When people say that they are accepting responsibility, they are commonly either talking nonsense or just being evasive.  The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia has not got there yet.  He prefers bare faced lies.  He says that he knew nothing about it.  No one believes that.  Not even the world’s greatest liar.

You often hear another weasel word – accountability.  What does being ‘responsible’ mean?  ‘Answerable, accountable (to another for something); liable to be called to account.’  Well, the trouble with that is that when you look up ‘accountable’, you get ‘responsible.’  We are going round in circles.

And too often when people say that they are accountable or responsible, they are saying that the buck stops here, or at least that the bus stops at this stop.  Et praeterea nihil.  And no more.  So, if the teacher asks who made that rude noise in class, and Little Johnnie puts his hand up, is that the end of the matter?  Of course not.  The question then is what should be done by or to Little Johnnie to protect and enforce discipline within and the standards of the school.

What is called the ball tampering scandal was a matter of national concern if not disgrace.  Something had to be done.  Three players put their hands up.  Was that enough?  Of course not.  The question then was what should be done by or to those three players to protect and enforce discipline within and standards of Australian cricket.

The Chairman of the board now says that he accepts responsibility.  He has put his hand up.  And he stays there.  Et praeterea nihil.  There is no more to be done.  The superior responds for the faults of the inferiors, but he is immune from suffering the consequences as they did.

Given the punishment of the three players, the board cannot say that they are accepting responsibility merely by saying that they do so.  The position of David Peever is morally and intellectually untenable.  It defies all sense and decency.  He cannot say that he accepts responsibility for this national scandal as chairman of the board while retaining that office.  Sometimes you see that a man is unfit for an office merely because he does not understand when he should stand down from that office.  That is the case with this man.

And that’s before you look at the disgraceful way that Peever engineered his reappointment, and the appointment of others responsible for the scandal, before releasing the report.  Peever gives every indication of not even being able to spell the word ‘fiduciary.’  He is a low flying ‘win at all costs’ mediocrity, the embodiment of our worst fears about sports administrators – the Panama hat brigade – in this duck pond.

Do you know what is the worst thing about this world after Trump?  It is the brazen way that they are insult our intelligence.  When Dylan Thomas died, his death certificate said the cause was ‘insult to the brain.’  His biographer said there was no such disease.  There is now.

Who do you think is the most brazen – the Chairman of Cricket Australia or the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia?

Bloopers

As the university’s management considers whether and on what terms it should enter into an agreement with the Ramsay Centre to fund the degree, a staff survey on the terms of a draft  memorandum of understanding has revealed deep divisions among the university’s academics.

But the vice-chancellor of the university, Michael Spence, has defended the proposal, saying the degree would not be undertaken on the basis of a “presumed superiority” of the west, but rather “contextualise and problematise” the subject if it goes ahead.

The Guardian, 13 October, 2018

If that is the way that any university teaches English, God save us

Here and there – Some terrorists from God: I

[A note comparing the Gunpowder Plot to the 2001 attacks on the US appears in four parts.]

1  The scene

They are all male.  They may not be young, but they are of a fighting age.  They are certainly of an age to plot.  Their community is proud of them.  They are deeply religious, too deeply.  They are in truth fanatics – religious fanatics.  The old word was ‘zealots.’  Their religious zeal is their tragic flaw.  They are so zealous that they are ready to kill and die for the cause of their faith.  The mainstream members and clerics of their faith say that their zeal and readiness to kill are contrary to the express tenets of their faith, but the zealots have more faith in their own zeal than in the teaching and discipline of their elders.  Their faith has a high place for martyrs and if they die in defence of their faith, they will do so in the firm belief that paradise awaits them.  Their clerics are not involved, at least directly, with their plans and plots, but they are there to give general guidance to the zealots, such that some others believe that the clerics are behind all actions undertaken in the name of their faith.

The zealots want to attack a ruling power that they believe is insulting to their religion, and cruel to those who practise it.  At least some of their clerics condemn the regime.  In truth, the zealots wish to bring down the whole order.  For that purpose they are ready to kill or wound men, women, and children who are on any view innocent – ‘innocent’ at least in the sense that they have done nothing to deserve to die.  The zealots do not acknowledge that acting out of hate rarely ends well.  They are tunnel visioned.

