Australian Notes

Saturday, 8th October 2011

Few issues have provoked upholders of free speech more than the Bolt case. Everyone knows the judge was judicially applying the statute to the words Andrew Bolt wrote in his newspaper columns a couple of years ago. But that only adds to the sense of shock or outrage. It means not just that the law is an ass but that we have been living under an asinine law ever since the Keating government introduced it in 1995. Their best hope now is an appeal to a higher court and ultimately to a new government. But the hundreds of liberals who endorsed the statement of principles published this week in the Australian by the Institute of Public Affairs would be foolish to blind themselves to the reactionary passions of the many who welcome any restrictions on free speech and want more of them.

Take the IQ2 debate last weekend in the Sydney Opera House, broadcast, we were told, to 80 million people in 25 countries. The proposition debated was ‘The media have no morals’. (Decoded this meant ‘Conservative journalists have no morals’.) Leading for the proposition, Stephen Mayne was applauded whenever he named a conservative or independent journalist or broadcaster he wanted sacked for lèse majesté: Miranda Devine, Piers Akerman, Col Allan, Glen Milne, Alan Jones, not to mention the unspeakable Andrew Bolt. Mayne had no problem with the idea of licensing journalists. He was not distracted by the suggestion that this is the technique used by dictators from Hitler to Mugabe to enforce a servile press. But his ultimate target remains Rupert Murdoch, who started out in Camberwell in Melbourne and has passed more than 40 years poisoning the wells of journalism around the world. Compared with Mayne, Senator Bob Brown, who supported him, was almost moderate. He reserved his contempt for ‘Mr Alan Beresford Jones AO’. Senator Brown also had no problem with licensing journalists. ‘They licence brothels, don’t they?’ The feisty Egyptian-American Mona Eltahawy also supported Mayne — but more cautiously: after her experience of Hosni Mubarak she is ‘allergic’ to licensing.

From the opposing side, Julian Burnside QC spoke up for journalists, especially those on the Left. He commended Michelle Grattan (cheers) and David Marr (loud cheers). He also praised Hedley Thomas of the Australian for his coverage of the Haneef case (confusion).We need more programs like Media Watch, Burnside said. We must read Fairfax, stop listening to talkback radio and quadruple the ABC’s budget (tumultuous cheers). He apologised again, sincerely he said, to Tony Abbott for his ‘paedos in speedos’ insult. Hamish Hamilton of Channel Ten reminded us that George Negus (cheers) has higher ratings than Bolt. (It’s the ABC and Insiders who are to blame, he said, for Bolt’s national fame.)

The strongest defence of journalists was made by Kate Adie, acclaimed former BBC war reporter. All over the world, she said, journalists face prison, torture and death to deliver their reports. (She has bits of a Sarajevo bullet in one of her toes.) You cannot stick it out in this trade without morals. If you vote for this motion, she warned the audience, you have no morals! As it happened, the vote was almost 51 per cent against the motion that journalists have no morals, 45 per cent for it, and four per cent undecided. It was a near thing. But there should be no doubt. It was a narrow defeat for licensers and censors and a victory for journalists of the conformist Left, not for the likes of Andrew Bolt.

Tanya Plibersek, Minister for Social Inclusion, has her heart in the right place when she talks about how ‘beautiful’ she finds the pledge of loyalty to Australian and democratic values recited at citizenship ceremonies. She takes these values to include tolerance, mateship, the equality of men and women, a fair go for all, and multiculturalism. (God is optional.) She wants every child at school to take the pledge daily. She also wants the rest of us to learn it by heart. But it is one thing to take a solemn pledge on a special occasion, for example when adopting a new citizenship. It becomes much more restrictive, even sinister, when that pledge is turned into a set of dogmas with which we must conform. We absorb values by living them, not by codifying them. Let’s leave national ideologies to the dictatorships and struggle on in our familiar ways — informal but free. The Plibersek doctrine is, one might say, too ‘un-Australian’.

I finally caught up last week with the famous/infamous Stalinist documentary of the Spanish civil war, The Spanish Earth (1937), thanks to the film program of the NSW State Library. Many celebrated Americans helped make it: Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Orson Welles, Virgil Thomson, Lillian Hellman. Its propaganda for the Stalin-controlled government in Spain has that mix of the complacent idealism (of fellow-travellers) and the homicidal cynicism (of Stalinists) characteristic of the 1930s, the Pink Decade. (Dos Passos was quickly purged from the film as too liberal.) It was an enormous propaganda success in its day, but its awful falsity raises the question of what would have happened if the communists had won the Spanish civil war. One consequence would have been that under the Hitler-Stalin pact, Hitler would have got from Stalin what he could not extract from Franco: full access to Spain with who-knows-what influence on the outcome of the second world war. No wonder so many revisionists now believe that the right side won in Spain after all.

A footnote to the Bolt case: For better or worse it may well doom the proposed constitutional referendum.

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