Author: Geoffrey Gibson

Bondi

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One difference between us and the apes – from which we humans came – is cutlery.  Cutlery is part of what we call courtesy, which is what helps humans get along with each other.  Apes do not know courtesy.  That is a significant plus for us in the evolution of humanity.

Another plus is that we think about how we relate to each other and seek to develop rules that we call morals and which we can elevate into rules of law.  Apes do not deal in morals or laws.

But there are at least two big minuses. 

One is that we think more than animals do, and we can find ways to hurt or destroy other humans.  We are capable of consciously doing evil.  Apes do not seek to hurt or kill anything.

The other minus is that we humans tend to believe in the supernatural.  We call that religion.  By definition, religion is beyond logic.  It is premised on faith.  It is therefore out of bounds for many of us, and there are very many types or brands of faith.

The Bible is scripture recognized in some parts by the three major faiths in Australia.  It says there is only one God, and that He favours one group of people over others.  He promises them land and authorizes them to kill men, women and children who stand in their way.

That teaching, and the teachings of other faiths, have been the cause of much hate and misery in the world.  Just as one example, I set out the account of Edward Gibbon of what occurred when the Crusaders entered Jerusalem.

A bloody sacrifice was offered by his [Tancred’s] mistaken votaries to the God of the Christians: resistance might provoke, but neither age nor sex could mollify their implacable rage: they indulged themselves three days in a promiscuous massacre; and the infection of the dead bodies produced an epidemical disease.  After seventy thousand Moslems had been put to the sword, and the harmless Jews had been burnt in their synagogue, they could still reserve a multitude of captives whom interest or lassitude persuaded them to spare.  The Holy Sepulchre was now free; and the bloody victors prepared to accomplish their vow.  Bare-headed and bare foot, with contrite hearts and in a humble posture, they ascended the hill of Calvary, amidst the loud anthems of the clergy; kissed the stone which had covered the Saviour of the world; and bedewed with tears of joy and penitence the monument of their redemption.  This union of the fiercest and most tender passions has been variously considered by two philosophers: by the one, as easy and natural; by the other, as absurd and critical.

(The first philosopher referred to is David Hume; the second was Voltaire.)

After the horrors of two world wars, a poll was taken in Germany of the war that terrified them most.  It was the ultimate war of religion, the Thirty Years War.

In my lifetime, there have been many wars, but the most lethal has been the conflict in the Holy Land following the creation of the state of Israel, and the division of Palestine.  Both sides claim vindication by faith as justifying violence and killing.

This has led to frightful repercussions for the diasporas of Muslims and Jews around the world.

It is far too early to draw conclusions, but the events of yesterday in Bondi appear to be one of those repercussions.

It is a fact of life that when a community is challenged its people look for scapegoats.  Elsewhere, I wrote:

In Ancient Greece there was a practice or rite of casting out someone like a beggar or cripple orcriminal in the face of some natural threat or disaster.  There are traces of a far older tradition in Syria when a goat would be invoked in the purification rites for the king’s wedding – a she-goat was driven out into the waste with a silver bell on her neck.  More recently, but before the Greek custom developed, the Old Testament, Leviticus 16:8, said that ‘And Aaron shall cast lots over the two goats, one lot for the Lord and the other lot for Azazel.’  The goat of the Lord was sacrificed, and the high priest by confession transferred the sins of himself and the people to the goat that was permitted to escape in the wilderness – where its fate would depend on what sort of predators it might have to contend with.  There was a form of atonement.  The goat that escaped became the ‘scapegoat.’  The traditions or rites might be said to prefigure the role of the Son of God being offered up to redeem mankind by atoning for its sins.  A scapegoat is one who is punished for the sins of others.  This ancient Middle Eastern rite has become a universal custom involving people rather than goats.

But the term has got much wider than that – a scapegoat now is not just one that has to answer for the sins of others; it has to answer for all the problems and failings of what might be called the host people.  So, in the most gruesome example, the Nazis held the Jews responsible for all the lesions on the German people, moral or economic. 

Typically, people look to outsiders to be their scapegoats.  In Europe and the United States in this century people have turned on migrants in the face of adversity. 

Will that happen here in Australia in light of the events at Bondi and elsewhere?

There are serious problems in making migrants into scapegoats in Australia – for which, if I believed in God, I would thank Him.

If by ‘migrant’ you refer to someone who was born outside this country, or is the child of such a person, then more than half of us are migrants.  You cannot scapegoat a majority. 

And I thank every such ‘migrant’ for helping us to escape our somnolent ride into mediocrity under a foreign monarch and a distinctly unreliable president.

Then, there are those who were here before us in the land we call Australia – the First Nations.  They were here for say sixty thousand years before us.  In their eyes, all white people are ‘migrants’ and very recent ones at that.  (I put to one side that a substantial number of Americans prefer Genesis to those timelines, because if you can jettison truth and reality for one purpose, you can do so for others.) 

We Australians say that the Americans lied when they said that all men are created equal.  But did not we white people lie when we said that we ‘settled’ here?  Do not the actions of the ‘settlers’ in Palestine now show just how slippery that term is?

That leaves the fundamental issue.  At the core of what I regard as ‘civilization’ is the notion that each of us has our own worth or dignity just because we are human.  It is a violation of that premise to suggest that a person may be denied that worth just because of the history of the group that that person belongs to.  Branding is what we do to cattle.  The aspersion of inferiority is in my view the root of most evil in our humanity.

It was therefore a relief to see humanity at Bondi.  A man tackled one killer and seized his weapon.  A boy then threw a rock at the killer.  The press says that the hero is a fruit shop owner named Ahmed.  They have not named the boy. 

We might forego the predictable reactions of some politicians, local and foreign, and leave blaming migrants to people like Farage and Trump.  But we should not spare what passes for the Opposition, which is both inept and tasteless.

Two questions interest me more.  We think our gun laws are sound enough to make us safe.  How did the killers get access to these weapons and that ammunition?  I suspect that the white settlers of the gun lobby have weakened our defences in our laws.  (And I say that as a former gun owner.)

Will the survivor live to talk?  The press says the killers were father and son.  The mother says of the survivor: ‘Anyone would wish to have a son like my son…he’s a good boy’.  The photo shows him a keen and proud student of the Koran.

I suspect that God will be invoked.  It would be ironic for God to be the ultimate scapegoat in a nation founded by English convicts.

Namier on English politics

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Sir Lewis Namier made his name with The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III published in 1929.It landed like a bomb, and Namier attracted conflict all his life.  I idolize him.  As a practising lawyer, I found it odd that Namier was said to be revolutionary because for primary evidence he preferred contemporary notes made at the time to secondary rehearsals made by scholars who were not present at the relevant times.  I then regarded him as I regarded Maitland on the history of the common law – if the inquirer devotes his life to digging so deep and with such understanding, he may well command our intellectual assent when he ascends to make observations that in others may sound too large and unfounded.

In 1961, Namier published the second edition of England In the Age of the American Revolution.  Amid the mountains of primary evidence that Namier assembled in the work of a lifetime, we still find large statements of insights that distinguish the story of England from that of Europe or the United States.  All of what follows comes from that second edition. 

It is a story of a remarkable people written by a most remarkable man.

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The social history of England could be written in terms of membership of the House of Commons, that peculiar club, election to which has at all times required some expression of consent on the part of the public……In its origin, the House of Commons was akin to the jury, and the representative character of the two were in a way cognate; from an intimate knowledge of conditions, the House declared the sense of commonalty on questions which most patently and directly concerned them….it came to represent not so much the sense of the community, as the distribution of power within it…(3)

England knows not democracy as a doctrine, but has always practised it as a fine art.  Since the Middle Ages, no one was ever barred on grounds of class from entering the House of Commons, and in the House all Members have always sat on equal terms; as between freemen, England never knew a rigid distinction of classes….

Trade was never despised, and English society has always showed respect for property and wealth.  The financial expert, usually a moneyed man, was valued in the House, and the Treasury has for centuries held a pre-eminent position in the government…. ‘gentry are always willing to submit to raising their families by what they call City fortunes….’ (6)

Feudalism was a system of social organisation whereby both army service and administrative functions were bound up with the holding of land. (7)

The fine growth of English Conservatism is due, in a high degree, to the country having been free from the revolutionary action of war within its borders, and of militarism within its social organisation.  The true Conservative is not a militarist. (8)

Trade was not despised in eighteenth century England – it was acknowledged to be the great concern of the nation; and money was honoured, the mystic common denominator of all values, the universal repository of as yet undetermined possibilities…. for the English are not a methodical or logical nation – they perceive and accept facts without anxiously inquiring into their reasons or meaning. (13)

Classes are the more sharply marked in England because there is no single test for them, except the final incontestable result; and there is more snobbery than in any other country, because the gate can be entered by anyone, and yet remains for those bent on entering it, a mysterious, awe-inspiring gate. (14)

Whereas on the Continent scholarships rank as poor relief, at Oxford or Cambridge the scholar holds a privileged position, coveted as a distinction.  More intellectual work is done by aristocrats in England than anywhere else: …. What is not valued in England is abstract knowledge as a profession, because the tradition of English civilization is that professions should be practical and culture should be the work of the leisured classes. (15)

When a tribe settles, membership of the tribe carries the right to share in the land.  In time, the order becomes inverted: the holding of land determines a man’s position in the community. (18)

English history, and especially English parliamentary history, is made by families rather than individuals; for a nation with the tradition of self-government must have thousands of dynasties, partaking of the peculiarities which in other countries belong to the royal family alone.  The English political family is a compound of ‘blood’, name and estate, the last, as the dominions of monarchs, being the most important of the three…. the men who are most intimately affected by the government have a primary claim to share in it; in reality, this conclusion is based on instincts and modes of thinking much deeper and much more cogent than any conscious reasonings…. [the British Parliament] is territorial rather than tribal….

