Western Australian leadership in defending federalism is also clear in Premier Barnett’s response to both the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and Gonski. Western Australia already has a better disability scheme than the one the Prime Minister is proposing and a better education system than Gonski’s. If Julia Gillard wants to help, she should fund the West Australian programs rather than impose her own. GST funds already go the states. So why should not an increase in the medicare levy? Or the Federal Gonski funds?

They thought they had come to the wrong dinner. Earlier this month two Federal MPs joined hundreds of journalists in Cockle Bay for the Australian Press Freedom Dinner of 2013. One was Malcolm Turnbull, a former journalist. The other was Senator George Brandis. They assumed it would be the celebration of the defeat of the Gillard government’s determined attempts to put an end to press freedom by appointing a statutory controller, licensor and censor with the Orwellian title ‘Public Interest Media Advocate’. Also worthy of celebration was the government’s reluctant withdrawal of Nicola Roxon’s plan to punish the publication of political opinions that some might find offensive — and, for good measure, to reverse the onus of proof. But to the MPs’ amazement they found that these triumphs in the cause of press freedom were barely mentioned in the speeches at the Press Freedom Dinner. In his account a few days later at the Sydney Institute (see opposite), Senator Brandis concluded: ‘I left the dinner with the very strong impression that if a fight for freedom of the press is to be fought in this country, it will not be fought by journalists.’ The principal response to Brandis came from Fairfax columnist Richard Ackland, who adopted the demeaning device of ignoring the argument and insulting Brandis instead: ‘I’m sceptical that Brandis will make much of an Attorney-General, should he ever attain the position… As an experienced lawyer confided: “Better to appoint a wombat as the next Attorney-General. At least it would do no harm and it would mean well.” ’

In his address to the Sydney Institute Brandis noted that the statutory charter of the Commonwealth’s Human Rights Commission incorporates the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which provides for ‘the right to freedom of expression’. So at the recent Senate Estimates hearings he ingenuously asked the Commission’s President what it had done, during the public controversies over the Bolt case and the Finkelstein Report, to advance the cause of press freedom and freedom of speech. The President replied: ‘We have not been emphasising the right to freedom of speech.’

The question was rhetorical, since everybody knew the answer. It had done nothing. But Brandis also suggested that since we now have all sorts of commissioners dealing with race, age, sex, disabilities and children, why should we not have a Freedom Commissioner to uphold press freedom and free speech? For example, the Parliament now has before it the Australia Council Bill amending the 1975 act governing Commonwealth assistance to the arts. The act declares that ‘freedom in the practice of the arts’ is a core principle. But this protection of artistic freedom has disappeared altogether from the amending bill. Sinister? An oversight? A Freedom Commissioner might have something to say.

Chris Bowen’s speech at the Revesby Workers’ Club in western Sydney launching Nick Cater’s The Lucky Culture was not so much a book-launcher as his manifesto of what he considers mainstream Laborism, and his guide to how Labor might recover after Saturday 14 September. He rejects Cater’s idea that Labor has been taken over by self-serving apparatchiks out of touch with ordinary aspirational workers. He speaks up for suburban life, growth, education and strong borders. Part of his speech appeared last week in these pages. You may think he is having himself on. But his full statement is worth looking up on the net. When and if the rubble is cleared away and Labor’s current leaders unloaded, Bowen must be considered a contender.

‘It’s the only major Shakespeare role I have not played and have a yearning for.’ So wrote John Bell a year or two ago in his book On Shakespeare. ‘But I’m apprehensive about it — I might be totally miscast.’ In his recent production of Henry IV he at long last played plump Jack. He need not have been the least apprehensive. He played him magnificently. It was an unforgettable performance, one of Bell’s greatest roles.

The post 18 May 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

What can possibly engender this degree of rage and vilification? It can only be that Cater has announced the end of the reign of what Latham calls ‘progressive values and ideas’. But the book’s enthusiastic launchers — from John Howard (Sydney) to Geoffrey Blainey (Melbourne) to Christopher Pearson (Adelaide) and not forgetting Bill Leak in Woy Woy — well outnumber the haters. At a champagne party in the Art Gallery of NSW, Howard welcomed Cater’s critique of the ‘exclusively political class’ with no experience of life. He also welcomed the celebration of the book in the Revesby Workers’ Club. (‘I grew up in Earlwood. I feel closer to Revesby than to Annandale.’) Bowen said the book is a warning to Labor to stick to the mainstream. Melham said, yes, and let’s conduct the debate with civility and courtesy. The Lucky Culture must be, Cater says, the most launched book in Australian history.

He is ‘one of the canniest operators in Washington’ and ‘one of its smartest thinkers’. He is also ‘one of us’, a leading member of ‘the Australian diaspora’. The words are those of Michael Fullilove, executive director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy. He was speaking about Martin Indyk, now an American citizen. ‘I must tell you,’ said Indyk, chuckling, ‘it was the Australian government that took away my Australian citizenship.’ ‘We’ll have to see what we can do about that,’ replied Fullilove. ‘We still claim you as Australian.’

