Author: Geoffrey Gibson

Passing Bull 30 – Bullshit you pay for

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

 

There is a growing consensus that the independent senators have a lot to offer – especially when you look at those representing established parties.  This now is a common reaction around the world, and is reaching some kind of hideous apotheosis in both the US and the UK.

There are of course exceptions.  David Leyonhjelm is one of them.  He does have a problem with the notion of rational thought.  Anyone who uses the label ‘libertarian’ should be an object of caution.  The senator has unfortunate views on guns and other subjects where he feels disposed to strike a pose as someone who is against government intervention – such as with compulsory packaging for cigarettes.  Every law in some way restricts your freedom.  To object to a law because it does that is to say nothing.

There is some controversy in Sydney about restricting hours for selling alcohol in public venues.  These are described as ‘lockout’ laws.  Since those laws restrict freedom, the Senator objects to them.  This of itself is nonsense.  In yesterday’s AFR, the Senator said:

Recently, in response to public criticism of Sydney’s ‘lockout’ laws, we had Professor Peter Miller telling all and sundry that ‘behind every number is a tragic story – you only need to ask the emergency department doctors, police, paramedics and surgeons who have to clean up the awful toll.’

Yes, violence causes injury and doctors are paid to treat the injuries.  But their involvement is a matter of choice; they are not compelled ‘to clean up the awful toll’.  Indeed, they don’t have to do trauma or emergency medicine, or even medicine itself, at all.  Moreover, no one is forced to join the police or ambulance service.

In fact, doctors demanding lockouts because they don’t like treating the victims of violence is equivalent to teachers demanding parents keep dumb kids at home.  They should do their jobs, or find a job that they’d rather do.

It is terrifying that a person who can be as stupid as this is on our payroll and in the legislature.  The simplest form of logical failure is to state a proposition which you think warrants a conclusion when it does not.  The Latin phrase is non sequitur.  People do not have to work in rape crisis centres, but that says nothing about rape or how to control it.  The preposterous notion that a doctor can refuse to treat someone because he is in some obscure ideological sense ‘free’ to do so merely shows how dangerous the notion of ‘freedom’ is with an idiot like David Leyonhjelm.

The AFR is my favourite paper, but I wonder why it gives space to galahs in politics like this.

As it happens, the same edition of the same paper carried an item headed ‘Elderly will be in charge, but why should they vote?’  It was written by two academics in economics at La Trobe University.  It is non-stop bullshit.

What is needed to redress the balance is some practical, low–cost and politically tractable method of making the age-distribution of the voting public younger, which will better match optimal intertemporal (consumption and taxation) preferences to better fulfil this intergenerational contract.

The world is going to come to an end because there are too many old people with too much political power and the solution of these academic economists is to make voting for them optional.

Many elderly Australians, who struggle operationally to get to the polling booth on election day, would no longer have to worry about receiving a cruel fine in the mail – not to mention those who simply do not like having to vote.  Many others would, for the sake of their children and grandchildren, agree about the need to offset the age profile distortion of government influence.

Making voting optional for elderly Australians can be seen as a democratic way of correcting the political implications of demographic skews.  By better balancing the intergenerational contract, the proposed arrangement would lead to public policies and a fairer, more sustainable, and conducive to future economic growth.

This is a particularly sad example of what happens when you put people in boxes and say that they are all the same.  It is a case of labelling.  George W Bush spoke recently of Donald Trump.  He said his father had told him that labels are what you put on soup cans.  I should declare my bias.  I am 70 and I have paid a lot of tax.  I object to being put in a box on the first ground without reference  to the second.

Poet of the month: Philip Larkin

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra just for you.

 

But they were fucked up in their turn

By fools in old–style hats and coats,

Who half the time were soppy-stern

And half at one another’s throats.

 

Man hands on misery to man.

It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

And don’t have any kids yourself.

Reading books again

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

 

Over the summer break, I read nine books that I had read before.  I did so because I knew I would enjoy each one, and because with most of them I had a new edition, generally from the Folio Society, to enjoy – and I thought that I might give them some authenticity on the shelf by reading those copies.  After owning a Kindle for 18 months, I finally got it started.  I have used it on a novel by Modiano, which I enjoyed, and SPQR, by Mary Beard, which I did not enjoy – I thought it was expensive and trite.  I have always liked to read a book with pencil at hand to note passages that appeal or that I may wish to remember – even in novels and poetry – and I have reached a stage of life where I enjoy just the feel and look of the book – and its pictures!  For example, I bought the new Folio War and Peace expressly for the purpose of reading it again (this time for the fourth time.)  Those two very handsome volumes cost a tick under $200 – which is a lot – but which is also about the price of the best seat at the Opera.  And this set remains as a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

Since I have written about all but two of these nine books elsewhere, I will just make some brief comments on each.

War and Peace is hopelessly flawed.  Tolstoy cannot help himself with the bullshit about Napoleon, heroes, and free will – the greater the writer, the thicker the thinker – and I had forgotten that it just keeps getting worse as the book goes on.  Then I remembered touring the Kremlin, and I remember the guy pointing to a gate and saying ‘that is the gate that he came in’ and point into another ‘that is the gate he went out’.  When we look at the crooks in charge of Russia now, we might remember that it was the Russian peasant who stopped both Napoleon and Hitler.  But after this reading, I have come to the settled view that this is the greatest novel for me that has ever been written.  It has a sweep and a kind of grandeur all of its own.  Gibbon is the only comparison.

I read Don Quixote again, also for the fourth time.  This time I used some editorial discretion on some of the tales – the structure of the book now reminds me of Canterbury Tales – and I focused on the dialogues between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.   It reminded me of how good the Philip de Souza reading is on Naxos.  There is a saintliness about the Don that I know of no match for, but Tolstoy can come out with these eruptions of El Greco and Beethoven that are spellbinding.

Old Goriot, in part a take on King Lear, is as close to perfection as the novel can aspire to.  This is one to read about once a year.  Each time something new hits you right between the eyes.  These daughters are up there with Goneril and Regan – I groaned aloud when they sent their carriages and footmen to the funeral of the father that they had killed.

The Leopard is a beautiful elegy.  So is the Visconti film.  This is another once a year job – both book and movie.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is another great book that produced a great film – I think the Big Nurse is up there with Nicholson in the movie.  I had forgotten that it is the Indian who is the narrative.  That was gutsy – one outcast writing about others.  A previous note on this book is at the end of this note.

People turn their noses up at Kim.  Kipling was an imperialist.  Get over it, as they say – there happened to be an empire, back then, and we were part of it – and if you would rather be having this discussion in French, German, or Flemish, let me know.  This book could not have been written by someone who did not have a complete affection for and knowledge of that beautifully corrupt place called India.  Where does this book stand for me?  It is the one I enjoy most.  This book is for everyone – but especially for us boys.

With some writers you are at ease before you finish the first page.  People who are good at their job put you at ease.  Turgenev is in this class – he is the writer’s writer.  On the eve is a beautiful love story that is not buried in the kind of neurotic self-analysis that the Russians went in for then.  This book too is c lose to flawless.  It is worth reading just for the visit of the two lovers to the opera in Venice to see Traviata, a love story that ends with the death of the consumptive heroine.

The other two were Wuthering Heights and The Great Gatsby.  I don’t know what they sprinkled on the porridge of those Brontë girls, but the passion still burns.  This was my fourth reading, and it may be the last.  The structure is tricky and there is bit of an Eroica or Bohême problem – when Cathy goes, there is a long way to go, and Heathcliff is not loveable.  As against that, the other rose in my estimation on this the third reading.

Someone once said that there are only three plots in Hollywood movies.  One of them is the love triangle.  That conflict is at the heart of Wuthering Heights and The Great Gatsby.  In each the heroine falls in love – fairly madly – with the hero, and then marries another man who is less desirable romantically but more desirable socially.

Cathy and Heathcliff are very much in love but Cathy expressly rejects Heathcliff for a man who is socially more acceptable, but who is not nearly as attractive – she says that she will use the marriage to help raise Heathcliff up.  (Cathy is very impressionable.)  Daisy falls for Gatsby and then marries a rotter, who happens to have a lot more social standing and money than Gatsby, but whom she never loved as much as Gatsby.  (Daisy too is bit flighty – it is just as well one of these books was written by a woman.)  The split here is not just for social reasons – the absence of Gatsby after the war is a catalyst.  (As in An affair to remember.)

Both Cathy and Daisy are previous and precocious.  Both Heathcliff and Gatsby have dicey pasts.  Heathcliff is a foundling who looks like a gypsy.  Gatsby came from the other side of the tracks, but a fluke of history enabled him to rise, at least on the surface.  He lies entirely about his past – for reasons that seemed good to him.  He also lies about his present – he is a crook.  Heathcliff is not a crook and he does not lie about his past.  The crowd that Gatsby attracts are not inclined to query his past or present.  Heathcliff has cut himself off from caring about what the world thinks.

Heathcliff is brutal, and we might have trouble now in seeing just how far his brutality was simply a feature of the way people, and in particular men, acted back in those days and in those places.  Gatsby is not brutal, at least physically, but it looks like his money derives entirely from crime – although prohibition, which enabled him to become rich, did lead to a lot of crime.

The brutal man in that novel is Daisy’s husband Tom.  He is not only brutal but hopelessly unfaithful in his marriage.  He comes from a caste that promotes marital infidelity and racism, and he is of a type that can easily hit a woman, particularly if she is socially inferior, and compromised by being his mistress.  Heathcliff and Tom are both studies in what we now call the epidemic of domestic violence.

Both of the rejected lovers become obsessed to the point of madness by the termination of their great loves.  They both acquire fortunes – we are only given a general idea of how Heathcliff gets his – perhaps with the express purpose of trying to retake the women they loved.  They both buy expensive properties and move house to be close to their prey.  Heathcliff pursues some kind of dynastic revenge and strikes out at all those associated with people who have got in his way in a manner that is terrifying.  Gatsby is far less intent on creating what we call collateral damage.

Each of the heroes establishes a kind of reunion – it was probably physical in the case of the later model, because it had been before – but the reunion does not last.  It is as if the forces of a Greek tragedy preclude the lovers from living happily ever after.  Romeo and Juliet is of course the template.

