As it happened, the boss liked the book and asked HarperCollins to rush ten copies to New York. I’m told he gave one to John Howard over dinner, along with a copy of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Niall Ferguson’s Reith Lectures. Mr Howard told Mr Murdoch he had already read The Lucky Culture and had agreed to launch it in Sydney.

Indeed he did, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which houses Tom Roberts’ ‘The Golden Fleece’, an image recording the industry and ingenuity of Australians barely a century after European settlement. One member of the arts community was incredulous when I told her the venue and the speaker for the launch. ‘John Howard?’ she asked. ‘In the Art Gallery?’

The notion that Labor is the friend of the arts and the Coalition is the party of philistines appears to persist despite all evidence to the contrary. In one of many unsolicited emails in response to my book, Mark Latham seized on my admission that I had given up soccer to barrack for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra as evidence of elitist tendencies. On the Chifley Research Institute website he claimed: ‘By any objective test, classical music, opera and ballet are insufferably boring.’ One cannot say the same about the former opposition leader, who may be insufferable but is rarely boring.

Keeping out of the culture war trenches was never going to be easy even if John Howard had not agreed to launch The Lucky Culture. There was a further setback when The Spectator Australia published a favourable review by Tony Abbott. In jumped Miranda Devine with a flattering column, followed by my old boss Piers Akerman. Why on earth had I agreed to my publisher’s suggestion that the cover should be blue?

Fortunately, Labor’s Chris Bowen came to my rescue, agreeing to launch the book in Western Sydney. My friend Michael Thompson recommended the Revesby Workers’ Club. I rang club president Daryl Melham. ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘But just remember I’m doing this for Chris and Michael, not the Australian.’

After John Howard’s speech at the Art Gallery, I recounted an incident in 2006 when the prime ministerial motorcade emerged from Kirribilli House to find its path blocked by a cyclist. In Australia, even the prime minister has to take his turn; he cannot pull rank, even when the cyclist realises who is behind him and deliberately slows down. It was time to own up. The boofhead on a bike was me.

It was nothing personal: I was merely reveling in the egalitarian moment. Indeed only the other week I was cycling home to my Kirribilli apartment when I looked over my shoulder to see Julia Gillard in the back of the Comcar. Sadly I was never able to slow down Kevin Rudd, although I suspect even he would now admit I might have been doing him a favour if I had.

I repeated the anecdote that evening in my speech at the Revesby Workers’ Club. ‘It’s a pity it wasn’t Bob Askin,’ heckled Daryl Melham. ‘He would have run you over.’

Jack Snelling, South Australia’s Health Minister, hosted the Adelaide launch at Parliament House. ‘I’m glad that at least you have given Mark Latham something to do,’ he said. Snelling told the gathering that The Lucky Culture was ‘a necessary read for those of us in the Labor party’ with one qualification: ‘You take too much of a Whiggish view of history, without a Tory awareness of the crooked timber of humanity.’ A reprimand from a Labor minister for lacking ‘a Tory awareness’ was a moment to treasure.

‘This book has had more launches than Nasa,’ Henry Ergas told me. And why not? Many within the beltway find its thesis puzzling. On the ABC’s Q&A, Tony Jones pressed me to define the insider class more clearly. Jon Faine on ABC Melbourne 774 insisted that cultural power was no match for wealth. Was I suggesting, he asked, that a humble radio presenter had more power than Gina Rinehart? ‘Yes,’ I replied, although it was plain he was not convinced. In suburban and rural Australia, however, the concept needs no explanation at all.

I am told by someone who subscribes to Crikey that Guy Rundle ran out of invective after a mere 2,000 words. That’s the problem with the cultural progressives this days: no stamina. Janet Albrechtsen’s column on The Lucky Culture gave him second wind, however. ‘The vaguely North Korean festival of journalist Nick Cater continues,’ he wrote. Peter Coleman told me Bob Ellis has called for the book to be pulped. For a first-time author, it was a proud moment.

