Enduring resolve to fight for freedom and the truth.

That was the leading front-page headline on The Weekend Australian following the retirement of Rupert Murdoch.

The breathtaking and brazen falsity of the headline proves the opposite.  Rupert Murdoch had just agreed to pay more than $US 760, 000,000 to victims of lies that he had consciously promoted at Fox News.  In that he was aided by his son and successor, Lachlan Murdoch.  Who had committed a most grievous error of judgment by suing a publication for libel for saying just that.  And then he ran up the white flag.

Paul Kelly was just one of those who described Rupert Murdoch as the ‘most successful business man in Australian history’.  What are the criteria of such greatness or success?  Money – et praeteria nihil .  It matters not if in the course of amassing the fortune you become one of the most loathed people in the nation. 

On that basis, Alan Joyce would be a strong contender.  And he never put capital at risk.  Au contraire, they kept throwing millions of dollars at him while he trashed the business.  (And when Judas got found out, he at least had the courtesy to throw away the bribe and hang himself.)

But while Joyce trashed a brand, the Murdoch family through Fox News have trashed a nation.  And its failings and current stresses now threaten the whole world order.

All for money.  For Rupert and family.

The poison hit here.  John Howard said ‘At Wapping in the 1980s he stared down the print unions, thus striking a blow for free speech.’  A select poodle, Greg Sheridan, said ‘His contribution is overwhelmingly positive, his legacy magnificent.’

What is the family’s biggest lie?  The competition here is intense.  They say they are engaged in a battle of ideas and they seek after truth.  (Like the prophets of old in the desert?)

But they succumb to the bullshit of their own press.  Two of the richest people on the planet, one educated at Oxford and the other at Princeton (philosophy, no less), say they are standing up for the common people against bureaucracies and elites. 

So you can be magnificent, and utterly successful and above all others, but not elite.

Truth is dying at the hands of this malevolent family for the same old reason.  There’s one born every minute.

There are times when you really regret the demise of a sane sensible civil service in this nation. 

I sent a letter to the Melbourne address of the ACCC.  It contains a complaint from me as a consumer against what appears to me to blatantly anti-competitive behaviour that affects and harms about one in four Australians.  Its text is set out below – without the schedules.

Why did I entrust Australia Post with this task?  Because in the year of Our Lord 2023, this body that is there to look after us consumers against greedy corporates does not see fit to hand out on its website email addresses to those who want to help it do its job. 

Well, that is not quite true.  They trust the press to communicate with them by email – but not mugs like you or me.  So I twice sent the letter to the press email address and asked them to see it got to the proper person.  I got no response to either.  Perhaps I should have produced a press union card.

So, I go to my good Vietnamese friends at the Yarraville LPO, and get them to printout the letter and send it by registered mail.  Just half an hour out of my life.

It has just been returned to me marked: ‘Refused by receiver.  Must have a contact name on it.’

What kind of galah runs a shamble like this?  I was instantly reminded of the lady at ASIC who after I had told them of my change of address told me I had to fill a form in with the same information.  Did she want me to jump the counter and become a filing clerk for the afternoon?

What we have is a slow collective death of the mind brought to us by robots and the ACCC now going head-to-head with ASIC for the worst run department in Australia.

And don’t worry, I know better than to ask who is ‘responsible’.  That word is dead and buried.  Pentecostally.

Letter that the ACCC refused to accept

ACCC

Level 17, 2 Lonsdale St,

Melbourne, 3000

Dear ACCC,

Strata Community Association (SCA)

I write to state my concern about the activity of the SCA and one of its members The Body Corporate Collective Pty Ltd. 

The background is set out in my letter to the Minister CAV which is the First Schedule to this letter.

My post of 26 March, 2023 is in the Second Schedule.

The Third Schedule contains one form of the Appointment of The Body Corporate Collective by my owners corporation.  I can provide a true copy when I get an email address for that purpose.

This whole area is a legal minefield, but two questions arise that I raise with you.

First, did CAV approve the terms of the SCA standard form?  I await the response of CAV.

Secondly, is the SCA acting lawfully in endorsing this form of agreement and encouraging its members to use it?

I refer to my post generally, and in particular to the following.

Anti-trust law is not my strong suit, but consider this. 

