Author: Geoffrey Gibson

Rupert’s reindeers

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After Rupert Murdoch gave the thumbs down to our Prime Minister from New York, the vigour that his lieutenants have shown in implementing the death sentence has been unsettling. Boyhood friendships and years of alliance went clear out the window almost overnight at the croak of His Master’s Voice. It has been a chilling reminder of the truth of the Biblical injunction – put not your trust in princes. The killing ground every night on Sky TV has been revolting. They have been shedding more blood than Fox News.

Dennis Shanahan has been a loyal and imperturbable supporter of Tony Abbott for years, from the time he became leader so heroically, through his glory days as Opposition Leader, and from that wonderful day when government of the nation was returned to its true owners. The endurance of the fidelity has been remarkable. In today’s Australian, we get this.

Abbott’s attitude since becoming opposition leader in 2009, by one vote, then failing to get the support of two independent MPs to form government in 2010 and finally defeating a reheated Kevin Rudd in 2013, has been one of an almost accidental leader uncomfortable in the job.

It takes your breath away. Someone has gone through an overnight change of total reversal – either the writer or his subject. The two are entirely unrecognisable. Jekyll and Hyde.

Mr Shanahan then goes on to compare the PM with Prince Hal, who found friendship among rough mates. He says that ‘Even after becoming king, Henry V, Shakespeare’s character retains a warmth for his old mates until forced to endorse Bardolph’s hanging for looting.’ Now, it may not be wise to sully Shakespeare with the latrine of our politics. That is not how it happened. The reversal of Prince Hal comes immediately after he accepts the crown when he repudiates and as good as kills his would-be mate Falstaff in the coldest line in literature. Prince Hal is a rat. Besides, if the analogy were to be pressed, who is the undesirable that the PM might now be advised to repudiate – if necessary in cold blood?

Still, the PM has as yet some memories of support among Rupert’s reindeers. Mr Chris Kenny is a former Liberal Party staffer who has been swinging the lead about his sometime mate on Sky, but in today’s Oz, there is a most moving return to form and to the fold.

For all the Coalition’s failings and missteps, it is surely incontestable that Tony Abbott has provided the best 16 months of government Australia has seen in more than seven years.

Now, here truly we behold a miracle! The government seen by most Australians and many of its backbench as incurably stupid and unreliable is incontestably the best that this country has had for seven years – incontestably.

After that shell-burst of revelation, we get the following damnation of demons and a catechism for the faithful:

Nor is it a surprise that the ABC, Fairfax Media and most of the press gallery have been ferociously attacking Abbott – [as has Mr Kenny and his colleagues on Sky]; he is anathema to the love media. They are diametrically opposed to his views on climate, borders, gay marriage, even national security.

Can’t you imagine being at a pub or a barbecue and expressing views different to those of our PM on climate, borders, or gay marriage and being dismissed as part of the love media?

Now you can see why this country is buggered. We are surrounded by politicians and people from the press who are just wall to wall bullshit. They roll around and glory in pure bullshit.

A model of confection

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Although labels are demeaning and dangerous, you might be able to discern two different kinds of politicians. There are conviction politicians. They believe in something and they stand for it. And then there are confection politicians. They do not believe in much and they stand for even less – they just follow the pack and the polls. A confection is a ‘making by mixture of ingredients’ – the advisers and pollsters just mix the ingredients up in a vessel that is close to empty, and lo! you have a confection politician straight off the shelf.

We do not see many conviction politicians now. Margaret Thatcher and Paul Keating believed in something and stood up for it, and I admired each of them greatly for doing just that. They disdained populism, and swimming against the tide was a badge of honour for them. You don’t see their kind now. The strength of Angela Markel is different – as someone remarked, she just takes the politics out of politics. Angela Merkel makes politics decent. That is a heroic achievement.

People generally, here and elsewhere, are sick of politicians who just keep turning out as if they were made up as actors in a show. They are talking heads who go through their unlovely routines in their unlovely parliaments with their unlovely accomplices in the press. The whole confected lot are neither liked nor respected by the voters, and that does not look like changing. The people of conviction are seen to be dangerous zealots who are electoral poison. It is a curio of history that these puritanical party-killers and vote-losers were mostly on the Left two generations ago, and now they sit exclusively on the Right. It is now the conservative side that can be infected by cranks.

Before going to the present Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, let me refer to two politicians that I see as models of decency. Lindsay Thompson and John Cain were Premiers of this State about thirty years ago. Each was incorruptible. We take that for granted in Victoria, but no other state can. Each was a loyal member of his party but each was aware of the limitations of himself and his party. Each had a sense of decency that kept him at a distance from the press. Each remained grounded, even in the top job. Neither was marked by apparent personal ambition; to the contrary, both appeared to accept that in its essence, their job was to be a servant of the public.