To start their campaign they want to strike terror into the regime by a strike that is so daring and so vengeful that it will give the zealots a complete propaganda victory and provoke division and despair in their enemy.  They are ultimately driven back to the maxim that was the first refuge of the fascist and of lawless, godless and cruel dictators like Stalin and Hitler – the ends justify the means.  In short, they are terrorists – exemplary terrorists – the worst and most frightening kinds of terrorists.  They commit their acts of terror in the name of and on behalf of God.  Their claim is nothing less than that they act in the service of God.

Are we speaking of Muslims who attacked the twin towers in New York in 2001?  Yes.  Are we speaking also of the Catholics who attempted to blow up the English House of Parliament in 1605?  Yes.  And the comparison is instructive.

2  The background

The movement known to history as the Reformation involved a schism in the religion called Christianity.  The Catholic Church was no longer the one church.  Kant would later say that wars between different versions of the one faith were far worse than wars between those of different faiths.  Heresy is lethal.  The Reformation caused untold evil and misery for centuries – something that tends to be forgotten by those who want to teach or preach about the place of the Reformation in the ‘values’ of western civilisation.

The split in Germany was mainly about religion.  It led to the Thirty Years War that laid waste to so much of Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century.  The split in England was mainly about politics.  It led to vicious persecution and recrimination on both sides.  It also led to a foreign invasion, the Spanish Armada.  England’s defeat of Spain left the Protestants in control, and it left the Catholics subject to persecution and suspicion.

On the death of Henry VIII, Queen Mary had taken the Church of England back to Rome and she had burnt Protestants as heretics.  On her death, Queen Elizabeth took the Church back to the Protestants and executed Catholics.  Her schismatic death toll was far smaller than that of her half-sister (a point made in the trial we are coming to).

But the loathing that many English felt for Rome led to a split among Protestants.  The people we know as Puritans wanted to put the Church of England further away from Rome.  The purity of their consciences, and their God-driven sanctimony, would help to lead England into the agony of its Civil War.  Before the English tired of the lot of them, the Puritans would reach their frightful apotheosis in the bloodbath conducted by their champion in Ireland – Oliver Cromwell.

The Society of Jesus was formed by a former captain in the Spanish army.  It was to be part of the Church militant.  The level of its ambition is evident from its calling itself after Jesus, something that gave offence to many.  Membership was open to those wishing to serve as soldiers of God and for the defence and propagation of the faith.  The Society came to the fore in opposing the Protestants, and in the movement known as the Counter Reformation.  It started in Spain, the nation that invaded England in order to bring it back to the Catholic faith.  Protestants would therefore not trust the Jesuits, as they were called, and Jesuits had been banned from England and they would come to be expelled from France and other countries.  The Jesuits enjoyed an aura of secrecy that the Masons would copy.  They also exuded intellectual self-satisfaction.

An idle if mordant observer in London who had a sane view of the place of God may have thought at this time that the Puritans and the Jesuits deserved each other.  On any view, they were supremely well equipped to get up each other’s noses – and so to wreak havoc on the rest of us.  (And the worldly triumph of the Puritans in America would be testimony to the proposition that men who are assured that they are to inherit heaven usually find ways of presently taking possession of the earth.)

The cornerstone of the English reformation was the Act of Supremacy of 1559.  In 1570, the pope published a document (a bull) in which he excommunicated Queen Elizabeth and absolved her subjects from paying allegiance to her.  The bull declared ‘Elizabeth to be deprived of her pretended title to the aforesaid crown’.  English sovereignty is in the news now, but it is hard to imagine a more open violation of it than this act of the Holy See – short of invasion.

The King of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor disagreed with the pope.  They believed that the English would react against Catholics in general and Jesuits in particular.  They were dead right.  But a dissident English cardinal, the founder of the Douai seminary in France, wrote of the ‘filthy lust’ of ‘an incestuous bastard, begotten and borne of an infamous courtesan.’  In Douai, the missionaries were imbued with a sense of martyrdom – it was glorious to die trying to wrest England from the grip of heresy.  The English government became alarmed at the numbers fleeing overseas and legislated against it.  Douai would have been a much softer spot for what we now call radicalisation than those of the caliphate.  The Oxford History of England says:

The via dolorosa that led from Douai to Tyburn [the Golgotha of London] could not have been trod by men who were not profoundly imbued with the spiritual character of their worth….under the guise of saving souls, the priests were really acting as executors of the bull.