A group of participants in a market have the power to dominate it to the point of holding a monopoly.  The market is controlled and rendered exclusive by government licensing.  The service providers combine to form standard terms of agreement between suppliers of their services and those wishing to purchase them.  The object and effect of one term is twofold.  It reduces competition between suppliers.  And it imposes hardship on purchasers by depriving them of basic common law rights in a manner that would not have been accepted by parties negotiating at arms’ length in a free market.

What do our competition laws have to say about this?

The issue may I suppose be clouded by the power of a tribunal under a state act to declare terms unfair, but I would not think it was appropriate for state or federal regulators to leave it to people to fight it out.  They could go mad or bankrupt in the process.

I may say that in my view there is a real issue about whether this document was ever validly executed.  I do not know if the owners got independent legal advice.  I suspect the response may have been ‘You can take it or leave it.’  I doubt if there was a resolution of the owners, and the Victorian act states the usual prohibition of delegation by a delegate.  Other parts of the act, which follows the old public company model, may give rise to technical arguments – which are for another day.

The only other thing I would say now is that litigating these issues is beyond the means of most owners and indeed at risk of being too hard for many courts and tribunals.

I am happy to discuss this further.  As I remarked to the Minister, a lot of Australians are affected by issues like these, and litigation has all the hallmarks of litigious misery – which is something I know about.

Yours truly,

Geoffrey Gibson

6/46 Fehon St,

Yarraville, 3013

18 September, 2023

He is small in stature, and unremarkable to look at.  He may have the small man syndrome.

He was not born to the purple, or anything like it.

He is an animal loving vegetarian.

He believes he can see into the German psyche – which means he believes that there is such a thing.

When younger, he dabbled in rebellion, if not revolution.

He has a grievance against the world – he believes that he has the answer, but too few people understand him.  He is a prophet rejected in his own nation.

He is therefore a thwarted champion lusting for revenge on the whole inferior ungrateful world.

If seen by a psychiatrist now, he would be diagnosed as suffering from ‘chronic megalomania, paranoia and moral derangement.’

His ego is such that he has few if any friends.  He treats badly any of those who do not see or accept his superiority.

He has a longing for the hero (held) – especially a Teutonic one.

He believes that one great man can make all the difference.

He dreams of a massive building to be his shrine forever.

He has an immense power to appeal to, if not hypnotise, Germans – as a people.  He lives to captivate and control his followers.  It is a lust for power.

And he knows he has this gift, and he goes over the top to exploit it in order to bring his audience under his power.  They feed off and incite each other.  And neither feels any qualms about the process – which can subvert their own agencies of self-control.  That means that the mob can and does surrender to him.

He believes that Jewish people belong to a different race that is inferior to that of the German people and are a threat to the German nation.

By and large, and with some give and take, each such statement could be applied to Adolf Hitler and Richard Wagner.  I am not suggesting that one is as evil as the other – merely that the concatenation puts a lot of people off the man Richard Wagner. 

And I am yet to meet the person who likes or even takes seriously his poetry.  Some can take the librettos seriously – but not me.

A friend of mine – if it matters, a lady of an earlier generation – said ‘It feels like another nail in the coffin of my childhood.’ 

That is so right.  Cleopatra, as was her wont, put it more largely.

O, withered is the garland of the war.

The soldier’s pole is fall’n; young boys and girls
Are level now with men. The odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.

Offhand, I cannot think of any person who had as much living impact on the way I see the world and my tiny place in it.  I set out below my views on Ron Barassi in one of four books about the books and people who have furnished my mind – and defined my place in the world. 

Whatever else might be said of Barassi, he was not immortal.  But in the name of heaven, my world is not the same without him.

This whole town will stop when we put him down, and so it bloody well should.  He left us as our elder.

BARASSI

The Life Behind the Legend

Ron Barassi and Peter Mc Farline

Simon and Schuster, Australia, 1995  Rebound in half leather, red and blue.

When you get into your 70’s, you are tempted to say that we did things better in our time.  It’s almost always bullshit, just as it was always bullshit to be told that your schooldays were the best days of your life.  But, in the name of God, some of us had it good in footy in the 50’s and 60’s.  Things are very different now – and try as I may, they don’t look to me as good now.  This book is about one of the reasons for the difference.