Cathy dies in love with Heathcliff although he had been cruel to her in the reunion.  Gatsby is murdered on a false premise arising from two trains of deceit.  Heathcliff dies in a kind of slow suicidal delirium still obsessed with the dead Cathy.  Daisy survives when Gatsby is killed as the fall guy.  She appears to be reconciled to her husband, Tom.  That is punishment enough, because he is a rolled gold Fascist, the other product of the Jazz Age.

Well, I suppose we knew that there are endless combinations within a triangle.  One of the other plot themes is that of the hero undergoing trials to save the world, as in Star Wars.  I am not sure about the third.

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST

Ken Kesey (1962)

Folio Society, 2015; bound in cloth blocked with a design by the artist David Hughes, in mustard slip-case; introduction by John Sutherland.

You are strapped to a table, shaped, ironically, like a cross, with a crown of electric sparks in place of thorns.  You are touched  …and Zap!   It is a clever little procedure, simple, quick, nearly painless as it happens so fast, but no one ever wants another one.  Ever.

This was a protest moment in a protest book published in a time and place preoccupied with protest and drugs, the US in the early 1960s.  The start of the book One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest must also have grabbed attention when it was first published in 1962.  ‘They’re out there.  Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them’.  Ken Kesey dedicated the book to someone ‘who told me dragons did not exist, and then led me to their lairs’.  Cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other birds.  They leave one egg in each nest.  The newly hatched cuckoo therefore feels free to throw out the others.  This is the dark side of Darwin’s natural selection.  Should we be above that?

Kesey was brought up on a dairy farm in Colorado.  He was a star wrestler and drama student at Oregon.  He took part in government drug tests.  He was paid $75 to take LSD and mescaline.  He was in with the beat crowd and he became a kind of priest of psychedelic culture.  He got into trouble with marijuana and he did time for getting up the nose of the cops.  He worked a night shift at a hospital for vets and this led him to our novel, his first.

The mental ward in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is for Kesey what Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were for George Orwell – the threat posed by ‘them’ to ‘us’.  It is a story of a power struggle between two people told by a third, an immensely tall and large Indian called Chief Bromden.

Nurse Ratched is a very, very evil character, as evil as any referred to in this present book.  She is a 50-year old single former Army nurse.  She has a practised sexlessness that seems to threaten men with its very sterility – in the male language of the time, she is a ‘ball cutter’; she could feed their jellies into a garlic crusher.  It is not so much that she is puritanical as that she is matronly – the word could have been invented for her.  ‘Precise, automatic gesture.  Her face is smooth, calculated, and precision-made, like an expensive baby doll, skin like flesh coloured enamel, blend of white and cream and baby-blue eyes, small nose, pink little nostrils – everything working except the colour on her lips and finger nails, and the size of her bosom.  A mistake was made somehow in manufacturing, putting those big, womanly breasts on what would have otherwise been a perfect work, and you can see how bitter she is about it.’

Remember that the US is coming out of McCarthyism, and that Kesey would have been a front-line target for a body like the HUAC.  The Big Nurse has the perfect technique for crushing weakened male inmates (classed as ‘Acutes’ or ‘Chronics’).  She does not accuse; she does not need to.  She insinuates.  She has a genius for insinuation.  And she insinuates that her charges are at fault, and weak, and that they are only safe when they submit to her control and are at peace with the matron.  If the phrase ‘control-freak’ had not been invented, she would have required it.

And she puts on this front that she is doing it for their benefit, and she requires them to submit to this too.  It is a lie.  She is doing what she is doing because her mission in life is that of the bully – to dictate and to control, to ‘stand over’ in truth – those who are weaker than she is – and that is everyone in the ward, because the patients are patients – voluntary or committed – and because she selects and breaks the staff and only allows doctors who go along with her regime.  She disciplines, bullies, tranquillises and sedates – and punishes with shock therapy.  An immovable case gets the worst kind of head job, a lobotomy.

This is how one of the nuts – that is the term used in the film – previews her retaliation after they have been enjoying themselves:  ‘We shall be all of us be shot at dawn.  One hundred cc’s apiece.  Ms. Ratched shall line us all against the wall, where we’ll face the terrible maw of a muzzle-loaded shotgun which she has loaded with Miltowns!  Thorazines!  Libriums!  Stelazines!’  The book was in many ways prophetic.

Into this drug induced still-pond under the fog comes lightning.  It comes in the form of a rude, loud, slippery petty crook.  Randall P. McMurphy faked his madness to get out of gaol where he had had to work.  Barrel-chested and red-haired, he is a conman and an excitement machine and a myth-maker.  He wins the confidence of the nuts even as he takes their money.  And he realises instantly that it is Big Mack versus the Big Nurse; the Lord of Misrule v The Badge of Chastity; Anarchy v Law – and the World.  The ward –and the world – is not big enough for both of them.

Big Mac and Falstaff have some things in common.  They are dishonest, they have front, and they have a kind of forbidden allure that attracts, and even inspires, others.  But that is all they have in common.  Falstaff could never have done and would never have tried to do what McMurphy does.  McMurphy has courage as well as front.  Falstaff is a coward.  McMurphy also has remarkable endurance.  He can intimidate and wear down opponents in a way that Falstaff never could.  Falstaff was always a bit player, but Big Mac is ready to put himself on the line for the main event.  Falstaff would never have attempted what McMurphy did because there was too much risk and not enough fiscal return at the margin.  And Big Mac would never have had airs like a knighthood.  McMurphy has balls, and Nurse Ratched wants them.

The Chief saw McMurphy as ‘a giant come out of the sky to save us from the Combine’.  The Chief would also say that ‘I’m just getting the full force of the dangers we let ourselves in for when we let McMurphy lure us out of the fog’.  The Chief would have got on with Don Quixote.

Was McMurphy a real liberator of the oppressed?  Or was this just another con?  Possibly, but what matters is that Nurse Ratched knew that she was in for the mother of all battles and that the nuts were ready to go and stay with McMurphy if he was good enough.

Kesey’s decision to cast the narrator as an Indian – Chief Bromden – was courageous, but he had had experience with Indians.  When he was leading a round-up with his father, an Indian with a knife between his teeth deliberately ran into an oncoming diesel truck that was bringing piping to a dam project.  Kesey had witnessed a man who had been willing to make the greatest sacrifice in honour of a way of life, a way of life that no money could buy.  The dam had represented the destruction of a way of life.  The Indians, too, were outcasts lined up against the Combine.  They had learned that the most pervasive and lethal drug of death of the paleface is alcohol.  McMurphy reminded the Chief of a time when the Indians used to spear salmon in some waters but then gave up their rights – under duress – for money.

The Chief has a lot of the Greek Chorus and Shakespeare’s Fool.  He is also the Epilogue, although more active than most, and the part is equally attractive in the book and the film.

So, the trial of strength starts. The power plays involve the volume at which the music is played in the ward, basketball practice, whether they can get to watch the World Series on TV, a fishing expedition, bringing grog and hookers on to the ward.  It is exhilarating reading (and viewing in the film).  We are looking not so much at liberation as what we – even we men! – have learned to describe as empowerment.  The Combine does not like people who are different.  Since people are different, the Combine is a problem.

The fishing expedition was a huge leap of faith and a great step forward for the nuts.  McMurphy then gets punished with successive doses of shock treatment, but he is still there on the night that the whores turn up with the booze. The drama surges around the cast like the finale of the Fifth Symphony of Tchaikovsky.  The scenes with the nuts and sluts are very high drama.  When the Big Nurse finds Billie, locked away by his mother, in bed with Candy – ‘Good morning, Miss Ratched, this is Candy’ – she reacts with the venom of a taipan.  ‘She got the response she was after.  ‘Billie flinched and put his hand to his cheek like he had been burned with acid.’  The venom is lethal, and McMurphy is pushed over the brink.

There are only ten pages of the novel left.  If there is a novel with a more powerful finish, I am not aware of it.

The film came out in 1975 and won five Oscars.  A large part of its success was due to the Czech director, Milos Forman.  East Europeans and Latin Americans are good with off centre stories.  Louise Fletcher is stunning as the nurse and deserved her Oscar at least as much as Jack Nicholson.  (Brando and Bancroft knocked back the parts.)  She can inflict and receive pain unflinchingly and unwittingly.  Among the highlights of this great American movie are the Chief striding up and down the basketball court, and, at the end, bringing his own form of peace to the closure.  The Chief is serene.  The film could be a homage to his nation.

The book is not so much about madness and freedom as our capacity to tolerate differences in others and our readiness to resist the mediocrity of the conformists.  We deprive some insane people of their liberty by incarcerating them; we can do as much with medication.  When the time came to write the biography of the mad man who started the Oxford English Dictionary, the author was driven to ask whether we would get the same result now because of the way we medicate those whom we call mad.  And who is to deny that more light may enter a cracked mind than one that is sealed?

1962 was the year Doctor Martin Luther King said: ‘And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can’t ride your back unless it is bent.’  Dr King said to coloured people what Mc Murphy was saying to the nuts.  This book is one of our little triumphs, something to treasure.  One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of those books that make you want to stand up and punch the air and shout out loud.  Like The Graduate, here too was a movie to define a generation.

Passing Bull 29 – Let the sun shine upon ME

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

A member of the Seekers once described a friend of mine as a Kelvinator – she could not walk past a fringe without opening the door to feel the light shine upon her.  That was not fair to her, but it is dead right for some people who are, one way or another, in the entertainment business.

There must be something very bad in the legal air in Sydney.  Dyson Heydon has been making a fool of himself ever since he accepted his commission from Tony Abbott.  Now we have an intense competition between former members of the Supreme Court as to who can be the rudest and the silliest.  It is very unsettling to watch, even from this side of the Murray.

A lot of it has to do with ICAC.  A lot more has to do with Margaret Cunneen S C who is regularly described in the press as ‘one of Australia’s most accomplished criminal prosecutors and a media darling’.  She sounds like a real Kelvinator.  She just cannot help herself.  The other day the AFR reported that she had said of ICAC that ‘they are out of control, these people.  The whole thing has to be completely destroyed.’  And of the ACC: ‘The whole thing is a total attempt to annihilate what they think is a very political conservative, when I was told I had a chance to be a Supreme Court Judge.’  She referred to a former Supreme Court judge who had defended ICAC as ‘an old man with dyed hair trying to get back on TV.’  She said of the head of the child abuse Royal Commission that he ‘seems to have it in for me – I think McClellan is the author of all my bad press, until ICAC.’