Though the State primarily belongs to the owners of the land, it is the circulating part of the nation which is most directly concerned with government…. (29)  Trade is the natural form for the acquisitive endeavor of islanders… (30) Continental nations engaged in wars for loot and talked of glory (31); the English went out for adventure and talked of trade…. (32)  Colonies… were not ‘planted with a view to founding new empires, but for the sake of trade….’ (37)

No great historic problem has ever been settled by means of a brilliant idea…. Restraint, coupled with the tolerance which it implies and with plain human kindness, is much more valuable in politics than ideas which are ahead of their time; but restraint was a quality in which the eighteenth-century Englishman was as deficient as most other nations are even now. (36)

The basic elements of the Imperial Problem during the American Revolution must be sought not so much in conscious opinions and professed views bearing directly on it, as in the very structure and life of the Empire; and in doing that, the words of Danton should be remembered – on ne fait pas le proces aux revolutions.  Those who are out to apportion guilt in history have to keep to views and opinions, judge the collisions of planets by the rules of road traffic, make history into something like a column of motoring accidents, and discuss it in the atmosphere of a police court.  (40)

History is made up of juggernauts, revolting to human feelings in their blindness, supremely humorous in their stupidity.  One of the greatest caricaturists that ever lived, Francesco Goya y Lucientes, reached the highest level of historical humour in his picture of a military execution of Spanish rebels.  A bundle of feeling, suffering humanity is huddled together in the last stages of agony, despair or defiance, and facing them stands a row of the most perfectly trained Napoleonic soldiers, with their hats and rifles all cocked at the same angle.  One knows that the next moment the rebels will be at peace, inanimate matter, and the firing squad will dissolve into a number of very ordinary, dull human beings.  Similarly in Breughel’s ‘Fall of Icarus’, the true humour of the tragedy is not so much the pair of naked legs sticking out of the water, as the complete unconcern of all the potential onlookers…….History of infinite weight was to be made in the absurd beginnings of a reign which was to witness the elimination of those who had hitherto governed England…..and the break-up of an Empire such as the world had not seen since the disruption of the Roman Empire – history was to be started in ridiculous beginnings, while small men did things both infinitely smaller and infinitely greater than they knew.  (131)

In the absence of distinct definable programs, it was becoming increasingly difficult to say who, from the angle of practical politics, should be considered a Tory and who a Whig …. and parties at all times at all times rest on types and on connections rather than on intellectual tenets…. (179)  Moreover, the disturbing element of personal connexions is always present in politics; the game is played by groups, and human ties continually cross and confound the logic of social and political alignments.  (184)

The territorial magnates were the nucleus of that governing class, whose claims even now are based on rank, wealth, experience, and a tradition of social and political pre-eminence (or, according to George Meredith, are ‘commonly built on birth, acres, tailoring, style, and an air’).  (181)

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We don’t get history like that anymore.  And that is a great worry, because every word of it bears on our travails here and now.  Namier was I gather from people at Cambridge not easy to like, and I can understand how he may have unsettled the academic Establishment.  But Sir Lewis Namier stands very high in my pantheon because of the depth of his insights into our humanity.

Bismarck

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Count Otto von Bismarck, known as the Iron Chancellor, was a Prussian Junker, and therefore a notable man of the land, and the lord of a German manor.  He was also a servant of his State and of his God, and, to the extent that the word ‘conservative’ still has any meaning, about as conservative as any man at any time could be.  That did not prevent him from becoming the de facto master of Europe by reference, if necessary, to ‘blood and iron’. 

Nor did it prevent him from achieving the following.  The unification of Germany.  The grant of universal suffrage in the German democracy.  And the beginning of the Welfare State. 

As it happened, the first would lead to the most appalling consequences for not just Europe but the whole world in two world wars – but Bismarck could not be held responsible for either.  The second was alarmingly ‘progressive’ for its time, and the third even more so.  History does not give Germany or Bismarck sufficient credit for laying the foundation of the Welfare State – which the United States still refuses to accept.

In 1883 and 1889, Bismarck pushed through legislation for accident insurance for workers and then old age and disability insurance.  For the first, the German government said it had put an end ‘to all those attempts to make health insurance a private matter …and asserts the role of the state’. 

Nearly thirty years later, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill followed that lead in England with the People’s Budget.  They spoke of the ‘business of the state’ in looking after the infirm and the aged.  They provoked a constitutional crisis.  The English averted revolution by having the King threaten to create enough peers to get the legislation passed.  They followed the precedent of the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832.  In each case, the ancient safety valve saved the day.

Bismarck was a most extraordinary man.

Politics are not a science based on logic; they are the capacity of choosing at each instant, in constantly changing situations, the least harmful, the most useful.

As my friends know, that accords exactly with my view of the common law, which underlies our constitution, and politics.  That may not be all that surprising, because that in my view is the Anglo-Saxon – and therefore German – preference for experience over theory, which so distinguishes England from Europe – including Germany.  That is not meant to be confusing.  The roads by which we got where we are have never been straight.

Bismarck had God and could accommodate Him.

A statesman cannot create anything himself.  He must wait until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of his garment…. I am content when I see where the Lord wishes to go and can stumble after him.

Some, especially right now, may wish, like Hamlet, to substitute Providence for God in detecting even the fall of a sparrow.

I have never been a doctrinaire…. Liberal, reactionary, conservative – those I confess seem to me luxuries….

Can you imagine a better statement of the sheer banality of politics today either here or in places we once respected?

Bismarck spent his whole political life dealing with people he could not respect.

There are white men, there are black men, and there are monarchs.

God only knows what fate would await someone rash enough to say that now.

For his scheme of social insurance, Bismarck was content to accept the label ‘progressive’, even ‘socialist’!  A J P Taylor said:

German social insurance was the first in the world, and has served as a model for every other civilized country…At the end, he [Bismarck] talked of ‘the right to work’ and thought of insurance against unemployment – this was the final step to the welfare state of the twentieth century…. He was a despairing conservative, staving off a dreaded though inevitable future, clinging to the present for the fear of something worse.  Real conservatism is rooted in the pride of class.  Bismarck had no feeling for the Junkers from whom he sprung.  In taste and outlook, he was nearest to the rich merchants of Hamburg.

Well, they don’t write history like that anymore.

Nations crave security.  So do their subjects.  The king commanded his subjects to hold him and the state securely.  People now elected governments so that the state would keep the people securely.  That was change indeed.

Bismarck was a soldier who never read Clausewitz.  Ranke was his favourite historian, but he had a soft spot for Taine.  He soaked himself in the Bible and Shakespeare, but he fancied the novels of Dumas.  He naturally had no time for philosophy – Kant, let alone Hegel – and he dismissed Wagner as a monkey. 

In other words, he was ein mensch with whom you knew where you stood – and when you should stop.  What would we give to have on record what passed between this German and Benjamin Disraeli?  A J P Taylor said:

Both had the brooding melancholy of the Romantic movement in its Byronic phase; both had broken into the charmed circle of privilege…. both had a profound contempt for political moralizing…. In politics both had used universal suffrage to ruin liberalism…. Both genuinely advocated social reform….

So much, then, for pigeon holing people.

I referred above to the banality of our politics.  Hannah Arendt, who had some of the most piercing insights of her time, got into trouble talking about the banality of evil.  We now have to live with the evil of banality.  Those vacuous standard-bearers of theory and ideology, who falsely claim to be prophets of ‘conservatism,’ should look on the works of Bismarck and despair.

Passing Bull 413 –Discovery

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We were taught that Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America.  As one historian remarked, this was hardly a revelation – ‘news’ – to the sixty million people living there – even though it sparked astonishment in all of Europe.

But the advent of white people, and their diseases, from Europe caused a human disaster that has no parallel.  ‘Virgin-soil’ epidemics devastated a population that had no immunity to these diseases.  By 1650, the original population of about 60 million in 1492 had shrunk to 6 million. 

This was a far greater catastrophe for the American continent than the Black Death had been for Europe.  It was what one historian called a ‘largely unwitting exercise in biological ethnic cleansing’ that had profound global consequences’.

And it is hardly ever mentioned when Europeans or Americans contemplate the ‘cost’ of the creation of the nation that we know as the United States.

Words and language in opera

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My first Summer School at Oxford was on Verdi and Shakespeare.  Verdi had written operas for Macbeth Othello.  His last opera was Falstaff.  The tutor, who was excellent, explained why in his view Italian was the best language for opera – which is theatre set to music.  It all sounded very logical, and we discussed the differences with English and French – and giggled when we spoke of German – just a little bit of Jingoism at Oxford.

But I recalled a previous visit to England when I saw a great performance of Billy Budd at Covent Garden.  This was in the 90’s when the AO was blazing.  I had asked Moffat Oxenbould, the Artistic Director of the AO, whether I should see Billy Budd or La Bohème.  One reason he gave in favour of the former is that it would be good for me to hear an opera in my own language.  This was very good advice, because at that time I found the music of Britten to be challenging.  Billy Budd is now my favourite opera – beside Falstaff.  (I would add Die Walküre, with the proviso that I must skip the second act – and watch the closing duet at the bar.)

*

Simone Young will conduct Wagner’s Ring Cycle at La Scala.  (She was the first female conductor of it at Bayreuth, just as she had been the first female conductor with the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic.) 

She will share the function with a younger conductor who has learned under her.  (The person first appointed pulled out at short notice.) 

Simone had come to Wagner via Barenboim, who in turn came to Wagner via Furtwangler.  She and Barenboim had started their roles in Wagner on the piano.  Since Furtwangler is my favourite conductor, this is some pedigree. 

You can get an idea of what is involved by watching a video of Young talking in fluent Italian about preparing for Das Rheingold.  (She had previously held a long appointment at Hamburg.)  It is a great comfort to see learning being passed down from one generation to another in this high art form.

