Bullshit

Passing Bull 141 – A sole billboard outside Trinity

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Am I the only old boy of another school to wonder about the sanity of Trinity Old Boys?  As I follow it, they think that a staff sacking was too harsh. Their remedy is to sack one or more of those responsible. It’s like the French Revolution – has anyone seen the ghost of Robespierre at the podium?  Is it possible to imagine a worse form of publicity for any school?   Do they not realise that any publicity for a school that is seen as – in that ghastly word – elite, is bad publicity?

Now, some well-heeled clown has put up a billboard.  ‘It’s time to go.  Our school community is far too progressive and inclusive for your 18th century values.’  Mate – ‘progressive’ and ‘inclusive’ are terms of abuse in some circles.  I had thought that such abuse was bullshit.  Now I wonder.  The Trinity Old Boys seem intent on murdering sense as well as the English language.

The herd mentality is rarely attractive, and it is never pleasant when it is as mean as this.  If they do get their man, his replacement will be looking at a cup as full of poison as any seen since the Crusades.

Bloopers

I propose to add some citations from the press that seem to me to be a symptom of our time.  I would be more than happy to receive suggestions.  I will start with one that will be harder to beat than Lewis Hamilton in today’s Grand Prix in Melbourne.

‘It makes sense for Australians to treat the President as he is.  Trump is clever and cunning.  He does not read much but he is highly intelligent.’

Gerard Henderson, The Weekend Australian 17-18 March 2018

Here is a party or pub game.  State the facts to justify the claim that Donald Trump is highly intelligent.  Here is one suggestion:

As when he instructed his lawyers to claim $20 million from a porn star for breaching an agreement to which he was not a party, and for which he gave no consideration, and for referring to something that did not happen.

Could Einstein have topped that?

Passing Bull 140 – Bull about reform

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

The word ‘reform’ is loaded, and not just in the political context.  The Oxford English Dictionary says ‘To amend or improve (an arrangement, state of things, institution, etc.) by removal of faults or abuses.’  The word ‘amend’ has to be read with ‘by removal of faults or abuses’, and the ‘removal of faults’ must be read to include ‘rectifying omissions.’

So, there are two things involved – change, and improvement.  There is rarely doubt about the fact of change, but there is often argument about whether the change is for the better.  One of the most significant legislative reforms came in England with the passing of the Reform Act, 1832.  We now know that this reform paved the way for democracy, which was unthinkable then, and we believe that if the opposition to it had prevailed, there may well have been a revolution.

There is I think a general agreement now that changes to the law introduced by the Hawke and Keating governments relating to taxation, currency, and superannuation effected real improvements, and were therefore real reforms.  But it is not easy to think of many other reforms in our recent history.

We have just seen another example.  The federal opposition just announced a proposal to change part of the law dealing with double taxation of dividends in the hands of shareholders.  The relevant law formed part of the reforms of Mr Keating.  The proposed changes just announced can obviously be rationally defended as being required to make the law work better.  That would mean that the change would amount to a reform – and Mr Keating was reported to have said that it was.  But you could just count the minutes before a political hack used the term ‘tax grab’, usually with the epithet ‘brutal’, and wheel out a worthy couple of retirees who have structured their life savings on the faith that government will not then change the rules to make them worse off – the phrase is ‘shift the goalposts.’  For these people the proposed change is for the worse, and not for the better.  It is anything but a reform.  And they have a point.  They have invested in good faith relying on representations from both parties that government will respect their investments and leave them alone.  Taking away an ‘entitlement’ is far more threatening than offering a chance of another.

We see this problem all the time.  One example is tuition fees for university students.  These fees were put up as reforms – but not for the student being saddled with $100,000 debt – for fees imposed by politicians most of whose graduate members had not had to pay a cracker.

The Reformation at least began about reform.  In his History of the Reformation in Germany, Leopold von Ranke said:

No man, to whatever confession he may belong, can deny, what was admitted even by the most zealous Catholics of that day; viz. that the Latin church stood in need of reform.  Its thorough worldliness, and the ever-increasing rigidity and unintelligible formalism of its dogma and observances, rendered this necessary in a religious view; while the interference of the papal court, which was not only oppressive in a pecuniary sense, by consuming all the surplus revenue, but destructive of the unity and independence of the nation, made it not less essential to the national interest.

But while reform was essential, a schism, or split, was not.  Ranke said:

Public order rests on two foundations – first, the stability of the governing body; secondly, the consent and accordance of public opinion with the established government…..But when the constituted powers doubt, vacillate and conflict with one another, whilst at the same moment, opinions essentially hostile to the existing order of things become predominant, then, indeed, is the peril imminent.

That proposition is pregnant for our time, and we will come back to it.  But what happens when the reform movement hits full swing?

…..it is not in human nature to rest content with a moderate success; it is vain to expect reason from a conquering multitude….for the most part they were goaded by long-cherished hatred and lust for revenge, which now found vent.

We see that all the time. Some see a bit of it now in the #MeToo movement.  The Germans’ political dam threatened to burst.

It was now taught that as all were children of one father, and all equally redeemed by the blood of Christ, there should be no longer inequality of wealth or station.

Well, that was at least three centuries ahead of its time (although we may be due for another explosion about inequality.)  That was the way of the Peasants’ War, and a dint in the democratic glow of Martin Luther.

There were also consequences that were not foreseen.

By rejecting celibacy, they [the clergy] secured a new influence over the mind of the nation.  The body of married clergy became a nursery for the learned professions and civil offices; the centre of a cultivated middle class…..In the year 1750, Justus Möser reckoned that from ten to fifteen millions of human beings in all countries and regions of the globe owed their existence to Luther, and to his example, and adds, ‘A statue ought to be erected to him as the preserver of the species.’

That’s a diverting proposition, but if Ranke is right about ‘the centre of a cultivated middle class’ in Reformation areas – such as Germany, Holland and England – that may go some way to explain the difference in political maturity between the nations of northern Europe and southern Europe.

