Bullshit

Passing Bull 114 – Bull about a Christian nation

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

From time to time, you hear chatter about whether Australia may be called a Christian nation.

There is a problem with the question.  Religion involves faith.  Can an impersonal thing have faith? The word ‘nation’ is a form of abstraction, or a label, for a ‘distinct race or people, characterised by common descent, language or history, usually organised as a separate political state and occupying a definite territory’.  It may make sense to speak of a small body of people having feelings, but a body of 25 million?  How does a nation profess its faith?  Would it make any sense to ask whether BHP or the Melbourne City Council was a Christian corporation?

As I see it, the answer to those questions is no.  The inquiry presumably then becomes whether the number of people somehow or other professing their faith in Christianity entails that the nation might fairly be described as Christian – even if those who are not of that faith may be a little put out by the suggestion.

I suppose that nations like Iraq and Indonesia are loosely characterised as Muslim nations because a very large majority of their peoples actively practise the religion of Islam and their governments seek to apply its teaching.  Indeed, one of the things that makes people here fear Islam is a perceived threat that Muslims will seek to introduce Sharia Law among peoples not considered to be Muslim.

Well, then, let’s put to one side the question of how many Australians actually practise the religion of Christianity, do Australian governments seek to apply the teaching of Christianity?

A key statement of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth is in the Sermon on the Mount.  Here are some parts of it as found in the fifth chapter of the gospel of St Matthew in the Bible.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek; for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy…..

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, but I say unto you that you resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn him the other also.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you…..

It would be absurd to suggest that any government in our history has ever sought to give effect to that teaching in government.  It would be seriously offensive, even to a lapsed member of the faith like me, to claim that the Commonwealth government, in any current manifestation, is adhering to the Sermon on the Mount in its dealings with refugees.

The reason is simple enough.  There is an unstated premise in government across the West – the Sermon on the Mount does not apply to governments.  Governing is hard enough as it is without worrying about high moral teaching about turning the other cheek.  I have never learned where this dispensation comes from, but you won’t find it in the bits in red.

It’s a fair bet that Donald Trump, who defames all Christians by claiming to adhere to their religion, would not know the difference between a beatitude and a Siamese kitten.  God only knows how he might react if Mr Bannon whispered in his ear that in the course of their Leninist destruction of Washington DC, the meek would inherit the earth.  There could be a Twitter meltdown.  And imagine what might be the reaction if you told a Queensland rozzer – say Peter Dutton – to turn the other cheek!

The Marquess of Salisbury (Robert Cecil) was the definitive Tory.  Andrew Roberts said he believed ‘in the politics of prestige and vengeance’ – a comprehensive repudiation of the Sermon on the Mount.

No one dreams of conducting national affairs with the principles which are prescribed to individuals.  The meek and poor spirited among nations are not to be blessed, and the common sense of Christendom has always prescribed for national policy principles diametrically opposed to those that are laid down in the Sermon on the Mount.

Elsewhere he said: ‘Christianity forced its way up from being the religion of slaves and outcasts, to become the religion of the powerful and the rich; but somehow it seems to have lost the power to force its way down again.’ We don’t speak so plainly about the first proposition now, but it is an inarticulate premise of our view of government

On those grounds, I suspect that people who claim Australia as a Christian nation are talking bullshit.  And, after all, why bother?  What’s the point?  Will anyone feel or act any better in the unlikely event that they see some merit in the proposition?  Who wants to make some Australians feel left out of it?

Who else might qualify?  All of both Americas, Western Europe, and the UK.  There would have to be exceptions.  The Germans know better than to label an entire nation.  The French have firmly locked religion out of politics since 1789.  And in my view the US are disqualified on three counts – their gun laws, their health care laws, and the election and adulation of an absurd graven image.  You would also have a problem with Ireland for the reason I am coming to.

May I now make a technical point?  The word ‘Christian’ has only come into vogue here in the last generation or so.  Prior to that, people identified their denomination, or their lack of it.  And for least some purposes, you still have to do so.   If you called yourself a Christian in Ireland, you would at best get a funny look.  It’s not good enough for our head of state to claim to be a Christian.  Because of the provisions of a foreign constitution, over which we have no control, our sovereign must be in communion with the Church of England.  Because of this relic of the Reformation, it’s not just Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or good God-fearing doubters like me who need not apply – Catholics are banned too, and all those the English called Dissenters.  How, as a matter of either form or substance, you square that barrier with our being a Christian nation is a matter that may have diverted the Medieval Schoolmen.

But to finish on a point of substance, haven’t we done enough to besmirch the teaching of the man Einstein called ‘the luminous Nazarene’ without applying his name to a crude political label?  The people who want to make this argument tend to have a reactionary caste of thought, and invoking the name of the Lord to make some political point, with an exclusionary tendency, looks to me go infringe the spirit if not the text of another biblical injunction.  Indeed, the whole discussion leaves a bad taste in the mouth – and partly for reasons that might fairly be called religious – even in an old apostate like me.

Poet of the month: Walt Whitman

O Captain!my Captain!