My Mum and Dad did not follow footy.  I chose Melbourne in about 1953 because it was the capital city.  I got a Melbourne jumper.  The secretary of the MFC, Jim Cardwell saw us running round and gave us season’s tickets.  I was too young to go.  Then on one memorable day with some other young believers, I walked to the house of Denis Cordner in Hartwell.  I wore number fifteen (the jumper of Athol Webb, a decoy full forward.)  Denis Cordner wore the number one guernsey and was the leading ruckman.  He was also a charming man.  He was an amateur – there were some left.  He and his wife looked after three or four little boys for an hour or two one Saturday morning with Milo and Maltesers, and took our autograph books away to be signed by the whole team.  I was in awe, and floated home in a dream.  We got the autograph books back and started to work more seriously on our swap-card collections.

I used to listen to the Pelaco Inquest and the London Stores Show with religious fervour (one was on DB and the other KZ), and go out and get The Globe – that we later called the Pink Comic – on Saturday night.  It was then that I started the lifelong habit of only reading a report of a game – or now watching a replay of it – if the right team won.  There is no point in punishing yourself just for the sake of it. 

Ron Barassi was born at Castlemaine Hospital on 27 February 1936.  His father played in a Premiership for Melbourne.  He was the first VFL player to be killed in action.  Ron junior was five.  The great player and coach Norm Smith helped bring up the young boy.  Mum got a job at Miller’s Rope Works in Brunswick and took a night-time job managing the sweets bar at the State Theatre.  Ron went to a couple of tech schools and for years sought to study engineering part time.  He didn’t show much aptitude for footy, but people noticed a determination that was somehow supernatural. 

Barassi started training at Melbourne in 1953.  He took his father’s number – 31.  Norm Smith was the coach.  That foster father relationship was fraught.  One day Barassi sought to pay his board by tipping out a bottle of threepences.  Smith told him to take it all back. 

From 1954 to 1964 Barassi played at ruck rover and captained Melbourne while they won six premierships.  I was there for the last of them in 1964 with my mother, and, as at 2019, we had not won one since.

Smith invented the role of ruck rover for Barassi.  As Ron ran out with Cordner, he asked Denis what he should do.  ‘Just don’t get in my bloody way.’  When Ron got married in 1957, Jim Cardwell organised a working bee of players to help build the house.

Barassi is one of the stand-outs of the game.  I saw him in a number of Grand Finals, including that in 1956 when the crowd was so thick, I got lifted off my feet and had to be pulled up to safety. 

Jack Dyer said:

Despite the greatness of John Coleman, the fluency and cunning of Whitten, the sheer brilliance and courage of Skilton, I nominate Barassi as the greatest player since the war …He is the team man to end all team men

He had the capacity to lift the whole team by example – especially in Grand Finals.  Just before half time in the 1959 Final, Essendon were a couple of goals up.  Barassi kicked three goals in five minutes when Bluey Adams thought he had only a one in three chance each time.  The first he kicked with defenders draped all over him, and ‘the next two came from the strongest marks I have ever seen.’

A lot of the story is part of legend.  In 1958, Hooker Harrison and Weideman sucked Barassi in and the Pies won.  When they tried to repeat the dose in 1960, Melbourne held them to 2.2.  In 1963, Roger Dean – thought to be as good an actor as James Dean – staged a free and got Barassi rubbed out for four weeks.  It sounds medieval but the tribunal refused to allow TV film or still photos into evidence.  (These were the days when it was hard to get a magistrate and impossible to get a JP to go against the evidence of the rozzers.)  In 1964, I was seated at the Punt Road end in direct line with the two goals of Gabelich and with a clear view of the Frog’s goal.  Smith thought they had stolen that game.  It was far from Barassi’s best.

Then the world fell in.  Barassi did the unthinkable.  He changed sides.  And to make it worse, he went to Carlton, a side that had unfortunate connections to politics, crime, and the church.  It was hard to know what was more offensive. 

Barassi, the ultimate team player, said something that in 2019 is worth reflecting on.

Loyalty is a word of which I am very, very wary.  Too often it can just mean blind faith.  And in a way blind faith is mindless.

For now we can see that the unthinkable was but a premonition of the revolution that Packer would bring about in cricket about a decade later.  And the cause in each case was exactly the same.  All sports in Australia were administered by haughty, inbred blockheads who took those in their charge for granted and just laughed in their face at players who suggested that they were underpaid – which they so obviously were.  They make the noblesse of the ancien rgime look downright sensible, but God spared these galahs the guillotine.

