‘Mr Rudd said Labor would take asylum-seekers who had been rescued from leaky boats to Christmas Island, and would turn back seaworthy vessels containing such people on the high seas. This would mean close co-operation with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the Indonesian government.’

No, it’s not a joke. The above is a report from the Australian of an interview Kevin Rudd gave Paul Kelly and Dennis Shanahan on 23 November 2007, two days before the Federal Election that swept him to power. Mr Rudd’s betrayal of the Australian electorate on border security outstrips even the most infamous broken promise of recent times, the implementation of the carbon tax by the current (at the time of going to press) Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

Yet in what must surely be the most perverse irony in Australian politics, the Labor caucus is agonising over whether to go back to Mr Rudd as their leader in the hopes of improving their chances at the forthcoming election. They must have a death wish, especially if they are serious about winning back the working-class and aspirational voters of Sydney’s western suburbs. Boat people are a toxic subject in what was once Labor’s heartland.

Mr Rudd has espoused so many different positions that he leaves virtually any sober person with the impression that his arguments are always dodgy. Simply put, he lacks deep conviction, gut instinct and will power. That is why he leads no movement, is spokesman for no cause and has no real cheer squad. Nothing better demonstrates the point than his chronic flipping and flopping over border protection.

Consider: within months of his tough talk about turning the boats back, he ended offshore processing and Temporary Protection Visas, despite warnings at the time from the Australian Federal Police that these measures would encourage people-smugglers. Almost immediately, the boats started to arrive in ever-greater numbers.

Then, in April 2009, as the first of what would become thousands of deaths at sea were reported, Mr Rudd’s only solution was to froth at the mouth in one of his typically impotent tirades: ‘People-smugglers are engaged in the world’s most evil trade and they should all rot in jail.’ (Can Robert Manne, David Marr and Christine Milne ever imagine Philip Ruddock using such language?)

Then, in June 2010, on the eve of being turfed out by his own party, Mr Rudd in his panic promised: ‘If I return I will be very clear of one thing: this party and government will not be lurching to the right on the question of asylum-seekers.’

If Labor re-install this most malleable character, they must be every bit as desperate as those who take to the high seas in leaky boats.

The real deal-makers

Even the nation’s greatest deal-maker recognised that resolving this particularly nasty conflict was beyond his formidable powers. A decade running the ACTU, four terms as PM and broker of the nation’s legendary Accord still didn’t leave Bob Hawke feeling sufficiently equipped to wade into the bog that is the Gillard vs Rudd pact of mutually-assured destruction. Either that or he realised that it would leave a rather unpleasant whiff around him in his twilight years. No wonder he was suddenly ‘unavailable’.

It was telling that so drained of ideas are the Labor party these days that they can only look backwards in order to move forwards. Former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie’s suggestion that former Prime Minister Hawke step in as a ‘circuit-breaker’ to ‘resolve’ the current imbroglio is an apt metaphor for Labor’s lack of inspiration.

The undergraduate socialist mentality that infests today’s Labor party cannot see beyond the limited horizons of its own paranoia and self-obsession. Control. Regulate. Make deals. The idea that a prime minister should be imposed upon the electorate at the whim of a couple of party elders conjures up images of men in ushankas anointing the next leader over Cuban cigars and vodka during intermission at the Bolshoi.

So, here’s a radical idea: why not insist that the choice of prime minister be made by those qualified to do so — the electorate?

The post Death Wish 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

Moreover, they see a society that is increasingly alien to them, one where stopping a resources project is more important than jobs, the wonders of same-sex marriage are more worthy than fathers in a traditional family and preserving a wilderness is more noble than building and constructing. In addition to that, I suspect that most men see quotas, affirmative action and the promotion of absurd schemes like the ALP’s Emily’s List for parliamentary candidates as an insult to them and an even greater insult to women. Now, on top of that, they find their Prime Minister, in her increasingly strident and caustic manner, stirring up division by claiming that without her, the country will fall into the hands of that most despised of species, men.

And the men who are about to take over will be the worst type, namely those wearing blue ties, a consequence so horrific it has not been seen since blue-tinged Pandorans of Avatar stalked the solar system. Then they hear the PM trying to link abortion to the influence of men, should she lose office.