*

Young told The New York Times that it was essential for the conductor to concentrate on the words in the libretto, as well as the music – then she knew how to place the accents of the orchestra – if I may be permitted the phrase. 

That makes sense.  The composer of the music wrote it to be played with the libretto written for just that purpose.  And it was written to be played with the score in the language in which the libretto was written.  Nessun dorma can’t come out like ‘None shall sleep.’

*

Now, when we who speak English see Shakespeare, we follow it in our own tongue – and miss some of the archaisms of plays written more than four hundred years ago.  We get the meaning and the poetry at the same time.  And while we may cut the text, and take other liberties, no one has suggested that we may in some way flirt with the text itself.  That would be the civil equivalent of blasphemy.  Like fiddling with the text Dante or Goethe.  Or the opening chords of Don Giovanni.  Or the background to the Mona Lisa.

Poetry, like music, is a mix of imagination, form, and rhythm – and, for the want of a better word, alchemy.  (When Wordsworth referred to a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ he was expressing a view good for Keats, but not so good for Wordsworth.)  And if you fiddle with either the music or the poetry, you might just wreck it.  Hamlet in French is a very different beast compared to Hamlet as it was written.

But most Australians who go to see the big operas of Mozart, Verdi, Wagner or Puccini do not speak the language in which the opera was written.  And with the possible exception of late Puccini, they are not the same as the audiences for which the operas were originally created.  Recording only started in the twentieth century.

This will not trouble those who go along to hear the big numbers and just bide their time otherwise.  (The Italians were notorious for gossiping until a set piece came on – when they exploded with applause – or derision.  Rather like a soccer match – or a bull fight.  Simone Young said that some thought that you had flopped in Germany with Wagner unless you got both raspberries and applause.  On the other hand, on one of my visits to Glyndebourne, the loudest applause came from the toff behind me who snored the loudest.)

But for the rest of us, at least two issues arise.  We are not getting the opera in the manner that its creators intended, and we cannot match the music to the language of the script.  We therefore have to put our trust in the translator, and in those directing the opera. 

*

These misgivings – and that is what they are – show the wisdom of the advice I got from Moffat Oxenbould about listening to operas written in English.  This has led me to something like an addiction to Britten. 

Curiously, I have also become attached to Janacek, who was a fanatic about linking the music exactly to the text.  He used to patrol the streets listening to people and watching them speak, so that he could mould his compositions accordingly. 

My absorption with Janacek and Britten came at a time of extended leave from the great Italian composers.  I got to the stage that I had got to with Swan Lake and Giselle many years ago – if I heard La Bohème or La Traviata yet again, I might just give it all away.

*

I doubt whether this gap for most of us between the text and the music in opera is grasped by many in the audience at the opera house or at home.

We are familiar with the problem with, say, French poetry.  On a good day, I can stagger through Verlaine and some of Victor Hugo.  (I subscribe to Paris Match, but I may say that is mostly for the photos – which is the precise opposite of what we schoolboys said when we smuggled in a Playboy.)  With Latin, I am on much firmer ground, and I have the luxury of not being called on to speak it. 

But take a well-known part of the Aeneid by Vergil.

Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

We can have a sporting chance of translating that.  ‘Even things have tears, and our mortality touches our minds’.  That may get the meaning of the words, but it sounds ugly, and however we translate it, we know it does and cannot have the poetic effect of the original text.  Latin has a very different structure and ring to it compared to English.

Or take an example plucked from Gutenberg:

In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray
Gone from the path direct: and e’en to tell
It were no easy task, how savage wild
That forest, how robust and rough its growth,
Which to remember only, my dismay
Renews, in bitterness not far from death.

That is among other things ugly and apparently wrought.  This is how Dante began the Divine Comedy.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura

esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Tant è amara che poco è più morte;

ma per trattar del ben chi vi trovai,

dirò de laltre cose chi vho scorte.

You do not have to speak a word of Italian to know that the translation into English now sounds like an act of strangulated butchery.

*

In course of the opera named after him, the third in the Ring Cycle, Siegfried kills his foster father before the latter kills him; he slays the dragon; he talks to the birds; he walks through a fire to free Brunnhilde from the spell put on her by her father; and then he takes off with her to the tune of what Simone Young says is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written.  The final two lines of the text are:

Leuchtender Liebe,

Lachender Tod!

Even allowing that Siegfried is the dull child who refuses to grow up, those lines could surely not be as banal as their translation:

Radiant love,

Laughing death!

(And there is certainly nothing to laugh about in the death of either in Götterdämmerung.) 

The splendid Penguin version of the text and translation gives this comment of Nietzsche, who knew something about this.

Wagner’s poetry is all about revelling in the German language, the warmth and candour in his communion with it, something that as such cannot be felt in any other German writer except Goethe.

That is close to saying the text in this context is barely translatable. 

The score of the Ring was formally dedicated ‘with faith in the German spirit’.  You would not want it get into the wrong hands, especially one who like Wagner wanted to plant frenzy in the German audiences; a leader who, like the master, could wield magnetic power over the German psyche; a German whose favourite opera was Götterdämmerung, but who failed to see that it prophesied the fall of his regime, and of the whole German volk.

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There is another way of looking at what happens when the demands of the audience or reader require tampering with the work of a genius.  Goethe and Pushkin are celebrated in their own country to about the same extent as Shakespeare is in England, but neither travels well.  (Ibsen and Chekhov do not have the same problems.  Homer is seen as untouchable, in part because of intellectual snobbery, and the myth of Oxbridge that ancient Greece was civilized.) 

It is hardly surprising that mutilation carries huge risks.  Rare people of nerve and imagination and the soul of a director can occasionally succeed.  Nearly forty years ago, I took my young daughters to see Goethe’s Faust put on at the little Russel Street theatre, blessed of memory.  I warned them that it might be long and tedious.  I think a young Barrie Kosky directed it.  At the start, the lights went right out.  Gorillas were just seen running up and down each side aisle.  Then, two spotlights shone down the middle aisle.  A gorilla emerged at the front of center stage.  From out of it emerged the smiling face of Barry Otto.  There may have been the sound of machine-gun fire.  And our close attention was held for the duration.  I still recall it.

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Which brings me back to the suggestion that Italian is the ‘best’ language for opera.  Well, opera was born in Italy, and a majority of its superstar composers were also born there, but, putting to one side what experts in linguistics and phonetics might say, you may want to be careful in expressing that view in Amsterdam, Bayreuth, Berlin, London, Madrid, New York, Salzburg, Stockholm, Vienna and other cities that know something of music and theatre.  Or Commedia dell’ Arte.

And the discovery of the meaning of what you have heard so often may have its own entertainment value.  Nessun dorma is the best-known aria.  Who knows the real circumstances of ‘None shall sleep’?  Who knows just how plain silly Siegfried, the great hero of the Ring, is?  (Even the Master thought he was stupid.  The Rheinmaidens knew he was mad.  And by the time he finally gets to depart, we do not go into mourning.)  Heaven knows how many times I had heard Jussi Bjoerling sing Mama chel vino es generoso, before I saw Cavalleria Rusticana, and I started to giggle.  ‘Well might you need a stiff drink from your Mum, Comrade, because you are about to greet the guy with whose wife you have been playing tootsies, and in your part of the world, there can only be one result.’

*

We should be careful about talking about meaning in this context.  We have trouble with the meaning of some passages in Hamlet because our language has changed – it is always evolving.  We have even more trouble with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but with some tuition and encouragement – like I got at another Oxford Summer School – you can get by.  Then Beowulf is beyond all but those taught at tertiary level.

It is obviously silly to ask the meaning of the Pietà or the Moonlight Sonata – or Rigoletto or Don Giovanni.  Or Ode to a Nightingale. 

Macaulay said that ‘perhaps no person can be a poet without a certain unsoundness of mind…. Truth indeed is essential to poetry; but it is the truth of madness.’  That may sound over the top, but Ibsen admired Michelangelo because he had ‘the courage to commit a madness now and then.’  A psychiatrist asked – ‘Why cannot more light enter a mind that is cracked than one that is whole?’  Einstein and Keynes would have had a view on that (as would Barrie Kosky).  Keynes said that Newton was ‘the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians…. the last wonder-child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.’  And, of course, Newton was up to his neck in alchemy.

*

When we speak of a libretto in a foreign tongue, we are in some kind of hinterland when it comes to meaning.  Logical analysis is on very shaky ground.  We face three filters.  First, we depend on the conductor and director to present their version of this musical drama called opera.  Secondly, we depend on the translators to tell us their view of the meaning of the script in English.  And, finally, we get a very different account of the carefully managed marriage between the music and the text. 

You would not want to be on an ascent of Everest or undergoing heart surgery on such a wobbly footing.

*

Opera translated into English does not have a good name – for good reason.  (One exception is the Mackerass Makropoulos Case.)  There is therefore a lot in favour of operas created in our own language.  We could never have survived Faust in German with voice over or subtitles.  Like the time some well intentioned internationalist got us at a Melbourne festival to see a Romanian theatre group do Titus Andronicus – in Romanian!  And our Romanian friends just hung their heads in horror. 

This was I think the ultimate risk in fiddling with the work of a giant, but at least to some extent, we take on some of that risk whenever we go to see most of the operas that are put on, especially in the straitened times since Covid.

*

And the great success of Simone Young in Bayreuth, Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna is a sad reflection of the decline of the AO since its glory days of the nineties. 

I had been to a talk given by Simone on Tristan, which she opened with a thundering chord on the piano, and I saw her conduct that opera and a Wagner gala.  On each occasion, I was transfixed.  A chairman of the AO told me that Simone had allowed him to stand at the back of the pit during a performance.  He said his hair stood on end as she entered the pit, and she stayed back later to talk to the orchestra.  She may be our best export since Melba or Sutherland – but she is just not seen by those up the back as having that éclat.