Why not? Indyk was born in London of Australian parents, raised and educated in Australia, and became an American citizen in his forties. Since then he has been a special assistant to President Clinton and US Ambassador to Israel. He is now Director for Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington. He is also on the Board of the Lowy Institute, where he spoke during the week on the US pivot to Asia and away from the Middle East. Asked what advice he has for Tony Abbott about how Australia might catch the attention of President Obama, Indyk’s reply was surprisingly optimistic: ‘Relax. Don’t worry.’ Australia does not have to salute and send troops, as it did in the past to win brownie points. Australia is a key part of Obama’s pivot to Asia, one of its pillars. ‘It is not caught between China and America. It can be a bridge between them.’

It was a black-tie affair but it felt like a dinner party. The venue was the Parkside Ballroom in Darling Harbour. More than 600 guests assembled from business, politics, law, journalism and the universities. They were rich and poor, young and old, Labor and Liberal. There was also a famous guest speaker introduced by the Premier. It was in short the 2013 Annual Dinner of the Sydney Institute.

The speaker was Amanda Foreman, the London-born, New York-based biographer and historian. Her award-winning books are scholarly and popular. Her most recent blockbuster, A World on Fire, is about the American Civil War, with special emphasis on the British volunteers who fought on both sides. Her most audacious publicity stunt has been standing nude behind a vertical pile of books for Tatler magazine. It helped her books sell in the hundreds of thousands.

Her theme at the dinner was leadership — political and military, good and bad. Her examples ranged from Spencer Cavendish to ‘Chesty’ Puller, Spartacus and Lenin. But the standout was General Sir John Monash —‘the greatest military planner of all time’. (He planned to win the Battle of Hamel in 90 minutes. It took 93.) Foreman illustrated his leadership in the great crisis of the mutiny in the AIF in September 1918. Since their arrival on the Western Front, the Australians had liberated 119 occupied villages, destroyed 39 German divisions and captured 25 per cent of all German prisoners. Their morale was high. Then out of the blue just before the attack on the Hindenburg line, the British High Command, in an act of extraordinary folly, decided to disband eight Australian battalions and send the original Anzacs on leave. The troops mutinied. They wanted to finish the war together, something to do with mateship. What could Monash do? He understood his men. But the penalty for mutiny is death. He also understood the High Command. He talked with the mutineers. (‘I realise that the AIF is different from any other army in the world.’) He then conferred with the generals and persuaded them to defer action until after the attack on the Hindenburg line two days later. The mutiny ended. The Germans lost the war. After the Armistice there was no more talk of the mutiny. The great American general ‘Chesty’ Puller could have been thinking of Monash when he said: ‘No weapon on earth is more powerful than leadership.’

The post 11 May 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

English by birth, Cater arrived in Australia in 1989, ‘unemployed, exhilarated and terrified’. Australia was still classless and egalitarian. But it soon changed. It became polarised by an elite that does not simply feel better off than the common herd, but better. This moral aristocracy claims to be indifferent to money. They eat healthily and drink in moderation. They are compassionate. They believe themselves neither racist nor sexist. They make a show of solidarity with lots of gay friends. They are plastic bag refuseniks and tickers of carbon offset boxes. They run the quangos. Mirthless, illiberal, intolerant and virtuous, they have set out to change the country root-and-branch.

Cater examines their grim program in the commissions, universities, the ABC and political parties. Take our nine (!) Human Rights Commissions. There is no evidence of institutionalised discrimination in Australia. But that is not the Commissioners’ concern. Their purpose is to impose controls and provide status and stipends for the elite. The same elite is destroying universities by turning them into self-serving ‘engine rooms of progress’. In the ABC a rigid consensus — on the environment, border protection, Iraq and Afghanistan, same-sex marriage, the mining tax, the Catholic Church, Rupert Murdoch, and Tony Abbott’s unsuitability for high office — is ‘unmistakable’ and getting worse. As for the political parties, Cater quotes Martin Ferguson on the influence in the Labor party of special interest groups which cloak self-interest in the language of compassion and level their outrage at what Ferguson calls ‘fundamental working class values such as hard work, independence and the traditional family’. And you can’t expect too much from a Liberal party which in government approved and funded a new National Museum of Australia with no understanding of the anti-Australian blitzkrieg that the museum was about to wage.

What is to be done? Where will the counter-revolution begin? Cater has no hopes of restoring the old Australia, however fondly he remembers it. But we can still free up the underlying democracy that the new ruling class has not yet eradicated. Cater doubts the ABC can ever be reformed, but we could make a start by abolishing the Human Rights Commissions. Cater ends his manifesto by quoting from a splendid tract published in 1847 by an English-born Adelaide editor urging Englishmen to come to South Australia, a land where ‘almost everything is possible’ for honest, sober, aspirational men and women with sturdy sons and daughters. Everything is still possible in Australia, says Cater, although he notes that the Adelaide editor discouraged immigrants whose only instrument of industry is the pen: ‘We have too many of that class already.’