But to return to what Ranke said about the breakdown of public order, it finds a curious echo in in the Bagehot column of last week’s Economist.

The biggest threat to British institutions, however, comes from a growing sense that democracy has let people down.  Stephen Holmes of New York university points out that liberal democracy is ‘a time-tested system for managing political disappointment’ – once you’ve lost patience with the existing elite you can vote them out.  But disappointment is surging, at a time when democracy’s ability to manage disappointment is declining…..The proportion of Britons who support a ‘strongman leader’ has increased from 25% in 1999 to 50%.  The under-25s are much more critical than people of the same age were two decades ago.  It is too early to head for the exits….But anyone who doesn’t know where the exits are is a fool.

If you believe that a decent ‘strongman leader’ is a contradiction in terms – and we are daily given countless repellent examples – then this trend is very scary.  We may in truth need major reform.

Passing Bull 139 – Madness in the commentariat elite about conservatism

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

I am sorry to harp on the love of labels and abstractions at The Weekend Australian, but last weekend it reached tsunami proportions.  I apologise in advance for the length of this note, but I do see more than bullshit at work here.

Paul Kelly sees the crisis of conservatism as ‘a moral crisis.’  While Mr Kelly does not say what he means by ‘conservatism’, it is not hard to see the crisis as ‘moral’ – at base, all political issues involve moral questions – unless you subscribe to the view that winning means everything.

But then you look at what Mr Kelly says that ‘conservatives’ demand from Turnbull – ‘quitting the Paris accords, pitting coal against renewables, ditching Gonski funding, revisiting the National Disability Insurance Scheme and achieving small government with a new round of spending cuts.’  Then you are even more at sea about what a ‘conservative’ may believe – except, as Mr Kelly says, ‘a package for guaranteed electoral suicide.’  It’s little wonder then that Mr Kelly concludes that ‘the political contest over morality is pivotal and the conservatives mainly lose it.’

But Mr Kelly’s infatuation with –isms finds another demon.

The issue for conservatism has been its paralysis before its gobsmacking individual expressionism and its violation of Christian views of human nature.

The last phrase looks over the top – are we not supposed to be a secular community? – but what on earth is wrong with individuals wishing to express themselves.  Isn’t that what ‘conservatism’ is about?  ‘Thank you, Government, but no – leave me alone to look after myself.’  And Mr Kelly refers to a writer who gives a horrifying indication of what happens when the individual surrenders to the herd.  The highest rating TV show of the 1950’s, I Love Lucy, had a 67.3 Nielsen rating.  Can you imagine a worse indictment on the intellectual life of a nation?  In 2014, the highest rated show Saturday Night Football maxed out at 14.8 rating.  Is not that the best news you have heard from the U S in ages?

Finally, Mr Kelly says that ‘the problem with Turnbull is that he remains a transactional rather than conviction politician.’  There are two labels in play here.  What is a conviction politician?  If it is politician who is in some way ideologically driven, then they have to confront an aversion that is not just Australian, but Anglo-Saxon.  We have produced Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating.  The UK produced Mrs Thatcher.  Any other takers?  One thing is sure.  Mr Trump is not a conviction politician.  He has no convictions at all.

What then is a transactional politician?  When applied to people like Trump or Shorten, it is one of disfavour.  Buy why?  Is not the ultimate platitude that politics involves the art of compromise?  The Turnbull government in my view has transacted good business on trade with our Pacific neighbours, and looks to be navigating the turbulence of Trump.  That, for me at least, is good politics, not bad politics.

But Grace Collier tells us the truth about what she and her colleagues think of a ‘transactional politician.’

It is true that Shorten is often described as ‘transactional’.  Further, this term is one you always hear when people are trying to account for his seeming lack of core values and belief systems, friendships with the super wealthy and other inexplicable contradictions…..The word transactional and really seems to me just a polite way of saying someone is an untrustworthy shyster who would sell his grandmother to the highest bidder.

Well, sadly, that’s not far off how many Australians see most politicians.  But, if you haven’t guessed the politics of Ms Collier yet, she is keen to disabuse you.

Most people think that the purpose of the union movement is to look after working people, in workplaces.  That is a naïve assumption and wrong.  The purpose of the union movement is to put union officials into parliament.

Well, there it is – and perhaps not surprising from a journalist who sees a friendship between the leader of the ALP and some of our very rich people as involving an ‘inexplicable contradiction.’  Why?  Has the man got uppity and got ideas above his station?  Is Ms Collier’s commitment to the tribe so commanding?  God help us, has she succumbed to ‘identity politics’?

Noel Pearson has a piece on how conservatism has been hijacked by reactionaries.  He makes the obvious point that people are never exclusively conservative, liberal or socialist – unless you melt those terms down to nothing.  So much of our discussion is flawed by the fallacy that you have to be one thing or the other.

Mr Pearson makes an observation that is so true for most of Team Oz:

…so-called conservatives, while railing against the victimhood of the leftish tribes, are themselves pushing their own victimhood.

He says that Keith Windschuttle, Gary Johns, Andrew Bolt and so many more ‘started in the left,’ but after a Damascene conversion wound up ‘more extreme in their views than their new associates.’  Mr Pearson subscribes to the view that Mr Bolt just ‘found a business model.’  Mr Bolt, then, is no conviction commentator.

Mr Pearson then gets into his stride.  ‘The Centre for Western Civilisation is the apotheosis of this reverse identity politics….Conservative English philosopher Roger Scruton in his 2012 book Green Philosophy argued that conservatives should properly be conservationists.’  How could they be otherwise?  How could anyone in our political tradition prefer theory to evidence, ideology to facts, or dreams to sense and reality?  And Mr Pearson gets something else right.

Howard deferred major crises of conservatism, such as same-sex marriage and religious freedom, climate change and energy security, rather than resolving them.

Chris Kenny riffs, as is his wont, by pushing his own victimhood, to use the term of Mr Pearson.