So, men get the blame. The results have been known for some time: when men and boys see themselves as the victims of discrimination and the objects of blame, they will naturally lose their self-esteem. Thus, we have seen, for instance, a decline in the school results of boys, a difficulty in recruiting male teachers in government schools, a drifting away from traditional apprenticeships for boys and the almost complete disappearance of gentlemanly behaviour among young men. So far, and probably until the attacks on them fomented by the Prime Minister, men have kept their counsel and sought to assert their masculinity in their own way in activities like the rise of extreme and contact sports. But recent events seem to have been a bridge too far and men are reacting with their vote. Is it any wonder, then, that men, or enough of them to make a statistical difference, have reacted adversely to Gillard’s demonisation of them, her preoccupation with phony claims of misogyny and her recruitment of an exclusively female support group? Determined to make a protest, they have moved their vote to a more congenial refuge, the opposition and, in particular, its leader.

Nor has the Coalition become this congenial refuge by accident: men undoubtedly see Tony Abbott as a rugged individual who speaks his mind, makes mistakes like all men and is in touch with traditional views on manhood. Gillard watches sport; Abbott plays it.

As the election comes closer, the parties are no doubt working on their slogans for the campaign. As the Labor party is commendably concerned with education, I thought I would suggest one for them. It will be spoken by Ms Gillard against a backdrop of the morning sun as she poses for the television news and says with an air of conviction: ‘No school will be worse off under a government I lead.’

In case you think I am anti-Gillard, this might even up the balance. I was surprised to hear Barrie Cassidy announce on Insiders last week that Julia Gillard would not lead the Labor party to the next election. His panellists all express opinions, but at least they talk around the issue, give the evidence and their conclusions. In contrast, Cassidy’s ex cathedra pronouncement was a statement of established fact from on high, with all the authority of a signature ABC program. I question whether it was appropriate for the ABC in effect to take a position on a political issue like the leadership of a party. Speaking of Insiders, it really is becoming ponderous and the interviews are lame, with milksop questions and no follow-up on evasive answers. The rest of the show seems unstructured, with nothing to hold it together but the prospect of the hilarious cartoon segment. In contrast, Andrew Bolt’s show is lively, short and sharp, its main attraction being to watch the squirming ex-Labor politicians as they valiantly defend Ms Gillard and her government.

The post 19 June 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

put your pen down pet and rest here.
Midnight swallowing the mirror whole, swallowing

my mother in her pale blue slippers,
and my brother, my big brother in his too small bed.

Bed, the longed for stopped short sound delivering
us at last from sense-making. The trains

are empty, the magnolia trees are still, the tower block
has lost another dozen yellow squares but

they’ll fill up and we’ll fill too, and in tomorrow’s
morning we’ll awake, washed up again among

the bills.  Meanwhile, the stars are queuing up
to get behind your lids.  Come, give me your hand.

The post Nocturne appeared first on The Spectator.

The final episode of the aforementioned House of Cards contains a snap of Francis Underwood’s desk as his intriguing and plotting reaches its dénouement. On it, lies a copy of Robert Caro’s Passage of Power, the fourth and penultimate volume of his biography of Lyndon Johnson. The producers are clearly making a connection between the anti-hero Underwood and LBJ. This is a tenuous link. But I will take any opportunity to talk about the Caro masterpieces. There is a small but dedicated cross-party group of parliamentary admirers of Caro. It consists of, among others, Foreign Minister Carr, Shadow Attorney George Brandis, and Liberal and Labor backbenchers Jamie Briggs, Scott Ryan and Nick Champion, as well as your humble columnist. As among House of Cards aficionados, there is a degree of disagreement over which is the best volume. Some say that the latest edition, Passage of Power, which deals with Johnson’s ascension to the Presidency, is the best. Personally, I think it is very hard to go past the Pulitzer Prize-winning Master of the Senate. (This disagreement crosses party lines. While Nick Champion and I vote for Master of the Senate, we are joined by Senator Scott Ryan, while Mayo MP Jamie Briggs gives his vote to Passage of Power.)

