across the land take time out to remember those dark days of struggle and despair when class sizes were above double figures and monthly salaries below.

Highlights include a televised parade of what remains of the army of 4,000 brave DEEWR bureaucrats who soldiered on in the face of terrible adversity (i.e. no money) to implement the Great Gonski Reforms of 2013. Popular celebrations include Street Spelling Bees (in which members of the public are asked if they can spell, um, anything) and Two Up, a hugely popular game only permitted on Gonski Day in which children win a prize every time they can add up two primary numbers. Bonus prizes are awarded if the answer is actually correct.

Surplus Sunday

Originally created to commemorate the most humiliating and decisive defeat by any Australian government since the war against the Turks, Surplus Sunday is a quiet day of reflection on which the elderly and the infirm recall the Last Great Surplus of 2006-7. (Not to be confused with an event most historians now agree never actually occurred, the four-year period of Phoney Surplus Promises leading up to 2012-13.)

Nonetheless, the public are encouraged to celebrate, rather than feel regret over, an epoch-defining and character-building moment in the history of this great nation: the demise of the so-called ‘Commitment to Surplus’. Free of the artificial and outmoded concept of ‘living within your means’ and by embracing rather than fighting against ever-greater deficits, Australians found themselves able to indulge in higher wages, better jobs, better health and disability care, higher unemployment benefits, greater maternity and paternity leave, larger schoolkids’ bonuses, more sick leave, fewer working hours, earlier retirement and all the other wondrous benefits of what is now loosely termed our ‘Euro-lifestyle’.

Carbon Hour

To replace the increasingly barbaric and old-fashioned celebration that was previously known as Earth Hour (in which the entire nation celebrated by switching off their lights for one hour every year), Carbon Hour was recently introduced by popular demand.

Only once a year, for 60 minutes, members of the public are permitted to switch on all the lights in their home, which is pretty much all they can afford.

Mining Tax Monday

To celebrate one of the greatest failures in Australian history since Malcolm Turnbull tried to overthrow the monarchy, Mining Tax Monday is a uniquely antipodean event that encourages us to laugh at our own ineptitude.

Celebrations are ushered in with the hugely popular ‘Big Fizzer’ fiasco which always attracts tiny crowds; a fireworks display over Sydney Harbour in which none of the fireworks actually explode, much to the delight of the three people who drew up the event’s original design. This is typically followed by a ‘Big Breakfast at Bondi’ at which a huge banquet is promised to everyone who attends, but at which no food is ever served, in honour of the quaint historical practice known as ‘spreading the boom’.

Super Saturday

Once a year, dressed up as old or retired people, ordinary Australians take to the streets clutching their colostomy bags and knock on their neighbour’s door and say ‘not one jot, not one tittle’ while asking for money, or food, or medical supplies. This delightful custom harks back to the quirky historical event known as ‘Budget’s Eve’ in which a succession of Labor politicians pretended that they wouldn’t tamper with the superannuation of the nation’s retirees but tricked them into handing over the lot anyway via taxes aimed ‘only at the fabulously wealthy’.

Many participants love to dress up as scary figures from the past, by donning large noses and red wigs or by terrifying people by pretending to be a Bruce Springsteen fan in charge of the nation’s finances.

Boat Race Weekend

Undeniably the most popular event of Australia’s now permanent year-long ‘Festival of Failure’. During this riotous celebration, all-comers from around the world are invited to descend upon any part of the Australian coastline they choose in any variety of makeshift craft or leaky vessel, each crammed with as many women and children as can possibly fit in before the boat capsizes and they all drown.

Anything goes in this ‘no rules, no borders’ festivity, and participants are rewarded with a large bowl of sugar sitting on a table on the beach, provided they burn their papers first. Alternatively, winners may prefer to choose from a list of other prizes, including a Bravia TV, an iPad or a furnished room adjacent to an all-female university dormitory.

The post Epic fail appeared first on The Spectator.

At a fundraising lunch earlier this month, he made the unspeakable error of praising a woman for her looks: California’s Attorney-General, Kamala Harris. ‘You have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake. She also happens to be by far the best-looking Attorney-General in the country.’