Bring back the Barnaby story.  Half of what passes for national debate is almost as inconsequential….It can’t only be me who simultaneously feels overgoverned and ungoverned…..If voters want environmental gestures, nanny state laws and never-ending government interventions, they can vote for the past masters – Labor – so why vote for the cheap imitations?  ….Perhaps Labor did them [Tassie Liberals] a huge favour by proposing a radical poker machine ban they could never accept, thereby forcing them into a strong position of differentiation…But in my view the warning signs are flashing for Liberals across the country.  In a haze of opinion polls, social media, and superficial spin-driven politicking, they have forgotten their mission.

Will Mr Kenny never see that he is one of the main creators of the ‘haze…..and superficial spin-driven politicking’?  What else has he ever done in life?  We can come back to banning poker-machines, but do we not see here Mr Kenny condemning politicians for being naïve in making a moral stand on a matter of conviction?

Speaking of the haze of opinion polls, Dennis Shanahan is obsessed by them.  He is also obsessed with the ‘regicide’ of his mate, Tony Abbott.  If his piece had any other point, I missed it.

Greg Sheridan wrestles with the moral dilemma of Trump and conservatism.  It is or ought to be common ground that Mr Trump is a liar, a fraud, a coward, a fool, a lout, and a man so deeply in love with himself that the word ‘shameless’ is hardly enough.

Trump is in many ways a very unsatisfactory president.  But the crisis in Western governance is morphing into a crisis of Western civilisation.

What could that mean?  Well, at least Mr Sheridan believes that imposing tariffs is a bad idea – as does Judith Sloan – but why does he feel the need to justify the man and put blame on the ‘exaggerated and hysterical reaction’ of the rest of us?

John Durie has an interesting piece on Mr Andrew Mackenzie, the CEO of BHP.  Mr Mackenzie (or Dr Mackenzie) studied geology at St Andrew’s University, took a PhD in organic chemistry at the University of Bristol, and was awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship at the Julich nuclear research centre in Germany.  He is a member of the Royal Society.  (The members of the Royal Society don’t elect idiots.)  Not bad for a corporate CEO.  Far, far better credentials than mine.

But Terry McCrann in his piece sees Mr Mackenzie as part of the ‘commentariat elites’ and an idiot.  Since Mr Mackenzie says ‘we don’t hide from the global challenge of climate change’, the rest of the commentariat elite at that paper would also think he’s an idiot.  As would all others who falsely call themselves ‘conservatives’ while refusing to act to conserve the earth that we live on.

Leaving the best to last, what does the good Christian Gerard Henderson say about the moral issue of middle class recreational facilities living off the earnings of gaming?

The comments from the likes of White, O’Connor and Brown [people who said the Liberals were ‘a bought government’] are imbued with elitism…..the absence of poker machines and the customers they attract would have put financial pressure on hotels and clubs throughout the state….Whatever the damage caused by the small number of problem gamblers, hotels and clubs give a vibrancy to local life for many citizens.

It’s true the Federal Group campaigned to retain its poker machines in hotels and clubs throughout Tasmania.  That’s what the management of a legal business is expected to do.  Yet Labor and the Greens are delusional if they hold the view that the Federal Group ‘bought’ the Liberal Party.

Well, there you are.  We have so far been looking at bullshit.  Now we have more bullshit, and with it, a searing hypocrisy.  Bugger morality – just look at the politics.  Had the moral question been answered against the government, some businesses would have felt ‘financial pressure.’  Since those businesses were prepared to give a lot of money to the government to avoid that pressure, the moral issue would just be ignored.  I was, apparently, wrong to say that all political questions resolve into moral issues – although I did say there was an exception for those who believe that winning is everything.

That’s apparently the view of Mr Henderson.  I find it impossible to believe that that view could even have been contemplated by the holy man who preached the Sermon on the Mount and who issued his own death warrant by taking to money dealers with the lash.

If people at the Australian really want to know why newspapers and politicians are so on the nose, just look at those comments of Mr Henderson.  They also indicate why his church is sinking before our eyes.  The whole mess is terribly sad.  I had thought that Mr Henderson was harmless.  I now think that I was wrong in that.

In fairness to the faith I have lost, I may say that a good friend of mine who subscribes to that faith – if it matters, as a member of the cloth – was appalled by the comments of Mr Henderson.  As I recall it, when the golf club in his town said they would shut down without pokies, my friend asked why shouldn’t they?  I think that’s a real question – but not for Mr Henderson.  If people cannot maintain a recreational facility without relying on income from a business that inevitably causes harm to other people, why should the rest of us allow it?  Are we not complicit in their living off the earnings of wrongdoing?

What is clear is that there is a lot of bullshit involved if people want to talk about morals, convictions and transactions when looking at poker machines in Tasmania.  The Liberals knew a transaction when they saw it – you piss in my pocket and I will allow you to pick the pockets of others – to hell with conviction or morals.  As squalor goes, this is hard to beat; and when God gets invoked, it becomes unbeatably squalid.

Passing Bull 138 – The sex ban

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

The reaction to the Prime Minister’s sex ban was curious.  Many of the people who attacked the PM on this issue are the same people who complain that he never does anything.  They wheel out that weasel word ‘leadership’.  To my surprise and relief, Mr Greg Sheridan supported the ban in The Australian.  In response, I wrote a letter to the editor, which was published, as follows.

In something of a change for me, I am happy to support Mr Sheridan in what he says about the sex ban.  It is about abuse of power, not sex.  As I read the piece, I recalled a discussion I had with a neighbour that we knew as Old Jack.  Old Jack had flown 47 missions in Mosquitoes.  We discussed my namesake, Guy Gibson – Wing Commander Guy Gibson, VC, the leader of the Dambusters.  War heroes don’t get more sacred than Gibson.  But Old Jack said that many in Bomber Command doubted Gibson.  Why?  He went out with women of lesser rank.  What’s wrong with that?  Mr Sheridan states the obvious.  You can see it in large law firms; in the hierarchy of the churches; and worst of all in any uniformed service.  And that’s before you get to the Caesar’s wife point about Ministers of the Crown.