For me the standout show in the Sydney Comedy Festival was Lenny Bruce: 13 Daze Un-Dug in Sydney 1962 at the Bondi Pavilion. This was partly because I am one of the few survivors of that extraordinary night more than 50 years ago in the now demolished Aarons Hotel, when the American ‘sick comedian’ Lenny Bruce introduced what one amazed theatre critic called ‘the Lady Chatterley words’ to the Sydney stage. (Bruce denied he was a comedian. He was, he said, a lecturer. And he was not sick, society was.) I wanted to see what the playwright Benito Di Fonzo made of that night at Aarons and of two nights in the old Rose Bay Wintergarden (where, Bruce said, ‘I was on for two hours before they told me no one was there.’). Soon afterwards he was, more or less, run out of town. There was another reason for my seeking out the show. Lenny Bruce is becoming an idol in Australian mythology: the artist confronting the frightened philistines, the poète maudit. How did the Tamarama Rock Surfers Theatre Company handle this? With great gusto.

The 1962 show was not without influence. Richard Neville said it encouraged him to launch the satirical magazine Oz to ridicule Australian conservatism. It had the opposite effect on me. In those days I was still gung-ho for the abolition of censorship and had just written a book on it. So I started out on Lenny Bruce’s side. But I was beginning to have second thoughts. Is there much wit in yelling ‘F*** you madam’ at a heckler, or humour in his one-liner: ‘Yes the Jews killed Jesus, and if he comes back we’ll do it again.’? It was impossible not to feel empathy with him as he spiralled down to his squalid death in Hollywood. But I found myself coming round to supporting some minimum restrictions in defence of, well, civility. Needless to add, no one took any notice of this quaint idea.

One quibble. This is the third play about Lenny Bruce’s preposterous Sydney tour. The actors playing him always look healthy, vigorous, wide-awake, well-fed young men. The Lenny I met in Sydney was a pasty, comatose, heroin-addicted desperado.

The post 4 May 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

I for one am glad most Premiers did not submit to Gonski. Premier Campbell Newman summed it up well: Gonski is ‘centralist, prescriptive and bureaucratic’. Time to reconsider its financial bait after 14 September…

The other day at Sydney’s Gleebooks I launched a book about what’s wrong with universities. It could not have been more timely. Your heart sinks almost daily as you read about the continual abandonment of liberal principles in universities. One day it’s Sydney University banning the Dalai Lama from its campus. (It would offend China, we are told.) Another day it’s a students’ representative council calling for an academic boycott of Israel. Universities are becoming less bastions of liberal tolerance than centres of intolerance. You get more independent thinking these days in non-university think tanks than in universities. The IPA, for example, recently gave a platform to Rupert Murdoch for an important speech on free markets. Imagine a university doing that.

The book I launched is On the Purpose of a University Education (Australian Scholarly Publishing), edited by Luciano Boschiero. It is a collection of papers from a conference on the liberal arts at Campion College in Old Toongabbie. One of the contributors, the historian Greg Melleuish, summed up the general theme: ‘We are standing in the ruins.’ His view is that when the universities turned away from liberal arts and the cultivation of disinterestedness or wisdom, (‘the proper development of the soul’), the vacuum was soon filled with the ‘rancour and hatred’ that characterise universities today. The criticism is not new. The philosopher David Stove said as much in his famous essay of 1986, ‘A Farewell to Arts’. It has been an underlying theme for generations in the recurrent disputes between the secularists and the religious. The secularists usually held the initiative, although the religious mounted one spectacular counterattack some 50 years ago. It began with a pamphlet by a surgeon from Sydney’s North Shore who, reflecting views widespread in his community, condemned the ‘impudent fellows’ who taught philosophy at Sydney University. They are, he said, an ‘unwitting and witless fifth column’ who planted in our youth ‘the seeds of moral corruption and political subversion’. The pamphlet attracted no public attention until the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney took up its theme in a sermon to a cathedral packed with distinguished lawyers, including the chief justices of England and Wales, the United States, Australia and New South Wales. The Archbishop considered the consequences of the loss of belief in God. His principal example was Adolf Eichmann, who had administered the Holocaust unrestrained by conscience and whose trial in Israel had just been concluded. He went on to denounce the empiricist philosophy being taught at Sydney University. It too undermined conscience. The government, he thought, should take action to stop the rot.

Controversy raged for weeks as academics and liberal churchmen deplored the intemperate or ‘dangerous’ opinions of both the Archbishop and the surgeon. (The philosopher David Stove was one of the few who thought the Archbishop and the surgeon were essentially right — a view shared, incidentally, by another famous philosopher, R.G. Collingwood of Oxford.) When the tumult died down, it appeared nothing had changed. Yet not long afterwards the first steps were taken to establish a Catholic non-vocational liberal arts college in secession from mainstream universities. Some years later it became Campion College — which produced the book I launched. It has only 100 students out of the one million in Australian universities, but it is a leaven in the lump.