I suppose that that view might have become a little roseate with age, but it looks right. Each man is I think fondly remembered – and now, the type of each is badly missed. We do not see people with those solid but modest attributes trying to reach the top in the cess-pit of Canberra. Mr Thompson may be better remembered now as an economic manager, but Mr Cain was attended by fools, and an inept opposition was unable to terminate his rule after one term.

You do not see the attributes of a model politician in Tony Abbott. What you do see are the attributes of a model confection politician. This was immediately apparent to Mr Matthew Parris of The Times of London.

Muscled, tanned, sharpshooting, God-fearing, straight-talking, climate-change-mocking and tough on immigration.

He’s the Right’s dream: the kind of guy Tory-toddlers could paint by numbers, a politician who focus-groupers could have stitched together with canvas returns, polling data and steel wire.

Well, here’s news for them. There’s no need to dream. This populist paragon lives and breathes and was elected to lead in 2013. And, this weekend, after only 17 months, he’s tanking……

I sense….a conflicted man, but a man of immoderate ambition and only modest ability; a leader who wanted to be smiled on by the Deity and roared on by the people, and hoped he might marry the people’s instincts with his own….

The general lesson is this. You cannot construct winning positions simply by summing together the things voters tell pollsters they want.

Once you see Tony Abbott as a confection politician or made-up job, things become clear.

His weaknesses were concealed as Leader of the Opposition because all that he had to do was destroy, and his target was self-destructing in slow motion and in technicolour. Mr Abbott was a disaster in opposition. Doctor No. He was programmed by his minders and an all-powerful personal staff to block everything. It was close to an abuse of office – we see it in the US – but he never bothered to formulate positive policies, which is what oppositions are for, and he arrived in government without policies – and without women. He looked forlorn and irrelevant from the start.

Because he performed so badly and was so unloved, he did not win enough seats to implement such policies as he did have, and he has looked impotent ever since. This does not stop him abusing the word ‘mandate’ – he had hardly won one. All he can do is blame the Opposition – and make the hilarious claim that they are being unduly obstructive. It was not their fault or doing that he campaigned so badly that we let in real and not just make-believe galahs.

But even though he could not lose, he made promises that he knew he could not keep. This comes from his insecurity – I will come back to this.

Then he made two mistakes that you would expect from a confection politician. He failed to change his make-up between opposition and government. He thought that the Hit Squad that served him in opposition might run the country. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing. This is perhaps the biggest curse of his whole debacle. The failure to move from opposition mode was spotted immediately by a Liberal premier, and I don’t think that this man has ever grown into the job or seen his awful limitations in it.

This relates to his other great mistake at this time. Confection politicians thrive on praise and support – that is, after all, all that they have. Mr Abbott believed the bullshit coming from his own cheer squad in the press. He really did believe that he had not been a disaster – he thought that he and his team had been great, and he was happy to pose in the sun under his laurels. The Canberra press gallery has a lot to answer for in the uncomely circus of Canberra, but none more unsettling than this fevered anointing of the duffer named Tony Abbott. Most of them have recently dropped him like a hot scone, and pointed the bone at him in a most unattractive way, as if on cue, but that is another story. The damage to Mr Abbott and the country had been done.

Now, you can see why he clings so desperately to his advisers and his pollsters, and his personal team. They are part of him. They made him. This is why he is content to flout his personal association with confected front-men of the Right like Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt, in a manner precisely calculated to alienate the whole East Coast Establishment, and why he is prepared to embrace the program of the Institute of Public Affairs, in a manner designed to estrange his rank and file. The IPA is fast moving to the level of toxic electoral demonology for years claimed by the League of Rights. It is a good example of how the Looney Tunes of the Right have become the best allies of the Labor Party. Indeed, the Labor people now pray that Mr Abbott can hang on indefinitely.

Now you see why Mr Abbott promoted and clung on to a policy that his party loathed and that floated around him like a loaded jellyfish. He was trying to tell as that he could really stand for something.

Now you can see why Mr Abbott keeps saying things that are so silly. These mouthings do not come from deep or even personal conviction, apart from trivia, but from how the team says he should go the cameras with the day’s bon mot. These offerings are at best boring and banal, but too often they suffer in transition. Some, like the shirtfront, have passed into the lexicon, but it is embarrassing to go back.