It was business as usual the next day.  I often find it hard to follow what Janet Albrechtsen and John Roskam are saying.  Neither liked the ban, but I have trouble seeing why.  Ms Albrechtsen said the ban was ‘patronising’ and ‘illiberal’.

It’s not surprising that the socially fashionable Turnbull would tack so close to the #Me Too movement, but his clunky, gender-driven over-reaction, like much within the #Me Too movement, is paternalism writ large.

Yet, before she resorted to the scattergun of labels, Ms Albrechtsen indicated that she understood at least part of the issue.

It’s not sex between consenting adults, even between a minister and staffer, that matters.  It’s a boss’s preferment of a staffer, arranging new highly paid jobs that matters.  Had Turnbull stepped up earlier, telling voters that such preferment and conflicts will not be tolerated, he would have done a fine and measured job.

Most laws, and all prohibitions, restrict freedom, and are therefore ‘illiberal.’  One such law is the law of murder.  Your freedom to fire a gun is restricted if the head of your estranged spouse is at the other end of the gun.  All gun laws are illiberal.  To object to them on that ground would plant you firmly in the moral and intellectual wilderness of Second Amendment America.   To object to any law on the footing that it restricts freedom is to invoke something close to a tautology.  It’s a little like saying that the police shouldn’t charge a person because that person will be defamed by the process.

Well, is the law patronising?  Does it assume that people may need protection when they might be better off if left to stand on their own two feet?

Now, this gets closer to the issue, but people should understand how much of our law is dedicated to protecting the weak against the strong – or, to put it differently, how much of our law is about restraining abuse of power or acting in bad faith.

Those who think that the law has nothing to do with morals are dead wrong.  If we put to one side infants, lunatics, and consumers, there are many areas of the law that are concerned with relief from oppression or bad faith.  A large part of our constitutional and administrative law is there to prevent government becoming overbearing on us.  The transactions of people in business are at risk if their conduct has been ‘misleading’, ‘deceptive’, or ‘unconscionable’.  A dispute among shareholders may be resolved by reference to what is ‘just and equitable.’  Majority shareholders may be restrained from conduct that is ‘oppressive.’  Directors and other employees have to act ‘honestly’ and ‘for a proper purpose.’  Large companies may be restrained from conduct that is ‘predatory.’  The laws of most Western countries provide that a corporation that has a substantial degree of power in a market must not take advantage of that power for the purpose of substantially damaging competition.  A dependant with a ‘moral claim’ on a testator may ask the court to make an ‘adequate’ and ‘proper’ provision for them.  Reports in the Fairfax press suggest that the laws of franchising need to change to give more protection to the franchisee – too many franchisors have the insouciant brutality of Caligula.

Those are statutory extensions of case law on the duties owed by people in positions of trust and confidence.  This is part of the law known as equity.  It goes back many centuries.  Here is how the basic premise was expressed in an old text.

If confidence is reposed, it must be faithfully acted upon, and preserved from any intermixture of imposition.  If influence is acquired, it must be kept free from the taint of selfish interest, and cunning, and overreaching bargains…..The general principle, which governs in all cases of this sort, is that if a confidence is reposed, and that confidence is abused, courts of equity will grant relief.

One way the law goes about enforcing these obligations is to ban the person in a position of trust from entering into relations that will put them in conflict in carrying out their trust.  This is what is called a ‘fiduciary’ duty.  It is very hard for a company director to retain a profit that he has earned as a result of carrying out his director’s duties.  Partners and staff of a business owe these fiduciary duties to their firm.  A sexual liaison between a partner and a member of staff may involve each in a conflict of duty and interest.  That being so, it is not silly to suggest that such a liaison may be unlawful under the general law as it stands.

A related part of the law deals with people who can influence others unconscionably as the result of an imbalance of power.  This is the law about ‘undue influence.’  Sir Owen Dixon said:

But the parties may antecedently stand in a relation that gives to one an authority or influence over the other from the abuse of which it is proper that he should be protected.

On policy grounds, that statement may apply to a Minister of the Crown propositioning a member of his staff.  It just depends on your point of view.

It is very hard for a lawyer to uphold a substantial gift from a client or for a priest to uphold a gift from a dying penitent.  The rationale of the law may be stated as follows:

By constructive frauds are meant such acts or contracts as , although not originating in any actual evil design, or contrivance to perpetrate a positive fraud….are yet by their tendency to deceive or mislead other persons, or to violate private or public confidence, or to impair or injure the public interests, deemed equally reprehensible with positive fraud, and, therefore, are prohibited by law….the doctrines ….will be perceived to be founded in an anxious desire of the law to apply the principle of preventive justice, so as to shut out the inducements to perpetrate a wrong, rather than to rely on mere remedial justice, after a wrong has been committed.

Almost every word of that could be applied to the case of Mr Joyce and the reaction of the government.  Mr Joyce did not set out to do something wrong, but the tendency of his actions has been to violate public or private confidences and injure the public interest.  That in turn led the government to take preventive action to reduce the risk of this tendency to lead to this kind of harm in the future.

Our law has always been zealous to protect beneficiaries from their trustees.  It has been zealous not only in examining benefits obtained by those people we call fiduciaries – it has said that some kinds of transaction are so inherently dangerous, that it will not inquire into the merits of particular transactions – it will just ban them.

That is the course that the government has adopted in dealing with fiduciary obligations of public officers called ministers – at least when it comes to having sex with those who are under them and whom they are obliged to protect.  Barnaby Joyce entered into a relationship that could and did conflict with his public duties.  This was a clear breach of fiduciary duty – as Ms Albrechtsen may acknowledge.  The temptation was there for Mr Joyce to misuse his office, and persuade others to do the same, in order to favour his mistress.  It’s hardly surprising then that the government has followed one path of the law by deciding to ban certain transactions outright for those who owe fiduciary duties.