This is all unspeakably vulgar and unprofessional.  If this woman ever had any prospect of a judicial career, she has none now – and at her own hands.  You wonder if she is fit for any office at all.  The press says that her ‘background briefings, networking and friendships with journalists are legendary.’  The last thing that this country needs is a prosecutor who goes in for that sort of thing.

Shane Warne and Eddie McGuire are both legendary Kelvinators.  Warne is now intent on proving just how stupid he really is.  The other day he attacked Steve Waugh for dropping him.  It gives you an insight into ego when someone complains of being dropped.  That must be unthinkable.  But even if there were some ground for the complaint – and there was none – Warne should have kept his mouth shut  Steve Waugh is in my view the toughest cricketer that we have produced in my time, and that means he is the best.  The difference between him and Shane Warne is that he has character.

There is another reason why Warne should be keeping his head down.  A charity that he was associated with, the Shane Warne Foundation, looks to have been a temple built for egos.  It is being shut down.  Eddie McGuire was one of the ‘celebrities’ on the board.  He said that ‘The reason why nobody has bailed off the board is that we really believe in this bloke, we believe in Shane Warne, we know his heart, we know his track record, we know he has recast this foundation.’  Well, Eddie, perhaps you should have bailed off the board when you found out that the brother of Warne, Jason, had been paid an $80,000 annual salary in the same year that the foundation had donated just $54,600 to charity.  Looking after the family before charity does not look good in a charity, not least if those who run it are in it for their own ego.

In both these instances, the bullshit is corrosive.  Bullshit and ego are a bad mix.  Cunneen, Warnie, and Eddie have all made enough money out of blowing their own trumpets to be able to afford to buy banks of Kelvinators and leave them on with their doors open all night.  That might serve to cool them down, which would be helpful for the rest of us.

Movie and Opera

Different people see films and operas differently.  Some people liked Titanic – The Age gave it five stars and I have never forgiven them – and I thought it was the worst film I have seen.  Some people like Looking for Grace, and I thought it was the second worst film I have seen.  It was staggeringly slow, boring, incredible, and irritating.  A money back job.  I thought the Melbourne Opera show of Mozart’s Seraglio was a wonderful night’s entertainment – and I may have been the only one there not speaking German.  This is what Mozart, at least in that phase, and entertainment should be.  The Age reviewer must have slept through the opera and his writing his review.

Poet of the month: Philip Larkin

Naturally the Foundation will Bear Your expenses

Hurrying to catch my Comet

One dark November day,

Which soon would snatch me from it

To the sunshine of Bombay,

I pondered pages Berkeley

Not three weeks since had heard,

Perceiving Chatto darkly

Through the mirror of the Third.

 

Crowds, colourless and careworn

Had made my taxi late,

Yet not till I was airborne

Did I recall the date –

That day when Queen and Minister

And Band of Guards and all

Still act their solemn–sinister

Wreath- rubbish in Whitehall.

 

It used to make me throw up,

These mawkish nursery games:

O when will England grow up?

But I outsoar the Thames,

And dwindle off down Auster

To greet Professor Lal

(He once met Morgan Forster),

My contact and my pal.

Passing Bull 28 Just who is running this bloody country anyway?

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

We have become resigned to the fact that we have lost responsible government in Australia.  Ministers no longer resign when someone in their charge does something wrong.  They sack the wrongdoer.  On a very good day you might get an expression of regret.  You will not get an apology – and of course resignation is entirely out of question.  It has only taken about a generation to wind up that part of what used to be called the Westminster System.

There appears to be a new and possibly more insidious invasion of ministerial responsibility.  A suggestion has been made that a federal government minister has not complied with some written standards.  The Prime Minister says that he has referred the issue to a senior public servant.

There are two things here.  First there is apparently some written code that someone has prepared – I’m not sure whether it applies just to this government or all members of this party or what its standing is; I am accordingly even less sure of whether its prescriptions would accord with what members of the public might think should be standards of decency to be expected from their elected representatives who happen also to be ministers of the Crown.  That is one issue – our legal system has not always got on well with codes.

The other question is why the Prime Minister, or any minister, or any Member of Parliament is referring an issue of their conduct in office to a civil servant.  Judges do not ask their clerks if they have done something wrong; generals do not ask their valets if they have buggered something up in battle; doctors do not ask their receptionists or even their nurses whether they have got something wrong.  Just who, then, is in charge?

The accused minister is happy to describe the civil servant as ‘the highest public servant in the land’: golly, should we curtsey?  I had assumed that this personage would merely offer some report or advice.  Perhaps we could live with that level of intervention, as long as the decision is ultimately taken by those who should take it, namely, the relevant ministers or members of Parliament.

But that view does not appear to be shared by all of the press.  The senior political reporter for the AFR yesterday said that the fate of the accused minister ‘now rests with senior public servant Martin Parkinson who is deciding whether Robert [the accused minister] breached the ministerial code of conduct.  If he finds he did, his future is grim.’  That report does suggest that this civil servant has received some kind of high judicial appointment.

Well, these things happen in the press, but other suggestions in that report of Phillip Coorey are a lot more disturbing.  The article says that in June 2013 a Chinese billionaire attended a dinner at Parliament House.  So also did Tony Abbott, his chief of staff Peta Credlin, the then Shadow industry Minister Ian Macfarlane and the Shadow Minister for defence Stuart Robert – who is now the minister the subject of the enquiry.  The article then goes on to say that the Chinese billionaire gave each of these people ‘designer watches… as a goodwill gesture…’  In addition, watches were provided, the article says, to the wife of Abbott and to the wife of Robert who were not there.  It must have been quite a night at Parliament House – did the bountiful Chinaman turn up with a big sack of gifts like Santa?

Mr Macfarlane then went and saw the clerk of the House of Representatives to declare his gift.  So here we have another case of politicians referring to civil servants for advice on their professional conduct.

But then Mr Macfarlane made a very serious mistake.  He ‘reasoned’ that his ‘designer watch’, a Rolex, was a fake.  Was the then Shadow Minister an expert in watches, fake or otherwise?  Mr Macfarlane, whose star has fallen, comes across, with some effort, as a plain man from the sticks – but that did not stop him estimating the value of the ‘fake Rolex’ at between three hundred dollars and five hundred dollars.  This was, I gather, beneath the value in which he had to make a public declaration relating to the gift.

The article appears to me to suggest that the clerk of the House was a party to this exercise in assessing the value of the gift.  If so, both of those involved were making a very serious error.  It does suggest, to put it at its lowest, a cavalier regard for determining the value of gifts for determining how someone in a position of public trust should respond to them.  Getting a fake Rolex might be one thing; getting a real one is altogether a different thing.

And the problem is worse for Mr Macfarlane because his thinking was apparently predicated on the assumption that the Chinese billionaire who made the gift was a crook – a crook who could not even give a proper watch, but had to give a fake one.  This is hardly a good position to start from if you have two come to explain later on why you get accepted a gift – that you thought that the donor was a crook.  You may be able to dismiss a fake as a bauble, but no one is naive enough to think that Chinese businessmen are handing out real Rolex watches to Australian politicians for nothing.  I’ve had some difficulty in following the current allegation against Mr Robert, but I doubt whether it is as serious as suggesting that he received a gift worth tens of thousands of dollars from a Chinese businessman.

But then apparently Mr Macfarlane ran into a colleague who had a real Rolex and who compared the weights of the two watches.  On the basis of that show of expertise by another MP, the two of them concluded that the gift was a genuine watch.  Golly – what will we do now?  Mr Macfarlane then had the watch valued – which he should have done in the first place if he was serious.  He was then told it was worth $40,000!  And he was also told, again according to the article, that his watch ‘wasn’t as flash as those given to Abbott, Margie Abbott, and Credlin’.  Was even the sky no limit to this bounty from the Orient?

What should Mr Macfarlane do then?  Well of course he should go back to the clerk and be advised what to do.  He told the clerk that he thought he should hand it back.  The clerk said he was entitled to keep it – which is an interesting proposition of either propriety or law – but that giving it back would be a good idea.  It would be interesting to know how the return of the gift was worded.

The article then says that Mr Macfarlane informed Mr Tony Nutt who is now the federal director of the Liberal Party of the problem.  Mr Nutt then ‘ordered the immediate collection of the watches so they could be given back… Robert like his MP colleagues complied.  There remain suggestions one watch was not returned.’  The word was ordered.  The scene may have been more interesting if Mr Nutt’s predecessor had issued such an order to Ms Credlin.

So here you have a whole group of politicians who should know better behaving in a very curious way in response to gifts of Rolex watches by a visiting Chinese businessman of great wealth. Whoever else the arbiters of ministerial conduct may have been, they appear to be here the clerk of the House of Representatives and the director of the Liberal Party.  We are told how Mr Macfarlane blithely accepted these gifts of great value – but we are not told how the other donees pacified their consciences.

I happen to know something about Rolex watches.  One thing I know is that Rolex watches of the kind apparently being handed out here are worth many times the value of a bottle of Grange Hermitage.

Those who want to condemn footballers for the way that they accept what their employer tells them would presumably be horrified at the conduct of these leaders of the nation with a Chinaman on the make.  Who do you think behaved more irresponsibly – the footballers who accepted what is alleged to be Flyaway X, or the political grandees who accepted actual Rolex watches worth $40,000 each or more?

But, whichever way that you look at this report, there is some absolutely prime bullshit here.

***

Correction

When I said in my previous note that Essendon lied to the players, I should have made it clear that that allegation is predicated on the assumption that the relevant finding by the CAS Panel was valid.  I was saying, or meant to say, that if you accept the decision of the Panel, then the other propositions followed.

***

Poet of the month – Philip Larkin

Long Sight in Age

They say eyes clear with age,

As dew clarifies air

To sharpen evenings

As if time put an edge

Round the last shape of things

To show them there;

The many-levelled trees,

The long soft tides of grass

Wrinkling away the gold

Wind-ridden waves – all these,

They say, come back to focus

As we grow old.

***

Movie – Steve Jobs

This film is brilliantly written. It is put together like a top West End play.  Fassbender and Winslett look perfect in the lead roles.  (I did not think she had it in her.)  The only problem is that the hero, who is rarely off the screen, at a personal level makes Hitler look like an avuncular softy.  Jobs has a manic need to hurt those closest to him, and to insult and bulldoze people, especially the weak.  Is it something in his past that makes him degrade people in a way that makes us wince?  He is what we call ‘damaged goods’ – he has a maimed psyche.  (There is a lot of the revenge of Heathcliff and Gatsby in this character, but more of that later.)