Disappointing that Premier Barry O’Farrell now supports gay marriage. But I’m with him when he says he has slowly come to his change of mind. I, too, like many others, have changed my mind over the years on this or that aspect of the rights of homosexuals. Dennis Altman reminded me of this last year in his new introduction to the 40th anniversary re-issue of his acclaimed manifesto Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation. (Homosexuality was still illegal when it was first published.) Back in July 1972 he and I were on an ABC TV panel to discuss the book. I recall the occasion but had forgotten the view I then held. I supported de facto legalisation — that is, I thought that in a live-and-let-live world all prosecutions of homosexuals should cease. But I did not support de jure legalisation. That would, I believed then, greenlight homosexuality. (Widely quoted in those days was a line from the play The Boys in the Band: ‘Show me a happy homosexual and I will show you a gay corpse.’) I later came to see this compromise as unworkable and changed my view. I’m still against legalising ‘same-sex adoptions’ and gay marriage (as distinct from civil unions). But in the light of my prevarications I am reluctant to get stuck into Premier O’Farrell for his.

The commentators queued up again to denounce the popular and widely maligned ‘shock jock’ Alan Jones for his quick suggestion that the Boston bombers may turn out to be radical students. One Sydney professor found him ‘poisonous’. A Melbourne college warden asked why he is allowed on air. Journalists agreed he had lost his marbles. So what did the bombers turn out to be? Radical students.

The post 27 April 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

Judicial humour? The former Justice Dyson Heydon, reflecting the other day on his ten years on the High Court, remarked that it has ‘immense’ indeed ‘matchless’ capacities. ‘That is because they are in mint condition. They have never been used!’ He was speaking on ‘Great Legal Disasters of the Late Twentieth Century’. He began with a few anecdotes, mainly about politicians. One of them was Senator Reg Withers, a Liberal minister in the 1970’s. Irritated by some High Court decision, he exclaimed: ‘The trouble is that as soon as you appoint people to that bench, they behave as though they got there on merit!’ Graham Richardson does not escape. As a law student ‘Richo’ asked fellow student James Spigelman, later Chief Justice of NSW: ‘Jim, is it possible to pass torts on one month’s work?’ Fatally Spigelman answered: ‘Graham, it can be done – but not by you.’ At that point the young Spigelman’s political career ‘ended abruptly.’ Turning to Malcolm Fraser – and  to the difficulties Australian leaders face in winning international recognition – Heydon quotes Margaret Thatcher’s outburst when told of Fraser’s ambition to become Secretary General of the Commonwealth: ‘If we are going to have an African as head of the Commonwealth, I really think we should have a black one.’

But Heydon’s main target was the Federal Court. Why was it created? The idea could not have been to reduce the growing burden on the High Court. The extra work could easily have been delegated to the State courts. Was it to ensure greater uniformity of interpretation of federal statutes? This had not troubled Sir Garfield Barwick when he guided the Matrimonial Causes Act through Parliament in 1959. He praised the capacity of the State Supreme Courts (‘great courts’), and the High Court on appeal, to secure uniformity. In practice the federal court has been a disaster. It has damaged the standing of the efficiently operating State court system and has engendered ‘costly and useless jurisdictional disputes’. For what purpose? ‘What does the new court do that the State Supreme Courts failed to do, or were capable of doing?’ Heydon concluded: ‘Was such a court worth creating? Not in my opinion.’

A final touch of judicial humour. Heydon recalls the first civil appeal heard by Mr Justice R.P. (‘Roddy’) Meagher. The other judge was the distinguished President of the Court of Appeal, Justice Michael Kirby. The trial judge had been Mr Justice Sully. At the end of the oral argument, the President uttered these  graceful words: ‘It is quite beyond my ability to improve on the reasons for judgment of the learned trial judge, Mr Justice Sully. I would dismiss the appeal.’ Mr Justice Meagher then sadly remarked: ‘This is indeed a most lamentable state of affairs, but I agree that it is quite beyond the ability of Mr Justice Kirby to improve on the reasons for judgment of the learned trial judge, Mr Justice Sully.’

What a coup Helen Trinca has pulled off with her biography Madeleine. A Life of Madeleine St John. St John is best known for her novel The Women in Black about a Sydney department store like David Jones, although she published three more novels all based in Notting Hill, London where she settled. (One was shortlisted  for the Man Booker Prize.) She was mentally unstable and spent 25 years on the edge of sanity, in and out of hospitals, smoking marijuana, worshipping her swami, fighting with family and friends, working on a biography of Madame Blavatsky which she destroyed. Then suddenly she wrote a perfectly sane, coherent, funny, observant and tolerant book about her native country which she sincerely loathed. (She took out British citizenship.) Trinca tells this difficult story with a hard-won objectivity while keeping her focus on St John’s achievement. She might now turn her mind to another difficult  personage, Madeleine’s father, Edward St John QC who had a brief, convulsive career in the federal Parliament.