In Master of the Senate, Caro captures Johnson’s ability to cajole and control a legislative chamber. It is also as good a social and political history of America over those decades as you will read anywhere and a remarkable guide to the inner workings of the congressional system of the time, which still has relevance today. Caro also provides a compelling backstory for the main protagonists. Johnson, for example meets Richard Russell of Georgia and becomes a key acolyte of the senior senator. There follow 40 or so pages of background on Russell which serves as perfectly suitable mini-biography. But whichever you prefer, the LBJ series of biographies has earned its place in the pantheon of the best political writing. The attention to detail is compelling. For the first two volumes, Caro and his equally impressive and learned wife went to live in the Texas hills to immerse themselves in the world of young Lyndon Johnson of Johnson County to inform every detail of the early story. The second volume, Means of Ascent, tells the remarkable story of Johnson’s less than above-board election to the Senate in 1948 in much, never before revealed detail. Johnson is a man who does bad things to achieve very good means. A combination of this intriguing personality with Caro’s almost obsessive dedication to detail and sympathetic but not hagiographic approach to Johnson’s career makes this series of biographies a must-read. Because of Caro’s meticulous nature, it is likely to be several years before we see the emergence of the fifth and final volume. In the meantime, it would be good to get the 77-year-old Caro out to Australia for a speaking tour to discuss this and more. If I knew anybody who worked at the US Studies Centre, maybe I could ask them to arrange such a coup.

Last week, this column suggested that Malcolm Fraser sounds like a Greens candidate for the Senate these days. On cue, Fraser took to Twitter to recommend a vote for the Greens in the Senate to deny either party a majority there. I suppose if one party had a majority in the Senate they might do something outrageous like block supply.

The post Across the aisle appeared first on The Spectator.

An emergency meeting of Cabinet was held in Canberra later in the morning. Copies of the departmental submissions, to which are added ‘talking points’ supplied by ministerial staffers, have fallen into my hands. They are reproduced below.

Chief of the Navy

Questions may be asked as to how six naval vessels could unload these asylum-seekers undetected. All Defence White Papers have declared that the threats to Australia will come from the north. Accordingly ships and resources are concentrated in that region. Plans have regularly been made to relocate the ships berthed in Sydney Harbour to Jervis Bay (which is Commonwealth territory, close to Bateman’s Bay) but they have never been actioned because governments of both parties have accepted it would constitute hardship to require the wives of senior naval officers to move from Sydney to Jervis Bay.

Talking point: It is fortunate that the Coalition is not in power for it may have attempted to stop these boats, with disastrous consequences.

Chief of the Army

Most of our infantry battalions are stationed in Townsville and Darwin. Only a small force of 1,000 men, lightly armed, could be assembled in the next few hours. They could attempt to stop the progress of the asylum-seekers at a strategic point where the Canberra road ascends through the coastal range. If the asylum-seekers persisted with their intention of reaching Canberra, they would have to be resisted by force. A holding operation awaiting the arrival of heavier weaponry would nevertheless involve casualties. It should be considered whether the Australian people are ready to see sacrifices of, say, 100 or 200 service personnel in such an operation. It has become the practice of the Prime Minister and leader of the opposition to attend funerals of all service personnel who die in action. Attendance at this number of funerals might be thought too serious an interruption to the business of government. There would also be an increase in the number of cases of post-traumatic stress disorder. At a time of cutbacks to the defence budget, we are under pressure to keep these to a minimum.

On balance, the Army considers that even if the government’s legal advisers decide that these soldiers can be considered an invading force, it would be more advisable to treat them as asylum-seekers and not impede their march to Canberra.

Talking point: If any person or group calls these asylum-seekers an invading force, they should be criticised as racists and xenophobes.

Department of the Attorney-General

There is nothing in the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees or its 1967 Protocol that would prevent soldiers in uniform carrying weapons from making a claim for asylum. It is certain that the High Court would adopt this position if the matter were litigated there. The leading refugee advocacy group has been informally consulted. It confirms that it would run a case on behalf of any soldier whose claim for asylum was not considered. It would seek special government funding in order to run what would be a landmark case.

Talking point: Australia would be failing in its international obligations if it did not treat the Chinese soldiers as asylum-seekers and consider their claims. There is no such thing as an illegal arrival.

Department of Immigration

An assessment has been made of facilities for accommodating 10,000 asylum-seekers in Canberra. Option 1 is the oval, grandstand and exhibition sheds of the Canberra Showgrounds. Option 2 is the largest building in the city, Parliament House.

The facilities at the Showgrounds would be adequate, but since tyrannical regimes have often used sports stadia to hold detainees, this option might cast doubt on whether the government’s policy of a humanitarian treatment of asylum-seekers was being followed. No such objection could be made to Option 2. It will be remembered that the Chinese President addressed a joint sitting of the Houses so a strong association between this building and China already exists. Fortunately parliament is not in session and only a skeleton staff remains. If these were re-located to the Showgrounds, the whole building would be available to the asylum-seekers. It is assumed they carry some form of bedding and cooking equipment. The asylum-seekers would have to be supplied with rice but the cost of staffing the restaurants, coffee lounges and so on would be avoided.