At his best, Jobs was like Wagner – a rolled gold shit who thought that the world owed his genius obeisance and that it also owed him a living.  There is no genius here.  Jobs says that he is not the musician but the conductor.  He is no more a genius than the Madam of a high-class knock-shop, if a bit better paid.  The film is often painful, but it is well worth it – even if the end is tartly mawkish.

This film is as good in its own way as The Big Short.  After you have seen both, you might conclude that the big winners in big business are crooks, nuts, or psychopaths.  Well, is this what Shakespeare may have called the ‘promised end’ of capitalism?  Was Karl Marx right after all?

The haughty arrogance of lawyers -Part 4-Grounds for holding a public inquiry

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 3 Comments

So far, I have sought to make good the following.

First, it does not matter what you or I or God think of what these Essendon players did.  I am concerned with whether they have been fairly treated.  Did they get due process?  Was justice done and seen to be done?  Did the players get a fair go?  You may be surprised to learn that those questions mean much the same in the eye of the law – and, I take it, for those outside the law.

In my view the answer to that question is no.  I set out a summary of my reasons for that conclusion in a previous note as follows.

They should never have had to face charges on these issues that did not call for proof of intent.  They should never have had to face fixed penalties.  They should never have been required to exculpate themselves on penalty once a finding on strict liability had been made.  They should never have been faced with a second prosecution after they succeeded on the first.  The prosecutors should not have been allowed to change their case.  The identical sentences for very different cases are demonstrably unjust and logically untenable.

Second, if you think that the players did not get a fair go, it does not matter if that unfairness derives from the provisions of the WADA Code or from the decisions and reasoning of the CAS Panel.  Both the Code and the decision are the work of foreign lawyers (at least a majority on the Panel), and it does not matter to the players which product of the lawyers was instrumental in their downfall and present suspension.  If any player is precluded by his personal agreement with WADA from complaining about what WADA or CAS have done to him, he should look to those responsible for his agreeing to any course that could have led to such a result.

Third, because the CAS Panel was precluded by the Code from judging each player on the merits of his own case, and because each player was subject to the same mandatory penalty regardless of his level of fault, then in my view it follows that justice has not been done to the individual players – again whether or not that injustice flows from the Code or the Panel decision or both.  The conclusion of injustice in my view follows from a proposition that I regard as axiomatic.  Each player is or should be entitled to have his case determined on the merits of his own case.  If you do not accept a proposition that I regard as axiomatic, there is no point in our continuing this discussion any further.

Our law deals with the rights of persons, not with the rights of groups of people.  At least, that is what it does for the most part.  When it departs from that principle, as some governments now do in dealing with ‘terrorists’, and as some did in dealing with ‘Gypsies’, then we know that those governments are chancing their arms.  The Great Charter of 1215 said that ‘no free man shall be… in any way ruined, nor will we go against him, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.’

Fourth, if you do accept the decision and the findings of the CAS Panel, you need to remember just what it decided and just what it found.  The Panel did not make a finding of dishonesty or cheating, either by the criminal standard of proof, or at all.  The Panel made its findings on a standard of proof that is less in some unquantifiable way than the standard imposed for many hundreds of years – for longer than the white man has been in this country – by our criminal law of proof beyond reasonable doubt, but higher, in some equally unquantifiable way, from the standard of the balance of probabilities in civil proceedings.  The Panel found on the basis of circumstantial and expert evidence that its members were comfortably satisfied that the players had – and that every one of them had – taken some prohibited substance of a quantity that they could not specify, and with consequences that they did not attempt to make any finding upon.  Then they found that they were satisfied, to an unspecified level of comfort, that the players had not discharged the onus that the Code put upon them to prove that they had acted without relevant ‘fault’.  It is remarkable, indeed, that the Panel could make this finding against each one of the 34 accused without separately ruling on the evidence that related to each one of them.  Is it seriously contended that each of the 34 footballers was equally culpably uninquisitive about what was going into his body?  Is the Panel really saying that they were all equally dumb or naughty?

The Panel did not say that any Essendon footballer had sought to gain, or that he had gained, an unlawful competitive advantage.  So, whatever else the Panel found, it did not make any express finding of against any player of cheating.  The fact that the reasons of the Panel not only do not make this clear, but obscure it by muddying the waters with groundless speculation about the effects on the players of the alleged consumption of prohibited substances and by their finding that all accused had failed to prove that they were innocent, is another reason why I conclude that these people on the Panel were not up to this job.

Fifth, although for the most part neither WADA nor the CAS are concerned with what lawyers call the merits and with what other people called justice, the reasoning of the Panel on what may be called ‘the merits’ is sadly flawed.  The reasoning is in stilted legalese with no attempt to explain it to the losers, with no attempt to explain how limited their decision was, and with no attempt to acknowledge that the Code was driving them to a result that most Australians find odd and that a lot of them find revolting.  Some of the comments of the Panel on the conduct of the players are just silly.  The members of the original tribunal knew what they were doing and they were better placed to do justice to these footballers, and they did so.  The members of the CAS Panel did not know what they were doing, and it shows.

Sixth, I find it offensive, and I invite other Australians to find it offensive, to be told by people from outside Australia that we in Australia cannot be trusted to regulate our own professional sportsmen, but that we should hand over our responsibility to do so to foreigners, whom we do not know, and that we should leave those foreigners with the power to rule over our own citizens, with the power to cancel their right to work, and that we should put our trust in foreign bodies and foreign laws – if it matters, laws that are not made democratically – for our own good.  The coup de grâce is that those bodies that we are asked to trust derive from and still have links with bodies that are notorious all around the world for being utterly and irredeemably corrupt – the IOC and the IAAF.  (And you do have to wonder about WADA.  Its governance comes from governments and the Olympic movement.  From 2008 to 2013, its President was a failed New South Wales politician named John Fahey.  He was a member of the New South Wales political party that has been the staple diet of that state’s anti-corruption authority.)

Seventh, in the best tradition of Australian sports administrators – the ones that we used to call the Panama Hat Brigade – the AFL has been at best silly and at worst cruel.  Those responsible, including Fitzpatrick and McLachlan, should resign – but they won’t; they will adopt the Lord Coe gambit.

And now I may add that we have the absurd spectacle of Australian workers having to defend their right to work by hiring lawyers to address a Swiss court in French.  Which improvident clowns exposed the poor players to this indignity?

The first ground for holding a public inquiry

In an area of trade and commerce that is of interest to and which affects people across the Commonwealth of Australia, people in business, government, and the professions who are responsible for the conduct of that trade and commerce, have brought it into disrepute and have caused people to lose confidence in it.  The delay and ineptitude of almost all those involved have become matters of what is called a public scandal.  The sequence of actual past events and possible future events is as follows.

  • If you accept the findings of the CAS Panel,  Essendon lied to its players about what they are being injected with.
  • The AFL punishes all involved at Essendon for bringing the game into disrepute, although no dishonesty was alleged, and although no harm or undue advantage was proved.
  • ASADA is slow and puts its case in a way that loses and that it later gives up. Even though ASADA is very inept, it is very loud and entirely unprofessional.
  • Essendon loses or has squashed various court proceedings.
  • The WADA Code is finally enforced on appeal by a CAS Panel that makes no finding of dishonesty but which imposes a fixed penalty on all of the players irrespective of individual cases. The panel says that the players did not do enough to show that their employer was a crook.
  • The players go to Switzerland in search of justice.
  • The players then sue Essendon for the original lies and its failure to look after them.
  • The players or Essendon then sue the AFL for exposing the livelihood of the players to a process that denies them due process and by leaving those players in the hands of the body that people do not trust – WADA.
  • The damages that the players seek are compensation for the consequences of the penalty inflicted on them by WADA and the CAS panel – and possibly for the consequences of the penalty inflicted on Essendon as a whole by the AFL.

That pile-up is too big to ignore.  And a prime suspect is a Commonwealth statutory body.

The second ground for holding a public enquiry

It is for the courts to determine what is lawful, and for others to say what is right.  But experience suggests that the odds are that we will never get a ruling from the courts (apart from the watch makers), at least at a level that some of the concepts might call for.  It is therefore appropriate that the Parliament conduct an enquiry into these issues in the national interest.  Some of the issues are:

  • Was the AFL obliged to act in good faith and in the interests of the players? Did the AFL discharge those obligations?  The AFL throughout has appeared to act defensively in its own interests, that is, the interests of those who run it, rather than in the interests of those the AFL should look after – the players, members, patrons, and fans.  They have behaved like the directors of a takeover target or the hierarchy of a church charged with abuse and breach of trust.
  • Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights are still part of our (Victorian) law. We shall not have justice delayed, sold, or denied.  We shall not be subject to cruel and unusual punishments.  Justice for the players was plainly delayed.  It was equally plainly sold.  (Heaven knows how much these lawyers have trousered for this mess.)  Was justice denied?  Were the players subjected to ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ in breach of the Bill of Rights?  If so what are the juristic consequences of any such breaches of our law that are more deeply entrenched in it than any other parts of it?
  • Contracts that restrain trade are void under our law. Can that law be avoided by a contract between other parties?  Can our law of due process be avoided by contracts between parties?  Even if the parties whose trade is restrained or whose rights are denied are not parties to the contract?  Was it either lawful or proper for the AFL and for Essendon to enter into contracts to permit the restraint of the trade of the players without their agreement, and with a denial of due process that would have infected any termination at common law?

The third ground for holding a public enquiry

Truth in history is relative, but a Senate enquiry would have a much better prospect of reaching after it than anything that has gone before.  That may not be saying much, but should we as a nation decline to take the opportunity?

Movie – The Big Short and the Cancer in Capitalism

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

 

G K Chesterton once said that the ultimate test of a Catholic was to visit Rome and remain in the faith.  You might say that about a capitalist going to Las Vegas – or watching The Big Short.  Las Vegas is the ultimate temple to greed and emptiness.  It is therefore only right that this film reaches a kind of climax in Las Vegas.  The film, following the book of the same name by Michael Lewis, is as full a diagnosis of the cancer in capitalism as you could find.  It is also as good a movie as I have seen for a long time.

Banking is not hard.  The bank takes money from me and pays me the cost to them of X %, and then lends that money on to you for a price for them of X +Y% and trousers the Y% difference in the two rates of return.  The only way the bank can lose is if you default on the loan.  That loan will be secured by a mortgage.  The effect of a mortgage is that the bank can sell your home if you don’t repay the money.