I want to say that we have made a good start, that the adults are back in charge, and that strong, stable, methodical and purposeful government is once more the rule in our national capital.   Yes, we will speak when we need to speak. But we won’t speak for the sake of speaking, and we won’t bang on things for the purposes of a PR gesture….The Afghan War ends not with victory, not with defeat, but with hope…..Australian troops do not fight wars of conquest; we fight wars of freedom…..I regret to say that not every Australian is a monarchist, but today everyone feels like a monarchist…..You might expect with the ABC that it might show some basic affection for the home side….Australia is a land of droughts and flooding rains. Always has been. Always will be.…Jesus knew that there was a place for everything, and it is not necessarily everyone’s place to come to Australia.     We admired the skill and sense of honour that they [Japanese servicemen ] brought to their task, although we disagreed with what they did.   Gallipoli was a magnificent defeat.     World War I was in one sense a tragic waste but it was for a good cause……My position is that everyone has to be on Team Australia…..What the Scots do is a matter for the Scots…. I think the people who would like to see the break-up of the United Kingdom are not the friends of justice, not the friends of freedom….The arrival of the first fleet was the defining moment in the history of this continent….Modern Australia has an important and indigenous multicultural character. Still, it’s British settlement that has most profoundly shaped the country that we are….There was a holocaust of jobs in defence industries under the members opposite….I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I withdraw…there was a decimation of jobs.

‘Decimation’ was wrong, too. Mr Abbott keeps making these appalling errors because under the confection, there is no conviction. It is as if he mocks himself, and he does. And he does it in front of the world. We just never know what he might say or do next. We should all go down on knees and thank God that we do not have the bomb.

Curiously, the want of bedrock, and this fixation with slogans, appears to be a reason that Mr Abbott also has the worst failure of a politician. He cannot negotiate. Before the last election, the absolutist said he would not negotiate with minority parties. Nowadays, that is political death. It was this disability or childishness of Mr Abbott that allowed Julia Gillard to form a minority government in the first place. She had what it took; he did not. It is curious that his claim to fame is that he killed off a PM who was only there because he dropped the ball. But, as ever, he would not see that.

And it is this absence of conviction that makes Mr Abbott look so insecure, looking as if his mum had done his hair, and sent a note for the teacher. This is how he always comes out programmed by his handlers and it is why Mr Turnbull looks ever so much more polished and urbane. And he is. It is why no one wants to listen to the PM any more. He is at best irrelevant, and he is so completely out of touch with his time and place.

And this lack of conviction and consequent insecurity are behind three of his worse failings. He does not understand how far behind he has got, and he still gets shocked to find that he has been left behind. Then, he fails under stress. We saw this when he went weak at the knees and made rash promises on election eve; he was at it again the other day when he started offering submarines for a vote, and when he got his mate Alan Jones to cold call the party. He was also making seriously wrong statements about our governance and refusing to back away, while taking cover under verbal sandbags like ‘distraction’ and ‘chaos’. It was like the Praetorian Guard auctioning the purple. Finally, and most damagingly for the country, this Prime Minister has put his own interests over those of the country by refusing to put the best man in the job of Treasurer. His Treasurer now commands as much confidence in the nation as the Prime Minister himself, and that is a disaster for all of us, who are being made to pay for the failings of others.

This confection man is not in the same league as the decent politicians I mentioned. He is manifestly not up to the job that he fell into by one vote, and the job now before us is to bring this simple truth home. In the meantime, we just wait for the make-up to fail again before the next mistake. In light of the croaks tweeted from the lonely old man in New York, it is just a matter of time, but that will be an ugly time that will not be good for any of us.

If it matters, I see no real prospect of anything better from Mr Shorten. He also stands for mannered insincerity, a kind of conviction deficit. This is not surprising, as neither party stands for anything that the other does not – with the possible exception that the Labor Party is not overtly Neanderthal about the environment and the Liberal Party favours capital over labour in what they call small business. Funnily enough, people do not see that is why our politics are so presidential – the leaders may be uninspiring, but their parties are no better. Just imagine if the bastards we get as leaders were footballers – you would not cross the road to watch either of them.

Birdman

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This is a movie by a brilliant director about the other side of the lights on Broadway.  We are going through a phase of movies ‘based on real stories’.  Another phase is about actors on the skids, including actors who can just drop in and who know the lines already (Venus in a Fur), or who have diverting personal lives.  As well as Birdman, there is one on the way with Al Pacino.  If you like your humour blacker than pitch, and if you like the supernatural at full throttle in the Latin American mode, so that the hero literally takes wing and  flies out the window, you might enjoy this movie.  If you don’t, you won’t.  You will see it as silly, precious, pretentious self-indulgence.  Sadly I fall into the second group, so I did my dough.  I think many who claim to be in the first group are like those who acclaim minimalism – they are scared to stand up for themselves.  At least we get an insight into why the West End is different.

East West

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There is a Greek if not Byzantine twist to the controversy about a large Victorian government project called East West. I have not seen one document or opened one book, but you know something is badly wrong when a government enters into a secret deal to frustrate the decision of the courts and the verdict of the electorate. My very limited understanding is as follows.