So our jurisprudence may have approached the Joyce Case through a few avenues, but it is a little hard to see what Paul Kelly makes of it.

Turnbull’s ban on ministers having sexual relations with their staff formalises what should be the case anyway…..It is one thing for Turnbull to justifiably take a stand and say ministers cannot have sex with their own staff.

That seems clear enough, but beware – Turnbull is a ‘declared progressive’ and so we then get this.

This is a progressive, not a conservative, movement.  It means libertarianism is being sacrificed to identity justice, a process catching many people out.  It assumes people cannot be allowed to pursue relationships freely because of the risk of exploitation on the basis of power or gender.  The progressive quest is for new rules and regulations to govern human relations.

This is not just about halting sexual abuse or harassment, an essential goal.  The progressive vanguard has moved far beyond this- it is now focused on power and argues that consensual sexual relations based on a power imbalance are suspect on grounds of exploitation.  Just think about that crazy idea.

You get a box of Jaffas and a smiley koala stamp if you can reconcile those statements.  This is labelling gone mad.  As I have tried to show, it has been the business of the law to rule on ‘relations based on a power imbalance’ as being ‘suspect on grounds of exploitation’ since the time when the Puritans ran England.  Having learned what we have in the last few years about relations in the churches suspect on these grounds, it is sad to see uncertainty and confusion in how we should now react.

And that’s before we get to the point that Ministers of the Crown hold positions of public trust and that there were issues of the use of public money involved in the Joyce Case.  Rarely does a day go by when the Murdoch press does not excoriate the ABC over its use of public money, but when it comes to obvious failings of a politician deemed to be a ‘conservative’ vote winner, they change their tune.

But perhaps it is not surprising that the Murdoch people get skittish about issues of integrity and their conservative political clients.  They oppose an integrity commission for the federal politicians – a move that is as sought after in the community at large as the sex ban that was imposed in light of the Joyce Case.

Passing bull 138 – Family values

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

What on earth are they?  One test of the worth of a proposition is whether anyone could be bothered to assert the contrary.  If I said ‘I believe in family values’, you might respond by asking the question I began with.  Or you might say ‘Who bloody well wouldn’t?’  Either way, the conversation is hardly illuminating.  In ordinary parlance, we are dealing in motherhood statements.

Yet, in the controversy about Barnaby Joyce, the former Deputy Prime Minister, many in the press said that part of his problem in answering allegations of hypocrisy was that the man with a wife and four children was having an affair with a woman while at the same time leading a party that subscribes to ‘family values’. 

Don’t the Liberal, Labor, and Greens parties have the same values?  Of course they do, and it is idle to suggest that you might find a difference in their platforms founded on a difference in their attitude to the family.  Insofar as anyone suggested that marriage equality might be a threat to ‘family values’, they would be begging a booklist of tendentious questions.

You might be reminded of that other shocker, ‘Australian values.’  Every time I hear that term, I immediately think of Senator McCarthy and the House of Un-American Affairs Committee – and we don’t want to go down there. 

The term certainly invites twisted history.  It’s downright sad to see Australians trying to find ‘mateship’ in the wasted slaughterhouse called Gallipoli.  The Turks, English and French all lost more men at Gallipoli than Australia did.  Didn’t they have mates?  The whole notion is at once precious and insulting. 

If I were asked to take a stab at an ‘Australian value’, I might suggest that we might be less class conscious than say the English, Americans, or French.  But I couldn’t verify that suggestion, and our claim to be egalitarian has taken a hit over the last generation, with bank managers taking home 100 times the money they pay their tellers.  And people like Henry Lawson and Paul Keating see too many people around here who are keen to tug the forelock, and who don’t think that we can be trusted to appoint our own head of state.

So, Australian values are as much use – in language – as family values.

And while we speak of the National Party, let’s reflect on another vapid buzz phrase – ‘identity politics.’  According to Wikipedia:

Identity politics, also called identitarian politics, refers to political positions based on the interests and perspectives of social groups with which people identify. Identity politics includes the ways in which people’s politics are shaped by aspects of their identity through loosely correlated social organizations.

Can you imagine a more dedicated set of exponents of identity politics than the National Party?  The teams at the Murdoch Press and the IPA may be faced with what they like to call an existential crisis when they reflect that all Coalition governments – and they can support no other – are premised on identity politics.  Dear, dear, dear, dear.

And while on buzz words, watch ‘virtue signalling’ take off.  The usual suspects go after labels with the same glee that little boys go after marbles or yo-yos.

Passing Bull 137 – The either/or fallacy – again

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

Someone sent me an example from the U S.  An examiner, who claimed to have a Ph D, failed an exam candidate on one question for saying that Australia was a country.  The examiner thought it was a continent.  Why couldn’t it be both?

The fallacy might sometimes be called ‘the single cause fallacy’.  The U S President put such a fallacy on horrific show after the Florida murders of school children – in which murders he was complicit.  He said that the issue was mental health, not gun control.  Then, in a display of callous inanity which was revolting even by his standards, he suggested that these murders may not have happened if the FBI had not been preoccupied with the Russian investigation.  Is it not obvious that all three of those issues may have been involved in these murders?

On a lighter note, Phillip Coorey, whose work I like, began a piece in the AFR about a fallen politician as follows:

Party officials believe increasingly that Barnaby Joyce’s tenure as Nationals leader has become untenable but say the ultimate decision whether to keep him rests with Nationals MPs.

There is no error of logic or syntax there, but the choice of words is unfortunate.  ‘Tenure’ and ‘untenable’ involve the same concept and stem – holding.  So, the proposition is that the holding is unholdable.  In defence of Mr Coorey, it might be said that the subject does cry out for Basil Fawlty.