(In memory of Robyn Williams)

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:

But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red,

Where on the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

Rise up–for you the flag is flung–for you the bugle trills;

For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths–for you the shores a-crowding;

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head;

It is some dream that on the deck, You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;

The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;

From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;

Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells! But I, with mournful tread,

Walk the deck my Captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

Passing Bull 113 – Bleating from the banks

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

New taxes on banks, both federal and state, have caused outrage. My paper, the AFR, got itself into a right tizz, and went into a leaden, clichéd overdrive.

First Canberra held up the banks because the politicians couldn’t control their spending, and the banks were both profitable and unpopular. Now that the Feds have broken into the banks’ vaults, other levels of government are joining in the looting of private stakeholders’ money. What we are witnessing is nothing less than the debauchery of the political system.

In yesterday’s budget, South Australian Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis announced that his state was going to follow Scott Morrison’s lead and whack the big four banks plus Macquarie with a 0.015 per cent tax on the South Australian share of their liabilities. Whereas Morrison said the banks could afford to ‘‘pony up’’ because ‘‘no one likes you anyway’’ and it was just a ‘‘fair additional contribution’’, Mr Koutsantonis said ’’we know they are making super profits’’ and that ‘‘even if every other state follows, they’d still be under-taxed’’. Sound familiar? Oh, and it will raise $370 million for the mendicant state whose disastrous renewable energy policy means they can barely keep the lights on, just as Morrison’s version is expected to raise $6.2 billion federally.

As we editorialised after the May budget, this is the Willie Sutton school of budget management: robbing the banks because that’s where the money is. Strapped governments simply reach around for cash wherever it can be found. Morrison’s Liberal Party, ostensibly the party of fiscal discipline, thought this was a great idea. Why shouldn’t the states follow suit? Yet this is serious, and may be the thin end of the wedge if other cash-strapped states choose to follow South Australia’s lead.

Dear, dear, dear – looting!  ‘Of private stakeholders’ money’ – in a public company?  Should we be looking for reds under the bed?

Then they published what lawyers call a plea from Ian Narev of the CBA (in which I hold shares).

The providers of the capital that fuels our economy are international pension funds, just like the Australian super funds looking after our retirement savings. These funds place high importance on strong banks. But they also place high importance on strong, predictable government policy. Providers of capital hate surprises. Surprises undermine their confidence to invest. They wonder where surprises will end. And in a world where they have abundant choices for investment, surprises ultimately lead them to take their capital – the capital we need to build businesses and create jobs – elsewhere.

Unpredictability of government policy has a clear label: sovereign risk. Ask global investors about their view of Australia, and most will point to significantly elevated levels of sovereign risk.

It is in this context that we should view the South Australian government’s unprincipled and reckless tax grab as it walked through the gate the federal government left open. Despite the fact that almost every Australian has an economic stake in the banks, and that banks directly and indirectly create jobs and wage growth, the Federal and South Australian Governments revel in saying how easy it will be to gain support even for populist policies that have no basis in sound economics.

They may be right. But they miss the big point. Under their watch, sovereign risk in Australia is rising exponentially. That won’t show up in short term opinion polls. It will show up over the longer term in reduced investment and higher costs of capital. And the community may take a different view when, in time, the consequences of these ill-considered policies become obvious, and can’t be explained away by slogans.

What that means, I think, is that Mr Narev fears that he may now have to pay more for his money.  Poor fellow – quel domage!  The business of banking is simple.  You take money in through the left window at X% and let it out through the right window at X+Y% and you pocket the difference.  Mr Narev is here worrying about the left widow – X may grow a bit.  But what got the silly buggers into trouble was the right window – they found that in their greed they could not get their money back.  You should watch The Big Short at the cinema and listen to the audience sigh and groan at the galahs that nearly sent us down.

The banks may have a ground of objection in economics.  I wouldn’t know – but I do know that I am suspicious about economists.  Where were these gurus when we needed them in the lead up to the GFC?  Why could some whizz kids working in a U S garage see what was coming when no practising economist could?  I’m even more suspicious when an appeal is made to the knowledge of business insiders.  ‘Trust me, I’m a banker’ does not wash – to the certain knowledge of ‘I the banker.’

What about the politics then?  A home run against the banks.  How many people are in favour of cutting taxes paid by large profitable companies and reducing support for the young, the sick, the unemployed, and the aged? (Disclaimer – I may qualify under three of those headings.)

The federal government was crude – as is its wont – in saying that they could be cavalier with the banks because banks are unloved.  But we do have a kind of democracy, and that is a form of government that should reflect the thinking and feelings of the people at large.  It’s just tripe to dismiss that fact of life as ‘populism.’  If the people as a whole are angry with the banks – and they are – then it is natural that the government reflects this anger in their laws.  That’s just what we have here.

For my part, I see no substance in the Commonwealth’s criticism of the state of South Australia. The people of that state have a government of a different political colour to that of the Commonwealth.  For reasons I understand, people there are angry with both the Commonwealth and the banks, and that anger too will be reflected in their laws.

Of course there is a risk that these taxes will expand.  That’s a risk with any tax and with just about any law.  Income tax started as an emergency wartime measure to stop Napoleon.  The government just got hooked on it, just as our governments got hooked on gambling revenues.