*

Well, at least my girls got to see our team at its best.  But it is sobering for an eighty-year-old lawyer who has been listening to or going to the opera for more than sixty years to reflect that not only can he not read the score – he cannot even read the script. 

That is just one of the reasons why I wonder if I am not much better off watching the live theatre of a test match – cricket or rugby – or a Grand Prix or Grand Final.  Or the Melbourne Cup.  Then I know just what is going on, but I have no idea how it all may end.  There is a lot to be said for that – it is called drama.

Then there is the shortest poem of Chris Wallace-Crabbe.  ‘Whatever Christ meant, it wasn’t this.’

A rotten state

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The desolate prince was right when he described the state of Denmark as ‘rotten’.  The Compact OED gives us ‘rotting or decaying…. morally or politically corrupt.’  And there was a lot more to that decay and corruption than an ‘o’er hasty marriage’ and binge boozing behind the battlements. 

We can see signs of this rotting in governments generally in what we call the western world, but none more so than in the United States.

In her most enlightening book, Autocracy Inc, Anne Applebaum traces the similarities between the current regime in the U S, and those autocratic regimes like China or Russia, or ‘illiberal democracies’ like Turkey, Malaysia, India, the Philippines, or Hungary.

They share a brutally pragmatic approach to wealth.  Unlike the communist and fascist leaders of the past…the leaders of Autocracy Inc often maintain opulent residences and structure much of their collaboration as for-profit ventures.  Their bonds with one another, and with their friends in the democratic world, are cemented not through ideals, but deals – deals designed to take the edge off sanctions, to exchange surveillance technology, to help one another get rich…. Autocracy Inc offers its members not only money and security, but also something less tangible: impunity.

Does that not describe the Trump malaise in the U S?

After referring to ‘the fascist belief in the liberating power of violence’ and describing the feeling of success and calm after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Anne Applebaum says:

Everyone assumed that in a more open, interconnected world, democracy and liberal ideals would spread to the autocratic states.  Nobody imagined that autocracy and illiberalism would spread to the democratic world instead.

Later, the author refers to the remarks of a U S senator who said that ‘the same techniques of concealment used to facilitate offshore thugs and criminal activities also facilitate the political activities of domestic special interests.’

The book prompts discussion of the following – the relationship between political and financial dishonesty; the fundamental fallacy that underlies every aspect of the Trump administration; the limitations of the notion of kleptocracy; and the liability of the profiteers to account for their obtaining profits from their offices.

Trust and probity

People who hold office in government are in a position of trust owed to those who put them there.  They were not appointed or elected to look after themselves, but to serve the interests of others.  If they choose to break the rules about the limitations on their political powers, then they may just as easily break the rules about how they help themselves financially.  If they are dishonest politically, why not be dishonest financially?  If you are rotten about the rights of others, why not be rotten about their money?

There is nothing new in the notion that those in charge of the most austere political regimes are also likely to be the most corrupt financially.  Here from my schooldays is J B Bury, the bible on ancient Greece, on Sparta.

…..  the ‘communism’ which we observed in the life of the citizens was only superficial.  But it was specially provided by law that no Spartan should possess wealth in the form of gold or silver.  This law was at first eluded by the device of depositing money in foreign temples, and it ultimately became a dead letter; Spartans even gained throughout Greece an evil reputation for avarice.  By the fourth century, they had greatly degenerated, and those who wrote studies of the [Spartan] constitution contrasted Sparta as it should be and used to be with Sparta as it was.

The Spartans were not alone in having an evil reputation for avarice.  Greed was good generally – just look at Timon of Athens.  Bury remarks that Solon of Athens introduced reforms that ‘hit the rich hard,’ but that he was ‘too discreet to attempt to interfere seriously with the money market by artificial restrictions’. 

But it does seem that otherwise austere regimes cause its members to resort to graft as a way of life.  Does anyone believe that the rulers of Burma or Iran or Venezuela have clean hands?

Yet for centuries, Oxbridge clung to the myth that ancient Athens and Rome were civilized.  The wealth of each was built on slavery and the protection racket called empire.  Both slavery and empire disqualify the ancients from being called civilized. 

It was not until England shed its empire that it saw the ancient world for what it was.  Neither Athens nor Rome had ever dreamed that each of us is born with a dignity or worth merely because we are human – the sine qua non of civilization after the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth or Immanuel Kant.

For many, including me, The Republic of Plato is a blueprint for fascism.  But if we go to authentic fascists like those of Nazi Germany, we find real graft and corruption on a huge scale.  Put aside the dog-like loyalty of people like Hess and Rohm – Hitler, Goring and Himmler wallowed in mansions and riches, much of it the product of what the Romans called rapine.  Indeed, the conquering Roman armies lived off rapine – vae victis – in a manner that would only be surpassed by Attila the Hun, and Napoleon the Corsican.

It is not surprising that people cannot silo their dishonesty or greed.  That is why I take the view that we should be wary of dismissing as irrelevant the failures of those in public life that may be characterized as ‘private’.  If a person in a position of public trust cannot be trusted by those close to them, where does that leave the rest of us? 

That view may sound old fashioned.  That is not of itself a problem for most of us – if, for example, you also believe in having a trained independent civil service, or two political parties both capable of serving equally in government and opposition.  Each of those has gone clean out the window here in the last two generations.

So, that is the first point.  People in power who break the rules of government may be just as likely to break the rules about crime generally, and enrich themselves at your and my expense.

The present Trump regime stands for every part of that proposition.  Its own contribution is to be more brazen – shameless – than any of those who came before it – starting in the garden of Eden.

Government and business – and profit

The second point is the fallacy that underlies the whole Trump administration.  About forty years ago, some business people in Melbourne thought it would be simple to save struggling football clubs.  Just run them like their business.  They were dead wrong, and they sadly failed in their mission. 

Trump makes the same error.  He thinks he can run the U S like a business.  He is wrong. 

A trading corporation is formed and managed to return a profit on its business for its shareholders. 

That is not what the United States was formed for.  Its founders may have been grandiose, and hypocritical, but their stated object was not to make money.  Putting to one side the dreams of the Puritans, the aim of the founders was to deliver and ennoble the new Promised Land:

We the People of the United States in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common Defence, and general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity ….

The congeries of slave owners who had their own self-evident truths were not after profit, but justice, tranquility, and general welfare. 

Those aspirations are pure moonshine for the New York property developer and his rough mates.  He is in it for profit and fame, and that contradiction undermines every part of his administration.  To adopt the phrase of Anne Applebaum, he puts deals way above ideals. 

Although he did not write one word of the book, Trump is obsessed with ‘the art of the deal,’ and his coming out the winner.  This is a different universe to that of Lincoln, Roosevelt, or Truman, whose one aspiration was to serve the people of the United States – ‘of the people, by the people, for the people.’  Trump does not believe in God, but if he did, he would surely know that God did not create him to serve the people.

It follows that this presidency stands on an obviously false premise.  But it gets worse.  The first object of government is to keep the peace – to ensure domestic tranquility and general welfare.  The laws of the union about guns make the first impossible, and the opposition to the Welfare State, that is pursued everywhere else in the West, make the second impossible.  The United States has not achieved its stated objectives.

Trump must be taken to have admitted that the United States has not ensured tranquility for Americans.  He says he should send the federal army into cities that have let crime run amok.  That would be unthinkable in Western Europe – or, say, Australia or Canada.

Because Trump is so egocentric, his political responses are often so personal.  During the Dark Age, the justice of the state was created to replace the vendetta.  Trump now uses – or abuses – the organs of the state to pursue his own personal and political vendettas, and to give succor to those whom he persuaded to try to overthrow the Constitution.  We therefore have a fearful combination of Alice in Wonderland and Nineteen Eighty Four.

There is something more about Trump’s infatuation with ‘deals’ – as when he told President Zelensky that he, Zelensky, did not hold the right cards.  To which the obvious response was – this is not a card game. 

But deals are games for Trump, and he is a very bad loser.  (Witness the Nobel Prize, a loss he suffered in full war-like mode.)  

People do not come back for repeat business with Trump.  Good business people know that the best ‘deals’ are contained in documents that are put on file and left there.  Ongoing arrangements turn on trust – and Trump’s whole career in business suggests he cannot be trusted. 

You can, if you wish, start with two admitted facts – he avoided national service, and he avoided paying tax.  In any other western nation, his history on those grounds alone would disqualify him from being elected to any significant public office.

So, there is something unsettling, is there not, about the following proposition?  ‘Jack and Jill went into politics – and then Jack and Jill got filthy rich.’

Kleptocracy

That leaves the kleptocracies discussed at length in Autocracy Inc.  Trump puts Mammon before God every time.  (His ego has no room for God.)  And he is making millions for himself and his family from the public offices he holds.  (I could be typing this under a framed cartoon of Trump as Superman.  He sold the cartoons.  The proceeds did not go to charity.  The very idea would be absurd.) 

Words like kleptomania come from the Greek kleptos meaning ‘theft.’  Wikipedia says:

Kleptocracy is different from plutocracy (rule by the richest) and oligarchy (rule by a small elite). In a kleptocracy, corrupt politicians enrich themselves secretly outside the rule of law, through kickbacks, bribes, and special favours from lobbyists and corporations, or they simply direct state funds to themselves and their associates.

That is not Trump.  His schtick is not theft.  That is a crime.  But Trump’s profiteering certainly looks unlawful and dishonest.

Under our Westminster system, ministers of the Crown, the members of the executive government, hold positions of trust.  As the great English legal historian, Maitland, said in another context, ‘for every exercise of the royal power, some minister is answerable’.  Civil servants are servants of the Crown and the people, and being in the same position as employees, they owe obligations under the general law of loyalty and good faith to those whose interests they serve.