The Lucky Culture was launched for the fourth time in Woy Woy, in the finest Thai restaurant on the Central Coast, where Goong served a magnificent feast for 60 or so guests. H.G. Nelson, aka Greig Pickhaver, told the audience that the good news is that there are 12 more launches to go. ‘I know Engelbert Humperdinck when he tours in July will be saying a few words. Wayne Swan’s offered to say a few words before the budget speech on Tuesday night. I think Prince Harry will be saying something at the christening of his nephew. And the big news, the breaking news is that Kevin Rudd — that’s right, Kevin Rudd — will be launching the book in Brisbane.’

The post Diary appeared first on The Spectator.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post 18 May 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

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.

It is unprincipled because it is not the role of government to waste vast sums of taxpayers’ money on schemes that have no logical hope of achieving their goals merely to satisfy the fickle fantasies of the few. Paying billions of dollars to private enterprise to pay for them to reduce their carbon emissions in order to mitigate against climate change is a fool’s errand in all but one set of circumstances: that the rest of the world comprehensively reduces their own emissions. CO2 knows no boundaries. Without action from all the major polluters, China, India, Russia and the US combined, Australia’s efforts are beyond futile. As Nigel Lawson remarked during his 2011 visit to these shores:

We’re not talking about Australian warming, or British warming. It’s global warming. And there have been a number of United Nations conferences to try and get a global agreement and China and India have made it absolutely clear that they’re not going to have their carbon emissions limited.

Since then, the European carbon price has plummeted, the US has abandoned cap and trade, and the rest of the world has avoided any meaningful action.

As Lord Lawson argued in his (now extremely prescient and relevant) 2008 book An Appeal to Reason, a wise government should instead be focusing not on mitigation but on adaptation.

The science of warming does not say that warming is catastrophic. That is what the propagandists say. There is no evidence to suggest that at all. There will be both positive and negative. Even the IPCC … say the most certain result of the warming which may or may not happen … is the reduction in cold-related mortality. On the health front there’ll be huge benefits. There may be other things that are harms. So, if you adapt, what you do is you reduce the extent of any harm … and you pocket all the benefits.

Human ingenuity, over the millennia, has shown an extraordinary ability to triumph over natural adversity. Predictions about the impact of climate change vary wildly, yet if the Coalition win government they intend squandering squillions on the Sisyphean task of ‘direct action’.

As our own columnist Charles Moore pointed out on the subject of adaptation, ‘It is a well-known feature of British culture that we usually come to the right view about something in the end, but only after we have indulged the wrong view for too long.’ Ditto Australia.

The Coalition should ditch Direct Action now. The only conceivable alternative is that they’ll end up walking away from it further down the track, after having wasted billions that should have been put to more productive use elsewhere.

Mugged by reality

It’s that time of year again, when the combined financial efforts of Australian taxpayers, NSW taxpayers and City of Sydney ratepayers (too bad if you happen to be all three) bring us the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

Lest we be accused of being churlish, allow us to point out that this magazine’s antipathy has nothing to do with not having been invited to share a stage with Bob Brown, Phillip Adams, Mia Freedman, Mike Carlton, Maxine McKew, Anne Summers, Monica Attard or any of the other worthy contributors.

As always, our concern is over who should be paying for such a luvvie-fest. Should Barry O’Farrell be committing taxpayers’ money to an event that prides itself on promoting the views of those who almost exclusively fit Nick Cater’s description of ‘plastic bag refuseniks’? (Incidentally, Nick himself pops up at the festival on Thursday — will the audience realise they themselves are the subject of his polemic?)

Yet again, Barry O’Farrell is showing himself to be conservative in name only. Where Campbell Newman was brave enough to challenge the notion that such events should be the responsibility of the taxpayer, O’Farrell and his team have donned their bike helmets to meekly pander to the inner-city cultural elites.