  • A government and a builder enter into a contract.
  • The contract is hugely controversial and it becomes an election issue.  The opposition threatens to cancel it, if, as is likely, it wins government.
  • Opponents of the project also see a process issue on which to get the courts to say that the contract is invalid.  The government did not go through the right process to test the project, and the courts may well say the deal is bad.
  • With knowledge of all this, a representative of the government enters into what is called a side deal with the builder to honour the contract even if the court says that it is unenforceable.  They keep this deal secret from the public who only find out about it after the election and the new government sets about to cancel the deal.
  • If a representative of a corporation or trust purported to enter into a secret deal with a builder binding on stakeholders to honour a deal even if the courts say it should not be honoured, I think those running the corporation or trust would be obliged to do all that they could to relieve stakeholders of any liability that might flow from the secret transaction.
  • The builder looks to lack merit.  Why did it enter into the secret deal?  Was it told that it would get nothing unless it did?  Did it just chance its arm on a process that looks as desperate as it is grubby?  Above all, what in equity can it say that it has done or outlaid in reliance upon a secret deal after the event with a sinking government?  Is this just not a scheme to make taxpayers liable even though the courts say that in law they are not liable?
  • I think it is quite open to the government of Victoria to say that the previous government secretly entered into a deal purporting to say that the merry-go-round for the builder will stop for the benefit of the builders and at the expense of the taxpayers as if the courts had not ruled on the contract – now, the new government will by statute say that the merry-go- round for the builder will stop for the benefit of the taxpayers and so as to deprive the builder of unjust enrichment as if that side-deal had not been made, and as if the courts had ruled against the contract. You just extinguish a covert executive act with an overt legislative instrument. It is no contest.
  • I would have thought that such a course was not just open to the government but one the like of which it was it was obliged to undertake.
  • The rest it tactics.  The government could test the planning issue in the courts.  The previous government and the builder evidently thought that they were on a loser. Then or subsequently, they could test the validity of a deal done by a government in secret to bind taxpayers to an expense and to award a builder a gain  contrary to the ruling of the Supreme Court of Victoria.  The critical point would be the cross-examination of the signatories.  That would take place before a court whose authority they have sought to deny and whose protection of the community and the rule of law thay have clandestinely sought to avoid. Sane politicians and business people do not subject themselves to this kind of ritual humiliation. The government would have the fall-back of legislating in a case that would not attract the opprobrium such a course usually does. As I say, these are just tactical issues.
  • I would be surprised if the builder went the distance.  They are without merit or friends.  They have come by their title by underhand means. Doubtless the parties had oodles of expensive and high-powered legal advice. So did the directors of James Hardie before they sought to shaft their workers, and they were lucky not to go to jail. Grubby deals and their makers usually fall apart in the glare of daylight.

Liberalism and education

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The Economist is a newspaper that I trust. It also espouses liberalism in a way that no political party does, because it is honest and to the point. The paper uses no by-lines, but in the current issue, we learn that Mr John Micklethwait (quel nom Anglais!) is completing his term as editor that started in 2006 – when Twitter was ten days old.

The editor refers to his ‘only true master’ – the liberal credo of open markets and individual freedom. He surveys the world scene. ‘Democracy is no longer the presumed dimension….Western democracy, too, looks even less exemplary….The only way to feel good about American democracy is to set it beside Brussels.’ The political graveyard or playground in Westminster is not apparently worth mentioning.

One issue facing liberalism is inequality. As global markets give more rewards to talent, inequality gets worse and more entrenched. The paper resists the calls from the Left to punish the talented and ‘somehow mandate equality’. (Did the editor really say ‘mandate’?) It advocates attacking privilege and waging war on ‘crony capitalism’, recalling the great liberals of the 19th century who waged war on the ‘old corruption’ of aristocratic patronage and protection for the rich – he might have added Lloyd George and Winston Churchill in the twentieth century with the People’s Budget and the acknowledgement that the sick and the aged are part of the business of the state. Four times as much public money goes to the wealthiest 20% of Americans in mortgage interest deductions than is spent on social housing for the poorest fifth. Those tax laws favour landlords over tenants, the wealthy over the not so wealthy.

The other great issue facing liberalism is the extent of state intervention. The great liberals were progressives who also sought a smaller state but –

….although this newspaper wants government’s role to be limited, some of the remedies for inequality involve the state doing more, not less.

That is the political issue of our time. The editor quotes an example of education – only 28% of American four-year-olds attend state-funded pre-school; China is hoping to put 70% of its children through pre-school by 2020. And we do not need reminding of the economic power of China.

Australia is not giving an equal opportunity to its children to be educated. Those children with wealthy parents get a better opportunity by being sent to expensive private schools which a majority of parents see as better than government schools. This split in schooling, which you do not see in most of Europe, mocks our commitment to equality and serves to entrench inequality. Class might pass into caste.

There is one thing that economists agree on – inequality of wealth is bad for the economy. We as a young nation have an interest in seeing that our young are educated and trained to take part in the competition of all the talents and share in the rewards on offer in global markets. Whether or not we as a people get our money back that way, it seems to me only fair that those who have done well out of a system should give something back to it. I take that as something like a moral given. That is how good clubs and companies, and schools, work.