There are therefore two ways the bank can get it wrong.  It can lend you more than you can afford and put you in a position where you may well default if there is some change in your fortune.  Then if you do default, and the housing market has gone down, and the bank has lent too much to you, it may not recover its money at all.

This is at the bottom what happened with the failure of the mortgage market in the US in 2007 that led to the Great Financial Crisis.  It was compounded because very clever people in the finance industry and bond markets – all known in America as Wall Street – bundled up all of these mortgages in fancy sounding documents and securities that hardly anyone ever bothered to read or try to understand and then sold rights to the returns on the mortgages as bonds.  The bonds of course were only as good as the underlying mortgages – no matter how complex the eventual layers on the cake became, the whole structure turned on the capacity of the original borrowers to repay the loan, or of their secured property to make good any default.  If interest rates went up, and the property market went down – and those two events commonly occur together – then the house of cards would all fall down.  That is what happened in what we call the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage debacle that brought the financial world to its knees.

(As it happened, I had to look at most of this a long time ago when acting for the government after Pyramid failed – some silly people (including one Supreme Court judge) suggested that the government may have been at fault!)

This all happened because people who were negotiating the original mortgages and then tying them up to sell them on were being paid so much by way of commission that they lost any interest at all in the worth of their transactions and simply kept churning out the mortgages and all the subsequent bonds in order to get their own commission and irrespective of the consequences.

There is only one other thing you need to remember when looking at the failure of Wall Street that led to the GFC – there is one born every minute.  Most people lose their brains if you wave enough dollars in front of their face.  And Wall Street lives off feeding that greed and stupidity.

You need only to see that greed and a kind of moral emptiness drove these deals at both ends – those selling the mortgages or bonds got paid too much; those taking them paid too much for what they thought was cheap money.  At both ends, people were getting money that they had not earned.  The people we feel sorry for are those at the bottom who were conned into transactions they could not afford.  People should be jailed for inflicting this kind of misery.  It is daylight robbery.

How did it all work at the top end?  The big hitters see every deal – or ‘trade’ – as a gamble or bet.  Most people buy shares or bonds in the belief and hope that they will go up in value.  This is called going long.  But what if you think that a security – say, a share, bond, or even mortgage – will go down in value?  How do you profit on that movement if it happens?  What ‘trade’ can you do to give effect to the bet you want to make?  One way is to enter into a deal where you sell a security before you buy it.  If you agree to sell now at a current market price of $X on the basis that you will deliver in the future, and when that time comes the market price has dropped or crashed to $X-Y, you win – you trouser the $Y.

This is called going short, or short selling, or simply ‘shorting’.  Hence the title of the book and film.  The practice is legal and some say useful in serving to keep market values real.  Slater & Gordon may have a different view – their shares have been shorted by dealers who talk the stock down to fulfil their own prophecies and trades.  People tend to go long in a rising or bull market and short in a falling or bear market.

And if you have won your bet, someone has lost theirs.  And if they take a big enough hit, they might fail and go out of business.  If this happens to a lot of them, the whole economy might be threatened.  A bet against a number of banks if they are big enough may be a bet against the economy of the United States – if not the world.  And although any investment is a kind of gamble, shorting is not for mum and dad.  If the bet of the short comes off, the other party takes a real loss – and not just a foregone possible profit if they have sold before a price rise.  But if the bet fails, and the price goes up, the capacity for loss for the short seller may be unlimited.

That is all you need to know when you go to see The Big Short.  And the world owes Michael Lewis a great debt for the books that he has written about Wall Street.  He has on a number of occasions now lifted the lid clean off a stinking cesspit.  He has now got the status of Bob Woodward – people listen to him, and you choose not to speak to him at your own risk.  I read the book with a lot of interest, but at times it lost me.  This film never did.  I think it is a brilliant film that should be seen by anyone who has any interest in the fragile way our moral world is structured.

The main charm of the film is that although it deals with an industry run for the most part by outright crooks, the people in it have an interest if not a charm of their own.  The most important part of the film is that the idea of the big short was put in place by a man who did what no one else bothered to do.  He actually looked at the mortgages and the properties that they secured, and the lenders who took the mortgages, and concluded that they had to fail.  This man looked hard at the security and saw it that it was bad.  A dealer in securities actually looked at the securities!  The loans were doomed to fail.  This dealer could therefore bet against them and the deals done on top of them.  This man is a cranky but brilliant former doctor.  He lives with music blaring in his earphones and playing the drums.  There are people out there like this who are quite brilliant in their own way, but who are utterly unable to carry on a decent conversation.

So, he is the man who first discovers that the house of cards may come down.  By accident, this information falls into the hands of a real Wall Streeter who unusually has a social conscience, and who wants to stick it right up the big banks on Wall Street, even though his little hedge fund his effectively owned by one of them.  He is the man who worried his rabbi by finding inconsistencies in the word of God when he was a boy.  (His mother asked the rabbi whether he had found any.)  We first see him coming late into a group therapy session and hijacking it and then bitterly resenting the suggestion that he has done so.  He is a wonderful character that is beautifully developed and played.  He, rather than the mad doctor, is the man at the heart of the film.  (My recollection is that the man in the book is not likeable at all.)

The other two main characters are young whiz kids starting a business out of a garage.  There is a hilarious scene where they go to one of the big banks to try to get some ticket that will have them ‘to sit at the table’ as they say, and they get wiped off like a dirty bum.  The kids get a disaffected dealer to get them in and out of the big market.  These three bring a sense of fun and innocence – at least they are sane.

And so it all goes on, and it all comes to pass, and the balloon goes up, and the banks go down.  And we, the public, bail them out, and cop the bill.

It is a very, very funny movie and you worry for a while that you are laughing at events that will lead to untold human misery.  But the film deals with this in a way that works dramatically.  The human element is there, and so is the fact that the crooks have just walked away.  The film said that one person went to jail.  I cannot recall that, but what the film makes crystal clear is that the US should have had to set up a penal colony to deal with all of those shysters who robbed ordinary people.

There are two levels of robbery revealed in in the film.  One is those at the higher level of the banks who just rip off anyone in sight, including the bank’s own customers, and its own shareholders.  The other is the people down the bottom who are defrauding members of the public who blindly sign their life away.  There is a hideous scene where mortgage brokers are boasting about the way that they clip migrants and people of colour.  The hedge fund manager who is the hero interrupts the discussion to take his colleagues outside and ask them why these idiots are confessing.  The answer is they are not confessing – they are bragging.

And the film gives it to the ratings agencies with both barrels.  Standard & Poore are represented by a woman who looks blind.  She is – but not physically.  This is brilliant theatre.  These bastards – and that is the polite term – gave glowing endorsements to liars and thieves who paid them to do so.  It is a very sad comment on American justice that these crooks have not been brought to justice – even in civil actions.

The central message of the book was that those driving this world-threatening farce were utterly amoral.  They could not spell the word ‘conscience’, and we have no reason to believe that anything has changed.  Clever crooks still skin greedy idiots.  They are not just too big to fail – they are too big to be reined in.  Their corruption now looks endemic, just as violence in the US is rooted in the gun laws and their way of life.  There will be more regulation, but this just makes the dealers more careful and soulless – liked doped cyclists.  You cannot, after all, legislate away greed and inanity.

Inequality will be the issue of our time – inequality in income and wealth, and in the justice system.  These shysters keep getting away with it at both ends, and history suggests that the victims will eventually erupt unless there is a real change.

The film has what may be called an ensemble cast including Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Steve Carrell, and Brad Pitt.  It was written and directed by Adam McKay.  They all show complete assurance.  One character is like a Greek chorus who offers asides to the audience – that I think is a mark of this film as high theatre.

This is a very important story and I find it very hard to imagine it being better told.  It is also I think a tribute to the U S that they can tell such a dark story so well and so frankly.  God only knows that the U S can deal with some tribute just now.

Movies – Suffragette – And a little history

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Our morals tend to get plastic when we talk of politics.  Take the following.  Politically driven people want to change the world.  They want to have more say in how things are done and to right injustices.  They are passionate but they are getting nowhere.  They get hardened, and they turn to violence.  The reaction of the law hardens them more, and former unbelievers are inducted, indoctrinated, and ‘radicalised’.  (Are you with me?)  They leave or are cast out of their own homes.  Their own families feel betrayed, but this rejection just drives the militants on further.  They become outlaws and utterly case hardened.  They have crossed over to the other side.  They adore their leader and they do whatever they are told.  Their righteousness acknowledges no legal or moral boundary.  Zealotry and fanaticism leads inevitably to terrorism that repels all but the hard core.  The logical conclusion is self-immolation, suicide, in the most effective way possible – before the eyes of the world.  For the cause – live on film.

A Muslem ‘terrorist’?  Perhaps.  A suffragette?  Emphatically, according to this film.

There are related risks with a political film.  It may become holier than thou, and the white hats may be whiter than white, and the black hats blacker than black, and you may be left with a tawdry melodrama that is bad history and worse theatre.

Although others whose views I respect hold a different view, that is what I got with the film Suffragette.  The men are almost laughably bad, and the women are all glorious but boring martyrs.  The predictability ends by leaving you flat, and the people who made this film have not learned that since the dramas of ancient Greece, the best theatre, excepting Ibsen, has been relieved by humour.

Does devotion to a political cause ever justify you in walking out on your own family?  The question is hardly asked in this film – and some twerp thought that it would be a good idea to have Anglo-Saxon male tyranny led by a red-bearded Irishman played by a throwback to James Robertson Justice.

I had a go at the story of English women in those times in a little book called The English Difference?  The tablets of their laws.  Some extracts are below.  The real story is in my view far more uplifting.

There will be more on Essendon and the law shortly – a statement of the case for a public inquiry.

WOMEN (1905 – 2011)

Patriotism is not enough. (Edith Cavell)

In a war-time speech that you do not hear so much now, Churchill spoke of the need to deal with class and snobbery in England.  [The fate of Churchill after World War II.]

There is a famous photo of Lloyd George and Winston Churchill on their way to delivering the People’s Budget on 29 April 1909.  Lloyd George is obviously the older (by about twelve years).  Both men are in pinstriped trousers, frock-coat, waistcoat and watch-chain, wing collar, a bow tie or necktie, and top hat.  Lloyd George is carrying a furled brolly and the red despatch box.  Churchill is carrying a cane and folded gloves.  To our left, Margaret Lloyd George looks wary. (What woman married to Lloyd George would not look wary?)  To our right, a tall and desperately humble functionary is wearing gloves and carrying a brolly and another despatch box.  Behind them is a double-decker bus carrying a sign for Tatcho and Dewars, and a man with a boater and a moustache.