Talking point: Only the Labor government with its policy of accommodating asylum-seekers in the community could think of housing 10,000 Chinese soldiers in Parliament House.

The post Space invaders appeared first on The Spectator.

There are two significant events taking place in Aboriginal affairs. The Northern Territory government is intending to lock up drunks until they are rehabilitated, and the South Australian government is refusing to restore electricity on a remote settlement at Watarru on the APY lands. These proposals have aroused the ire of many in the Aboriginal industry, and yet they herald a far more realistic response to Aboriginal despair than hundreds of programs that have preceded them.

As a Townsville-based program manager wrote in response to criticism of the NT government:

Every single day my homeless, alcohol-dependent clients get offered options that can change their lives. Very few voluntarily accept these options … The prison system is providing the dry-out but there are no concurrent programs in place in prison to move these persons towards sobriety on release. These programs, if implemented in prison, need to be mandatory.

Australia is now reaching the endgame of the separatist era in Aboriginal policy, and this volume is a stark reminder that there are insiders and outsiders in Aboriginal policy. The insiders write trash; the outsiders make sense.

Among 24 contributors to this volume, two make a standout contribution. These are Dave and Bess Price. Dave is married to Bess, the newly elected Aboriginal CLP member for Stuart in the NT parliament. Despite living in the midst of the real Aboriginal Australia, the one that needs help, the Prices are policy outsiders. If for no other reason, buy this volume and read their essay.

The Prices’ central argument is that some elements of traditional culture need to be discarded. One in particular, ‘demand-sharing’, is killing any chance of Aboriginal success.

An old man … kept complaining that although he had several sources of income he never had enough money … He was earning annually about the same as the Prime Minister. He acted like a financial funnel. In his culture an extended family grows in proportion to the income received by an individual … He continues to live in poverty despite his income.

The principles of the demand-share economy are very deeply ingrained, taught from the beginning of life. Conforming to the rules is deeply emotionally satisfying but completely rules out the ability to budget, or to plan, and invest in the future.

Another dispensable element of Aboriginal culture is the acceptance of violence. In criticising this, the Prices are joined by a fine essay by Stephanie Jarrett.

Refusing to conform to the rules in order to maintain personal or familial solvency can lead to verbal or physical assault. The much greater acceptance of interpersonal violence in small-scale societies leads to ferocious attacks on wives in particular and to ‘granny bashing’, the young assaulting the old to obtain the means to finance addictions to alcohol, ganja, or gambling.

The Prices and Jarrett describe a sick society. So what is to be done? In the first instance, take Anthony Dillon’s advice and don’t play the victim, and take Kerryn Pholi’s advice and stop silencing dissent. Brian Roberts identifies the worst offenders in the silencing game:

The present intellectual inbreeding in Indigenous academe requires urgent new blood. This can be done by accepting that both ‘radical’ Indigenous thinkers and well-informed non-Indigenous scholars could beneficially buck the illogical, inward-looking stance which has captured some [Indigenous Studies] Centres.

The next step is to read Helen and Mark Hughes’ forensic account of the 2011 Census. The good news is that the numbers who need help are relatively small.

These [remote discrete] communities concentrate the most dismal social indicators – lack of literacy and numeracy (45,000 men and women), poor health (diabetes, trachoma, otitis media) and low life expectancy.

About 20,000 were children … attending Indigenous schools … with failure rates often exceeding 90%.

Next is to heed the words of Alison Anderson MP, a colleague of Bess Price.

One of the things we have to do to make schools normal is introduce normal curriculum just as they have in Melbourne, London, or New York.

Next is to ask the question: is it possible to change the culture to which the Prices refer and teach English as Anderson wishes in remote Aboriginal communities? Helen and Mark Hughes argue that secure private property rights will help. Indeed they may, but many lives will be lost while that works its magic.

The alternative is to save the children by getting as many as possible to boarding school. There are many, such as Jonny Samengo, whose sentiments are wildly at odds with reality,

Australia’s Indigenous people had lived for 40,000 years without the need to build anything or own anything … [they] had lived with the land, not off it and they had stood the test of time in spectacular fashion.

but who, nevertheless, are doing good work by raising funds to purchase scholarships for Aborigines. Whether he and others are choosing those most in need is debatable, and there are less expensive boarding schools, but the direction and motives for schooling away from the horrors of bad culture are sound.