The banks were on the nose before the GFC.  Someone like Mr Narev gets paid about one hundred times what Peggy Sue the bank teller gets.  One of his main functions – one of his ‘drivers’ – is to sack as many Peggy Sues as he can and to  leave me dangling on the line to the bowels of Bengal.

In their defence of their obscene pay levels, the banks refer to market forces.  But their embrace of these forces dissolves into the ether when those forces don’t suit them.  When market forces threatened the very existence of the banks, they came running to Daddy and Mummy for their dummy.  They want me to stand behind them, whether I like it or not.  They need us to guarantee them.  So much for market forces, and those reactionaries who fulminate against government funded bodies like the ABC.  At least the ABC acknowledges that it’s there to serve us – and don’t even think of asking which people trust more, Aunty or the banks.

With our help, the banks rode out the GFC.  That crisis had been brought on by criminal greed and profit-driven ineptitude.  We picked up the tab.  The bankers trousered their bonuses.  Almost no one went to jail.  But people kept losing their jobs.  Those left in work saw their wages stall, while their bosses were rolling in it.  The banks sat pretty on our backs.

And they didn’t bother to support the government or even decently liaise with it.  Instead they gave it the bird by appointing someone from the other team to lead their defence.

The banks behave with this lordly insouciance in an industry that doesn’t just need what politicians call a ‘social licence’ – they must have a legal licence to open their doors, just as I need a licence to drive a car.  Well, they have got used to being callous with their staff, and rude to me – but can’t they see the sense of getting on with their government, or, if you prefer, their sovereign?

And in cataloguing some of the reasons why people don’t like or trust banks, I have not mentioned that the top pay levels are often set by criteria that encourage bank officers to cut corners with the law and decency.  The word for that is ‘corrupt’.

What about sovereign risk?  This is a protean term.  I would think that people dealing with a bank may have to account for the chance that the government behind it may default on its debts or other obligations or that it might legislate against the banks.  The greatest risk, as it looks to me, is that the government might repudiate its guarantee of the banks or fail to honour it.  It’s not in Mr Narev’s interest to mention that risk in this context.

My little super fund holds a significant part of its shares in banks.  I did that on advice from a mate who is a broker.  He said that the conduct of the banks that made them jerks to their staff or me may make them more profitable and enable them to maintain their flow of dividends.  He also advised that I look for markets that are tightly controlled and looked after by governments. (I can’t recall if he used the word ‘cosseted’.)

These new taxes may lead to a reduction in my dividends.  I doubt that – I certainly don’t fear my being ‘looted’.  But it will all be worthwhile if this little démarche leads to an improvement in the banks’ manners.  I am sick of their arrogance, posturing, and bleating.  Frankly, I’m even sicker of looking at people making twenty times what I made at my top with little of the learning and none of the risk.

Poet of the month: Homer, Iliad, Book 1.

The Greeks in shouts their joint assent declare, 

The priest to reverence, and release the fair. 

Not so Atrides; he, with kingly pride, 

Repulsed the sacred sire, and thus replied:

‘Hence on thy life, and fly these hostile plains, 

Nor ask, presumptuous, what the king detains 

Hence, with thy laurel crown, and golden rod, 

Nor trust too far those ensigns of thy god. 

Mine is thy daughter, priest, and shall remain; 

And prayers, and tears, and bribes, shall plead in vain; 

Till time shall rifle every youthful grace, 

And age dismiss her from my cold embrace, 

In daily labours of the loom employ’d, 

Or doom’d to deck the bed she once enjoy’d 

Hence then; to Argos shall the maid retire, 

Far from her native soil and weeping sire.’

Passing Bull 112 – Bull about terrorism and patriotism

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 6 Comments

Sebastian Haffner was a law student in Berlin when the brownshirts evicted the Jews from the law library.  He said that the failure of educated Germans to deal with Adolf Hitler led to a kind of national nervous breakdown.  He summed it up as follows.

The only thing that is missing is what in animals is called ‘breeding.’  This is a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle and dignity, to be drawn on in the hour of trial….At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and completely collapsed, and suffered a nervous breakdown.  The Kammergericht [superior court] toed the line.  No Frederick the Great was needed.  Not even Hitler had to intervene.  All that was required was a few Amstgerichstrats [judges] with a deficient knowledge of the law.

When Saudi funded terrorists successfully attacked the twin towers in New York, the Americans suffered a loss of nerve, a failure of mettle.  They harped on the need for patriotism and they passed a law called the Patriot Act. Why should one kind of crime lead to calls for patriotism, but not others?

Some terrorists do want to undermine government, and in that sense they resemble those guilty of the crime of treason – people who are called traitors.  If you feared that a fifth column may be at work and ready to aid an invading power, you might then appeal to patriotism.  You might even invoke terror yourself in order to meet the threat and to defend the motherland.  This was precisely the course taken by the French government after 1789 when they declared, for good reason, that la patrie est en dangère.

   But there is nothing like that threat facing people in Britain, the U S or Australia from I S or other manifestations of terror linked to Islam.  Nor does the present threat level appear to exceed that faced by Britain from terror linked to Ireland in the last third of the last century.  In none of those cases could it be said that the nation’s very existence was in peril.  Why then do some people feel the need to invoke patriotism for this kind of crime and not for others?