It is not the Westminster model, but the rule of law that regulates the way that our governments ministers discharge their obligations under the law, at least to the same extent that we regulate the way that directors of public companies are obliged to act – in the interests of shareholders, and not themselves. 

That is very much the way of the common law in the view we take of the proper role of all those in government.  It is not to the constitution that we ordinarily look in order to control those who direct government, in much the same way that we seek to control those who direct business.  Parliament looks after its own, but otherwise these are matters for our general law – the common law and the statutes of our parliaments.  The rationale is the same.  These people are where they are for us, and not for themselves.

Unjust enrichment or unconscionable profit?

The ministers are, therefore, subject to legal duties owed to those who put their trust in them.  As such, the Ministers must put the interests of the public before their own; they must act toward the public with the utmost good faith (uberrima fidei); they must avoid any external obligation that conflicts with their duties to the public; and they must account to the public for any financial benefit they derive from breaching any such obligations.

There is a kicker for grifters in that last remedial proposition.  We are not constrained to talk about cases where the fault of the agent has led to loss of the principal.  If the principal happens to score a win, the agent may get the windfall.  The liability to account under our laws does not turn on dishonesty. 

The duties I refer to are customarily called ‘fiduciary’.  That is a very slippery word.  It is not understood by most lawyers, let alone those who are appointed as Ministers of the Crown.  It is a standing invitation to circular reasoning – he has to account, because he is a fiduciary; because he is a fiduciary, he has to account. 

But the obligations owed by public officers (or public servants) to the Crown (the Commonwealth) are described as ‘fiduciary’.  And the law is clear that the ordinary relationship of a contract of employment entails that the employee is subject to fiduciary duties to the employer.  It follows that those serving the Commonwealth, including Ministers of the Crown, owe these duties to the people of Australia.  They are accountable to the people of the Commonwealth for any failure to observe those duties and are liable to account to those people for any profit they derive from doing so.

Now, there may I suppose be nuanced arguments about the extent of these duties for public officers, but it would be difficult for ministers to say that they did not have to act in good faith, or that they could make and keep a profit arising from their position without seeking some form of authority – or without disclosing it.  Such a denial would of itself lead to loss of office.

This part of the law, generally called equity, turns on conscience, rather than fault, and it provides a remedy for conduct it regards as unconscionable.  And it does so in terms that would shock those shysters who are wont to clip the ticket, and with much greater thrust than our regulators can summon up.

Here are extracts from two texts of undoubted authority on equity.  The first is the standard text of Maitland.

….wherever a person clothed with fiduciary character gains some personal advantage by availing himself of his situation as a trustee, he becomes a trustee of the advantage so gained…the rule includes persons who are not trustees properly so called, but all those who stand in what is called a fiduciary position …it is a general principle of equity that if an agent acquire any pecuniary advantage to himself from third parties by means of his fiduciary character, he is accountable to his employer as a trustee for the profit he has made.  

The second is the great American text of Story.

But by far the most comprehensive class of cases of undue concealment arises from some peculiar relation, or fiduciary character, between the parties …the relation of client and attorney and principal and agent.  In these and the like cases, the law, in order to prevent undue advantage from the unlimited confidence, affection, or sense of duty, which the relation naturally creates, requires the utmost degree of good faith (uberrima fides) in all transactions between the parties.  If there is any misrepresentation, or any concealment of a material fact, or any justsuspicion of artifice or undue influence, courts of equity will interpose and pronounce the transaction void ….

In short, it may be laid down as a general rule, that a trustee is bound not to do anything which can place him in a position inconsistent with the interests of the trust, or which has a tendency to interfere with his duty in discharging it.  And this doctrine applies, not only to trustees strictly so called, but to other persons standing in like situation.  … Besides, agents are not only responsible for a due account of all the property of their principals, but also for all profits which they have clandestinely obtained by any improper use of that property.

Story originated in the U S.  These citations come from an English edition.  But I am not qualified to say what may be the American law relevant to the millions upon millions Trump and his family are milking from the people as a result of his use, or abuse, of public office. 

Nor do I know whether abuse of, or misfeasance in, public office gives rise to a cause of action there, or whether our law of unjust enrichment may apply.  (That law derives from the decision of Lord Mansfield given before the United States was born, in Moses vMacferlan, and which was founded simply on the ‘ties of natural justice’ and ‘the equity of the plaintiff’s case’.)

It may help to mention two English cases where people have had to account for profit they made out of a relationship where they had to act in good faith.  Only one case involved dishonesty. 

In Reading v Attorney- General, an English sergeant during the war made a large amount of money by using his position and uniform to assist smugglers.  The court held that the assets of which the sergeant had control, or the facilities which he enjoyed, or the position which he occupied, were the real cause of his obtaining the money, and he was therefore accountable for it to his employer – at common law.  It mattered not that the employer had not lost any profit, nor suffered any damage.  (Sadly, our texts on equity are reluctant to discuss this decision at common law – given at the highest level.)

Previously, the same court (the House of Lords) in Regal Hastings Ltd v Gulliver had ruled that where the directors of a public company had, as if by accident, derived a profit from a corporate restructure, they were liable to account to the company for that profit.  It arose while they were discharging a fiduciary obligation, and that liability did not depend on any finding of fraud or bad faith.  ‘The profiteer, however honest and well intentioned, cannot escape the risk of being called to account.’ That is not comfortable reading for company directors.  Or servants of government.

So, our law makes not only the greedy pause before feathering their nest.  For present purposes, we need not stay to see what particular legal rubric – what we call common law or equity – that the court applied, since all have moved on since.

Under our laws therefore, Trump and his family would be liable to be sued for millions.  I do not know what is the position in the U S. 

It is easy to hear the response of Trump.  ‘I have not even been furtive; I am the most brazen hero of the Golden Age since Achilles.  In any event, I can do what I like since I am the President of the United Sates.’  Neither could be a defence, and either should inflame the remedy.

The assertion that the President is above the law represents an argument that was lost in England in 1215.  The President would strike at the very basis of the rule of law in the United Sates if he asserted that he could derive profit from breaching the trust imposed on him by virtue of his office, and that the law denied any remedy to the people.  Such a proposition may or may not hold in China, Iran or Russia, but not in the United States.

There is a medieval background beside Magna Carta.  The Statute of Westminster 1275 provided that ‘No Sheriff nor other’s King officer shall take any reward to do his office, but shall be paid out of that which they take of the King.’  Later, Lord Mansfield said that a ‘public officer’ held ‘an office of trust and confidence concerning the public.’  The general law – common law or equity – had for long provided that someone misusing an official position for personal gain was liable to the relevant authority under a writ of account.  This was not a matter of what we call ‘constitutional law.’  It is the law that applies to the boy selling pies at the footy.

The old writ of account at common law, which was later effectively taken over by courts of equity, goes back to at least the twelfth century.  It involved two phases.  First, the issue was whether the defendant was accountable.  Secondly, a judgment for the return of capital and any profits from its use.  As was common with the development of substantive law from procedure, the writ came first, and the doctrine followed later – reluctantly.  Still, a leading text book is entitled ‘The Duty to Account’.

There is nothing therefore extraordinary, at least for Australian lawyers, about public officers at the highest level being subject to the general law of the land.  To adapt the language of A V Dicey, no one is above the law, but all of us, whatever our rank or condition, are subject to the ordinary law of the land, and amenable to the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals.  ‘The principles of private law have with us been by the action of the courts and parliament so extended as to determine the position of the Crown and its servants; thus, the constitution is the result of the ordinary law of the land.’

The second proposition does not apply in the United States.  The first did not apply in France.  I would be surprised if that were so in the United States.  (A footnote in Dicey, published in 1885, refers to the ‘servitude of the French.’)

The Prime Minister of Australia and the janitor at Parliament House are subject to the same laws about how they go about serving the people of Australia.  If the barons got it right at Runnymede in 1215, this issue is not one of governance, much less the constitution, but one of domestic housekeeping.  The law in Australia is clear that employees are liable to account to their employers and this applies to employees of government.  It would be odd if the Prime Minister had less exposure to the law than the janitor.  Is the state of the revenue less important than the state of the loo?

Put differently, the question is not whether Ministers of the Crown are accountable to the Commonwealth and the people for any profit obtained in the carrying out of their trust, but on what legal ground could it be submitted that they are not?  A standard work of authority is blunt: ‘Wherever A owes a duty to B, B is entitled to recover from A every benefit obtained by A by virtue of his fiduciary position, without B’s knowledge and consent.’

If the legal position is not the same in the United States, it might be time they came clean about it.

Now, the proper plaintiff in any action against the President would, I suppose, be the nation – the United States.  Trump could prevent that – but only while he is in office. 

There are ways around this where a company refuses to sue its directors – one is a ‘derivative shareholder action’ – but I do not know what the position may be in the United States.  Eventually, however, Trump and his family could be held to account.

Which brings me back to the disconsolate prince of Denmark.  He fell to ground like the providential sparrow.  He felt cursed that it was left to him to put things right in Denmark.  The problem for America is that no one is putting their hand up to do so there.

And it would be a shame if they were seen to go back nine hundred years on the bequest of the nation from which they seceded.

Notes

Maitland on ministers of the Crown: The Constitutional History of England, C U P, 1963, 203.

Equity: Maitland, Lectures in Equity, Cambridge, 1910, 82-83.

Equity: Story, Commentaries on Equity Jurisprudence, First English Edition, Stevens and Haynes, 1884, pars 218, 232, and 462.

Moses vMacferlan (1760) 2 Bur 1005.

Reading v Attorney- General [1951] AC 507.

Regal Hastings Ltd V Gulliver [1967] 2 AC 134n, 144.

Statute of Westminster, 1275, 3 Edward I, Ch 26: Paul Finn, Fiduciary Obligations, 2016, 358, fn 15. (Wikipedia offers a different version.)

Lord Mansfield: R v Bembridge (1783) 22 State Trials I, 155-156.