The post 6 April 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

In February 2008 the federal government officially apologised for the so-called ‘Stolen Generations’ of Aboriginal children. In November 2009 it apologised for the ‘Forgotten Australians’, English children tricked into believing they were orphans and brought to Australia to be abused and violated. Both apologies were political triumphs for Prime Minister Rudd. Last week in Canberra the federal government apologised to the victims (mothers and children) of forced adoptions. It was  another triumph, this time for Prime Minister Gillard. Her speech in the Parliament’s Great Hall was punctuated with enthusiastic applause and culminated in a standing ovation. But it received little publicity in the media obsessed at that very moment with the Rudd leadership issue. Not so Abbott. He was noisily heckled and was therefore widely reported. Yet an enduring image of the occasion remains the sensitive and courteous way Abbott dealt with his hecklers (who objected to the term ‘birth mothers’ and opposed adoption in principle): ‘I hear what you are saying… Thank you ma’am… The last thing I would wish to do is to cause pain to those who have suffered too much pain already. I am happy to retract.’ The occasion  may turn out to do more for Abbott’s public standing than for Gillard’s.

One speaker stood out at the launching of the symposium, Really Dangerous Ideas, at the Quadrant dinner during the week. The book’s target is Sydney’s annual ‘Festival of Dangerous Ideas’ (FODI) which celebrates the Australian ‘progressive’ orthodoxy but kids itself that it is bold and freethinking. Edited by Gary Johns, with a foreword by Judith (‘I’m signing on’) Sloan, and published by Connor Court, Really Dangerous Ideas brings together 20 heretics who reject the Great Australian Orthodoxy. They range from Gary Johns who calls for the abolition of  the Human Rights Commission to Tom Switzer who would privatise the ABC. Greg Melleuish casts a cold eye over Australian intellectuals. Peter Day speaks up for the Anglosphere. Barry Cohen speaks up for Israel and asks why Bob Carr has aligned Australia with the world’s anti-Semites in the United Nations. There are many more. Five of the writers of the book spoke at the launching. The one who made most of us sit up was Kerryn Pholi. Speaking ‘as a person of Aboriginal descent’ but not ‘a professional Aborigine’, she took on James Spigelman, the former Chief Justice of NSW and now Chairman of the ABC. Spigelman wants the law to restrict ‘hate speech’ in order to protect people’s dignity, including Aborigines’. Pholi scorns this ‘well-intentioned arrogance… My dignity resides within me; it does not require legal protection…The vague cloying sentiment we call “respect” does not matter.’

A chapter on taxes caught my eye. It is by John Humphreys. He bemoans  the failure of the Australian states to live up to the ideal of  competitive federalism. The root cause is the Commonwealth’s control since 1942 of income tax and the subsequent dependence of the states on Commonwealth handouts. Humphreys wants to abolish income tax by the Commonwealth and restore it to the states. A beautiful idea but it is not going to happen for two reasons. One is that the Commonwealth will never agree. The other is that the states would be terrified of the idea. The basic problem with the Australian states is their death wish.

Despite all the reports about the rorts, rackets, and political influence of trade union bosses it is strange how little of it turns up in Australian literature. Barry Humphries gave us the irrepressible and repulsive racketeer Lance Boyle, and Bruce Beresford gave us the cheerfully corrupt Ed Gallagher, beautifully played by Ray Marshall in the film Money Movers. But they were long ago back in the 1970s. Perhaps real-life trade unions today leave nothing for the writer’s imagination? Or is the taboo entirely due to the caution of subsidised publishers and producers? Whatever the reason there is a large public waiting for the playwright or novelist who breaks the long silence.

The post 30 March 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

You cannot hope to bribe or twist,
Thank God! the Canberra journalist.
But, seeing what the man will do unbribed,
There’s no occasion to.
– with apologies to Humber Wolfe

Whenever a government threatens freedom of opinion, there are always a few journalists ready to defend the regulators and censors. So it was on the ABC’s Insiders last Sunday. In a three-against-one contest only Piers Akerman defended freedom of opinion against Senator Conroy’s masterplan to appoint a statutory censor and de facto licensor of newspapers he has named, in hideous doublespeak, the ‘Public Interest Media Advocate’. Akerman was also alone in defending the famous Telegraph front page which likened Conroy to various dictators. (‘A great front page!’) It’s an ancient argument.The last time it raged in peacetime Australia was almost 200 years ago when Governor Darling brought in his Newspaper Regulating Acts to license newspapers, close down any he did not like and deport offending journalists. Fortunately the Colonial Office in London ‘relieved’ Darling of his duties. Let’s hope the public will soon relieve Senator Conroy of his.

The Attorney General of New South Wales and well-known tenor Greg Smith was in fine voice last weekend as he and his folk band the Tokens belted out those sad Irish songs of loss, loneliness and heartbreak for the St Patrick’s Day celebration at the Criterion Hotel in Sydney’s CBD. The Attorney General, clad in green, called them all up: Sweet Molly Malone (in streets broad and narrow), Maggie (when you and I were young) and Kathleen (I’ll take you home again), not to mention Danny Boy (all the flowers are dying) and Galway Bay (with language that the strangers do not know). Nor did the Tokens forget Botany Bay (had I the wings of a turtle dove) or Van Diemen’s Land (following the Black Velvet Band). The abundant, often teary, public chorus was of one mind: ‘The Attorney has missed his vocation.’