There is nothing new about terrorism.  The bible and the Koran are splattered with it.  Homer had the man-killing Achilles claim that he was the most terrifying man alive.  Ancient Athens thought nothing of putting a whole town to the sword for not paying protection money.  Sparta was worse.  One Roman general injected discipline by killing every tenth soldier in his army. (Hence we have the word ‘decimate’.)   Rome responded to a slave revolt by crucifying 6000 of them on the Appian Way.   Before at least one crusade, the crusaders got their arm in for the slaughter of Muslims by slaughtering thousands of Jews on their way to the Holy Land.  The nations of the U S, France, Ireland and Israel were all conceived and born amid acts of terrorism.

If you look up ‘terrorist’ in the OED, you will find that it ‘applied to the Jacobins and their agents and partisans in the French Revolution.’  Robespierre is not greatly loved now, but there is still a Robespierre Society in France devoted to the archetypal terrorist.  Whether you regard people like George Washington or Nelson Mandela as terrorists depends mainly on what side wins. As one American rebel mordantly remarked, they would either stick together or they would hang separately.  For that matter, more than a few blackfellas would think that the white occupation of Australia was only effected by terrorism, and brutally effective terrorism at that.

The Patriot Act was said to be about ‘Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001’.  That kind of silly word game of itself suggests a loss of nerve.  Outside of the U S, patriotism has not had a good press since Dr Johnson described it as the last refuge of the scoundrel, a proposition exemplified in a case we will come to, and E M Forster declared that if he had to choose between betraying a friend and betraying his country, he hoped he would have the courage to choose the latter.

Outside the U S, the word patriotism has become a dirty word since it was perverted by the scourge of Senator McCarthy.  For similar reasons, phrases like ‘Un-American’ die on our lips.

At the beginning of what we call the Cold War, many Americans felt that communism posed a threat that might be unhelpfully characterised as ‘existential’ (a word that should be left to followers of Jean Paul Sartre).  Some thought that this threat permitted appeals to patriotism.  They relied on high minded informers like Ronald Reagan to produce scapegoats by dobbing in their mates.  (Has any culture ever smiled on informers?)

Senator McCarthy – a vulgar, loud mouthed and vicious drunk – used a government committee to conduct an inquisition.  The inquisition was, like its European religious ancestors, based on fear and smear.  The fear was twofold – there was the popular fear of communism, and there was the fear felt by the targets of the inquisition.  (On one his trips to the Inquisition, Galileo copped this bell-ringer straight off: ‘Why do you think that you are here?’)  The smear consisted of labelling all communists as the same, and by saying that people were guilty merely if they were suspected of being communists.  In this, they reverted to type, and the infamous French Law of Suspects, that enabled Robespierre to lift the death rate sharply.  (On one occasion, Robespierre said ‘Look about you and share my fear.’  He was only brought down when those who were left realised it was just of matter of time until it was their turn.  One survivor bustled about saying ‘I hear he has a list – and that your name is on it.’)

The ultimate crime of McCarthy, as it is in all such inquisitions, lay in seeking to induce or compel witnesses to repeat the crime of Judas – not by holding out thirty pieces of silver, but by abusing the power of government.

We can I think see precisely these techniques being applied to Muslims in Australia by nasty people like Pauline Hanson, Alan Jones, Cory Bernardi, Andrew Bolt and other parts of the press (but not the decent press).  It may therefore be as well to reflect on why McCarthyism is such a dirty word, a word that casts at least as great a stain on the U S as the Salem witch-hunts (a word that the current U S President is greatly attracted to).  Indeed, it might be helpful if some scholar were to analyse the two together – with particular reference to the influence of perverted religion on each.  (The same scholar might consider the ways that the crusades involved a perversion of religion.  He or she may also want to look at whether religion was involved or invoked on either side of the terrorist atrocities of the IRA.)

Ike – President Eisenhower – loathed McCarthy, who said that his mission was ‘making certain that every government employee is a loyal American.’  Ike said:

We have opposed the confusing of loyalty with conformity, and all misguided attempts to convert freedom into a privilege licensed by censors…We must, even in our zeal to defeat the enemies of freedom, never betray ourselves into seizing their weapons to make our own defence…[America] is too strong ever to acknowledge fear and too wise ever to fear knowledge….This is the kind of America – and the kind of Republican Party – in which I believe.

As warriors go, Ike’s credentials are hard to beat.  Later he said of a critic:

The writer labors under the false but prevalent notion that bullying and leadership are synonymous; that desk-pounding is more effective than is persistent adherence to a purpose and winning to that purpose sufficient support for its achievement….As for McCarthy, only a short-sighted or completely inexperienced individual would urge the use of the office of the Presidency to give an opponent the publicity he so avidly desires.

(In the name of heaven, what would Ike have said about the ‘short-sighted or completely inexperienced individual’ in the White House now?)

Harry Truman was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee.  He condemned the government for ‘yielding to hysteria rather than resisting it’ and rounded on ‘fake crusaders who dig up and distort records of the past to distract the attention of the people from political failures of the present.’  Harry Truman was a model president.

Then four Puerto Rican terrorist gun-men opened fire in Congress and shot and wounded five congressmen. Terrorism had hit home on the hill. Ike responded by saying that ‘we are defeating ourselves by [using] methods that do not conform to the American sense of justice and fair play.’