Or are we being too harsh? After all, perhaps the average taxpayer, struggling against endless traffic jams and lack of hospitals, can take pride in the fact his hard-earned salary is paying for such inspired forums as ‘I’m a Feminist — Can I Vajazzle?’ or listening to Brisbane writer Jo Sri explain how he spends his spare time philosophising about what to do with his spare time.

The post Ditch Direct Action appeared first on The Spectator.

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.

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Questioned about our debt levels in light of Gonski, the NDIS, Direct Action and Paid Parental Leave, Mr Costello was clear: ‘Wouldn’t you sit back and say, “Well, I can’t afford what I’ve got, maybe I should be spending less,” rather than saying, “I can’t afford what I’ve got so I will spend some more?”’ The man many voters wish were the next prime minster has not only laid out the best possible path for a future Coalition government (‘we won’t spend more than we’ve got’), but also generously provided the epitaph that deserves to be chiseled onto the headstone of the Gillard experiment (‘we always spent what we never had’).

The most successful political leaders have the knack of presenting the bottom line in ways that resonate with the man or woman in the street. Unfortunately, the Coalition refuses to embrace Mr Costello’s simple, straightforward plan, preferring instead to contort themselves into semantic knots in order to cling to previous political commitments. A few sound thinkers — and one relentless self-promoter on the Opposition backbench — are now calling for the scrapping of Tony Abbott’s Paid Parental Leave scheme, the cost of which is estimated to rise to $5.3 billion in 2016-17.

Even Joe Hockey, by far the most natural performer among the senior members of the Coalition, looked uncomfortable and unconvincing this week as he struggled to reconcile an excessively generous middle-class scheme and brand new levy on business with his prior rhetoric about entitlements.

As Rowan Dean points out on page ix, by committing to this and other expenditure on the never-never, the Coalition is undermining what should be the perfect conservative narrative of small government and economic management. In doing so, Mr Abbott and his colleagues are leaving themselves open to the criticism that they are just as wedded to profligacy-when-it-suits and double standards as those on the left. ‘The reckless spending must stop’ was one of Kevin Rudd’s many ironic battle cries. Until recently it was a phrase Mr Abbott sought to appropriate for his own ends. He should stick to it.

After six years of Labor, industry, small business and the electorate deserve to know that an incoming Coalition government is unequivocally committed to restoring productivity while attacking European-style entitlements. The latest emergency-level interest rate cut makes it clear the RBA is concerned our economy is comatose. Mr Costello is right. All new spending programs must be put on the back burner until such time as we can afford to pay for them.

Climate change wags off

‘As a Prime Minister, she makes a very good education minister’ was one of the more amusing — and accurate — tweets during Julia Gillard’s lengthy ‘High School Showdown’ on Q&A recently. Almost certainly Ms Gillard would have made a more effective and successful schoolteacher than she has a Prime Minister. There was much to admire about the way she communicated with the kids; prepared to admit to her own moments of self-doubt, and offering inspiration and encouragement. Her obvious rapport and ability to get on the same wavelength as some of her more unusual interlocutors was impressive.

Needless to say, ‘sexism’ got a good run, morphing into rape culture, violence against women, ‘sauntering down the road in the middle of the night’ and other topics. Slightly disingenuously, Ms Gillard allowed the assertion to go unchallenged that ‘women [in politics] are faced with sexism every day in every way.’ Really? Tellingly, her famed bête noire Tony Abbott, once the convenient excuse for every ill in the world, didn’t rate a single mention.

Even more noticeable by its absence was the topic that until recently was guaranteed to fire up any idealistic school student: the ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’, climate change. After all the pain of the carbon tax, soaring energy bills, jobs lost or pushed overseas, floor prices abandoned, tax cuts cancelled, global gabfests collapsing and economic activity stymied in the name of ‘saving the planet for future generations’, how disappointing that those future generations themselves seem to have lost all interest in what was so recently a matter of such great national importance.

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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.

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