Passing Bull 136 – The either/or fallacy

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

The Bill of Rights in the U S enables its Supreme Court effectively to make laws on sensitive political issues.  One example is the First Amendment.  It prohibits the making of laws that abridge freedom of speech.  In previous and purer times, the Justices had a lot of trouble squaring this protection with prohibitions on obscenity.  Surely people should not be heard to say ‘fuck’ and get away with it.  The Court developed a doctrine – in truth they made a law – that said that obscenity was ‘conduct’, not ‘speech.’

The issue came to a head in 1971 in a case about the Vietnam War and the draft in Cohen v California.  Mr Cohen got thirty days in jail for wearing a jacket that said ‘Fuck the draft.’  Under existing doctrine, the slogan was unprotected ‘conduct’ rather than protected ‘speech’.  The majority disagreed and set aside the conviction – and the jail sentence.  The minority was unrepentant, but they muddied the water in retreat.  They said that Mr Cohen’s ‘absurd and immature antic … was mainly conduct and little speech.’  Well, their Honours were not going to let the uppity Mr Cohen go unsmacked, but had that last proposition been put in argument, might not the response have been: in what way is being a little speech different to being a little pregnant?

But was not the whole argument premised on a fallacy?  Is it not a premise of the argument that there is an essential distinction between ‘conduct’ and ‘speech’ – perhaps what Fowler refers to as the ‘essential duality’?  The argument must be that if what we do is classified as ‘conduct’, it cannot be classified as ‘speech’.  But that is not the case.  The word conduct here means ‘things we do’, and one of the things we do is to speak.  (The Oxford English Dictionary is opaque: ‘Manner of conducting oneself; behaviour.’  For the verb, we get ‘to comport or behave oneself (in a specified way)’).  If I say ‘To hell with all politicians’ or ‘Fuck the draft,’ I am engaging in that form of conduct that we call speaking, or speech.  The former includes the latter; there is no necessary distinction between the two terms; and the whole basis of the argument falls to the ground.  The fallacy might be called the ‘either/or’ fallacy, or perhaps, ‘the false dichotomy fallacy’.

Another example of this fallacy can be seen in an AFR piece by John Roskam of the IPA about the movie Darkest Hour.  Mr Roskam says that the movie makes the point that people make history, and that our universities are wrong to preach – as he believes they do – otherwise.

In tertiary institutions individuals have been replaced by ideologies. The most common themes in those 746 subjects [undergraduate history subjects taught at Australian universities] are, in order, indigenous issues, race, gender, the environment and identity…..

The ideology of identity politics and the categorisation of people into pigeon holes according to personal characteristics that they had little or no role in choosing is that there’s no room for choices.

Now, for better or worse, it’s more than fifty years since I studied or taught history at an Australian university, but over the last fifteen years I have spent a lot of time in summer schools at Cambridge and Oxford studying history.  The tutors there are not interested in windy ideological suspirations.   But if an issue like this comes up, as it did in a course on Cromwell at Cambridge conducted by Dr David Smith, then the obvious answer is that people make history – and not vice versa.  I don’t know if there is a different current in our universities but then again, there is a lot that I don’t know about bogeymen of the IPA.

But the fallacy again is that there is no necessary distinction or exclusivity between what might be called the individualistic and the determinist views of history.  It is sufficient to recall the insight of Carlyle – history, our story, is a collection of biographies.  It’s about what people have done – their conduct, including what they said.  When Mr Roskam rehearses his demons – ‘indigenous issues, race, gender, the environment and identity’ – he is referring to labels applied by commentators like Mr Roskam to aspects or effects of what individual people have done.  Most history, even what is called microhistory, inevitably entails some generalization and labelling – and on a bad day, some graphs or tables – but that does not require us to believe that we are not talking about what people do.  There is no such thing as race, gender or identity alone and palely loitering.  Tolstoy obsessed about this in War and Peace, and Carlyle got onto trouble over allegations of hero worship, but for most of us, the issue just doesn’t arise

Of course, the conduct of Churchill had more effect on the outcome of World War II than the man who swept the floor of the Cabinet War Rooms.  Of course, Napoleon had more say about the impact of the French Revolution than the sans-culotte who got his first taste of blood on 14 July 1789.  But no one could write a history of those events by talking alone about named individuals.  Lenin was instrumental in the arrival of Communism in Russia; Gorbachev was instrumental in its departure.  But it is impossible to describe either story without feeling and speaking of the elemental forces that moved across all the Russias during those times.

Great lakes of watery ink have been let go on these themes.  If you ignore large issues like causation, you are exposed to the taunt of Voltaire: ‘If you have nothing to tell us except that one barbarian succeeded another on the banks of the Oxus and Jaxartes, what is that to us?’  But if you get carried away on the airstream of causation, you forget ‘man’s mysterious powers of breaking the laws of his own being.’  (Someone referred to the tragedy of all social sciences as that of ‘a syllogism broken by a fact.’  Against that, someone else said that ‘unpredictability is the privilege of the insane.’)  Karl Marx said: ‘History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, fights no battles.  It is rather man, real living man, who does everything – who possesses and fights.’  History is all about individuals, but their doings are commonly described in very large groups.

In What is History?, E H Carr put one aspect of our discussion this way:

The logical dilemma about free will and determinism does not arise in real life.  It is not that some human actions are free and others determined.  The fact is that all human actions are both free and determined, according to the point of view from which one considers them…..Cause and moral responsibility are different categories.  An Institute and Chair of Criminology have recently been established in this university.  It would not, I feel sure, occur to any of those investigating the causes of crime to suppose that this committed them to a denial of the moral responsibility of the criminal.

That looks plain common sense to me – except that if it is thought that there is some logical distinction between ‘real life’ and ‘history’, then I would reject it as groundless.

If you are asked to tell the story of what we have done, how much weight you give to the individual – hero or villain – and how much you give to the rest – Mr Roskam would not be keen on the ‘masses’ – are matters of degree and possibly taste.  But to suggest that there is a necessary logical distinction is, I’m afraid, just bullshit.