The last word should go to the Prices.

To proudly claim that we have in Australia the remnants of a culture that is the longest surviving living culture in the world and then insist that … we do whatever we can to keep what’s left of it intact is to condemn its practitioners to poverty, violence, and ignorance.

The post The end of separatism appeared first on The Spectator.

We should always be open to constructive dialogue with our nearest neighbours. But our policy must always be what is best for Australia and its people. In any case, there is another point we should be making to Indonesia: if you don’t like our policy of sending the boats back, don’t let them leave your waters. In fact, the opposition’s policy should now be expanded to say: ‘We will return the boats to the same port from which they sailed; if the boats won’t last the distance, we will fly the passengers there.’

The second and equally absurd principle now being concocted is that the Navy has some sort of right of veto over government policy, especially if things look dangerous. It is as if the Duke of Wellington, surveying the field at Waterloo, had said: ‘This battle is not on; if I charge the French they might shoot back.’ Of course the armed forces can give advice, but they are completely out of order debating the issue in public or giving background briefings on its alleged dangers. Such a practice is contrary both to the separation of powers and the more basic principle that the armed forces should carry out the lawful orders of the elected government.

I may be slow on the uptake, but I admit it was only last week I learned that, although we pay millions to stop the boats, we then pay the refugees if they succeed in getting here. Deluded me; I had thought we looked after them and gave them basic sustenance while their applications for refugee status were being sorted out. No doubt that eccentric belief was encouraged by the fact that they had, after all, come into this country illegally, despite what the celebrity refugee lawyers tell you. In fact, next time you hear a self-appointed spokesman tell you that asylum-seekers who come here by boat are acting lawfully, ask them why so many paragraphs of the Refugee Convention use the word ‘illegally’. Anyway, I always thought that as they were here illegally and as they had broken through our border security, such as it is, we certainly would not be rewarding them for a successful voyage. But no, I was wrong. We pay them a success fee for getting here. I owe my enlightenment on this subject to the ABC, which showed a program over the weekend which checked out some new arrivals and analysed the benefits they receive. Without getting too jingoistic about it, I must say that I was surprised to hear about the living allowance, more surprised to hear about the rent allowance and still more surprised to hear the tenor of the questions from the clients, as they are now called, the most forthright of which was whether the government would also pay their rent when they found a property. (The immigration official running the briefing did not know.) No doubt the details of this apparently unlimited largesse are relayed back to the refugee assembly points in Indonesia and elsewhere as an additional incentive to make the perilous voyage to Australia. Is it any wonder there is a wholesale revolt brewing in Australia at the persistent waste of taxpayers’ money on patching up government incompetence?

But I wonder if the opposition’s alternative policy on border control is strong enough. The real point about having a tough policy is not simply to be tough, but to make it clear to people-smugglers and their customers that the game is up and that it is worthless even to try. So a public announcement by the alternative government that it will consider renouncing the refugee convention, that illegal entrants will be prosecuted, that no one coming by irregular means will ever be considered for settlement and that there will in any case be a reduction in the number of refugees we take from anywhere, will finally get the message across that the illegal trade is at an end.

Finally, my source inside the court of King Mswati III of Swaziland has brought to my attention a new ground for claiming refugee status generated by the claims of a young lady who escaped from his majesty’s harem and who is now hiding out in Birmingham. She is claiming refugee status on the ground that the king wants to make her his 14th virgin bride, he being allowed by Swazi custom to claim such a prize as part of the local droit de seigneur. Odd as it seems, her claim seems no less plausible than some of the other far-fetched claims successfully pursued in the UK and, of course, in the home of refugee ingenuity, Australia.

The post 15 June 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

When I first met Christopher Pearson I was a newly elected backbench MP in the South Australian Parliament. We struck up a firm friendship based on our mutual interest in politics and religion. Under his tutelage, my interests broadened to include music, the arts and literature.

He enjoyed taking people under his wing and it was always interesting to see Christopher with the young. While generally speaking he was of the ‘children should be seen and not heard’ school, he enjoyed engaging with those young people in whom he detected a spark of intelligence. Much of his time was taken with mentoring young prodigies, the most notable being the celebrated pianist and author Anna Goldsworthy.