We need to learn from the good economies how giving back works for them. Just look at German technical education for example, or at the role of universities in Israel in developing information technology. Why should not we be trying to join the world’s best in these and other spheres? Are we looking too hard at the wrong games?

Forty years ago, I paid a lot more tax, but university was free back then. It is offensive to me to hear people say that this country cannot afford to educate its own young, but must get them to pay for it. If this nation is to come anywhere near its potential, it needs to even out education between public and private, and to help as many as possible with free tertiary training and education.

To help the nation and the economy grow, we should be spending a lot more effort and money on educating and training our girls and boys in an attempt to catch up to, say, France, Germany, or China in education. We should just get more tax from the better off to educate those who are worse off. You encourage a cycle of take and give back. The scheme has the primal mark of fairness and therefore justice – symmetry.

The editor of The Economist may not have had precisely that end in view, but it is in any event one that is quite beyond our politicians. We do, after all, have other things to worry about. Like the royal family. The local press has been priming a forthcoming biography of Charles. It says that both he and Diana panicked on the eve of their wedding. We can see why. Poor Diana in desperation told her sister that the marriage was ‘absolutely unbelievable.’ The answer? ‘Your face is already on the tea towels.’

There you have it. We are more interested in princes and duchesses in England than the education of our children. If I were young and fit, and that way inclined, I would run for election on a platform of two policies – an equal opportunity for all Australian children in education, and self-government for all Australians; and it would be a fair bet that my hardest opponents on each would be equally hard on both.

American football

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The Superbowl aptly showcases, as they say, American football.  It is unapologetically violent – life threateningly, and life ruiningly.  It is incandescent with money on a stage that we call obscene.  It sees the  loudest displays of egoism available in this galaxy.  It is macho male to a degree that is as revolting as the violence.  It is longer and more self-centred than a Wagner opera – and that is a huge statement at each end – and people who watch it live even once increase their prospects of succumbing to alcohol.  Above all, it is the most structured , segmented, guarded, and hierarchical affair you can get outside the Roman Catholic Church, and its premise also is that every player out there, bar one, is a moron who is incapable of doing more than one thing at once, like chewing gum and walking – and that one person is therefore almost never black.  I doubt whether any of those over-paid  egomaniacal brain-dead brickheads could get a run for the Melbourne Storm thirds.  That is why one dude is being ensainted for catching a ball thrown to him at the distance of a cricket pitch.  No wonder they do not know what to do with one of our players who can kick, pass, tackle, withstand assault, and sprint – and think.

And the winners were Patriots.

Terror in Paris V – Surveillance

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Murders like those in Paris committed in the name of organisations prompt calls for surveillance of the members of such organisations.  Below is an extract from Terror and the Police State dealing with surveillance in the Paris Terror and elsewhere.

 

Surveillance

The proposition ‘Big Brother Is Watching You’ has become justly famous since the luminous mind and the graphic pen of George Orwell depicted the totalitarian state in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is an essential part of that sense of entrapment, powerlessness, enclosedeness, inevitability and hopelessness which, together with the prevalence of informers and denouncers, and a feeling of randomness, leaves mere objects of a police state feeling utterly helpless – and that is in large part the object of the exercize – to sterilise the individual. The end condition of unaccommodated man was described in King Lear as follows:

As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods,

They kill us for their sport. (Act 4, Scene 1, 36-37).

We have seen that the Nazi regime did not just threaten those in a minority – this colossal machine rose up and brooded over every single person in the Reich. The threat of arrest and detention, and dismissal and disgrace, hung over everyone except the Leader, and no one knew when it might come or how it might fall. The collective fear within the nation left in a kind of submission or acquiescence those who had not been seduced by the glitter and the lies – and the successes, at home, and across borders.

In Nazi Germany, every group of houses had a ‘Block Warden.’ These were at the bottom of the hierarchy, neither respected nor loved. Every local branch of the Party had an average of eight cells with about fifty households in each. The Blockwart was responsible for what might be called the political supervision of about fifty households. He was in charge of seeing that flags and bunting were put out, and that his people voluntarily attended parades, but he was also an access point for informers, and a source of information in his own right. He was commonly a very minor party functionary, doubtless with the social scars to prove it, and he was concerned with both propaganda and the maintenance of order. Those who had been bombed out or who had issues with ration cards would go to him first, but he was also a reporting post.

Like any good German, he had to report dangerous or suspicious behaviour, and when he did, the suspect could expect a visit from the Gestapo. He was therefore what might be called an ‘officious bystander’, and he was loathed accordingly. In many cases, he was called simply der Braune, ‘the brown one’, after the brownshirt that many of his ilk commonly wore. They were also called Political Leaders, and by 1935, there were perhaps 200,000 of them. Richard Evans makes the remarkable assertion that ‘including their helpers there were almost two million Block Wardens by the beginning of the war.’ They must have been like a sinister and all pervasive Dad’s Army, and since a majority were middle class, they may have been even more unpopular in working class areas.