The either/or fallacy occurs when someone says you have to choose between A or B, and that they are inconsistent – when that is not the case.  It is related to the fallacy of the false dilemma.  A dilemma is false if it says that there are only two choices when in truth there are more.  What you generally get is that if you do not do A, you will have to go with B, which will be truly awful.  The truth is that there are other possibilities, but you face an attempt to induce you to believe that you have no real choice.

Passing Bull 135 – Greed, madness, and fraud

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

In The Age on Saturday, it was alleged that the ‘prominent real estate figure’ John Mc Grath owes $16.2 million in gambling debts to the betting company William Hill Australia.  Mr Mc Grath has since denied that allegation, but according to The Age, he did not bother to respond to their written questions on the subject.  The paper said that the British parent is trying to sell William Hill.  That company is run by Tom Waterhouse, a figure of some colour and controversy in his own right.  Not surprisingly, some prospective purchasers have some questions about such a large debt.  Equally unsurprisingly, some of the shareholders of McGrath Real Estate Ltd have some questions about the impact of such a debt on the capacity of Mr McGrath to run a company that has attracted its own colour and controversy – all of the worst kind.

When asked about the debt of Mr McGrath, Mr Waterhouse said:

I am not aware of any individual client in terms of betting or whether they are a client, or not a client, whether it is Joe Bloggs or John whatever.

When it was put to him that the identity of such a gambler would be of critical interest to the betting company, Mr Waterhouse said that he would not say who the gambler was – if the company did in fact have a debt of that amount.  The identity of their clients is confidential.

He might be right on the last point, but the rest is pure bullshit.  It may remind us of the advice given to politicians – never tell a barefaced lie if you can bullshit your way through.  It’s just another indication of how the very idea of truth is sinking in the Trump sunset.

Should Mr McGrath have disclosed his gambling position to the publicly listed company, and should that company have disclosed it to the Stock Exchange?  Let me say two things.  If I was a shareholder – and I thank heaven I am not – I would like to have been told that the moving force of the company had what that distinguished football commentator Crackers Keenan called ‘attitudinal issues.’  Then, about twenty-five years ago, I was acting for a very large gaming entity that was subject to very close scrutiny from gaming and corporate regulators.  One regulator said that the company should disclose big losses to professional gamblers.  Had it done that, it may have had to disclose that disclosure to the other regulator.  This could have led to an infinite regress.  So, we issued serial greetings from Her Majesty to clear the air.

It is rare in the Inquirer in The Saturday Australian to find an assertion of verifiable fact.  It’s all just boxes, labels, and tribal grouping. On Saturday, Mr Paul Kelly was ruminating on the kind of things that that stable chews on.

The left continues to win the battle on defining issues.  With Shorten having embraced the integrity commission concept this week, it will be near impossible for the government to resist this initiative.  It is popular, populist, sanctified by retired judges, beloved by the progressive media and justified by a grand and fraudulent argument that it will restore trust to politics, a result not evident in any jurisdiction in this country where such commissions have long operated.

So, we get the same old tribal labels – left, populist, and progressive media – and no evidence.  Since I hardly know what left means, I cannot see why an integrity commission should be a left initiative.  Since I hardly know what populist means, I cannot see how it is different to popular.  But if the proposal for an integrity commission is as popular as Mr Kelly suggests, to the point where resistance is ‘near impossible’, why should the government resist it?  Isn’t it the function of democracy that government reflects the mood and purpose of the majority of the people?  Some states have introduced such bodies and their working has shown why they were needed.  No sane party in those states would propose getting rid of them.  Are federal government people somehow different or cleaner?

People who use labels like left, progressive and populist do not often say what labels they would accept – right, regressive, elite or doctrinaire puritan? – and it remains a mystery to me why the people who were so dogmatic about climate change are now equally dogmatic about integrity commissions.  They are like cattle lowing in a herd.  They are almost indecently out of touch, but does that make them conservative – whatever that means?

But the reason I cited that passage can be found in one word – fraudulent.  That’s an allegation of dishonesty.  The only identified targets are retired judges and progressive media.  (You will have seen the graffiti smear of sanctified.) Well, I couldn’t give a bugger if the target was the queen or the pope, or Donald Trump.  I don’t know whether the allegation derives from malice or laziness, but it was grossly unprofessional, and it would not be allowed by a decent newspaper.  It is another symptom of the decline in standards that must accompany any partisan divide.  And that paper is almost as loaded with fire and fury as Fox News.

Ah, well, on the facing page, Mr Kenny has found the answer for the Liberal Party – ‘their most bankable political asset, still, is that they are not Labor.’

Quod erat demonstrandum.  And may God give the rest of us strength.

Passing Bull 134 – Useless words

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

It was a comfort to see government moving to try to do something about the scourge of gambling.  The gaming industry may not be the killers of the tobacco companies, but they live off the earnings that they derive from wrecking lives.  They are evil.  They also ruin the TV coverage of sporting events with blanket advertising designed by crooks to appeal to idiots.  That is now the modus operandi made famous by Donald Trump.  They also employ the technique of Saint Ignatius Loyola and McDonald’s – get’em young enough and you have them for life.  There is now a whole generation of people conditioned to associate any sport or contest with gambling – and they all carry around an SP bookie and a totalisator in their pockets.  It’s a deadly cocktail, an ugly dance between thieves and fools.

And what have we done so far?  We have insisted that they put out the message: ‘Gamble responsibly.’  That’s even less use than ‘Shag safely’ or ‘Drink in moderation’, or the source of a political ad, spat out at you with the speed of Bren gun.  It’s also an insult to our intelligence and a confession not just of failure but of helplessness and the never ending mediocrity of our politics.