Meanwhile, across the road in the Wesley Centre, Tony Abbott was delivering one of his landmark speeches — ‘A New Approach: Engagement with Indigenous Australians’ — to a meeting of the Sydney Institute. It was well-written, well-argued, thoughtful, sincere. My complaint is that it sounded too much like a good magazine article. It lacked that touch of oratory that turns a dry lecture into a moving speech. But I’ve voiced this complaint before. Abbott must know what he is doing. So let’s move on to what he said. If elected his government will bring the handling of Aboriginal affairs under the department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. There will be in effect a Prime Minister for Aboriginal Affairs as well as a Minister. This will give Aboriginal affairs the importance they deserve. (Abbott will continue to spend a week each year living and working in remote Aboriginal communities.) But a more portentous policy will be amending the federal constitution (‘completing’ it, Abbott says) by including in the Preamble an acknowledgment of Aborigines as the first Australians. He knows this will be controversial. Many voters who support Aboriginal causes oppose the division of Australians into two classes — the first, and the rest of  us. They may not speak out about it but they will vote against changing the constitution in any referendum (as they suspiciously tend to do in all referenda). Well aware of these obstacles, Abbott will take it step by step. He wants to avoid John Howard’s mistakes with the referendum of 1999. Howard had been burned in 1997 at the Reconciliation Convention in Melbourne when Aboriginal leaders turned their backs on him as he banged the lectern and shouted at them. In the same year Noel Pearson, one of the most influential Aboriginal leaders, condemned the Howard government (which included Abbott) as ‘racist scum’. In a sort of conversion and to correct these misjudgments, Howard adopted the idea of including in the republic referendum a ‘consequential’ proposal to amend the Preamble to acknowledge the Aborigines. There was no real debate. Hardly anyone publicly opposed the idea. But in the referendum it was even more heavily defeated than the republic. (I voted against it.) To avoid another defeat Abbott will move more slowly and cautiously than Howard. If the Coalition wins the coming election Abbott, in his first year as Prime Minister, will bring forward for public consultation a draft constitutional amendment to honour Aborigines. He will also ‘establish a bipartisan process to assess its chances of success’. If there is no prospect of success he will not proceed. But Abbott is determined to succeed — and to ‘redress the most intractable difficulty our country has ever faced’. Passing his referendum will be, he says, ‘a unifying and liberating moment surpassing the Apology’.

The Gillard government could not have found a better launcher for its long-awaited National Cultural Policy than jolly Simon Crean. He brought a liveliness and folksiness to a touchy job. He told us that his dad, as federal Treasurer, had to sign the cheque ($1 million) to buy Jackson Pollock’s ‘Blue Poles’, and his mum had done her bit as fundraiser for the National Gallery of Victoria. But even he stumbled over some of the jargon built into the 150 pages of NCP (as they call it) — all that cabbage about the National Arts and Culture Accord, the Arts Excellence Pool, artist-centric grants, location incentives, digital hubs, national productivity, encouraging mateship and joining the dots. It will take some time to work out what a lot of it means. Senator Brandis, Crean’s Shadow, is right not to be hurried into responding.

The post 23 March 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

The first thing that strikes you about Not Dead Yet is the banality of its style. Trends are alarming. Attacks are relentless. Passions are burning. Comments are blithely ignored. People drop the ball or hold the line. There are lots of mantras, dead-ends and dead hands. Some of this may be second nature. A politician soon becomes a master of clichés and expert in vagueness. He is wary of precision because he wants to keep all options open. But Latham is no longer a politician. He has no wish to rejoin the Labor family. That part of his life is, yes, done and dusted. All he wants, having learned from ‘past errors of judgement’, is to offer ‘constructive advice’ on policy. But what policies?

He calls for the ending of the Labor party’s ‘formal connection to the union movement’ but adds: ‘This is not going to happen.’ He applauds Paul Keating’s commitment to the free market but quotes him: ‘Our people never believed it.’ He calls for more ‘community engagement’ by the Labor party and for the public’s participation in the preselection of party candidates. He wants to pay schoolteachers more. He would ‘relocate’ Aborigines from uneconomical desert communities to ‘places of genuine economic activity’. He wants to balance ‘freedom of speech’ with ‘improved standards in the media’. Above all he wants to see Labor committed to combatting global warming. He has nothing to say about ICAC, or foreign workers on 457.

None of these policies is faintly new or freshly thought out. Latham’s claim to attention is not his new ideas but his mix of old ones — and the sense he conveys that without some such rethinking the Labor party is finished. The party which once organised itself around doomed causes like White Australia, industry protection, population decentralisation, broadacre public housing estates or indigenous welfare, has become a façade: there is nothing behind it. Those three words might have made a better title for his manifesto than Not Dead Yet.