Professor Evans describes this level of surveillance as follows:

They were often the first port of call for denouncers, and they exercised close surveillance over known dissenters, Jews and those who made contact with them, and ‘politically unreliable’ people, usually former opponents of the Nazis. Known derisively as ‘golden pheasants’ from their brown-gold uniforms with their red collar epaulettes, they were required to report ‘rumour-mongers’ and anyone who failed to conform to the district Party organisation, which would pass on their names and misdemeanours to the Gestapo. Those who fell foul of the Block Wardens could also be denied state benefits and welfare payments. Other branches of the huge Nazi Party apparatus had similar local officials, ranging from welfare service to the Labour Front and the women’s organization, and all of them carried out similar functions of surveillance and control. In factories and work places, officials of the Labour Front, the employers, the foremen and the Nazi Security Service took over the functions of the Block Warden. Those workers who did not toe the line were singled out for discriminatory treatment, denial of promotion, transfer to less congenial duties, or even dismissal. ‘You couldn’t say anything,’ recalled one worker in the Krupp engineering factory later: ‘the foreman was always standing behind you, nobody could risk it.’ The Nazi terror machine reached down even to the smallest units of everyday life and daily work.

During the time of the French Terror, France was hardly a police state, at least in the sense that we understand the term now. But, in and from March 1793, France found itself facing mortal threats from within and without, and to help it to survive those threats, it passed a series of emergency measures, such as the creation of the Committee of Public Safety and the Declaration of Revolutionary Government (in October), that were bona fide emergency measures. Their General Dumouriez was about to defect; the Vendee and Marseilles were about to erupt; they were yet to win their first major victory against monarchist regimes; and they were fairly obviously heading to a showdown between the two completely different points of view on how the revolution might go forward – for constitutional change to make the middle class and property feel secure; or for radical change to make the people at the bottom better off. It was in short, time to take the gloves off, and what we know as surveillance was an essential part of the package, and one that would see those at the bottom – the sans-culottes – given direct power to control events in the revolution. This would be, for better or worse, people power in action.

On 21 March 1793, the National Convention made a law to set up Surveillance or Watch Committees. The recital said that the Convention considered that ‘at a time when the allied despots threaten the Republic still more by the efforts of their intrigues than by the success of their arms, it is its duty to prevent liberticide plots.’ Propaganda is rarely either pretty or sensible, but every commune, and each section in a larger commune, was to have a committee of twelve citizens elected by ballot – former priests and nobles were excluded. They were to take ‘declarations’ from foreigners in each arrondissement, but their work came to be directed against all suspected persons, French as well as foreign. They came to be known as ‘revolutionary committees’ in the Parisian sections. They might in truth be said to represent a devolution of power, but they were the vehicle in which the sans-culottes might at least feel that they were realising some political ambition.

These people had no small power in a time when being suspect might get you in prison (although the Law of Suspects was not passed until September.) They had a role of general surveillance that was utterly inhibited by forms and equally uninhibited by legality. These committees would be in charge of ‘Civic Certificates’ or ‘Civic Cards’, certificats de civisme. These attested to the patriotism of the bearer, and would be essential to anyone wishing to move around France if they were not to be treated as suspect where they arrived. Every citizen was required to certify before the commune or the committee his place of birth, his means of livelihood, and ‘the performance of his civic duties.’ We have seen a committee like this at work in the extracts from Les Deux Amis. They gave ordinary people the chance to terrify other ordinary people.

These committees look to have had great power, much more power and status than the German ‘Block Wardens’, although their roles had something in common. In parts of Paris there was a concerted effort to spread the sans-culotte zeal into less ardent arrondissements. Anyone with any experience of politics at the most local or grass-roots level will understand the power that bodies like these would possess, not least in a revolutionary state at war.

In September, the Paris Commune set out even broader grounds on which Civic Cards might be refused, some of which might now afford grounds to smile to those who struggle with the concept of patriotism at the best of times – ‘Those who pity the farmers the and greedy merchants against whom the law is obliged to take measures, …those who in assemblies of the people arrest their energy by crafty discourses, turbulent cries and threats, ….those who speak mysteriously of the misfortunes of the Republic, are full of pity for the lot of the people, and are always ready to spread the bad news with an affected grief, ….those who received the republican constitution with indifference and have given credence to false fears concerning its establishment and duration, or ….those who do not attend the meetings of their Sections and who give as excuses that they do not know how to speak or that their occupation prevents them.’ What might fairly be described as the clincher was ‘Those who having done nothing against liberty but have also done nothing for it.’