As you would expect from America’s first black President, the son of a white woman, who has spent his life navigating the politically charged minefield of race, Obama, 51, did not blunder into gender territory with a raw outburst of heterosexual admiration. He carefully prefaced his compliment with respectful caveats, gushing first about Harris’s intellectual prowess, character and legal skills. But that did not save him from the thought police.

The outrage from across the globe was swift and stern. Feminists and their craven male enablers berated Obama as a sexist, a chauvinist, a sellout, perhaps even a misogynist — although he almost immediately apologised for his uncharacteristic heresy, albeit while pointing out that Harris was a friend.

New York magazine said his comments were ‘disgraceful’ and called for the President to undergo ‘gender sensitivity training’. Previous misdeeds were unearthed to prove he was a closet gender bigot, such as the time he called a reporter ‘sweetie’.

It was the row that refused to go away, until Obama surrendered entirely on America’s Today show, describing his comments as a ‘useful teaching moment for me and the country’. He went to say: ‘As the father of two daughters, I want to make sure that they’re judged on their merits and not on their appearance.’

The capitulation of the world’s most powerful leader to the forces of political correctness marked the moment that chivalry emitted its last gasp. And right on cue, a week later and half a world away, feminist icon Germaine Greer declared on ABC TV’s Q&A: ‘Chivalry… is a misogynist assumption.’

So now you know. It is a gender crime to describe a woman as attractive. To do so risks social suicide, and worse. Men less agile and politically savvy than Obama have destroyed their careers with such transgressions. Take Peter Peters, the Manly Sea Eagles stalwart, sacked after 40 years with the rugby league club in 2011 for describing a comely Fox Sports reporter as ‘a good sort’.

The fact is that beauty is not incompatible with intelligence or competence. And Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican-American father, is attractive by any objective measure, with her tawny skin and cascading hair, eyes shining and face arranged according to the rules of mathematical symmetry,
the Greeks’ golden mean.

But beauty also isn’t just a frozen image. We are not statues carved in stone. In a photograph of Obama with Harris, we see two purposeful, engaged people striding across an airport tarmac. She has her head back, hair streaming in the wind, laughing up at him with full-throated abandon.

The look of delight on his face shows he loves the interaction, and what man doesn’t? Who doesn’t love the rapt attention of a person they admire — and if that person is attractive to boot, well, you’ve hit the jackpot. Are we supposed to close down our hearts to satisfy the cold proscriptions of ideologues?

Harris must care about her appearance or she wouldn’t look so good at 48. So why is it that Obama was allowed, even obliged, to list all the other sterling attributes to which she has devoted effort, but on the subject of physical appearance he was supposed to stay mute? Is everyone so eaten up with envy they can’t bear for a beautiful person to be acknowledged as such, as if by not acknowledging it, no one will notice the aesthetic discrepancies in the world?

This willful blindness to physical characteristics was once dubbed ‘Uglytopia’ by Psychology Today magazine: an imaginary place where beautiful people do not do better at work, earn more and generally get an easier ride in life. The irony is that in our narcissistic times, when image has never been more important, here we are trying to deny what slaps us in the face every waking moment. Never before have we been so bombarded with images of beautiful people selling us stuff, from movies to soap. Yet we are supposed to pretend we don’t notice.

The scolds and the fun police of gender correctness have managed to strangle human interaction to such an extent that one of the joys of being alive is being extinguished. To react to beauty in another person and transmit your appreciation is a pleasure to both giver and receiver. We’re not talking about sexual harassment, where the compliment is prelude to a grope; just an instinctive expression of appreciation for nature’s bounteous gifts.

Most of us are hardwired to appreciate beauty in the world, and most particularly beauty in the opposite sex. It could be a smile, a flash of personality, a chiselled jaw, a flick of the hair — you wouldn’t be fully human if it didn’t have an effect. And how delightful that the leader of the free world is in touch with his feelings enough to note the beauty of a woman.

In any case, while pulchritude is not distributed evenly at birth, there is always
a chance for redemption for the aesthetically challenged through discipline and effort. In Coco Chanel’s immortal words: ‘There are no ugly women, just lazy ones.’

Miranda Devine is a columnist with several News Ltd newspapers.

The post Welcome to Uglytopia appeared first on The Spectator.