Ed Murrow then gave a nationally televised address.

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.  We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends on evidence and due process of law.  We will not walk in fear, one of another.  We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men – not from men who refused to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment unpopular.  This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent….We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

Ike gave an impromptu speech from rough notes – ‘Just let me get up and talk to the people’ – in which he referred to ‘the fear that we will use intemperate investigative methods, particularly through congressional committees, to combat communistic penetration.’  Then Ike attacked the press that he thought had a guilty conscience for having built McCarthy up.  (A preview of Trump.)  He said they ‘put a premium upon clichés and slogans’.  Boy, could he see them now!

We incline to persuade with an attractive label; or to damn with a contemptuous tag.  But catchwords are not information.  And most certainly , sound popular judgments cannot be based upon them….Freedom of expression is not merely a right, its constructive use is a stern duty….Along with patriotism – understanding, comprehension, determination are the qualities we now need.  Without them, we cannot win.  With them, we cannot fail.

McCarthy was finally brought undone in a confrontation with a Boston attorney called Joe Welch.  It was a stand-off that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck whenever I watch it.  Welch was counsel for the U S army – which was another target of McCarthy.  Welch told a young man named Fisher on his staff that he should not take part in the case because when younger he had belonged to a suspect group.  McCarthy dredged this past up as a smear.  Welch responded in terms that do eternal honour to the profession of the law and which earned him a long ovation.

Until this moment, Senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.  Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us……Little did I dream that you would be so reckless and cruel as to do an injury to that lad….. I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you.  If it were within my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I would do so, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me……Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator.  You have done enough.  Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?  Have you left no sense of decency?….Mr McCarthy, I will not discuss this with you further…I will not ask Mr Cohn any more questions.  You, Mr Chairman, may, if you will, call the next witness.

There is much for us to heed from the cancer of McCarthyism.  If we are being attacked by people who want us to change our laws and customs, then it makes no sense for us to respond by doing just that  – whether under the label of patriotism, or at all.  If we respond to terrorism by giving up rights that preserve our freedom, are we not just giving in to the terrorists and completing their work for them?

Recent events in Holland, France and Germany suggest that Europe is holding the line.  That cannot be said for Australia, the U S or the U K.  Here, the two major parties are so much on the nose that either in government will be elected by about one third of the voters and then face people elected by the other two thirds of the voters.  And we have learned from the U S the art of unprincipled opposition.  The nation looks to be about as ungovernable as France was until recently. We have a government that is without principle or leader facing an opposition that is at least as deficient in both – and the people know it.

In the U S and the U K, people who look unfit for any kind of office have attracted large numbers of votes from voters who are as impervious to reality as they are indifferent to truth.  These people are not just disaffected with politics – they are deeply aggrieved that the whole world is unfair to them – and sensible people should understand their grievance.

And the malaise in all three nations is now such that politicians in senior positions and the lesser press feel no compunction about attacking judges and doing so in ways that are as spiteful as they are groundless.  Most of these people making these attacks should know better – except for Donald Trump, who has no sense of decency at all, and Peter Dutton, who may well be the most frankly vicious minister of the Crown that this nation has ever produced.

The inference appears to me to be plain that at least some of these people attacking the judges are seeking to undermine public trust in that organ of government called the judiciary.  Having debauched their own currency, it is not hard for them to seek to spread that form of cancer around. That being so, it may not be all that simple to articulate the moral difference between these dissolute rock throwers and common garden terrorists.

We are looking at an illness, a cancer, across our public life.  But when we look at the events in the U S and the U K, and the hopeless and unworkable condition of our Commonwealth Parliament, then it is clear that not just historians but all of us will now gaze with different eyes on the irresistible rise and success of evil people like Mussolini and Hitler.  Only a glib idiot would say that it couldn’t happen here.

We are not just speaking of a failure of nerve.  We are contemplating the erosion of that ‘solid inner kernel’ so finely drawn by Sebastian Haffner.  It is this kernel that has prevented us from descending to the primeval slime experienced by so many nations that have been exposed to violent revolution because they failed to react decently to change.

It took the English and their descendants more than eight hundred years to develop the rule of law and the Westminster system. They are the institutions that underlie our rights and freedoms – our whole way of life.  We can lose it all in a fraction of that time – especially if we insist on parroting nonsense about patriotism, and especially if we do that, as I think that we do, in order to discriminate against those of a faith different to that which our elected leaders affect to pray to on each day that they sit together to lay down our laws.

Poet of the month: Homer’s Iliad

‘Ye kings and warriors! may your vows be crown’d, 

And Troy’s proud walls lie level with the ground. 

May Jove restore you when your toils are o’er 

Safe to the pleasures of your native shore. 

But, oh! relieve a wretched parent’s pain, 

And give Chryseis to these arms again; 

If mercy fail, yet let my presents move, 

And dread avenging Phoebus, son of Jove.’

Passing Bull 111 – Bull about the Prime Minister and the President

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Our Prime Minister took the Mickey out of Donald Trump at an event for politicians and the press – where people are expected to be funny.  (They have a similar event in the US that this President boycotted.  He hates the press because they take the Mickey out of him all of the time.)