It is in its way a telling list of demons, but it would have been difficult to have opened your mouth without risking what may even then have been described as political incorrectness. What we do know is that the more insecure a regime is, the more it wants to know everything that you do and the more that it worries about anything you do that is somehow different. It is for that reason hostile to any reasonable conception of personal freedom. You could not afford to deviate, or even to be seen to combine, since, as Saint Just said, ‘Any faction is criminal, since it tends to divide the citizens.’

Knighthoods in Wonderland – Stand up for Catholics and the rest of us!

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Since we speak of High Romance in the knighthood of the Duke, we might notice what our Juliet saw as the ‘mannerly devotion’ of her Romeo in our PM. As well as being a devout monarchist, Mr Abbott is a devout Catholic. This is a source of conflict and pain to our PM, because he can never have a Catholic as his monarch.

In 1701, the English had had enough of Catholic monarchs. They signed up a German line for their crown under strict terms. Under the Act of Settlement, ‘whosoever shall come into possession of this crown shall join in communion with the Church of England as by law established.’ That law is part of the English Constitution. While we have the English crown as our head of state, that law binds us, and it is beyond our power to change it. Catholic disqualification is a cross our PM has to bear while he retains his dual devotion.

Australia cannot have as head of state a Christian from any precluded sect, and we certainly we cannot have an atheist – just look at the previous incumbent, who lived in sin, to boot. The next thing you know, someone might suggest that we put a Muslem or a Jew up there.

Now, this lack of religious tolerance is offensive. It flatly contradicts our own Constitution and way of life. But that, we are told, is a small price to pay to keep the connection to the English crown. After all, no one takes any of these old laws seriously. You might as well bring back the round table, or knights and dames – or confer a colonial knighthood on an English duke.

Some Australians feel demeaned by this nonsense with the Duke. I am one of them. But I feel no more demeaned by this nonsense than I do every day of my life when I am told that the people of this nation are incapable of governing themselves without maintaining our mannerly devotion to the English crown.

The above is the text of the last of along line of letters that were not good enough for our press.  I should have kept a file.  I found another reject from November 2012 which is set out below.  It deals with one of the many disgraceful ways in which this nation dealt with the immediate past PM.  Whatever her faults were, there were no doubts about her sanity.  One of the curious issues in the present debacle is that I would have thought that the Palace in London would have understood that it does nothing in or for Australia of a remotely political nature until it is assured that the proposal has the full backing of Her Majesty’s Australian advisers.  It is common ground that that was not the case here.  This failing puts a dint in the proposition that having a monarch in England is a harmless window dressing since they only ever do what we tell them to do.

The text of the former letter follows.

People have not before been so revolted by their politicians as they are now. Some politicians now make people feel physically ill.

The inane pogrom by The Australian against the Prime Minister must make decent journalists ashamed to see their professional colleagues living off the earnings of Mr Rupert Murdoch.

Sir Maurice Bowra said that a people get the gods they deserve. So it is with politicians and journalists. The editor of The Australian does not apologise for threatening to sue one of his journalists – as it happens, a woman –for libel for contradicting him. His newspaper now shows for our country the evil that can be done to political life by a corrupted news outlet like Fox News or the Volkischer Beobachter.

In the upshot, The Australian has made a remarkable contribution to modern science. They have shown that the Prime Minister has balls but that the Leader of the Opposition does not.

Journalists at The Australian should be ashamed of themselves. They dishonour their profession.

And could someone tell them how the defence of superior orders went down at Nuremberg?

Terror in Paris IV- Insulting God in Paris and Melbourne

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

 

Assuming that I may do what I like in private, should I be ‘free’ to insult you or God in public? For reasons that I discussed in a previous note (posted on 13 August last year), a question in those terms may not be all that helpful. There are so many possible legal consequences of speech that the phrase ‘freedom of speech’ is one of pious political aspiration rather than one that has any legal or juristic utility.

Since about the time that the State of Victoria was formed, it has been a criminal offence for a person in public to use indecent language or insulting words or to engage in offensive or insulting behaviour – or to engage in conduct to the same effect. The reason is that such behaviour is likely to lead to a breach of the peace if it does not do so in itself, and that the first object of the law is to preserve the peace. If during a wedding at a church or a synagogue a disappointed suitor marched up and down outside chanting the words ‘the bride is a slut’, or carrying a banner to the same effect, most people think that it would be better to allow the police to intervene than to leave the bride with an action for damages (for defamation, not nuisance) and to leave everyone else to their remedy of beating the villain up.

There is also a federal law dealing with racial discrimination that makes it unlawful to offend or insult a person because of their race. The federal law does not create a crime – it confers civil rights. It is not directed to speech but to conduct generally, whereas some state provisions are confined to words or speech. There is a requirement in the federal law that the conduct be in public but it is differently expressed.

The federal law deals with offence or insult directed to race, not religion. The state law mentions neither. It deals with offensive or insulting conduct, including speech, generally. The federal law might be seen as a specific application of the state law. There are all sorts of reasons why a law might deal with offences or insults to race but not to religion. One reason is that the difficulties in making legal rulings about race are as nothing beside those of making those rulings about religion.