The next year saw the vacuous members of the Establishment purporting to manage Melbourne commit the greatest crime in sport since the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth by sacking Norm Smith.  Nemesis was just as cruel.  Melbourne went without flags and always looked spineless.  Collingwood was a leader in maintaining serfdom over players and has since paid its own hideous price.  Carlton, as was its wont, bought a few flags, to general opprobrium, and has since descended into the kingdom of nothingness.  In truth, all the Victorian power-house clubs had dry runs in the cause of making the game national, but for many of us who have grown old, the sell-out to television and the dollar has been at best demeaning and at worst a disaster. 

Barassi saw success at Carlton, not least in 1970, and North Melbourne, but the second coming was not so good at Melbourne or Sydney.

In 1954, I had listened on the radio to us lose to Footscray in the Grand Final.  About fifty years later, I heard their full back that day describe his day.  He turned up for work as usual as an apprentice butcher.  He went home to Thornbury for lunch.  He drove to the MCG.  Bugger!  He had forgotten his boots.  He asked the man in blue to hold his spot open, went back home for his boots, and got back just in time to hear Charlie Sutton’s pre-match address.  In which, I am told, he said: ‘You blokes just worry about the ball – I will look after the other stuff.’

In many ways, I would trace our loss of innocence back to 1964 and 1965.  The relevant chapter in this book is headed ‘Little Boys Shed Tears.’  That I was a big boy did not exempt me.  We are not talking of a loss of blind faith – but a loss of any faith. 

And we go back to a time when the secretary of a footy club would stop his car and hand out tickets to kids from Glen Iris State School because of their jumpers, when people burning autumn leaves in the street signalled the start of the season, when the biggest cricket game in town was Victoria v New South Wales on Boxing Day, and when after seeing the Bulldogs at the Western oval, members of the Smorgon family would call in for fish and chips, and the elder would tell the younger not to mention the pickled onion to mum as it was ‘bad for the gazz.’

Now, older men in pubs talk about Trumper and Bradman, and Barassi and Whitten.  I never saw Trumper, and in a flat kind of way, I am not sad that I never saw Bradman.  But I sure did see Barassi, and that memory is not just part of me, but part of my country.

If the letters to The Age mean anything, the AFL has a lot to worry about following the dismissal of the case against Maynard.  And most is coming from parents and grandparents – like me.

The discussion has been oceanic.  No discussion I have seen cited the relevant rule.  A lawyer would say the discussion might cover four questions.

First – what does the relevant rule of the game – or, perhaps, law of the land – provide?

Secondly, what findings of fact were open on the evidence before the tribunal to determine whether those findings of fact showed conduct that breached the relevant rule?

Thirdly, if a charge was found to be proved, what was the appropriate range of penalty?  This presumably would require assessing the custom or precedents of the tribunal.

Finally, does the consequence so arrived at conform with the expectations of the community or market?

I have little notion on the first three, but the answer to the fourth looks to me to be ‘No’.

Which term is á la mode.

In The Last King of America, Andrew Roberts defends George III and he takes what is in my view a firm swipe at the hypocrisy of the colonists at the time of the Declaration  of Independence and its apologists since.

I have set out before my views on the subject in the book A Tale of Two Nations.

When American nationalism reaches a peak, which it does from time to time, when Americans become suffused with the glow of their own patriotism, some might remember that Dr. Johnson regarded the Tea Party as ‘theft and hooliganism’ for which he uttered his famous maxim:  ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’  When TV historians rhapsodise over the American Declaration of Independence, they are making a conscious effort to put behind them the limitations of the European Enlightenment of the 18^th century.  There was not, of course, a woman in sight.  This was a show for men only, and wealthy establishment men at that – men who could subscribe to the Tory view that a nation is best governed by those who have a stake in the nation.  The Founding Fathers were anything but advocates of democracy.  The very idea would have been as vulgar as it was unsound.

But, above all, the Declaration was of, by, and for, white men, and not men of any other colour.  Opinions were asserted in 1776 that would find no place in America more than two hundred years later.  We have seen that the Indians were written off as savage mass murderers:  ‘He [King George III] has incited domestic insurrections amongst us and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.’  This is a dismissal of an entire people by reference to race, and whatever else might be said of Indian war-making, they did not have the same means for dealing out death that their enemies had – they were for the most part just trying to protect their own people and land; and no one could ever accuse the Indians of genocide. 