In 1580, the papal secretary told English Jesuits that ‘whosoever sends her [Elizabeth] out of the world with the pious intention of doing God service, not only does not sin but gains merit.’  This was not a time for calmness.  Their pope had impaled the Catholics of England on a hopeless conflict of interest and ensured that religion would remain at the forefront of English politics.  English Catholics would pay a dreadful price over many generations.

3 Disaffected Catholics and the plot

The accession of James I on the death of Elizabeth led to hopes that things might get better for Catholics.  They did not.  James I had a personal interest in keeping the peace – his father, the unlamented Lord Darnley, had been taken out by an explosion that made a revolting form of assassination – even by Scottish standards.  For that matter, the mother of James I was a Catholic queen who was beheaded for trying to kill the Protestant queen that James succeeded.  These were fraught times.

A group of Catholic gentry, who were described by one observer as ‘gentlemen hunger-starved for innovation,’ came up with a scheme of ‘devastating insurrection’.  They sought to vindicate their faith and the adherents of their faith.  They planned to overthrow the government by blowing up Parliament with the royal family in it, and leading an uprising from the Midlands after kidnapping a young member of the royal family.  They wanted to start a civil war.  Each conspirator resolved to die rather than be taken; there was more than a whiff of suicide in the venture from the start.  They had collected more than enough gun-powder under the parliament to achieve that result, but the plot was uncovered.

There were thirteen in the plot.  They were led by a man called Catesby, but the best known now is Guy Fawkes.  (His continuance in his appointed role after he was on notice that they had been discovered is very hard to distinguish from suicide; it at least looks like a faith-driven embrace of death.)  Those terrorists, for that is what they plainly were, that were not killed in the pursuit were executed.  For the most part, they did not repent.  Indeed, one observer reported that during the trial, the ‘defendants were taking tobacco as if hanging were no trouble to them.’  Some cracked and asked for mercy at the end.  Not so, Catesby – his sword was engraved with the passion and death of Christ.

Immediately after the plot was revealed, the Catholic clergy denounced it as ‘intolerable, uncharitable, scandalous and desperate.’  It was clearly against Catholic doctrine for ‘private subjects, by private authority, to take arms against their lawful king’, even if he was a tyrant.  Private violent attempts could never be justified.  Catholics must not support them in any way.

If I say that I want the freedom to do something, I mean that I want there to be no law against my doing it.  But if I want to be able to do something that is against the law as it is, I am asking for something more.  I want my case to be excluded from the law – like when a charity is exempted from paying tax.  What I am asking for is a privilege – ‘A right advantage or immunity granted to or enjoyed by a person, or class of persons, beyond the common advantages of others.’(Shorter O E D.)  The two notions are very different, and obviously different, but this difference is usually ignored, especially in The Australian, when people talk about some chimera called ‘religious freedom.’

Generally speaking, Australians can follow what religion they like, but not in a way that is against the law.  A cleric gets no immunity from the laws of libel, racial discrimination, or treason just because he is speaking in a pulpit.

There are laws against discriminating against people on the ground of their sexuality.  There is a suggestion that some religious schools should be exempted from complying with this law to the extent that it makes it unlawful for a school to send a child away because of his or her sexuality.  A religious group seeking to acquire such a right is seeking a form of privilege.  But they prefer the word freedom because it is harder to deny a claim to be free as opposed to a claim for a privilege that puts someone above and beyond the law.  This is one time when labels matter.  We are not talking about freedom of religion but privileges of churches.

The law allows certain kinds of clubs exemption from some laws about sexual discrimination.  It is lawful for the Melbourne Club not to allow female members.  Different considerations of policy would arise for the Melbourne Cricket Club or Victorian Racing Club because of their standing in public life.

There are at least two grounds of policy difference when considering exempting a school from obeying the law relating to sexual discrimination.  One is that the Melbourne Club consists of consenting adults.  That is not so with a school.  Schools are there to benefit children who have not reached the age of consent.  The other difference is that one way or another, a private school is likely to receive public money.  In my view those two differences distinguish the case of a school from that of a club, and entail a rejection of the claim for privilege.

At the very least, any government agreeing to grant such a privilege should make it transcendentally clear that any such school will never receive one cent of my taxes.

Finally, may I say that in the present climate of opinion, any religious group seeking to put itself above the law is showing a level of hardihood and obtuseness that verges on the sublime.