The writ of account: J A Watson, The Duty to Account, Federation Press, 2006, pars 2, 61, and 169.  The writ said the defendant must ‘duly and without delay render to the plaintiff an account’ for the time during which he held the plaintiff’s money: Pollock andMaitland, The History of English Law, 2nd Ed, Vol II, 221.  The authors there say that in the thirteenth century, statutes ‘sanctioned a procedure against accountants which was in that age a procedure of exceptional rigour.’

Dicey, The Law and the Constitution, Macmillan & Co, 1885, 177 (and footnote), 216.

The end of the Liberal Party?

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

In an article in The Age published on 17 October this year, Waleed Aly described the present condition of the Liberal Party.  I will set out parts at length.

But in the broader sense, 2025 was decades in the making. If the Liberal Party’s problems are now existential, it is because the very conditions that made it viable, indeed dominant, for so long have evaporated. Some of this is a function of the Liberal Party’s contradictions. But some of it is a result of its successes, too.

Menzies created the party by uniting 18 anti-Labor organisations. Politics in those days was organised largely around the Labor Party: either Labor formed government, or a coalition of ‘non-Labor’ parties did. That coalition might be free-traders or protectionists or nationalists, or some combination of these, but there was no nationally co-ordinated conservative party. Menzies remedied this by building a party on the foundations of liberalism, in which the individual reigns supreme, but even this was complicated. The Coalition as we know it expresses an unorthodox marriage of the Liberal Party’s individualism, and the Nationals’ agrarian socialism, which backed state support for primary industries.

This basic structure of Australian politics changed dramatically with the Hawke and Keating governments. Their signature economic reforms had a distinctly liberal flavour: floating the dollar, dismantling tariffs, deregulating the financial system, privatising Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank. Hawke and Keating were not Reagan or Thatcher, and did things such as introducing Medicare, but they funded such projects with a more liberal economics, which changed Labor politics forever. And that, by definition, changed the nature of non-Labor politics, too.

Politics became a contest between shades of a broadly agreed liberalism. Fights occurred at the edges, over issues such as means-testing, safety nets and levels of government spending. Only when someone seriously overstepped, such as John Howard with WorkChoices, did sparks truly fly. The days of socialism being (to crib Menzies) ‘the growing threat to all that is good in our beloved country’ were over.

The big difference was on culture. As Labor liberalised economically, it also did so socially. The White Australia party dreaming of a working man’s paradise ended up spruiking being part of Asia, celebrating multiculturalism and pursuing reconciliation. From John Howard on, the Liberal Party struck a very different pose. Howard emphasised our British ties, dismissed reconciliation proposals and began interrogating migrant communities on their acceptance of Australian values.

But Howard’s lengthy success obscured the contradictions the Coalition now embodied. Put simply, its free-market economics pulled in the opposite direction of its social conservatism. It demanded high immigration – especially from Asia – but bemoaned the cultural change that brought. It wanted to deregulate labour, making working hours more irregular and unpredictable, then bemoaned the hollowing out of family life. It wanted globalisation and nationalism all at once.

This was a winning combination, but also an unstable one.

England had, and still has, both a Liberal Party and a Conservative Party.  It has always been hard to say what the Liberal Party in Australia stands for.  But is easy to say what they stood against.

The Labor Party had a history and base in the trade union movement that was its strength and its weakness.  The middle class of my generation did not want to associate with a body that had a proclaimed alliance with and reliance upon government.  There was hypocrisy in this since we as a nation have been so much more reliant on government than the Americans, but people do not have to logical in their politics. 

The Liberal Party got by not for what it stood for but what it opposed.  The bogey-man was ‘socialism’.  My schoolmates were horrified by the thought.  They were climbing the greasy pole of respectability and they did not want to be seen with that blue-collar crowd in the Collingwood outer.

The Labor Party up to 1972 was unelectable.  It was run by ‘faceless men’, and marooned by ideologues and shysters – people who thought more of themselves, and refused to acknowledge that they could only achieve their proclaimed political purpose by achieving power.

All that changed in the 80’s and the apparently calm phase under Howard is not looked back on with favour.  It has a kind of sterilized and gutless mediocrity.  Why did I before 1982 have to wait for a Labor government to lift the inane and cruel burden of income tax and to introduce the now untouchable Medicare? 

And then there were the wars joined under false pretenses, and the pussyfooting about the First Nations and the Crown.  And in the meantime, the edifice of agrarian socialism was dismantled.

So, now the infighting in a failed party that stands for nothing is vicious.  It is now the Liberal Party that is run by ‘faceless men’, and marooned by ideologues and shysters.  And they look unelectable.  Who would want to join or stand for such an ugly motley?

Their trouble makers do not recall two fundamentals about politics down under.  The man from Snowy River is a myth.  We are druggedly dependent on government.  And we could not give a bugger about ideology, class wars or the like. 

Just get on with the bloody job and make as little noise as possible.  There are not many thrilling footy umpires, but we don’t mind those that are seen but not heard.  Most of us want to have as little to do with government as possible, but we all know we have to look after those not doing so well – because one day something may go wrong for us.

My sense is that now people are less likely to be tribally attached to either major party and more able to change – to ‘swing’, if you prefer.  If you have debarred yourself from voting for one side, you have in a way disenfranchised yourself.  Going into the booth to administer a kick in the bum can be very cathartic.  And then there is the allure of those who have had real jobs and are not scarred by a political machine or albatross.

Our system of democracy turns on two parties.  At both the state level here in Victoria, and federally, one party is incapable of doing its job in that system.  That is very dangerous, and I have no idea what the answer may be, except that those called ‘independents’ will continue to fill the gaps. 

I do not see any future for the Liberal Party.  Its white ants look unstoppable and entirely unrepentant.  That again takes us back to the dark days of the 60’s, and it is of no comfort to see both the U S and U K struggling with apparently inherent weaknesses in their major parties.

If the party system collapses, what follows?

Falstaff at Covent Garden – a kind of alacrity in sinking

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment


This is how Sir John Falstaff reflects on the ignominy of being dumped in the Thames with filthy washing.

Have I lived to be carried in a basket like a barrow
of butcher’s offal, and to be thrown in the Thames?
Well, if I be served such another trick, I’ll have my
brains ta’en out and buttered, and give them to a
dog for a New Year’s gift.  S’blood, the rogues
slighted me into the river with as little remorse as
they would have drowned a blind bitch’s puppies,
fifteen i’ th’ litter! And you may know by my size
that I have a kind of alacrity in sinking; if the bottom
were as deep as hell, I should drown. I had
been drowned, but that the shore was shelvy and
shallow—a death that I abhor, for the water swells
a man, and what a thing should I have been when
I had been swelled! By the Lord, I should have
been a mountain of mummy.

This may remind you of the philosophical reflection of a sometime Spanish knight after a similar humiliation.  After being trampled on by a herd of bulls, Don Quixote laments:

Here I am with my name in the history books, a famous man of arms, courteous in my conduct, respected by princes, sought after by damsels, and just when I was expecting palms, triumphs, and crowns, I find myself this morning, as a climax to it all, trodden under foot, battered and kicked by a herd of filthy animals.

These are probably the two most famous characters in our literature.  They were created at about the same time.  In saluting what we may call the modern era, or the end of the Middle Ages, they stand for the end of all that moonshine about chivalry.  In the case of The Merry Wives of Windsor, we seethe arrival of the middle class as the centre of attention on our stage, a kind of Elizabethan prelude to Coronation Street, Neighbours, and Friends – although we had to wait centuries before Jennifer Anniston became the most photographed person on the planet, and bowed out in front of 52 million television viewers.

Well, that is one factor behind the snobbery that this play of Shakespeare attracts.  It may be his only play for which he supplied most of the plot, but the lead, Sir John Falstaff, had exploded on the stage in two history plays, before being killed off in another. 

But, as fans of Shakespeare are wont to remind fans of Verdi, the Falstaff of the comedy is much softer than the Falstaff of the history plays.  The brash insolence, fraud, drunkenness, cowardice, and womanizing are constant.  But in the comedy, and the Verdi opera Falstaff, we are spared watching Falstaff the recruiter accepting bribes to allow some poor blighters to be be despatched for cannon fodder.  If he cannot be said to rat on his mates, it’s because he does not have any.  It was this kind of nastiness, which gives a guilty edge to our glee, that led Sir Anthony Quayle call Falstaff ‘frankly vicious.’

The play and the opera are both put on to make us laugh and give us a good time – and reconcile ourselves to our condition.  Well, God only knows how much we need that release and therapy now.  Someone in the trade got up Verdi’s nose by saying he could not write an opera for comedy like Rossini.  Falstaff was Verdi’s answer.

At the beginning of the play, Page is discussing the form of his greyhound, which had just been outrun.  He tells Falstaff they have a hot venison pasty for dinner, and says ‘Come, gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness.’  At the end of the play, his wife says ‘let us every one go home, And laugh this sport o’er by a country fire….’  That is precisely the tone of the whole show – and it is precisely the tone of the whole Verdi score.  It may be the most remarkable marriage of script and score that I know.

Still, some snobbery attaches to the play – but not I think to the opera.  W H Auden just refused to lecture on the play.  Well, at least he had the courtesy to refer his audience to the opera.  My own view is that if you are not uplifted by any decent performance of the play, you need help.  As for the opera – Shakespeare is the best playwright that we know, and there are only two challengers to Verdi for that position as composer of opera.  In the result, Falstaff is not just my favourite Verdi opera, but my favourite across the board.  (I may say that I have never taken to the opera Macbeth, and that the play Othello gives me the willies.   Strawberries out of order have the same effect on me as they did on Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny.)

And for those who have been cruelled by Wagner, Falstaff has one unassailable charm.  It is not too long.  It takes less time than the final act of Wagner’s comedy.