The reference – or, as the Declaration was issued, the lack of reference – to African Americans is no better.  Jefferson had drafted a clause making the fatuous suggestion that the English – well, they said King George III – had instituted a trade of slavery, frustrated attempts to stop it, and then excited the blacks to rise up against ‘us’ – who were by definition white.  All this is expressed in the most colourful language:  ‘He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the person of a distant people who never offended him.’  ‘This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king ….He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce ….’  And so on.  Mercifully, Congress struck all this nonsense out.  But they left as it was the phrase ‘all men are created equal’ and that statement was, to their certain knowledge, untrue. 

Well, this evasion, if that is the term, on the subject of slavery might be expected from a slave-owner from the largest slave-owning state.  But what was not to be expected was the lack of candour on the causes of the revolt.

The American Declaration of Independence follows the form of the English Declaration of Rights.  It records the conduct complained of to justify the termination of the relationship.  (This is what lawyers call ‘accepting a repudiation’ of a contract.)  The English did so in short, crisp allegations that were for the most part devoid of oratorical colour in the Declaration of Rights. The allegations are expressed in simple enough terms and were not phrased so as to encourage an evasive form of denial. 

How does the American Declaration of Independence go about this process?  Before it gets to an allegation that the king maintains standing armies, which is a relatively specific charge, it made ten allegations of misconduct that were so general that they would not be permitted to stand today as an allegation of a breach of the law on a conviction for which a person might lose their liberty.  The fourteenth allegation, which is hopeless, but which appears to be an attempt to invoke the English precedent, is that:  ‘He [King George III] has abdicated government here.’  Then there is the fifteenth allegation:  ‘He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.’  If that allegation of plunder and murder – the old word was ‘rapine’ – had been seriously put, you might have expected to see it before an allegation of abdication – and before every other allegation.  The eighteenth allegation relates to the Indians. The nineteenth was the allegation relating to slavery and which was struck out.  Those drafting the Declaration were not evidently keen to get down to the subject of people of another race.  Or tax.

Let us put to one side that all these allegations are made against the Crown, and not the government, and that none of these allegations refers to any statute of the British government.  There is no history of the American Revolution that has been written that says that the American colonies revolted from their subjection to the British crown for any of the reasons that are set out in the eighteen clauses of the Declaration of Independence.  The primary reason that history gives for the revolt of the colonists was the imposition, or purported imposition, of taxes upon them by the British parliament – when those being taxed had no direct representation in the parliament levying the tax.  Most divorces are about money, and this one was no different. 

But British taxation is only mentioned once in the Declaration of Independence.  That reference is fallacious.  It is against the King.  The Glorious Revolution made it plain that he could not impose a tax.  The only reference to the English legislature comes when those drafting the documents scold the English for ‘attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us’.  Given that the 1688 revolution secured the supremacy of the English parliament over the English Crown and made it transcendentally clear that only the English parliament could levy a tax on its subjects, it may have seemed a little odd for Jefferson to be suggesting that the American colonies were somehow subject to the English Crown, but not to the English parliament.  ‘Jurisdiction’ is a word that has come to bedevil American jurisprudence, and it looks like the problem may have started very early.

The American Declaration of Independence is therefore of limited historical value in explaining why the American colonies proceeded as they did, or what values of humanity they proposed to pursue for their future. The tragic truth is that the barefaced lie about slavery would haunt the young republic until it was expunged by the death of more than six hundred thousand Americans in the Civil War and by the moral courage and intellectual genius of Abraham Lincoln, the one unquestionable gift of the United States to humanity.

Roberts says that ‘of the twenty-eight charges [in the Declaration], only two really stand in terms of logic, natural law, chronology or politics – namely, the seventeenth, about imposing taxes without the colonists’ consent, and the twenty-second, about Parliament being ‘invested with the power to legislate for us’ [which it undoubtedly was] – yet those two were so important that they went to the heart of the issue, and justified the whole rebellion on their own.’ 

The author say that while taxation may have been the excuse for rebellion, the real reason was that the colonists thought they were ready, willing and able to govern themselves.  The Civil War would, to put it softly, suggest that they were wrong.

So far as I can see, the author does not deal with the fact that George III on his own had no power to levy tax on the colonies.  That was the whole issue of the Glorious Revolution, and Jefferson used the Bill of Rights as a template for his Declaration. 

But Mr Roberts does refer to an observation of Sir Lewis Namier, whom I regard as the ultimate authority on the governance of the empire then.  I will set it out.