Lloyd George is looking at the camera, unflinchingly; Churchill is looking both determinedly and devoutly at his leader, as if seeking some sort of assurance.  It is of course a still photo, but you can still sense the rhythm and purpose of their stride.  Here are two men on a mission, two men who do not mind a fight – on the contrary, their opponents, both in Britain and in Germany, would from time to time lament that they would rather have had a fight than a feed.

These two, very much an odd couple of the sorcerer and his apprentice, were on their way to take from the rich to give to the poor.  They were intent on developing ‘real change’ in a way and to an extent that the President of the United States and the American nation itself could never even dream of.  And for that purpose they were giving battle – you might as well say that they had gone to war – with the British ruling class in a way that Karl Marx and his disciples could never have dreamed of.  These two fighting men – these two British samurai – were largely responsible for winning that battle or war, and in so doing they led the reshaping of British society and its constitution. We may not see such peace-time leadership again.

Lloyd George was a Welshman, the protégé of a cobbler, a defender of the Welsh church, and a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln.  Churchill was the son of a lord and an American heiress (a popular conjunction for a fading aristocracy).  These two men of very different backgrounds joined together to forge what was in truth a social revolution.  The opposition from entrenched wealth and class was ferocious – they had to use all their political skill, and that of Asquith, their PM, to get by.  They also had to deal with two kings.

The opposition was so visceral because that vicious little Welshman appeared to be committed to something more than equality – he looked like he wanted to make the Sermon on the Mount one of the tablets of the law in England.  Lloyd George had told the Commons: ‘These problems of the sick, the infirm, of the men who cannot find a means of earning a livelihood, are problems with which it is the business of the state to deal.’  Was he quite mad?  Was he really saying that ‘it is the business of the state’ to deal with the sick and the unemployed?  Had this little Welsh lunatic forgotten what happened to the first man who said the meek shall inherit the earth?  Would that the old Duke of Wellington were here – his grace would certainly have known how to clear the stables of this sort of rabble.

Both Lloyd George and Churchill were moved by compassion – nothing more, nothing less; what Sir Lewis Namier in another context referred to as ‘plain human kindness’.  Each of them was also a consummate politician, and each was alert to the politics of what they were about.  Churchill had publicly warned that the Liberal Party had to begin to address social issues or die.  The Labour Party was coming around the bend and might soon gobble them all up. 

[Discussion of the achievements of this Liberal government.]

These were stirring and progressive times for Asquith, Lloyd George, and Churchill.  There was another hot issue on which they were stirred but not so progressive – the rights of women, especially the right to vote.  Their attitude to women reminds us of Jefferson’s attitude to slaves.  Independence was a wonderful universal good; but it was not for slaves – slaves were not in the same universe.  A universal franchise was a wonderful universal good: but it was not for women; women were not in the same universe.  Some poor men were coming to terms with the view that they had descended from the apes – now a lunatic fringe was saying that men were no different to women.  Where will it all end?  In the trenches, perhaps.

The agitators came to be called suffragettes.  One group started with John Stuart Mill.  Of them, the French historian Elie Halevy said: ‘…its members abandoned themselves to the pleasure which English people enjoy so keenly of founding groups, gathering recruits – they began to come in large numbers – drawing up rules, electing presidents, secretaries, and treasurers, and organizing public meetings in the customary style.’  The other group was more militant.  Its leader was Mrs Emily Pankhurst.  They would use the word ‘militant’ in the titles of their memoirs.  They were long on what cricketers call sledging to sabotage public meetings.  Two of them wrecked a meeting addressed by Sir Edward Grey.  They went to jail rather than pay the fine.  The movement had martyrs.  There is a photo of two others in a carriage on their release – they had garlands in their hair.  They marched in great concourses, mixing with the unemployed.  They especially targeted Grey and Lloyd George.  When jailed, they went on hunger strike, and by violence made force feeding impossible.  They were evicted from the Commons, but then men took their place.  On Derby Day 1913, Miss Davidson committed suicide by throwing herself on the track.  They put bombs in letter-boxes, and they burned down churches.

How did Monsieur Halevy relate to all his when writing in 1952?  ‘The suffragettes exploited the weakness of their sex, its proneness to hysteria.’  It was not all violence.  There was a political movement.  One group broke with the Liberals to support the Labour Party.  The leaders of that party were not wild with enthusiasm about the idea, but the women had real money, and money talks.  Then Mrs Pankhurst got nine years’ jail, but what good would that do in the face of fanatics intent on martyrdom and bombing?  Should the Establishment follow the example of Napoleon and the Tsars and answer fire with fire?

Then a much, much more earthy but powerful force intervened that made all this internal conflict and excitement look both irrelevant and tawdry.  We recall from our discussion of the Anglo-Saxon levee of arms, of the law not simply allowing arms to be borne but requiring their men to carry arms, that such a law promotes a kind of equality.  If the state depends on you to protect and sustain it, then your standing in the state is so much surer.  Even the feudal relation went both ways – the vassal gave service, but the lord had to protect the vassal; if the lord did not discharge his obligation, the vassal was freed from his obedience.  If you fight for someone, you expect them to look after you.

At 6 am at Brussels on 12 October 1915, a German firing party assembled for that purpose executed by firing squad an English nurse named Edith Cavell.  Edith was forty-nine, the daughter of a vicar at a village near Norwich.  She had been practising her profession in Belgium before the war broke out.  Then she was engaged in saving the lives of both British and German soldiers.  She had also spied, but she was tried before a German military court for helping about 200 British soldiers to escape.  She had therefore been aiding the enemy.  She freely admitted what she had done.  The verdict and sentence were open to the German military court, but the latter was a frightful military mistake. 

The night before she died, Edith Cavell took Holy Communion with an Anglican priest.  She told him that ‘patriotism is not enough.’  Those four words should be enrolled on every military school, mess, and court in the land; they are on her memorial at Trafalgar Square, and for them alone Edith Cavell should be remembered.  The next morning she told a German Lutheran chaplain that ‘I am glad to die for my country.’  The German laws under which she was executed did not discriminate between men and women; neither did the English laws; laws against treason or military laws rarely do.  It is not recorded that the condemned prisoner showed any of the suggested weakness of her sex, ‘its proneness to hysteria,’ in the time leading up to her being shot for what she had done for her country.

Now, here you had a hero, a real hero, the kind of hero that a nation can sustain its faith on.  It was open to the Germans to say to Edith Cavell that if it was good enough for you to aid our enemy then it is good enough for you to be executed under the laws of war.  So could the women of England say to their government that if it is good enough for us to die to see that the country is run properly, it is good enough for us to vote to see that the country is run properly.  That argument is unanswerable; it was unanswerable even by those inbred fops out of Eton who had been sheltered from girls by mummy and daddy, but to whom exclusion came naturally, and who believed that old fairy tale about the battle of Waterloo being won on the playing fields of Eton. 

When they voted against these reforms, had Asquith, Lloyd George and Churchill forgotten that their longest serving monarch, before whom all mere Prime Ministers had kow-towed, was a woman; that the monarch who defeated the Spanish Armada, and who had put on a uniform before addressing her troops at Tilbury, was a woman; and that the mother of God was, of necessity, a woman?

These World Wars fell to be won or lost in the great armaments factories at home, and in the great arsenal of the United States.  And those fields of war were mainly staffed by women.  By the end of the First World War, there were nearly five million women in the workforce, and many of them were engaged in armaments and munitions.  You cannot deny the vote to those you depend on to win your wars.

There is another point.  This was not the time for the ruling classes of Europe to be saying ‘Leave well enough alone.  Leave it to us.’  The rulers of Europe behaved appallingly to get Europe into war, and then they behaved even worse in allowing inept officer classes to lead millions upon millions of poor workers to useless death in the mud of the Western Front.  The Kaiser and the Tsar – both deriving from Caesar – were deposed forever, but many of the men at the front thought that in an orderly world the entire officer corps – or at least the entire general staff – should have had to face the penalty faced by Edith Cavell for a war crime constituted by sending men to their death when there was no reasonable prospect of their being able to obtain a tactical or strategic objective.  It is very hard to believe that people like Haig behaved as they did while believing that the men that they were killing were as valuable as those men at the top.

The move to equality therefore was bottom up and top down.  The men and women at the bottom believed that they were worth more, and that those at the top were worse than useless.  Women had to get the vote.  They did in 1918, although then only those who had made it to thirty were trusted.  The battle was in substance over.  But some would not be able to break free of caste.  When the first woman MP took her place in the House, Winston Churchill could not bring himself to acknowledge the presence of this infidel in his temple – although he had broken bread with her in her own house.

 [A discussion of the role of ‘terror’ in war and a war-time judgment on due process and civil liberties.]

England had to wait more than half a century to see the vote for women being translated into a woman as Prime Minister.  Her name was Margaret Thatcher, and she aroused strong feelings back then.  She arouses even stronger feelings now – and not just in England, but in the colonies.  We will therefore completely ignore her politics.  Why are we looking at her at all in a book about the constitution?  Because the fact that Margaret Thatcher became PM about sixty years after Winston Churchill could not acknowledge a lady friend in the House of Commons says something about the tolerance and capacity of the English to adapt to change and to accept diversity.

Three things about the Iron Lady.  First, to get where she did, she had to get past those who were still the prisoners of their shibboleths about sex, many of the ilk of Monsieur Halevy.  But more than that, she had to confront and overcome the most appalling snobbery.  ‘In the name of Heaven, my dear boy, her father was an alderman – an alderman! – at Grantham – at Grantham! – and she – yes, SHE – stood behind the counter at a shop! Not even trade, Old Boy!  Retail.  Bloody retail, Old Boy.   Not at this club!  If she gets in, she will prove Napoleon right – a nation of bloody shopkeepers.’ 

Secondly, before she was elected, Mrs Thatcher said what she would do.  She had a policy and it was different to that of anyone else.  She was not afraid to adopt a position and then stick to it.  We do not see politicians like that now.  They cower behind minders and opinion polls and the dregs of the press.

