Diary

Saturday, 19th November 2011

The alarm wakes me, my wife and the dog at 4 a.m. I’m beginning my tortuous journey from Adelaide to New York, but not with Qantas. I’m a brand loyalist but the baggage handlers are on strike so I take an American carrier. The unions are well and truly back. In 2007 we boasted industrial disputes had fallen to their lowest level since the first world war. But with a Federal government which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the unions, industrial action is back in vogue. Five hundred Qantas flights were cancelled in October, affecting 70,000 passengers. Then Alan Joyce closed the airline. You can’t help but admire him. He has shown real guts and set a great example to business.

•••

American carriers are different from ours. I’m trying not to be judgemental but the cabin crew are quite, well, old. On average they are somewhere between my age and my mother’s age. Which is good, in a way. It means there are jobs in America for senior citizens. But it also means the union-dominated American operators are resistant to change. American carriers make very little money, if any, and are saddled with work practices which don’t reflect the modern world. Like Ansett. And Qantas.

•••

I’m starting to realise why there is such an aggressive reaction to government in the US from the Tea Party people. It’s not just debt they’re worried about. It’s freedom. The nanny state has gone mad. In one city, a youth is fined for wearing hipster jeans. I don’t like them, but banning them seems a little illiberal for the Land of the Free. I am nearly fined myself for smoking a small cigar outside my hotel. I have to go to a public park for a smoke. I go to see a friend at a major oil company and have to watch an occupational health and training video before being allowed into the building.

•••

I am in New York to spend two days with the UN Secretary General and the two community leaders of Cyprus. We go to an estate on Long Island called Greentree. It was built about 100 years ago by Jock Witney, a mega-rich socialite. It’s very much in the faux-English style so favoured by the American rich. It even has a Real or Royal tennis court. These are very rare, but I recall there is one in Melbourne and one in Hobart. I stay in the Princess Margaret room with signed photographs of the young, doe-eyed princess littering the mantelpiece. She was a Witney friend. Like many rich Americans, the Witneys were public-spirited and put the mansion and its land into a foundation to help promote peace. The UN now uses it for peace talks.

•••

The lesson is clear: if you tax people too heavily they will shrug their shoulders and say the State can take care of welfare and charitable works. If you let them keep some of their money, they’ll get involved with good works themselves. And that makes for a heathy society where even the rich realise they need to make a direct contribution to social welfare.

•••

Nabucco is on at the Met. Its Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves always brings tears to my eyes. The Jews were hated at the time of Nebuchadnezzar and many still hate them today. After thousands of years of persecution, they deserve a homeland which is secure and safe. But in today’s monde diplomatique, many don’t care about that. Attacking Israel is the fashion.

•••

On my last day in New York I address the UN Security Council. I make a ten-minute presentation and then each of the 15 members, represented by their Ambassadors, gives me their views. They are informed, but their varying narratives based on a single set of facts reminds me how hard diplomacy can be, particularly in a multilateral setting. No wonder they find it so challenging to agree on all the major issues facing the world; the Arab Spring, Iran, Burma, climate change, economics. These days there is no ideological difference between the members of the Security Council. Their differences are based entirely on national interest. Which tells multilateralists something about the reality of multilateral diplomacy; it’s just a bunch of countries pushing their own barrows, but in the one room.

•••

Before I leave I decide to go to Zuccotti Park to have a look at the Occupy Wall Street protest. I decide to occupy the protest myself by ambling through it as nonchalantly as I can. There’s nothing new about this crowd. Its the same old group of socialists, anarchists and ferals who were raging against globalisation a decade ago. Curiously, they don’t seem to have any message at all except that they hate banks and wealthy people. Well, without banks we’d be back in the Dark Ages. What is astonishing is that so many of the American political establishment have lionised these ferals; Joe Biden, Democrat senators, Nancy Pelosi and even the President himself see them as a force for good. They are not.

•••

Finally I’m home. There is great excitement. Julia Gillard is part of a new trans-Pacific free trade agreement announced at APEC in Honolulu. But hang on: I remember this being set as an APEC objective five years ago. And we already have a free trade agreement with most of the nine countries involved. Spin over substance again. And when President Obama arrives, he announces the Marines will use Darwin for forward positioning. This initiative was launched by Brendan Nelson and me with Dick Cheney in 2006. I’m glad a Howard-Bush initiative has been embraced by Gillard and Obama. Which reminds me of our friends in Zuccotti Park. They do have one point; the current crop of political leaders are just spinmeisters.

Alexander Downer was foreign minister from 1996 to 2007

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Michal Petelczyc

December 10th, 2011 2:37am Report this comment

Downer was an absolute failure as a foreign minister. His main drive was to travel overseas on taxpayer funded jaunts with his wife and family, making sue, always, that he was photographed with the hoi polloi. Contrary to his words above, neither he nor Nelson had anything with troops in Darwin. His bleat about taxes is an obnoxious. His party when in government imposed the highest taxes in Australia's history. I am surprised his statements were published without the Spectator verifying the veracity of them. It's odd he's never written about his public jokes about battery of women and when a minister, him being caught in suspenders and stockings. I suggest the Spectator research that...