This junction between the King and Parliament of Great Britain was by itself bound to carry the supremacy of the British Parliament into the Colonies; and the very fact that George III so thoroughly and loyally stood by the constitutional principles of the time rendered a conflict inevitable – had he entertained any idea of power or authority apart from the British Parliament, he might have welcomed the conception of a separate sovereignty in the Colonies.  The necessary limitations to the authority of the British Parliament, a territorial assembly, were not as yet understood.

Well, there you are.  A nation so conceived – the phrase is Lincoln’s – was bound to run into serious trouble.  Which it has now done – twice, at least.

The issue can I think be formulated as a question.  Which of the following do you think is the lowest?  Ted Cruz.  Lindsey Graham. Jim Jordan.  Mitch McConnell.  Mike Pence.  Donald Trump.

Our two main parties have platforms that you could swap.  It is hard to find policies of any real difference.  People pay allegiance to political parties for the same reasons they follow a faith or a footy team.  But on some issues of national and historical moment, party allegiances should be buried.  Two such issues are the treatment of those on this land before Europeans arrived on it, and how best to preserve this land against changes in the environment of the kind that the earth has experienced since it was formed.  Yet here, each has become a party political issue – for no reason that can be divined from the platform of either party.  And in both, the same people are involved in saying ‘No’ to change at least some of which is both desirable and necessary.  The tactic is simple enough.  You just say ‘Boo!’. 

These are real failures in our governance – governors who are too timid to make necessary changes, and the governed timid enough to go along with a dreary minuet of a mediocre nation too scared to stand on its own.

Twiggy says senior people are leaving Fortescue because they are not ‘aligned.’  In other regimes, that pronouncement might be terminal.  ‘It’s my way or the high way.’  He should get Mr Goyder to bring over his team from Qantas.  They will agree to anything.

Mr Goyder looks to suffer from the Andrews syndrome.  He has been in power uncontested for so long that he believes his own bullshit.  He ought to be left with one chairmanship, and I hope it is not the company in which I hold shares.

And that is certainly not Qantas.

And the Prime Minister is learning the hard way that people in his office should not associate with ratbags.  And he did not just associate with them – he fawned on them.  He might reflect on Caesar and his wife, and the notorious capacity of Oz politicians to be duchessed.

Visitors to G20 are greeted at Delhi: ‘Let us work together for a new paradigm of human centric co-operation’.  Unless you are a Muslim.  The PRC was not taking this lying down to excuse the absence the Sphynx.  It was absorbed ‘in thought study to fully implement the new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics to condense the heart and soul to achieve new results.’

As I pilot my way to that bourne beneath the daisies, in what Carmo calls the Riviera of the Western Suburbs, I have been treating myself to a weekly visit to the swish bistro called Bar Romanee in Anderson Street in the Yarraville Village.  It is well and amiably run and welcoming, and I am accepted as if I were a member of the club. 

Usually, I sit at the bar nearest the kitchen.  I can marvel at the cooking techniques there, and the fancy concoctions conjured up behind the bar.  At times it reminds me of the teamwork on display in Das Boot – people working in harmony for a purpose.

Last evening, there was a big Sunday crowd, perhaps because it was Father’s Day – one of those sponsored marketing jobs that does not loom large in my family. 

I arrive at about 5.30.  A young family of four was seated at a table.  That is not a cheap night out.  Mum was well dressed under a carefully manicured hair-do – bobs or bangs? – and an expensive cardi – over which she put an even more expensive overcoat on her departure.  Her blood temperature must be different to Dad’s – he had a tee to show his pictures above his shorts.  The children looked about eight or nine, snappily attired in casual clothes.  I don’t think they went to the State School up the road.  They were anything but overawed by the occasion – they looked quite at home, but they were not noisy.  

After an hour or so, another couple arrived with one child and sat at an adjoining table.  They all knew each other, but the foursome was finishing what looked like a three-course meal.  You could get even money that at least one family was travelling in a black Teutonic SUV, and I find myself wondering, especially after the panel beaters looked after my Alfa, how people can afford these things if they pay the bill with money on which they have paid tax.

Where I sit is where some come to pay their bill.  (I don’t know when this Parisian practice started here.  I simply call for the bill with the time-honoured signal.)  Then I looked down, and beside me was the young girl from the foursome bearing an iPhone well lit up.  ‘Have you come to settle up?’  ‘Yes.’  A bit later, after no scrutiny of the bill: ‘Tip?’  ‘Yes’.  This being an honest house, three figures would not have been added.