Sadly, a very experienced member of the press, who was at least until now respected, stayed away from the event.  Laurie Oakes takes the distorted view that his absence frees him from any obligation of confidentiality that he may have been bound by had he attended the party.  That casuistry of itself casts a pall on his trustworthiness.  I say that this incident is sad because it suggests that the reputation of our journalists might be sinking at about the same rate as that of our politicians.

I haven’t seen the parody, but everyone I have spoken to says it is terrific.  They found it hilariously funny and dead set true.

The exceptions, as we may have expected, also sadly, came from The Australian.  Three viscerally pro-Abbott hacks – Dennis Shanahan, Greg Sheridan, and Chris Kenny – rebuked the P M sharply.  Kenny was as usual revoltingly unprofessional (and he shares Oakes’ logic about confidentiality).

My golden rule for Liberal and Nationals politicians is that if they are pleasing the press gallery – especially Fairfax and ABC journalists – they will invariably be doing the wrong thing by their party and constituency.

It is a well-worn path – especially for moderate liberals – to appeal to the sensibilities of the so-called progressive media: speak with alarmism on climate and feel the love; speak with compassion on border security and be swept up in their embrace; or mock conservatives and have them eating out of your hand.

Someone should really tell the poor fellow that his view on the things that derange his thinking are about three generations out of date and that mocking the majority of his profession is as unprofessional as you can get.

But let me  make three comments on the kow-towers whose views were echoed in today’s editorial.

First, no one is suggesting that to the extent that the parody criticised Trump it was not justified.   It plainly was, and Trump is so absurd that he has generated a revival of late night comedy routines that command huge support in the U S.

Secondly, if the critics think this form of fun may impair our interests, the premise of that fear must be that in addition to all of his other faults, Trump is an irrational, vane, vengeful pig who might retaliate on Twitter in a way that could hurt us.  I agree with that, but I don’t think we should cringe in fear from an irrational, vane, vengeful pig – even one who holds the nuclear codes.

Thirdly, these commentators lead the charge in that newspaper in all that nonsense about freedom of speech and political correctness.  This must be the example par excellence of freedom of speech giving way to political correctness.

There is no to their hypocrisy.

Poet of the month: Homer’s Iliad.

Declare, O Muse! in what ill-fated hour

Sprung the fierce strife, from what offended power

Latona’s son a dire contagion spread

And heap’d the camp with mountains of the dead;

The king of men his reverent priest defied

And for the king’s offence the people died.

For Chryses sought with costly gifts to gain

His captive daughter from the victor’s chain.

Suppliant the venerable father stands;

Apollo’s awful ensigns grace his hands

By these he begs; and lowly bending down,

Extends the sceptre and the laurel crown

He sued to all, but chief implored for grace

The brother-kings, of Atreus’ royal race.

An Australian novelist on being Australian

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

Tim Winton’s book the boy behind the curtain contains lyrical reflections on the Australian condition.  I think that the notion of ‘Australian values’ is at best empty, and at worst dangerous.  In the present climate, it is commonly invoked to advance a kind of McCarthyism against those of one faith.  The usual suspects of the IPA and the Murdoch press commonly refer to ‘western values’.  We have waited a long time to hear how those values are different from ‘eastern values,’ or why our Chinatown might feel out of sorts, if not out of place.  We tend to forget that the three main faiths in Australia come out of Asia.  That’s why I thought it was very droll of Disraeli to see the Church of England as ‘a sacred corporation for the promotion and maintenance in Europe of certain Asian principles’.

So, I thought I might take out some of the snapshots of us taken by Tim Winton, and see if they might help us to frame a better view of what might pass for Australian states of mind – to use a neutral phrase.

Guns

Perhaps, deep down, everyone wants to feel dangerous.  Being rich can do that for you.  So can being very smart.  For the rest who are neither, the gun is a short-cut.  And whatever our circumstances, we’re all steeped in its romance.  We’ve marinated in this cult all our lives; it’s inescapable.  Even in a country where there is no fetishized right to bear arms, gunplay is a staple of entertainment.  Researchers estimate that by the age of eighteen, the average American child is likely to have been exposed to as many as 26,000 gun murders on TV, and there is no reason to assume Australian children’s exposure differs much.  In TV, movies and video games, the underlying showbiz message is that the world is a dangerous place and the only tool that will make a difference in it is a firearm.  The gun ends the discussion, solves the dispute, and, of course, brings the episode to its ‘natural end.’

This is a potent trope against which our children are largely undefended.  All-pervasive as it was in my childhood, it is even more raw and brutish now.  I’m not suggesting entertainment is uniquely responsible for gun violence, but in a country like ours, where gun ownership is uncommon, most young people’s knowledge of firearms is drawn from the festival of screen time killings.  And as the Internet has made plain, humans are suckers for a script.  In recent years to organisations have prospered by broadcasting real executions and assassinations, showing young men and women all across the world that they’re ‘getting things done’, just as the gun-slinging idols of every generation have, from Randolph Scott to Idris Elba, from Dirty Harry to Harry Brown.  Jihadis don’t upload these outrages solely for their own masturbatory gratification; the fact is, these video clips work as propaganda, as recruiting tools, they hit home.  For those who claim to believe that God is Greatest, the AK – 47 ends the discussion.  In their minds, it would seem, even the most sacred words are utterable are insufficient to the needs of the faithful.