If someone went on TV or stood on a street corner and said that some or all abos are idiots or crooks, they could be dealt with under the state law or the federal law. If someone went on TV or stood on a street corner and said that all Muslems are idiots or crooks, only the state law might apply because the federal law is about race, not religion.

There is a debate about the federal law which is said to involve issues of freedom of speech. A curious aspect of this debate is that those who want to get rid of the federal law say nothing about the state law although it covers much the same ground in wider and older terms. Do we want to legalise insulting or offensive behaviour in public that is calculated to inflame others and provoke a breach of the peace? Do we want to make it legal for a white man to walk through Chinatown with a placard saying ‘Slants eat cats’ or to stand outside a mosque chanting ‘Muslems follow a false prophet’ with a cartoon to match? Many people, and nearly all police, would agree that there is no reason to change those laws.

The abolitionists are high on ideology, and they are obsessed with phantoms. They think that a law that makes a form of words unlawful or illegal infringes speech and operates as censorship. If you were to offer one million dollars to a hit man to get rid of your ex or to blow up parliament, you would look a bit of a dill if you told the arresting police that they were imposing censorship on your right to free speech. This is another case of people substituting labels or slogans for thought, the hallmark of modern politicians. But if you wrote a script for the evening news that was riddled with what we call the magic words, you could certainly expect the script to be censored, and if not, the publisher would be liable to be dealt with under laws designed to protect manners more than morals. We do not hear calls to abolish those laws. Nor do we see people murdered when these laws are broken.

Why then is there concern about offence or insult caused by race? Is not the threat of a breach of the peace worse if I insult or offend you on the ground of your race? Or do people argue that the offensive or insulting behaviour should be a crime – unless it arises from race?

The other day, twelve people were murdered in Paris for insulting Islam in a newspaper. Before the dead journalists and cartoonists had been buried, the Australian press carried suggestions that these murders should reopen the debate about our federal law – although that law deals with race and not religion, and the number of dead suggests that there might be something to say for curtailing speech that is likely to lead to violence.

I am having trouble in seeing the connection between the murders in Paris and our debate about offending or insulting people on account of their race. Is it any more than this? These murders in Paris deter people from speaking their mind on religion. Murders are bad. Therefore our laws that deter people from speaking their mind on race are bad too. Even though we abolitionists say nothing about the other more general laws to the same effect which do not mention either religion or race.

It is curious that no one mentions our law of blasphemy. As I understand it (and the authority I refer to is at best wobbly), the common law in this country may still be to the effect that blasphemy is a criminal offence that is constituted by a form of denial of the basic elements of a religion in a manner likely to give offence, if not provoke a breach of the peace. If this part of our common law is still with us, it may give more offence than it did previously, because it is likely to be confined to Christianity, if not the Church of England, the church that our constitution says that our sovereign must be a communicant member of. I personally find it easier to get agitated about the role of a church in our constitution, and the law of blasphemy, than an arid politically driven discussion about one small part of our laws dealing with insulting or offensive conduct.

Our state laws dealing with offensive or insulting conduct have been used by police to control disruptive ratbags for longer than I can remember. When I started in the law, the police abused those laws by producing a ‘sheet of language’ when they could not think of anything else to charge a protestor with, but those days are long gone. I am not aware of any other reason to get rid of laws that appear to be sensible if not essential to a civilised community.

Since 1789, people in Paris and what is now Melbourne have been committed to the idea that we should be free to do what we like provided that it does not injure others. By the time you categorise all the ways in which others may be injured, there is not much content left to the original idea – the freedom is determined by the ambit of the exceptions, and where you draw the line is where you get the arguments. This is very common in the law. The events in Paris remind us that there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who can be greatly hurt by speech directed at their religious belief – so hurt that many of them want to kill those responsible. It is curious that that reminder leads some politically driven people in Melbourne to resume their campaign to abolish a law that gives another category of protection against injurious speech.

What are we to make of this? A lot of the agitation comes from the Institute of Public Affairs and friends and associates of Mr Andrew Bolt and Mr Rupert Murdoch. The conclusion that I draw about the IPA is that its members are strangers to the concept of rational thought and to the workings of the law, and that the IPA is a gift from God to the ALP. It is a gift that will keep on giving, just as years ago the faceless men behind the ALP kept on giving to the Liberal Party, because every time it opens its dopey mouth, the IPA spreads electoral poison. And that just might be a real triumph for free speech in this nation.

Terror and the Police State – extract

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Preface

Here is the beginning of the book Terror and the Police State.  I have put out some extracts before and others will follow, but the Preface seems to have relevance to the present discussion.  The case of Bob is real and continuing.  That vigilance is a cost of freedom might be a cliché, but it is hard to avoid.

Read on in the Preface above.