Bloopers

Now the enthusiasm gap has disappeared. Republicans are as intense as Democrats. This mutual loathing, by the way, is very bad for America.

Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 11 October 2018

The headline referred to ‘Kavanagh persecution.’  Two things.  It would be as hard to imagine a clearer instance of a spoiled child who is a flower of the Establishment, or of a man more unsuited for the judiciary because of his political views and failure of temperament – leaving Doctor Ford out of the question altogether.  American senators should dress in character and turn up in togas.

The dismissal of the CEO of the ABC raises issues of governance.  Are the directors and journalists at the ABC subject to different obligations to those at Fairfax or News?

The ABC is funded by public money.  So are News (Murdoch) and Fairfax.  There are at least two differences.  First, all citizens contribute in one way or another to the ABC and all have rights to get the services provided by the ABC for free.  They do not have to acquire shares in News or Fairfax or pay for any of their products.  Secondly, the functions of the ABC are set out in an act of parliament.  Those of News and Fairfax are set out in the constituent documents of the relevant corporations and the history of the role of a free press in a democracy like ours.

When considering that role, two questions may arise.  Are the journalists allowed to practise their profession independently?  What professional standards must those journalists apply?  The answers to those questions reflect the integrity of the corporation as a member of the press.  If you look at the two differences between the ABC on one hand and News and Fairfax on the other hand, is there anything there that may dictate different answers to either of those two questions?

Some people refer to the charter of the ABC in its act (section 6).  It contains motherhood statements, but three things can be said.  First, the obligation to ‘contribute to a sense of national identity’ might make people other than me feel queasy.  (Is that not the precise mission of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Pauline Hanson?)  Secondly, the words ‘independent’ and ‘balanced’ appear in the context of broadcasting programs that are specialised or of wide appeal.  Thirdly, the obligation in broadcasting overseas to ‘encourage awareness of Australia and an international understanding of Australian attitudes on world affairs’ is one of straight propaganda.

Another provision (section 8) provides that the board must ‘maintain the independence and integrity’ of the ABC and ‘ensure that the gathering and presentation…of news and information is accurate and impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism.’

But the same obligations attach to the directors of News and Fairfax.  In neither provision – section 6 or 8 – do I see any basis for saying that there is any difference between the ABC, News and Fairfax on their need to preserve editorial independence or their standards of journalism – that is, their integrity.  If that is right, much of the commentary on the ABC is based on false premises.

The essential difference is that the ABC is susceptible to political interference in a way that News and Fairfax are not.  As part of the free press, the ABC has to investigate and report on government.  In other words, it has to do things the government will not like.  You have only to look at the role of the press in investigating and reporting on our finance industry to see how fundamental this function of the press is to our democracy.  But for the reporting by the ABC and Fairfax, the Royal Commission, which was opposed to the last by government and News, would never have taken place, and we would be far, far worse off.  The press had to be good because government was so bad.

So, the ABC has to get stuck into government, and government must keep its hands off the ABC.  There must, therefore, be conflict.  In my view, the ABC generally handles that conflict much better than the government.

In The Australian, a News publication, Chris Kenny, a former Liberal Party staffer, said of the fracas about the ABC chairman:

And anyone with knowledge and experience of journalism, politics and public broadcasting should realise how unwise and improper it is to convey even the perception of political interference.

May I make two comments about The Australian?  First, in my view, too many of its journalists accept instructions to attack the ABC.  That conduct is unprofessional and it directly contradicts the need for editorial independence.  Secondly, too many of those journalists are too close to people in government.  The friendship between Messrs Abbott and Sheridan is just one example – and it shows, at both ends.  Journalists generally might follow the example of judges and steer clear of politicians.  A fortiori, they should not be pawns in political coups.  People at News go out of their way to suggest that they do just that.

What is the upshot?  Any suggestion that for either editorial independence or the standards of journalism or integrity generally the ABC is in some way inferior to, say, News, is at best just bloody laughable.

Bloopers

What’s your leadership style?

Collaborative, decisive, authentic and passionate. Leadership requires tremendous amounts of positive energy. Energy to inspire your people to be their best, to drive change in a rapidly evolving world, and to ensure we deliver superior outcomes.

Cindy Hook of Deloitte.  Australian Financial Review 18 September, 2018