A youth who is confused, depressed, or fearful will be tempted to resort to whatever means he has to make himself felt, if not understood, even if his problems, like those of my puberty, are minor and ephemeral, and a truly angry kid is liable to do something extreme and impulsive.  In countries where firearms are commonplace in the home, this often extends to more than self – harm.  Mass shootings have become a fixture of American news.  The carnage in schools and public places is so unremarkable that ritual ‘outpourings of grief’ border on the perfunctory.  Gun murder is so normal in the US it’s banal.  And the gun itself is sacrosanct.  The right to bear it outstrips a citizen’s right to be protected from it, and even a tearful president is impotent in the face of this cult.  In 2016 Barack Obama declared that modern gun restrictions were ‘the price of living in a civilised society’ but it seemed few were listening.  By all accounts, God is Great in America, too, but in truth the nation has always lived as if the gun is greater.  In God they trust, but armed they must proceed.

Most Australians have never owned a firearm.  Few will ever handle or discharge one, and I think this is something to be glad of. In moments of turmoil, the mere presence of a gun alters the atmosphere.  In a domestic dispute, a roadside altercation or a bout of depression, the thing most likely to push the scene out of shape beyond saving is a firearm.  It so often gets the wrong job done. 

Later on, Winton spoke of the leadership that then Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, showed on the issue of gun laws.

I was never a fan of John Howard.  I despised his retrograde social policies and was dismayed by his nostalgia for the unchallenged whiteness and patriarchy of the 1950s, but at a pivotal moment in our history, he literally stuck his neck out and did something vital and brave. By following through on gun reform, he made this country a little safer.  Fronting angry rednecks from the dais that day, he looked pale and stiff, like a man unwell, but that sick look was the face of courage.  That was the spectacle of a man exceeding himself.

That writing is beautiful, but here’s my bias.  I agree with every word of all of it, and I wish I could have put it even half as well.  Two things are involved in this kind of piece – having a clear view, and saying it well.  Winton succeeds completely in both and he brings sense – no, sanity – to areas of public discussion that are mired in nonsense and pure bullshit.

Winton allows us to see some of the nonsense about mass murder and terrorism in context.  We allow our children to soak up fake murders and our Protector indulges in the mass murders of its children by adherence to a fake ideology and a corrupted lobby.  We mash our children’s’ brains with Netflix and then smash their manners with Twitter.  Then we expect them to look solemn when a mass murder takes place in real life.  But what is ‘real’ and what is ‘life’ for these children of cyberspace who take their reality from Facebook before electing another fake politician?

If your child has been one of the victims of a mass murder, does it make any difference to you if the killer was a psychotic misfit who should never have been allowed to go near any kind of gun, or a deranged young man who has concluded, with help from the internet, that his religion warrants his joining in mass murder ending in his own suicide?

Would I say that these views should represent the chimerical values of this land?  Bloody oath, I would.

But there’s the problem.  When the late Jim Kennan was Attorney General, he told me that he was having trouble with our gun lobby.  I said that I thought that was a U S problem.  He said that we had such a lobby here, and that they were the last people I would ever want to see behind a gun.  The opposition to John Howard – about semi-automatic weapons – was such that our Prime Minister wore a Kevlar vest to the dais that Winton referred to.  And now some very unreliable people are being voted into parliaments on gun tickets, and the views of Tim Winton would gravely offend the heartless imbecile who currently resides in the White House. And if our politicians have one unshakeable value, it is that we don’t get fresh with Uncle Sam.

I shall return to Tim Winton’s Oz later.

Passing Bull 110 – Australian values again

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

After the recent attack in Manchester, and well before that of yesterday, the AFR published an editorial.  It included this:

It is not an inversion of western liberal values to say that living in Australia means at bare minimum an acceptance of democracy, rule of law, freedom of speech and equality of race, gender and belief. If you won’t defend these basics that allow you – and every Australian around you – to live in freedom; if you think your own intolerance comes first, then you need to change. That’s a civic inclusiveness which is quite different from the mindless nationalism of the fringes.

Then it got down to what it referred to as ‘Australian values.’  I wonder if they are different to ‘western liberal values,’ and if so how.  The author doesn’t say.

A totally secure police state would destroy the freedoms we enjoy, and migrants seek. But nor can we allow institutions of government, education and free speech to be intimidated by cultural concerns into ignoring unacceptable threats and dangers. We have been too passive in projecting the values that Australians hold, and why they are a better way of life than intolerance and jihad. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is right to insist on an Australian values test for new citizens – so that migrants know what those values are, and why they matter. And in one clear statement of those values: there is no moral equivalence between Western military actions in the Middle East that strive to minimise casualties, and terrorist attacks on the West that maximise them.

What caught my eye was the reference to ‘Western military actions in the Middle East that strive to minimise casualties.’  Hopefully, any such military action was subject to the rules of war, in which case the reference to minimising casualties adds little.  I say ‘hopefully’ because nothing about the war in Syria suggests that any of the many parties involved in bombing in Syria has the slightest interest in keeping casualties down.