The Centre for Independent Studies launched its T30 (Target 30 Per Cent) campaign during the week. At the moment government absorbs 35 per cent of GDP. The T30 campaign aims to cut back this back to 30 per cent in ten years. The CIS will easily win the economic argument (the bigger the government, the smaller the economic growth) and the moral argument (the bigger the handouts, the stronger the dependency culture). The problem will be winning the political argument. More than one in three of all voters rely on government welfare payments for income. Try taking some of that away. This will be the test and challenge for T30.

We don’t get to hear what really goes on at the formal and confidential meetings of the ABC Board. But unrestricted reports of what is said or done outside Board meetings sometimes give the rest of us a clue about how this taxpayer-funded government agency is run. It’s not always edifying. In the current Quadrant, former board member Keith Windschuttle describes the ABC’s farewell dinner in December 2011 for retiring chairman Maurice Newman (whom Windschuttle, like most Australians, admires). It was, he says, ‘one of the most awful functions I have ever attended’. The problem was the ‘nauseating’ speeches from ABC managing director Mark Scott and Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy. (Shortly before the dinner Conroy had made the ‘shonky’ decision to award the ABC, and not Sky News, a $233 million contract with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for overseas broadcasting by the Australia Network.) Conroy dominated proceedings. What was ‘nauseating,’ Windschuttle reports, was having ‘to sit through a sycophantic eulogy to Conroy by Scott, followed by an even more cringeworthy response’ by Conroy. Newman had always advised Windschuttle to be patient with ABC. Reform, he said, takes time. Yet, according to Windschuttle, things have got worse, not better, after Newman’s five years as chairman. When Newman lodged a formal complaint about the claim on air by an ABC science journalist that climate change sceptics could be compared with paedophiles, the ABC complaints department decided, barefaced, that the journalist ‘in the right’. The former chairman can now be openly insulted. Not a pretty picture.

Editor-at-large of the Australian, Paul Kelly, opened new themes at his recent talk at Campion College, the Catholic liberal arts college in Toongabbie. God, he told the students, is making a comeback — not in the West but in the rest of the world, whether it be Islam or Christianity. The famous political journalist then told the students that the practice of government requires a moral foundation, now more than ever. His last words: ‘Honour your education, your faith, your church, your family, and your country.’ It will be interesting to see how Kelly develops these themes in his newspaper.

The post 16 March 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

But next morning the rally on the banks of the polluted Duck River in Auburn was a great success. It was Clean Up Australia Day. About 100 local volunteers turned up, including dozens of Muslims from Turkey, Iraq and Afghanistan, and a leaven of Christians from Southern Sudan. Organisers gave everyone a yellow fluoro vest, gloves and bags, signed them up for public insurance, and warned them about needles. The volunteers jostled to be photographed with Abbott and his daughter Bridget. The president of the Gallipoli Mosque told him how proud they were that he had joined them. Then Abbott and the locals set to work among the undergrowth, mud, wildflowers and perhaps a snake or two, dragging from the smelly river banks two trolleys, a pram, a scooter, bits of cars, metres of undercarpet and innumerable plastic bags and bottles. Abbott soon worked up a sweat. It was excellent television.

The Prime Minister’s weekend was also mixed. In her address at the University of Western Sydney, and her dinner at the Rooty Hill RSL, she had several billion-dollar announcements to talk about — roads, schools, hospitals. She won front pages all over the country. Her problem is that her only remaining listeners are the faithful who cheer robotically at anything she says. No one else is taking her seriously. (She is better in interviews than on the platform. I liked her line, no doubt scripted, in one television interview: ‘I am a person with a lot to do.’) The ‘sleepover’ in Rooty Hill may win her back some supporters, but she cannot overcome the record of broken promises or the stench of recent Labor scandals in New South Wales. And at her back she will always hear the sound of polls and pollsters drawing near, calling Kevin Rudd back to leadership in the spring…

Does any think-tank in Australia do more to advance the cause of Aborigines than the free-enterprise Centre for Independent Studies (CIS)? For example, it regularly provides a platform for indigenous leaders who promote the integration of Aborigines into modern life — most recently Marcia Langton, still under furious attack from the Left for her support of mining companies that provide training and jobs for Aborigines. Or take the latest issue of the CIS journal Policy. In one paper Sara Hudson concludes: ‘The problems facing Aboriginal people in Australia are not unique. Around the world, communities deprived of individual property rights and decent education (but showered with welfare) are poor and dysfunctional. We need to stop treating Aboriginal people as inherently different.’ The same issue of Policy publishes a moving speech to the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly by Alison Nampitjinpa Anderson, the Minister for Indigenous Advancement. She speaks about Australia’s Third World. ‘Walk through Alice Springs after dark or visit Papunya and speak with my relatives — sick in their bodies and souls. They are uneducated, orphaned and widowed. They are in gaol and in cemeteries… I attend their baptisms and I go to their funerals.’ The only way out is real schools and real jobs, ‘not blackfella ones’, not ‘separate development’ or ‘progressive’ apartheid but integration in the modern world.

The Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House is an annual get-together of ‘progressives’ congratulating each other on their too often commonplace ideas. So it is good to see that later this month there will be a counterblast, a book called Really Dangerous Ideas. There are chapters on privatising the ABC (by Tom Switzer), on abolishing the Human Rights Commission (by Gary Johns), on scrapping the federal income tax (by John Humphreys) and much more of the same. Connor Court is the publisher, one of those small enterprises that has brought out some of the better books of recent years. The most famous is Ian Plimer’s international bestseller Heaven and Earth, exposing many of the myths and follies of the global warmist movement. Australia’s big publishers turned it down one after the other before Connor Court took it on. Other books in its list include Hal Colebatch’s biography of Bert Kelly and Damien Freeman’s life of Roddy Meagher. It has published books by Gary Johns, Barry Cohen, Kevin Donnelly, Barry Dickens, Brian Coman, Chris Berg and John Roskam. It has even published me!

The post 9 March 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

When Wilders arrived, the capacity crowd of 500 cheered and whistled — and half a dozen formidable-looking blokes in suits took up positions around the walls. Wilders is a good speaker but not an orator. (A warm-up speaker, a Christian convert from Islam, had already delivered the oratory.) He told the audience what they had come to hear, which no Australian politician (apart from Senator Cory Bernardi) seems willing to tell them: that liberal democracy and Islam are incompatible, that Islam treats women badly, that it oppresses Christians, Jews and humanists whenever it can, that Sharia law is often uncivilised. Wilders advised Australians to be more selective in the admission of immigrants. Moderate (that is, generally non-observing) Muslims may be saved for the open society but Islamists will always despise Australian liberal values. The audience applauded thunderously when he spoke up for Israel. It is, he says, the frontline of Western civilisation. That is why Islamists view its destruction as a religious imperative. (‘If Israel falls, we will all suffer the consequences.’)

So far no great problems. But Wilders lost me when he began his demonisation of Mohammed. If you want to win over the moderate Muslims, it is absurdly provocative to defame Mohammed as a terrorist, thief and paedophile. Apart from any scholarly uncertainties about Mohammed’s biography, it cannot advance the liberal cause to insult the moderates and their families, the very people we hope to convert. This is no doubt why the Liberal party has kept its distance from Wilders. Premier Barnett said he was not welcome in Perth. Premier Baillieu urged Melbourne people to ignore him. Neither gave good reasons for their advice but Tony Abbott put a case. He told Neil Mitchell on 3AW: ‘Let Wilders say his piece but there are very few lessons that Holland has to teach us when it comes to the integration of newcomers.’ None of these Liberal leaders can be dismissed as mere vote-grubbers (although all politicians keep an eye on ‘the Muslim vote’ and Abbott may have been gilding the lily when he described Muslims as ‘fair dinkum, dinky-di Aussies’). They are appealing to the fact that, even allowing for a couple of ugly incidents (Hyde Park, Cronulla), Australia has experienced none of the Islamicist murders and bombings that have characterised European countries. Is this luck or good management? Wilders warns Australians not to be self-satisfied. There are already 60 mosques in Sydney, he says ominously. ‘You need more brave politicians,’ he told his cheering audience. ‘I might even immigrate myself,’ he joked. Someone yelled: ‘Be our Prime Minister!’

We were in the State Library of New South Wales recalling the extraordinary life and adventures of the revolutionary feminist Teresa Brennan as chronicled in Fiona Harari’s A Tragedy in Two Acts: Marcus Einfeld & Teresa Brennan. Here she is in the 1970s, a student at Sydney University, squatting in Kings Cross terraces to save them from demolition, or swimming across White Bay to stop uranium yellowcake being loaded, or delivering ponderous papers on Lenin and ‘the women’s movement’. Then almost 30 years later, in December 2002, at 2 a.m. on a quiet rain-soaked suburban street in coastal Florida, a hit-and-run truck driver smashed the life out of her. Some asked if it was suicide. In those intervening 30 years after she left (or ‘fled’) Sydney she moved, sometimes spectacularly, to academic posts, including chairs, in Cambridge, Amsterdam, New York, Boston and Florida, and a Congressional position in Washington DC. She wrote several treatises, usually on psychoanalytic feminism. They were learned and dense, if not impenetrable. (Try reading History after Lacan.) They were always well reviewed. Throughout it all, her friends found her a passionate, fearless, prickly, visionary and charismatic life-changer. She was part Baron Munchhausen and part con but always unforgettable. She was also sometimes ‘scary’ and ‘a little bit loony’. The devil stalked her, she explained.

You may think her story has the makings of a tragic or perhaps tragi-comic novel. Fiona Harari has done the next best thing in her clear-eyed but sympathetic dual biography of Brennan and Marcus Einfeld. (Einfeld had told the court that Brennan had been the driver of his speeding car.) In the discussion in the State Library Harari agreed with me that Brennan’s books are incomprehensible. But she added: ‘I am not part of her target audience nor, I suspect, are you.’ She is right. Yet those unreadable books are Brennan’s legacy. They still capture something of the triumphs and disasters of revolutionary feminism — and of the sad, exemplary life of Teresa Brennan.

The post 2 March 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.