Finally, when she became PM, Mrs Thatcher was not going to take any nonsense from any of those boys in either party who had not supported her, or who had let England down – and there were not many boys that were in neither category.  They were lined up on shelves like laced up poodles so that she could from time to time wipe the floor with them.  If the world knew a stronger political leader at that time, it was a very well-kept secret.  Perhaps that is why she still makes so many people generally, and men in particular, anxious.  The only PM since to try to take a position has been sullied by Napoleonic ambitions in the Middle East evidenced by decisions to go to war based on false premises and not even referred to Cabinet –and a Napoleonic refusal to apologize to the nation.

Well, it took time to produce a Mrs Thatcher, but she certainly gave them something to talk about.  The Latin countries have not made it yet.  They are the ones bringing Europe down because they cannot balance their books.  Might there be a causal connection between the inability of France, Italy, Spain and Greece to elect a woman leader, and their inability to run their own economies?  How strong is the economy of the nation being run by Frau Merkel?

Finally, for more than 1000 years, the great stain on England’s record was Ireland.  The history is too long and too painful to recount.  In 2011, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II visited Ireland, the first English monarch to visit the Irish Republic.  A descendant of a people that had come over the water from Saxon forests, this singular queen is descended from another German line from around Hanover.  She was visiting a land of Celtic people with their own royal line.  The visit was an unqualified success.  The Irish President, also a woman, palpably gasped when the queen began a major speech in Irish in one of those parts of the program broadcast live on TV to a breathless Irish diaspora around the world.  There is good reason to believe that the peace will now hold, and that both nations can move on.  This was an affecting instance of the way that the English crown still holds an essential working place in the English constitution whose story we have tried to trace.

Passing Bull 27 -The Sniper unloads and re-loads

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

In today’s world, we need less ideology and more common sense; we need less impatience and more respect; we need less shouting at people and more engagement with them.

It is hard to say which peace of hypocrisy from the Sniper is the more aggravating.  It comes from an edited text of a speech to the Alliance Defending Freedom in New York.  Can you imagine the tone of that outfit?  Bring your own AK 47 and Bible.

The argument of the speech seemed to be that what matters when two people love each other is the commitment, and not the ceremony.  ‘You do not need to be married to love someone.’  Putting syntax to one side, that is a curious position for a soi disant conservative to adopt – that marriage of itself is just an inconsequential ceremony which is hardly necessary to bind a union or to give peace and security to the members of the union.

But, of course, the Sniper is no more of a conservative than Donald Trump is – they are both abrasive, vote-chasing, populist reactionaries who are immune to the call of principle.  It would be good to see a plain old-fashioned unapologetic Tory, but they just don’t make them anyone.  Just look at those Looney Tune old barnacles in what passes for our conservative political parties.  It is just that absence of principle that is ending people off in search of quacks and crooks.

Well, this column is supposed to be about bullshit, and not politics.  It is just as well then that the edited text of the speech begins with a piece of rolled gold bullshit.  ‘I have always regarded myself as a ‘pro-family’ member of Parliament…’  If you take out Hitler and Stalin, what politicians do you know who were or are ‘anti-family’?

Here is a good reminder that one test of the worth of a proposition is to ask if anyone could be bothered to assert the contrary.  If the answer is no, you may well have got yourself some bullshit.

And we have been assured by a mate of the Sniper, Mr Greg Sheridan of the Murdoch Press, that the Sniper is staying on as an MP for the good of the nation and because he is a good bloke.  One day I would like to ask Mr Sheridan, and those curious folk at The Australian Spectator, to meet me at the bottom of my garden.  There they could show me the fairies.  And in broad daylight.

Poet of the month: Philip Larkin

Ignorance

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure

Of what is true or right or real,

But forced to qualify or so I feel,

Or Well, it does seem so:

Someone must know.

 

Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:

Their skill at finding what they need,

Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed,

And willingness to change;

Yes, it is strange,

 

Even to wear such knowledge – for our flesh

Surrounds us with its own decisions –

And yet spanned all our life on imprecision is,

That when we start to die

Have no idea why.

 

PS  To return to politics, do you suppose that there is the remotest chance that the Sniper, or Doctor Death All Gone Grecian, are charging the expenses of these evangelical missions to the U S to us back here in Oz?  Is the Australian tax-payer to be behind the final immolation of American Conservatism?  Do you remember that hilarious day when the Sniper said that he would not allow his faith to interfere with how he ran the country?  You falsify such a proposition merely by stating it.  Was he going to forget the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount?

NOTE

A pattern of posts may emerge on this site, but I do propose to publish a Passing Bull note on bullshit once a week and to add a poem as a kind of balm.  I will try to avoid politics in this column, but you will understand that asking a student of bullshit to avoid politics is like asking a drunk to stay out of pubs.

There need be no connection between the poetry and what precedes it.  For example, Philip Larkin came from a different planet to Oz politicians.

Suggestions on the poets or poetry will be welcome.  Or polite suggestions on anything else.

The haughty arrogance of lawyers Part III The foreign members of the CAS Panel – the two amigos

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 8 Comments

 

There is a movement to hold a Senate inquiry into the case of the Essendon footballers which I will comment on in a later post.  In the meantime, may I introduce you to our two guests from overseas who sat on the CAS panel and who therefore sat in judgment on the conduct of Essendon footballers?  They were Mr Michael Beloff, QC, and Mr Romano Subiotto, QC.

Mr Beloff was in the Chair of this Panel.  According to Wikipedia, he was born in 1942.  The son of Baron Beloff, he is by courtesy styled ‘the Honourable’.  He was educated at Eton and Oxford – well, where else?  He is a Fellow of All Souls, and was President of Trinity College, Oxford.  The debating society of Trinity College runs the Michael Beloff After-Dinner Speaking Competition.  He has also chaired the IAAF Ethics Commission (again according to Wikipedia) and was involved in investigating Papa Massata Diack, the son of the predecessor at the IAAF of Lord Coe.  These people all seem to move in ever-diminishing concentric circles.  Finally, Mr Beloff is said to be a friend of – you guessed it – Cherie and Tony, and he and his wife were guests at Chequers.

So much for Wikipedia.  How does Mick describe himself on the website of Blackstone Chambers?  Immodestly.  The phrase ‘Senior Statesman’ recurs.  Is it a term of art or just a boast?  Then there are the quoted endorsements.

·         Administrative & Public Law – Senior Statesman. ‘He is extremely articulate and engaging as an advocate.’ ‘He can grasp a completely new area of law incredibly quickly and then deliver a brilliant performance in court showing complete mastery of the subject matter and demolishing every argument the other side puts forward.’

·         Education – Senior Statesman.

·         European law – Senior Statesman. ‘Always a joy to work with. He wears his brilliant intellect lightly and is very easy to engage with.’

·         Professional Discipline – ‘He’s an excellent thinker and advocate.’ ‘He’s a big beast of the Bar.’

·         Sport – ‘Michael Beloff more or less invented sports law’.

 

There was a time when this sort of arrant bullshit was thought to be bad form for a professional man.  Things must be very different in England.  It is unthinkable that a decent Australian silk would suffer this sort nonsense under his or her shingle.

But when it comes to blowing your own trumpet, Mick palls beside Mr Subiotto.  Here is how his firm demurely sets out his credentials.

Romano F. Subiotto QC is a partner based in the Brussels and London offices.

Mr. Subiotto joined the firm in 1988 and became a partner in 1997. He received his Diploma de Estudios Hispánicos from the University of Málaga, Spain in 1980; his LL.B., First Class Honours, from the University of London, King’s College, in 1984 (Harold Potter Prize in Property Law, Laws Exhibition, Second Maxwell Law Prize); his Maîtrise en Droit, Mention Bien, from the University of Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne, in the same year; and his LL.M. from Harvard Law School in 1986, where he was a John F. Kennedy Memorial Scholar. 

 Mr. Subiotto qualified as a Solicitor of the Senior Courts of England and Wales in 1988, and was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2009. Mr. Subiotto is also a member of the Bar in Brussels. He is fluent in English, French, Italian, Spanish and German. 

 Mr. Subiotto advises companies on a wide range of issues under European and national antitrust law, and represents companies in arbitrations and before the European Commission, national antitrust authorities, the European Courts in Luxembourg and the High Court in London. Mr. Subiotto has spoken widely on EU law issues and published numerous articles. He is also distinguished as a leading Competition/Antitrust lawyer by Chambers and Partners Global – The World’s Leading Lawyers. Mr. Subiotto is a member of the Court of Arbitration for Sport as well as a member of the Advisory Council of Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy.

Mr. Subiotto also regularly advises companies on a wide range of industrial sectors, including diamonds (Alrosa), payment cards (American Express), pharmaceutical products (Amgen, Boehringer Ingelheim, Debiopharm, Lundbeck, Merck & Co. Inc., Millenium Pharmaceuticals, PhRma, Sanofi), diagnostics (association of diagnostics manufacturers, Agilent Technologies), electronic measurement instruments (Agilent Technologies), air transport (British Airways, Lauda Air, TAT European Airlines), luxury products (Richemont, LVMH), telecommunications (Telefonica O2), cosmetics (Estée Lauder, Sephora), sports (FIFA Marketing, the IOC, the Grand Slam Committee), alcoholic beverages (LVMH), hospital beds (Hillenbrand), computer hardware (Logitech), animal health (Merial Intervet), plant protection (Bayer CropScience), radiopharmaceuticals (MSD Nordion), glass fibers (Owens Corning), rail transport (Russian Railways) security services (Securitas, Stanley Black & Decker), karting (Vega), offshore drilling (SeaDrill), Foreign Exchange (HSBC), EU financial regulation (European Central Bank), aquaculture (Marine Harvest).

Here is the description of itself offered by the firm Cleary Gottlieb. Steen and Hamilton LLP.

A leading international law firm with 16 offices located in major financial centers around the world, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP has helped shape the globalization of the legal profession for more than 65 years. Our worldwide practice has a proven track record for innovation and providing work of the highest quality to meet the needs of our domestic and international clients. In recognition of the firm’s strong global practice, its effectiveness in dealing with the different business cultures of the countries in which it operates, and its success in multiple jurisdictions, Cleary Gottlieb received Chambers & Partners’ inaugural International Law Firm of the Year award.

Organized and operated as a single, integrated global partnership (rather than a U.S. firm with a network of overseas offices), Cleary Gottlieb employs approximately 1,200 lawyers from more than 50 countries and diverse backgrounds who are admitted to practice in numerous jurisdictions around the world. Since the opening of our first European office in 1949, our legal staff has included European lawyers, most of whom have received a portion of their academic legal training in the United States and many of whom have worked as trainees in one of the firm’s U.S. offices. The firm was among the first international law firms to hire and promote non-U.S. lawyers as equal partners around the world.