People born here at the end of 1945, as I was , are definitive babyboomers.  Ten years later, olive oil and garlic had barely arrived.  There was six o’clock closing, and only about four restaurants, including the very toffy Menzies Hotel, in the city of Melbourne.  They enjoyed a status at least as high as the Latin or Society did later. 

A night out at one of those places was a very big deal for people like my folks, Mac and Norma – certainly only for a special event, and not more than once a year.  Only the wealthiest could afford to take their children to such places, but I have a vague recollection of Mac and Norma taking me to one in Spring Street – with lamps on the tables.  It would have been about 1955 – before the Olympics and television.  Great care would have been taken with dressing.  Mac and Norma may have had a sherry and then a glass of wine each – which they never drank at home – with a three-course meal that they would have chosen with one eye firmly on the price. 

There were no credit cards then – when they did arrive, Mac and Norma did not trust or use them.  Mac would have paid in cash, which had been put away for the purpose, after agonising about the tip. 

But what the hell?  I still have a flickering image of the night, and we would have motored home in the Ford Anglia, with me on my knees in the back, and my head on my arms on the back seat.  (I would later form the view that Mac was not the world’s best driver – which was unfortunate, because Norma was the world’s worst back seat driver.)

Mac and Norma would find the tariffs for eating out now well beyond comprehension – as incomprehensible as a man walking into a restaurant and not covering his tats.  They would say that one of the reasons that the prices are so high is that most people don’t pay the bill with real money.  They just add another stat to the ether. 

And I had much the same view when I started eating out in style.  Shortly after we were married, my wife and I were taken to the Southern Cross for dinner by a shipping magnate (who had unprintable views about a brash unionist called Bob Hawke).  This glistening monument was the successor to the Menzies as the dearest place to eat.  We had drinks in the lounge first.  I could not believe the prices, and lived in terror that I might be called on to buy a round – I did not have enough cash on me – or, for that matter, at home. 

That danger passed, but I was amazed that the magnate ordered caviar – which was brought in on a block of ice and mixed with a sauce with a majestic grandeur becoming to the price – and the magnate proceeded to leave half of it!  (The last time I had been to the Southern Cross, it was on night shift as an industrial cleaner working in the fan housing fourteen floors above the kitchen – through which my charge hand, Len Foster – may blessings be upon him – directed gross and vulgar abuse down to the night chef, Rocko.  Who did not take it like a sportsman.)

Well, all that was generations ago, but I would be seduced insensibly – as Gibbon may have put it – to be free with credit in ways that scandalised Norma and Mac.

Now, it is one thing to take kids out to a flash restaurant.  But it is altogether a different thing to allow them to believe that they can call the shots, and that they can be free with money because there is so much of it about.  What about manners?  ‘Thank you very much., We enjoyed your hospitality.’  Or do we just customise kids to accept that others should be grateful for their patronage, and then authorise them to set in train communications between robots in settlement of the tariff – when all courtesy then dissolves in the ether?

What I saw was the uncomely marriage between rising apparent wealth and an even more assertive technology – and the growing chasm between winners and losers.  Here was a perfect union of the corrupting effect of cheap money and soul and courtesy destroying technology.  It is all so precocious, and the stuff of history at its worst.  We are succumbing to the ignorance if not obliteration of our story from which our failures come. 

And, as it happens, that is so with a much greater issue facing this nation now.

Let me give an analogy on spoiling children.  The living I made as a lawyer allowed me, after about a dozen years, to fly to Europe or the US once a year – I also got to the other continents, and Asia and the Antarctic.  But I did so down the back, year after back breaking year, until I got to the stage where I decided that if I could not go in comfort, I would not go at all.  (I took that decision after a client sent me to the US up the very front.) 

Mac and Norma never reached that stage – and they would not have done so on principle.  But in part because of what they did for me, I was able to do so.  And the one thing that got to me when I did do was to see families wealthy enough to bring their kids into this Elysium in the sky for which I had laboured so long.

Well, the old saying was bootstraps to bootstraps in three generations.  And the big spenders and timid politicians are doing their best to fulfil that prophecy by denying their grandchildren the capacity to buy their own home.

This is not a good trajectory in a young nation, or any other.  The rot set in when those who had the benefit of a free tertiary education decided to deprive those coming later of that benefit.  That is not how history should work  But I am pleased to say that at this bistro I find young people committed to finding a place in the world – and let the robots and us old grumpies be damned.