Christopher had a gift for friendship. I think it was this as much as his writing that led Tony Abbott to describe him as ‘the glue that held conservative Australia together’. His greatest pleasure was derived from introducing people and seeing new friendships bloom in their own right. He wanted to share his friends, not hoard or jealously guard them. Christopher certainly provided me with an entrée to prominent Australians in politics, journalism and the arts with whom I couldn’t otherwise have hoped to form friendships.

Much has been written about his homosexuality and what might superficially appear to be the contradictions in his life. He was a lover of the 1970s South Australian Chief Justice John Bray, and deeply involved in the campaign to decriminalise homosexual relations. But refusing to conform to gay ideology made him a hate figure to some on the Left.

Christopher didn’t define himself by his sexual orientation. In his essay ‘The dubious business of coming out’ in Peter Coleman’s Double Take, he traces his growing disenchantment with Gay Lib. As the movement went from being mild and middle-class to increasingly ideological and authoritarian, he fell out. He hated the pressure to ideologically conform and was uncomfortable at the way some homosexuals were pressured to come out and the unnecessary pain that was caused.

This led to a lifelong antipathy towards identity politics. His later interest in indigenous policy, especially his crusade on the Hindmarsh Island Bridge affair, was borne of these early experiences.

But what set him apart from other conservatives was his breadth of interests. He went beyond the home turf on which conservatives feel most comfortable: economics, industrial relations and fiscal policy. He wanted to do battle with the Left in the policy areas where they had traditionally gone unchallenged: indigenous policy, the arts and the just treatment of same-sex couples.

Christopher wasn’t as easily pigeonholed as many of his friends and enemies would make out. He was, to use a term coined by George Orwell, a Tory Anarchist. If you were to attempt to find a common theme in his writing it might be best summed up in a line from a letter Orwell wrote to Malcolm Muggeridge: ‘The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.’

Thus he found allies from across the political spectrum and considered himself the unofficial patron of ‘Club Sensible.’

In 1999, he became a Catholic. I was coming home late one night from an ALP branch meeting when the phone rang. It was Fr Ephraem Chifley OP. ‘Pearson has submitted to Rome. I’m receiving him tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. You’re his sponsor, and you’ll have to drive him.’

Dutifully, but a little sceptically, I called on Christopher at 7.30 a.m. to take him to church. Sure enough, there he was, ready and waiting. One thing about CP is that once he made his mind up about a matter, he went through with it.

He was given the Sacraments and began life as a Catholic. He took his faith very seriously, observing the fasts as well as the feasts, saying his prayers and attending Mass. He loved the splendour of the ancient form of the Mass, but hated the philistinism of parts of the Australian Catholic Church.

He loved poetry and published, edited and mentored many of this nation’s greatest poets, including Les Murray. It was his love of beauty that drew him back to the Christian faith and he drew great solace from the works of John Donne:

Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were
done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through
which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow’d in, a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thyself, that at my death
thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done;
I fear no more.

Christopher died peacefully in his sleep, on the Feast of the Sacred Heart, at the home that he loved.

The post A gift for friendship appeared first on The Spectator.

I was an old friend of Christopher Pearson, who died last weekend. It was he who persuaded me 15 years ago to serve on Tony Abbott’s ‘Australians for Honest Government’, which Abbott had set up to combat Hansonism. A couple of years earlier I had persuaded him to contribute his brilliant autobiographical chapter on homosexuality to a symposium I was editing for the publisher Jennifer Byrne called Double Take: Six Incorrect Essays. His essay, ‘The Ambiguous Business of Coming Out’, was at once memoir, manifesto and harbinger of his conversion to the Catholic faith. In recent years he wrote a weekly column for the Australian. His was a unique voice, at once liberal and conservative, learned and stylish — and more influential than he seemed aware. Tony Abbott’s brief and noble tribute to his ‘steadfast’ friend spoke for all who knew him.

The evening began with a bomb scare: an unattended bag in the grounds of the University of New South Wales. But it only delayed proceedings briefly. It was a Jewish conference of ideas open to the general public — Limmud-Oz. The session I attended was about the Iranian Bomb. Credible commentators of all political persuasions tell us Iran will have the capacity for its Bomb later this year — unless Israel or America has already taken out the bomb-making facilities. One speaker — born, bred and tortured in Iran before he escaped to Australia — saw the madmen of Teheran as a threat not only to Israel but to the world. Iran, a richer country than Australia, entered a black hole in 1979 and is now controlled by thought police who make school children chant every day ‘Death to America! Death to Israel!’ Israel, he said, should pre-emptively bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities without waiting for US approval. Asked if there was any hope of an Iranian ‘Spring’, he said: ‘No!’ Other speakers were more cautious. One thought the mixture of diplomacy, sanctions and deterrence (Mutual Assured Destruction) could still save Israel from a nuclear attack. Another thought that even without using the Bomb Iran has already killed the dream of Zionism which promised a safe haven for Jews from all over the world. ‘Now you feel safer in Sydney or Melbourne than in Tel Aviv.’ He thanked God he did not have to decide whether or not to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. He prayed the decision be made wisely. Iran will pass ‘the red line’ at about the time of the Australian federal election.