Our clients include multinational corporations, international financial institutions, sovereign governments and their agencies, as well as domestic corporations and financial institutions in the countries where our offices are located. Although each of our 16 offices has its own practice, our “one firm” approach to the practice of law offers clients in any office the ability to access the full resources of all of our offices and lawyers worldwide to the extent their matters so require.

Now, I have been a partner in a large international law firm, and one thing is clear.  Neither the firm nor Mr Subiotto acts for the workers.  They are always on the other side, and at the biggest end of town you could ever imagine.  Mr Subiotto acts for corporates like Louis Vuitton and Richemont (Cartier, Mont Blanc and Purdey), and Merck, and for very repellent outfits like FIFA and the IOC.  The closest he gets to a working man in his professional life is when he collides with the janitor.  It would be about even money that he holds more university tickets than the 34 Essendon players put together.

The Australian, Jim Spigelman, was born in Poland and educated at Maroubra Public School (which here means the opposite of what it is in the UK) and Sydney Boys High before going to the University of Sydney and later becoming the 16th Chief Justice of New South Wales.

It is clear that the Australian model both at the original hearing, and in the Australian component on appeal, was far better placed to hear and determine this kind of case.  The original panel had two very sensible and practical former County Court judges and a lawyer who had played AFL footy.  The CAS panel was dominated at least in numbers by two apparently technically proficient lawyers from England and Europe who have no idea of how working people live generally, or of how Australians view the world, and who would be in the worst possible position to assess the conduct of Essendon footballers.  I doubt whether either of them knows what it is like to be subject to the power of the Boss.  The two amigos might be able to run rings around us with their imported juristic subtleties and fancy titles, but they had no idea of what was going on the ground at Essendon in 2012.  You might as well ask me for my insight on the sex life of the Eskimo.

There also you have the reason why the terms of the decision were so legalistic and so utterly unpersuasive.  A majority of the Panel was incapable of anything else.

And there also is a reason for an inquiry.  The more legally correct the decision is said to be, the more urgent becomes the need to work out how this wrong came to be inflicted upon us – because no one – no one – can maintain that at the end justice was done or seen to be done by handing out exactly the same penalties to each of all of the accused irrespective of the history and level of responsibility of each of them.

Each of us is entitled to be treated with our own individual dignity merely because we are human, and we need to find out how and why this Panel departed from this fundamental principle.  If the answer is that WADA and the Code dictated what I see as a violation of our rights, the case for an inquiry is so much stronger – but more on that later.

The point of this note is that it is just a cruel bloody joke to suggest that these imported lawyers may have been able to have done as good a job in this case as those Australian lawyers that we appointed.  If foreigners want to say that Australians cannot be trusted to manage their own footballers, my response – at least in its printable form – is that this case shows so clearly why we cannot trust anyone from outside to get any power at all over our own people.

And why should Australia as a nation even contemplating doing any such thing?  We may as a matter of history import our of head of state; we are told that that is merely a matter of form; importing a judicial body with real power to inflict damage on Australian people is an altogether different thing; and in this case it has worked out badly for all involved.

A Great Dane, a Confession, the Cataclysm, and a Bad Day

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

The Dane

But for Einstein, Niels Bohr may have been seen as the greatest scientific mind ever – but he still comes out of it much better than Salieri in Amadeus. Bohr won his Nobel Prize the year after Einstein.  As well as being a genius, this great Dane was, as they say in death notices, a devoted husband and father.  He was also a great teacher.  He told his students to treat every assertion that he made as a question.  Einstein says: ‘He utters his opinions like one perpetually groping and never like one who believes he is in possession of definite truth.’

There are obvious limits on our ability to understand the universe at either end – atoms and galaxies.  The major work of Niels Bohr was to work out the structure of the atom.  He said to Heisenberg, who discovered the principle of uncertainty, that:

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

This is terribly important.  As explained by Jacob Bronowski, what Bohr was saying was that when it comes to atoms, our language is not describing facts but rather is creating images. What lies below the visible world must in some sense always be imaginary, ‘a play of images’.

There is no other way to talk about the invisible – in nature, in art, or in science. When we step through the gateway of the atom, we are in a world which our senses cannot experience.

Einstein said that he rarely thought in words. What we think that he meant was that in his work and at his level, he generally thought not in words but in mathematics. His job was to find the relevant laws of the universe. He was fond of saying that ‘God does not play dice.’ One day Bohr responded: ‘Stop telling God what to do.’

Even where we think that we understand the meaning of words describing events in the universe or in history, there is a separate question of the extent to which we come to grips with comprehending the scale of what is being spoken of.  Do we really have an understanding of how an atom is made up?  Do we really have an understanding of the size of a galaxy when as far as we know, it may have disappeared millions of years ago, but it is just that news of that disappearance is yet to reach us?  Are we able to come to grips with the brute fact that more than 20 million Russians died during World War II, or that more than six million people were murdered in what is called the Holocaust, or that some historians have given up trying to count how many millions died under Mao?  Can we come to grips with the economy of China, or the fact that China builds the equivalent of the city of Brisbane every day?

To go back to the world of physics, one mathematician said that ‘I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy.’  New ideas in physics give us a different view of reality. What we are told now is that the world cannot be fully separated from our perception of it. Newton took God’s eye view of the world. Einstein took the view of each of us – the world is what we see and is relative to each of us. We cannot know what the world is like of itself – we can only compare what it looks like to each of us by talking about it. Jacob Bronowski summed it up as follows:

But what physics has now done is to show that that is the only method to knowledge. There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.  All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. That is the human condition; and that is what quantum physics says. I mean that literally.

Some say that Gödel made illusory the notion of truth in mathematics.  These are humbling thoughts about the power of thought.  Bohr indeed was a philosopher, even if he said that they all talked nonsense.

A biography of Bohr I read after Christmas referred to a sometime priest called Steno as the only prominent scientist to be beatified who said (in Latin):

Beautiful are the things we see

More beautiful those we understand

Much the most beautiful those we do not comprehend.

Bohr wrestled a lot with his own relativity.  He understood, he thought, that whether an object behaves as a participle or a wave depends on how you look at it – what kind of experiment you use to assess it.  You may hardly be able to ‘see’ either.  He believed that you cannot always separate thought from emotion.  He used a difficult word ‘complementarity.’  He referred to old truths, such as ‘we are spectators as well as actors in the great drama of existence’ and ‘if we try to analyse our emotions, we hardly possess them any more.’  The relativity comes in when you try to try to draw the line between subject and object.

Bohr was like other great wrestlers like Michelangelo, Luther, Beethoven, or Ibsen.  And he was that most beautiful gift – a decent, modest hero.  And God bless him – he gave us a glimpse of mystery in science, at least as deep as the mystery of religion; and in so doing he stuck it right up those arrant God-deniers who want to abolish all magic – and who even claim to have the answer!

A Confession

If you promise not to tell anyone, I watched a bit of the new pyjama game final last night.  I wanted to see Jacques Kallis in what I think will be his last visit.  He is as tough as Steve Waugh.  I also wanted to see if KP is earning his money.  He is, and I have no doubt that he is enjoying his cricket and being part of a team for the first time in a very long time.  The young Australian Muslem was a revelation in correctness.  The bits I saw were therefore encouraging, but I turned it off before the end.  I am trying to acquire this technique with red.

The Cataclysm

We must brace ourselves for disaster in the U S.  On the Democrat side you have a moral disaster and a managerial trainwreck.  The other side is unspeakable.  Trump has done a deal with Palin.  I infer that there is a deal that Trump bought Palin’s endorsement with a ministry.  She chose environment.  She can stand on her Alaskan shoreline with an AK47 and see the visible disproof of global warming.  Good Republicans – and there are some – fear Cruz more than Trump.  Cruz has two things that Trump doesn’t – brains and an agenda.  In a nation that slaughters its children in the name of ideology, we are entitled to be terrified.  If this most decent nation thinks that it will be able to reel in one of these galahs – on either side – if elected, let them reflect on what happened to a people who thought that they could the same with a brutal clown that Trump so closely resembles.

Mussolini still needed their [the moderates’] help, for most of the liberal parliamentarians would look to them for a lead.  He also took careful note that chaos had been caused in Russia when representatives of the old order were defenestrated en masse during the revolution:  fascism could hardly have survived if the police, the magistrates, the army leaders and the civil service had not continued to work just as before, and the complicity of these older politicians was eagerly sought and helped to preserve the important illusion that nothing had changed.

The liberals failed to use the leverage afforded by his need for their approbation.  Most of them saw some good in fascism as a way of defending social order and thought Italians too intelligent and civilised to permit the establishment of a complete dictatorship.  Above all, there was the very persuasive argument that the only alternative was to return to the anarchy and parliamentary stalemate they remembered….Mussolini had convincingly proved that he was the most effective politician of them all: he alone could have asked parliament for full powers and been given what he asked; he alone provided a defence against, and an alternative to, socialism.  And of course the old parliamentarians still hoped to capture and absorb him into their own system in the long run; their optimism was encouraged by the fact that his fascist collaborators were so second-rate. 

Here is the myth of the strong man cleaning the stables.  Does that not seem to be word for word a correct rendition of how decent Germans probably reacted to Hitler?  Still today you will find Christian apologists for Franco, and not just in Spain, who say that his fascism was preferable to republican socialism.  Mussolini had the other advantage that for reasons we now regard as obvious, no one outside Italy could take Mussolini seriously.  As his biographer reminds us, Mussolini was, rather like Berlusconi, seen as an ‘absurd little man’, a ‘second-rate cinema actor and someone who could not continue in power for long’, a ‘Cesar de carnaval’, a ‘braggart and an actor’, and possibly ‘slightly off his head.’  There is Trump.  Churchill always took Hitler seriously; he could never do that with that Italian buffoon.

A Bad Day

If I say that of tomorrow, I will just sit back and wait for an Abbottism about what I might wear on my arm.  So I won’t.  From 2015, 26 January will be looked back on as the day when Tony Abbott came out.  It was on that day that the Prime Minister of Australia formally announced that he was crackers.

In the meantime, Australians like me are resigned to popping up daisies before this nation reaches the stage reached by the United States on 4 July 1776.