Well, those who turned out to Covent Garden in October, 1999 to see a new production of Falstaff sure got their money’s worth.  The house, especially behind the famous curtain, had just had a major rebuild.  The lead was played by a popular local, Bryn Terfel.  The band was conducted by the urbane and unflappable Bernard Haitink.  The costumes and sets were alarmingly attention-grabbing.  The full crowd was expectant and knowing – and they got all that they wanted.  This is, after all, a show in which the English may claim some rights.  And I was at home, with Opus Arte, red at hand, cheering them all on.

At first, I thought the sets and costumes were overdone, and distracting.   But I acclimatised, especially after hearing the director say later that this is after all an Italian opera, and that the story had Italian roots.  (In the extras, Haitink said this is the one opera of Verdi where not one note, not one, is out of place.  Terfel in interview was entirely at ease and bore a remarkable resemblance to Richard Burton in so many ways.  The commentary on the massive work backstage is riveting.) 

This is an opera where the music is integral to the whole show to an extent rarely seen outside of Mozart and Wagner.  As it goes, it gets ethereal, but we always come back to what it is there for – to give us a great night out and send us home more at peace with our neighbours and the world.  And that’s God’s work.

The highlight of this show was the peak of dramatic irony where Falstaff is telling Ford disguised as Brook how he will get Ford’s wife into bed.  The incoming bourgeoisie, the future rulers of television and the world, are terrified of being cuckolded.  You may as well be castrated.  The English language has no female counterpart to ‘unmanned.’  The sequence is as paralyzingly funny as the mirror sequence with Groucho Marx in Duck Soup, and is a warrant for the value of filming this kind of theatre, so that we can see close-up the facial contortions of the splendid Italian actor.  For some reason, his pain and anguish at the cruelty of fate reminded me so strongly of that of Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners.  There are times when we get almost viscerally grabbed by the universality of theatre going right back to commedia dell’ arte and the Greeks.  And all this at what used to be a convent, then a red-light area, and now one of the more singular tourist traps on this earth.

And with it all there is a sense of elegy – unless that is just my coming to grips with coming gutsers as I get older.  Falstaff is not what he was.  They know it, and so does he.  An autumnal wistfulness pervades Henry IV Part II until it is shattered by an act of brutal betrayal.  We are spared this in the comedy and opera based on it, but not in Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight also entitled Falstaff.  (I do think it was a bit rich to give Jeanne Moreau second billing, when the tart Doll Tearsheet gets about three lines.)

In his play, Parolles gets his come-uppance too, but his decline and fall is total, and the pathos is scarcely funny.  As Tony Tanner remarked in discussing All’s Well, Falstaff in the comedy ‘dusts himself off fairly breezily…his attitude is more resigned – you win some, you lose some, and as you get older you lose more.’ 

I know just what he means, and perhaps that is why this play and opera just keeps getting better for me as I age.  It calls to mind a desolate Friday lunch in an Adelaide pub after court about forty years ago with a fading silk.  ‘You know, Mate, we are just like cats.  For every fight you have, you have one less to give.’

The Australian Opera put on a show of Falstaff in Melbourne about twenty years ago that mesmerised me and converted me to being a life-long a fan of both the play and the opera.  Well, this show at Covent Garden, now on film, is up there with the best – perhaps the locals can claim a home ground advantage, even if we now miss the subtle charms of the Crush Bar.  If anyone wants to challenge the West End as the beating heart of world theatre, they will have to get up bloody early.

Wuthering Heights – and Shakespeare

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

A few years back now, I bought the Franklin Edition of this novel.  Now I have just finished what was at least my fifth reading of the novel.  This edition is bound in leather, and the American drawings are almost photographic compared to the bleak wood cuts in the Folio Edition. 

After I had first read this version, I placed it at number 1 in the series of great books called A Curated Library.  It is elemental and unique, like the book that had been number 1 – Carlyle, The French Revolution.  And reading it again, I was reminded of the advice of a tutor at Cambridge.  ‘Don’t read it as history.  Treat it like opera or an epic poem.’

In the Foreword to the Folio, another Yorkshire novelist, Phyllis Bentley is recorded as saying:

On the moors one could escape from all the conventional restraint and battle fiercely with earth and sky… It is this untamed moorland and its untamed characters, who admit no restraint in their fierce passions, which give Wuthering Heights its incomparable air of dark, wild, stormy freedom.

That would accord with my sentiment that we are all like Hottentots tip toeing around the crater of a live volcano, when there is no known rule about who might fall in. 

I set out my impressions about fifteen years ago in the extract below, and I will just add a few observations about a novel about our inclination to lock out the outsider.

There is quite a bit of Antony and Cleopatra in Cathy and Heathcliff – a blazing untameable, but unworldly passion, except this time the gypsy is the male.  And there is a lot of Romeo and Juliet, except this time the lovers bring their dooms on their own heads.  And there are issues not just of class, but of caste.  There are aspects of this tragedy, for that is what it is, that call to mind Othello, theultimate outsider (depending on your view of The Merchant of Venice).

And this is a revenge story, as searing as the revenge in Titus Andronicus.  Then, in the end, two battered misfits survive the rubble to unite the two houses of the star-crossed lovers, and go out in quest of what Churchill called those broad sunlit uplands, in a way that calls to mind the magical finale of the Julie Taymor movie, or the ethereal peace found at the end of Die Walküre. 

You can, as they say, treat the novel as an opera, just as Wilhelm Furtwangler did for the symphony.  But, putting all labels to one side, this is one of the most searing and explosive moments in our literature.

Well, in addition to Shakespeare, Emily was brought up on the adamantine strictures of the Old Testament, the closet subtlety of Virgil, and the fiery imagination of Milton.  Perhaps no one else wrote like Emily because so few were brought up like that.

It is not just the location that makes this novel different – it is the times.  Class was all pervasive.  Servants were different – and less entitled to respect.  (That puts it softly.)  ‘Equality’ was a myth blown up by the French.  When Heathcliff returns, should he take food in the parlour, or stay in the kitchen with the servants?  Good grief, might they have had to set two tables?  Children were treated coldly, if not cruelly.  And sickness of any kind carried the threat of death.  Sick people had to be nursed over long periods.  Sanitation was not understood, and medicine was not far removed from the barber shop. 

The author died at the age of thirty.  When you compare her age and that of her sister, or Jane Austen, with that of Charles Dickens, you can gauge what we missed.

God only knows what may have happened if Mozart had lived as long as Shakespeare.

*

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

Emily Brontë (1847)

Franklin Library, 1971.  Fully leather bound, with gold edges and figured endpapers.  Illustrated by Alan Reingold.  Preface by Charlotte Bronte.

… and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.  It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am.  Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same….

Wuthering Heights has passages like this that some English ladies – and I do mean ladies – that you might meet at Oxford University know by heart.  It has become part of the English psyche.  It was the first and only novel of a young woman from Yorkshire who had probably scarcely been kissed by a man, and it fairly raises the question: just what did they put on the porridge of those young girls up there back then? 

Emily Brontë was brought up in Yorkshire with a Celtic ancestry of an Irish father and a Cornish mother.  Her father was an Anglican minister and the parsonage was the centre of the life of the family which included a sister, Charlotte.  The girls went to a harsh Curates’ Daughters’ School, but they had the run of their father’s library, so that their education in literature was so much better than what modern children get – the Old Testament, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, and the rest. 

The children’s mother died young, as was common in that time, and their aunt had a fiercely Calvinist view of the world.  The children began creating their own tales and legends and creating their own worlds for those legends.  They spent some time in Europe, but they were unhappy away from the parsonage.  The novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte came out two months before Wuthering Heights.  They are very, very different books.

When you think of Wuthering Heights, think not of a novel.  Think of Shakespeare – the passionate young Hamlet jumping into the grave in defiance of convention to embrace the dead body of a woman who went mad and then killed herself when Hamlet so coldly and cruelly rejected her; think of King Lear, plunged into madness by his sustained rage at being rejected by the one woman he loved; think of Othello, tipped over the brink of madness by the thought that the young, white woman he loved was not true to him; think of Macbeth, who allows the woman he loves to push him so that his ambition sends him and her to their respective hells; think of Malvolio, who is cruelly tricked into believing that his lady loves him and then is even more cruelly accused of being mad; and think of Prospero, who uses his powers of magic to bring together those who had wronged him and then brings them undone – and then buries his magic. 

Think of opera.  Think of The Flying Dutchman, and the thumping romantic drive of the music of the sea by Wagner, and the story of a rejected loner doomed to roam alone until he finds redemption.  Think of painting.  Think above all of La Tempesta by Giorgione.  Against a nocturnal European landscape, with sawn-off pillars and odd buildings, and lightning in the sky, a young man in contemporary costume stands calmly watching over a nude woman suckling a child.  Have you ever seen anything so enigmatic?  What on earth can it mean?  Or are we simply impertinent to seek to put into words what this great artist put on canvas?  Well, then, why not just enjoy it? 

Wuthering Heights is the story of a man despised and rejected of men, who is then rejected by the woman he loves, and who sets out to and does get revenge upon the whole pack of them, but who then, in the emptiness of his achievement, is reconciled to the memory of the woman he loved. 

The scenes between Cathy and Heathcliff on his return are the most blazing.  ‘I meditated this plan just to have one glimpse of your face – and a stare of surprise, perhaps, and pretended pleasure; afterwards settle my score with Hindley; and then prevent the law by doing execution on myself.’

The score settling would have to be terminal.  This is as elemental as Greek tragedy.

In their final argument Heathcliff looks to Nelly like a mad dog foaming at the mouth.  There is a level of sustained hysteria rarely seen outside of Dostoyevsky.  Heathcliff and Cathy flay and lacerate each other like mad monks.  It is like crossing Medea and Now, Voyager.