The years Lucy Sullivan covers in her ‘sociological memoir enhanced by statistics’ (False Promises: Sixties philosophy against the church) are roughly those of my own life. So I wondered what she made of it all and sent off for a copy. It will be a bit hardline for some readers. Her general view is that the first half of the 20th century was conservative and family-centred, the second half liberal or liberationist. More precisely she characterises the first half as the age of the family-related basic wage, marriage-related widow’s pension and child endowment, shotgun marriages, stay-at-home mums, fault-based divorce, high church attendance. The underlying idea was the Christian idea of family. But in the second half of the century, more easy-going ideas of social welfare prevailed — easy divorce, easy abortion, sole-parent benefits — along with working mums and falling church attendance. It also meant the False Promises of her title. She sees 1963 as a turning point. It ushered in rising rates of divorce, ex-nuptial births, violent crime and religious disbelief — not to mention homeless youth, drug abuse and epidemics of sexual disease. The solution? Basically it’s back to the Ten Commandments. I doubt that Sullivan will convince many liberals. But her statistics are worth recording bluntly. The big gap in her ‘memoir’ is the failure to give more than a few lines to sexual abuse of children in the churches, especially since she puts the church front and centre in the title of her ‘memoir’.

‘As a journo,’ said Tony Abbott the other day, ‘I was a frustrated politician. As a politician, I am a frustrated journalist.’ It was in his apology for being unable to attend a reunion of journalists from the now defunct Bulletin — the famous magazine that ran from the hanging of Ned Kelly through to the self-immolation of John Howard. What did Abbott mean? A journalist has some advantages. He can be wrong, inconsistent, immoral or drunk, and get away with it. For a politician, these are often fatal. An MP, let alone a leader and likely prime minister, is expected to be more disciplined. He may regret the old free-and-easy journalistic days but he would rather be prime minister than editor-in-chief. The meanest politician in the land would rather be inside the party or caucus room than standing outside waiting for handouts or leaks. But he must not become too self-important. One false step, and the journos pounce, especially if he is a conservative. He has to remember the advice Premier Bob Askin used to give to candidates back in the 1960s: ‘Whatever you do, don’t be caught in bed with the campaign director’s wife!’ He was only half joking.

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Ancient Greeks were fascinated by the subject. The myth of Pro-metheus (‘Fore-sight’) and Epi-metheus (‘Hind-sight’) laid the foundations. Prometheus, principal champion of mortal men, warned Epimetheus not to accept any gifts from the gods. Epimetheus ignored the advice and was persuaded by Hermes to marry the luscious Pandora, who brought with her a jar filled with all the world’s evils. She foolishly opened it, leaving only hope inside for mortals to cling to. Greek tragedy was full of men like Oedipus, convinced they had got things right, only to find they had got them tragically wrong. The historian Herodotus painted Xerxes, king of the Persian army defeated in the Persian wars by the Greeks (481-479 bc), as a man surrounded by advisers and infallibly choosing the wrong option at every turn.

But was it ever possible to get things right? Athenian intellectuals thought, on balance, that it was. After all, careful prognosis enabled Greek doctors to foresee the course of a disease; and Greek sophists claimed that, by understanding how humans thought and reacted, the successful politician could always persuade people to his cause. So in the belief that human psychology could be understood and manipulated, the art of persuasion was widely taught. Thucydides, historian of the Peloponnesian Wars between Athens and Sparta (431-404 bc), saw in Pericles the exemplar of one who ‘knew what needed to be done’ and could persuade the Athenians to do it.

And the EU? In 1971 the great economist Harry Johnson published an article laying out the consequences of monetary integration. In almost every respect, he described the disaster we see today. This was not black magic. It was elementary economic analysis. One cannot expect apologies or regrets from Eurocrats, but a period of silence on their part would, one feels, be welcome.

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