It was also a comfort to see the AFL doing something about the reliance of so many of its clubs on income derived from gaming, and poker machines in particular.  You don’t see too many brain surgeons or nuclear physicists queuing up to give their money away to machines that are programmed to give back a fixed amount less than what they receive.  It is, frankly, hard to see how a club can call itself the ‘Family Club’ when it depends on income derived from bringing misery to families.  I am not blind to economics, but I can’t see why the AFL could not put in place a program to ensure that after, say, ten years, it will be ‘clean’.

The financial press, and at least one shareholder, did not take comfort from the CBA announcement of its new CEO, an in-house appointment of a man who was in charge of retail banking.  The Editor of the AFR wondered if the decision was ‘crazy brave or just plain crazy.’  Many, it seems, had hoped for new eyes to look over the wreckage that was a main propellant of the Royal Commission and that made Mr Narev one of the most unloved figures in Australian public life.  Instead, the new old boy put on a Keystone Cops performance for the press, and the Chair, Catherine Livingstone said, with her best Presbyterian headmistress mien:

With Matt [Comyn’s] appointment today, the board believes we are delivering renewal and change, but change that will build on the many strengths of the organisation that have been enhanced or introduced on Ian’s watch,…The board’s main priorities in selecting the new CEO were to identify the candidate who will … transform the business and adapt the organisational capability and culture.

For some reason, that reminds me of Theresa May talking about Brexit, or a geography teacher talking about weather patterns in a Patagonian autumn.  Do you not think that we shareholders – yes, dear reader, I am one of them – could at least have been spared a reminder of ‘Ian’s watch’?  That’s about as sensitive as asking Adam if he still thinks it was a good idea to follow his squeeze and partake of the apple.  But, as bullshit goes, this is as refined a grain as you find.  And it does suggest that only one thing matters for the directors who manage the business of our banks – profit.  Greed remains good.

By contrast, the CEO of another bank found his bank’s submission to the Royal Commission ‘confronting.’  You would think that they may have learned from the scandals that led to another Royal Commission.  What inflames ordinary people is just what gets up the noses of sentencing judges – the absence of remorse.  One of the factors that distinguish clergymen from bank executives is the rate of pay – about ten thousand per cent, say.

Nor was it a comfort to be reminded that Stephen Conroy now fronts for the gaming industry.  In addition to collecting the pension that you and I pay him, he now gets filthy lucre for spreading misery among his fellow Australians.  Is it not time that these double-dipping racecourse touts, bludgers, layabouts, and urgers were brought to heel?

Passing Bull 133 – The agony of CNN

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

The President of the United States might allow us to add the concept of ‘worst man’ to that of best man.  It’s hard – very hard – to think of anyone less suited to his office.  (Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller?  How could an Almighty be so peevish as to put three such unlovely people in the one room at the same time?)  This gives journalists a problem.  How do we maintain a balance in reporting on a man who seems bent on outstripping himself in nastiness every time he opens his mouth?

CNN is up there with The New York Times as a bête noire of this president.  Given his historically great unpopularity, this would suggest that these two arms of the media are just doing their job.  (It does make you wonder how a politician elected on what is said to be a ‘populist’ ticket can get to be so unpopular.)  But, each of these reporting bodies is respectable, and each therefore may feel acutely the problem of balance.

CNN has in my view come up with the worst possible solution in segments broadcast from Los Angeles anchored by two very sensible and professional journalists, Isha Sesay and John Vause (one of whom is a graduate from Trinity College, Cambridge).  In a nation overloaded with qualified neutral commentators, such as the splendid professor from Loyola Law School who appears on this segment, CNN has inflicted on these two journalists the job of trying to extract sense from sundry partisan spin doctors – one giving Republican spin and the other giving Democrat spin.  Some at least have the grace to blush occasionally, but you will see immediately one problem – in the events that have happened, what, if anything, do Republicans believe in?

The more significant problem is that what drives most people mad is the polarised spruiking and preaching of soi disant politicians and members of the press.  It’s called tribalism.  The ultimate bogey man is Fox News.  (The Murdoch outfit down here, Sky News, is not as bad, but they are working on their game and they may catch up with the U S model.)  The worst of the lot are what are called spin doctors.

But they are precisely what CNN is inflicting on these two fine journalists – and me.  It’s an insult to them, and it’s an insult to me.  If you wanted an analysis of a contest between the Green Bay Packers and the New England Patriots, you wouldn’t set up a panel consisting of one-eyed desperadoes from the cheer squads of each side.  That would really get up our noses.  What light could be shed by those galahs?

But that is what we get here – cheer squads.  And to show their credentials as spin doctors, we are greeted by men with drop-down smiles like those of Barack Obama, or those that were painted on to the faces of what used to be called air hostesses.  One is so inane that he has no recourse but to giggle at himself – nervously and guiltily.  And there is much reason for both the nerves and the guilt.  The poor man sounds demented at times, as when he raves on about Hillary and Nazis.

It is deeply troubling to watch people grin about something like Charlottesville, Roy Moore, or shitholes.  But that’s what we get – until we turn it off in disgust.  If the object has been to show that the Republicans stand for nothing, or that the average American voter is easily duped, the segment has prospects.  Otherwise it is even worse than morning television.  In an effort to convey an impression of balance, CNN has brought itself into disrepute.

Whether or not this kind of thing finds favour in America, it is doubly offensive down here.  If we want partisan humbug, we can turn on Fox News.  But to get access to either CNN or Fox News, we have to pay a hefty monthly premium to a Murdoch entity that has the rights here.  So, in return for paying Murdoch a fee to enable us to avoid polarised claptrap, CNN is inflicting just that on us poor but suspecting Australians.

The issue came to a head the other night – our time – when Isha Sesay was getting the usual brush-off from a sour-pussed Republican about African shitholes.  Ms Sesay was moved to announce that she is African and that words matter.  That led to another zany pre-recorded political speech.  We pay our premium to get accurate news and fair comment.  This process serves to annihilate both.

This may just be Rupert’s ultimate revenge, but it is so sad that a respectable broadcaster is his accomplice.  It is silly to pile inanity on inanity.