Has any other English writer unleashed emotional power – passion – like this?  The fury that Heathcliff unloads on those who should have been close to him – for example his wife and his son – must unsettle any reader.  Heathcliff twice refers to Cathy as a ‘slut’.  Nelly got it right when she said they were ‘living among clowns and misanthropes’.  But the more revenge and power that Heathcliff gets, the emptier becomes the shell of his life, and then we see that the second Cathy is looking to change things by being civilized.

For Heathcliff, God and Satan are one, and equally irrelevant, but somehow, he manages to induce his own death, so that he can be at one in the ground with his Cathy. 

The novel ends in this way: ‘I sought, and soon discovered, that the three headstones on the slope next the moor …I lingered around them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and the harebells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth’.  It is so English, and yet so wild.  And the ending is as rich as that of The Dead by Joyce.

This novel comes up at us out of the earth like a novel of Christina Stead –a rough uncut diamond.  It is all rawness, and it is found in Yorkshire, of all places.  Antony and Cleopatra, Abelard and Heloise, Tristan and Isolde, and Romeo and Juliet come at us from the mists of the past and foreign places.  (Charlotte found her male lead in Rochester in Jane Eyre – those Brontë girls sure liked their men strong and tough.)  

Our novel is altogether more modern.  Heathcliff is the original angry young man who comes undone because his girl is not ready for him – Cathy prefers the discreet charms of the bourgeoisie, with a little bit of bovver on the side. 

Well, who could blame her?  Heathcliff was a gypsy, and he had all the makings of a real bastard.  And yet we know that neither was ever going to find peace above the ground.  How come, then, that Geoffrey Boycott was so boring? 

*

And if I can bring this note to an end by swapping from cricket to footy, when you get into this book, you are playing with the big boys.  What a shame for us that we never got a reading of this book with Heathcliff read by Richard Burton.

Quo vadis, Conservatism?

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The most abused word in our language may be ‘conservative’.  When applied to the political attitudes of a person or party, what does it mean?  Is it of any use here in Australia now?  Do we have a conservative political party?

The Shorter OED has: opposed to change and holding traditional values… (in politics) favouring free enterprise and private ownership.  The Macquarie has: disposed to preserve existing conditions…cautious or moderate…traditional in style or manner….

These categories are very wide, and obviously open to questions of degree.  They practically invite the application of bromides like ‘broad church’ – until the body is so wide that it is no longer a church. 

Most labels are suspect – this one is even more so.  Some people are optimistic about the work of government.  Others are pessimistic.  Some crave change.  Others fear it.  There may be deep emotional values underlying differing world views.  The place of ‘science’ in all this is wobbly.  The temptation of deception is strong.  And the poseur might have a field day.  Especially one who craves the ear of the ‘people’.

We can see the room for slippage in the notion of ‘conservative’ from the definition in The Oxford Definition of Philosophy.

Conservatism.  Originally in Burke an ideology of caution in departing from the historical roots of a society, or changing its inherited traditions and institutions.  In this ‘organic’ form, it includes allegiance to tradition, community, hierarchies of rank, benevolent paternalism, and a properly subservient underclass.  By contrast, conservatism can be taken to imply a laissez-faire ideology of untrammelled individualism that puts the emphasis on personal responsibility, free markets, law and order, and a minimal role for government, with neither community, nor tradition, nor benevolence entering more than marginally.  The two strands are not easy to reconcile, either in theory or in practice.

Those remarks are English and dated now.  No sane person here would refer to ‘a properly subservient underclass’.  But no political party in the Welfare State can reject ‘benevolent paternalism’.  That would be political suicide. 

We inherited the Welfare State from the English.  The constant political issue is that we demand to retain the benefits, but we turn against those who want us to pay for them.  The result is that our government is broke, because its members are too scared of us to do what is required.  They just pass the buck to the next lot. 

They deny that, but we do not believe them.  Nor do we do anything to fix the problem.  This failing looks to be inevitable in our model of democracy.  I have no idea what the end will be.

Another thing we inherited from the English was a rejection of theory or ideology.  We distrust both.  ‘Ideology’ comes from the study of ideas.  We act on the lessons of experience rather than the demands of logic.  You see very different attitudes across the Channel or the Atlantic.

Another thing we inherited from England, after America had not, is that the English had accepted the responsibility of government for looking after the poor from at least the time of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603).  In the sixteenth century, before white people had even seen America, the English people had assumed obligations for their poor that would have been abhorrent to their Puritans back then, and which still look at best alien to most Americans today.  By 1563, the English had made a law for the compulsory levy for the maintenance of ‘impotent, aged and needy persons’.  The Oxford History of England records that the English accepted that the poor were ‘a charge on public benevolence’ and that ‘responsibility in the matter could not be left to the conscience of the individual, but must be enforced by law upon everyone.’ 

The English did not do this for ideology or out of charity, but for the prosaic object of keeping the peace against vagabonds.  They faced reality, not God.  Common sense trumps theory.  The distance from this very old English position to that in America now is as deep as the Atlantic.

When you add to that the fact that the Welfare State was introduced to England by Lloyd George and Winston Churchill in the People’s Budget, you get a better idea of the difference between us and the U S. 

Before Churchill, Disraeli had been the pin-up boy of English Conservatives.  That did not stop him taking the plunge and introducing something like universal male suffrage.  The great Prussian, Count Otto von Bismarck, had done the same for Germany before he introduced the Welfare State there.  Disraeli and Bismarck were archetype conservatives – and I admire both.

‘Conservatives,’ then, could be alarmingly ‘progressive, to use another very plastic label.  Even when ‘conservatism’ was in full flower it allowed policies we now call liberal or progressive and which would be pure heresy to those who claim to be ‘conservatives’ in the U S today.  Burke, Bismarck and Disraeli did things that would lead to apoplexy on Sky After Dark.

England had both a conservative party and a liberal party.  (Churchill flitted between both, but he was one off.)  England still has a party with ‘Liberal’ in its name beside the party of the Tories.

Australia has a party called the Liberal Party.  It also claims to be conservative, although its lore is that the title ‘Liberal’ was deliberately chosen.  It now looks neither liberal nor conservative.

For about a generation it was wedded to a party of very determined agrarian socialists.  That party now looks to be in the hands not of farmers, but mining companies and urban ideologues in think tanks.  The coalition further dilutes any recognisable platform.

What are the results in Australia? 

 First, neither of the two main parties can come close to forming a majority in parliament.  Each is on the nose to the public at large.  One is accused of forgetting its roots or past.  The other is accused – and fairly accused – of not fulfilling its obligations in opposition and of turning its province into a one-party state. 

Secondly, on vote-driving issues, the only differences between the two parties are those of degree.  With the possible exception of preserving the environment, neither major party offers policies that derive from its platform, and are different in substance to those of the other side.  Each is engaged in a listless and useless game of charades that turns people right off politics as a whole.

Thirdly, whereas two generations ago it was the Labour Party that was unelectable because of division, ideology, cranks, and crooks, now it is the turn of the Liberal Party.  They look useless and bent on sustained irrelevance under the sedative of the ideology of their media drivers. 

It is best to pass over the National Party and One Nation in silence.

The conclusion is, I think, that the word ‘conservative’ has no place in Australian politics.  It is at best useless, and at worst misleading.  Like ‘socialist’, it is a darling dodo of our time.

And no populist can claim to be ‘conservative.’  They stand, they say, for ordinary people against the ruling Establishment, whose members they brand with the term ‘elites’.  I long for the day when an Australian says ‘I don’t want the best cricketer in my Australian XI – I want a dinky die Aussie battler or bludger.’  Or someone walking into a hospital saying ‘I need surgery to deal with a life-threatening condition, but I don’t want a Top Gun surgeon – a GP from the sticks suits my schtick.  I distrust all elites.  I am but a child of the people. Who was it who said of the people, by the people, for the people?’

The most hilarious claimant for the label ‘conservative’ is Donald Trump.  His mission is to obliterate the whole status quo by deceit, and if necessary by violence and force.  And a frightening number of Americans are happy to go along for the ride on a violent road.  And the last thing Trump wants to ‘conserve’ is the planet.

His major trumpet, Fox News, has nothing to do with politics.  It exists simply to enrich and aggrandize its owners.  In this respect, it resembles Trump.  By contrast, the function of the Murdoch press in Australia is simple.  It appeals only to a portion of the voters who can only vote for one party, and while doing so makes that party unelectable.

The American ideology is home grown – the family, God, and the flag.  They look still to have a hankering after royalty, as do the French, but at its worst in the U S, you get the spewing hate of Stephen Miller, who is besotted by the very idea of ideology.

There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved.  It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless.  It is an ideology that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth.  Its adherents organize constantly to tear down and destroy every mark of grace and beauty while lifting up everything monstrous and foul.

You would not want to be left alone in a room with a man who talks like that.  Goebbels would have blanched.  This is wild uncharted Scapegoat Territory.

So, the future looks bleak for democracy all round. 

Conservatism is a natural and decent instinct, but it has been claimed by people who are anything but decent, either because they are stupid, or greedy, or both.

Oddly enough, Australia may be well placed to deal with the Fall.  This is because we are not interested in ideology – or, for that matter, politics at large.  Life offers so much more.  Most sane Australians would much prefer to talk about footy or cricket than the so called ‘culture wars’.  And that is very healthy.  Australians correctly suspect those who have the time and inclination to indulge in what are called the ‘politics of grievance’.  What more do these people want?  What drives them to keep stirring the possum?  Did they not have enough toys in their childhood?

I was reminded of a very cold morning in the middle of winter on a crowded platform on a railway station an hour from Melbourne some years ago.  Then came the dreaded announcement.  The train was delayed.  Yet again.  That led to the following conversation.

I am going to punish these bastards for this at the next state election.

So am I, Mate.

Can you just remind me, Cobber – which set of bludgers claims to be running this bloody joint at the moment?