Let’s put that to one side.  We are invited to make a moral judgment that Western military actions in the Middle East are less immoral than or in some way morally superior to acts of terrorism that are driven by the conflict in the Middle East.

Two issues then arise.  What if you take the view – which many responsible people do – that no such military action has benefited the people who live in the affected nations?  Secondly, what if you take the view – which many responsible people do – that Western military action in Iraq was based on a false premise, was badly managed, and has left Iraq and Syria as failed states and breeding grounds for the most lethal kinds of terrorist?

About the worst crimes that politicians can commit is to lead their people into war on a false premise and for a bad result.  Most people think that that is what the governments of the U S, the U K, and Australia did in the second Iraq war.  It’s also clear to me – and many others – that the political leaders were not just wrong – they lied.  They said that they were invading to remove the threat of weapons of mass destruction when in truth they were invading to effect regime change, and it is precisely their botching of that function that has done so much to increase our exposure to terrorism.

Let’s assume then that some people believe that Bush, Blair and Howard lied about why they were going into Iraq, or at the very least they invaded Iraq on a false premise, and that as a result both the people of Iraq and we are worse off because we are all now exposed to more terrorism than we were before.  Then turn to a young Muslem who is deceived and deluded into accepting a perversion of his religion so that he becomes a suicidal terrorist and kills himself and others.

At bottom, all the above parties are involved in killing people to achieve political ends.  Many would think that any issue of moral equivalence or otherwise is one on which reasonable minds might differ and is also one that might best be left to God.  But it would be monstrous, would it not, to suggest that that there can only be one answer, and that such an answer might be found by applying ‘Australian values’ – the relevant premises of which are yet to be revealed to us?

So, in my view it’s best to stay away from ‘Australian values’.  As soon as you get away from motherhood – like ‘western liberal values’ – and you get specific, you risk finding yourself in a political quagmire and exposing people to the risk of g that brand of political blackmail that we call McCarthyism.

Poet of the month: Homer (Iliad, Book I)

Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring

  Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!

  That wrath which hurl’d to Pluto’s gloomy reign

  The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;

  Whose limbs unburied on the naked shore,

  Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore

  Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,

  Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove!

 

  Declare, O Muse! in what ill-fated hour

  Sprung the fierce strife, from what offended power

  Latona’s son a dire contagion spread

  And heap’d the camp with mountains of the dead;

  The king of men his reverent priest defied 

  And for the king’s offence the people died.

Passing Bull 109– Structural problems in U S politics

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The chaos and bullshit that are engulfing government in the United States reveal differences between our two constitutions and systems of government.  By and large, we adhere to the Westminster model.  We have jettisoned most of the idea of responsible government – ministers being liable for the actions of civil servants – and we have made deep inroads on the need for a politically neutral executive.  But we are closer to Westminster than Washington.  Some of the differences are as follows, not in any real order.

1.     The head of our government, the P M, is answerable in and to our parliament when it is sitting.  The ability of the leader to respond to questions without notice on a daily basis is one of the key factors that the party takes into account in choosing that person for P M.  The candidate must have real parliamentary experience.  This is not so with the President of the U S.  It was hard to imagine someone like George W Bush getting the job here.  It is impossible to imagine someone like Trump doing so.

2.     Nor are other Cabinet members answerable to Congress.  Some of the absurd appointments Trump has made simply could not happen here.  Like the Barbie Doll daughter and her visible husband.

3.     The opposition party has no recognised office of Leader of the Opposition.  This leads to irresponsibility in opposition, and it facilitates a wrecking opposition.  An opposition should not be heard unless it pledges to implement a different policy or platform.  I am not sure how far this practice feeds the custom that the outgoing president lays low (while making a fortune).  Who better to critique and oppose the incoming president?

4.     The President speaks through others – in the White House – in a way that encourages irresponsibility and incoherence.  Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway would be inconceivable here.  Trump has slow or slippery front people whom he then contradicts on Twitter.  The Marx Brothers White House show is not funny anymore.

5.     There is a much greater infection of partisanship in the U S executive.  Departments suffer wholesale reconstituting when the party in power in Congress changes.  The Department of State has been mutilated.  It has suffered political purges.  Sally Yates was attacked for being a Democrat.

6.     A lot of these issues derive from an ideological embrace of the separation of powers.  We follow the English.  We ask not whether a scheme or proposal conforms to theory, but whether it works.  The U S division of powers leaves them like the Stuarts on war powers – the executive declares the wars, but only the legislature can fund them.  We and the English want our ministry to be members of parliament and at least to that extent to be both elected to and answerable to the parliament.

7.     The process of finding nominees for the parties and then electing the president allows for the election of someone who is not just not qualified, but who ought to be disqualified.

8.     That process is hideously long and expensive.  It is as notorious for its inefficiency as their health system.

9.     The Supreme Court is and has been split along ideological fault lines that would be anathema here.

10.                        The Bill of Rights has a constitutional effect in the U S and is far too ideological for our tastes.  It gives unelected judges far too much law making power, and it is prone to debase the currency of the independence of the judiciary.

11.                        Apart from their gun laws, the crassest example of the sad triumph of theory over sense in the U S is their failure to make voting compulsory.  That to us makes as much sense as not insisting on a secret ballot, or making jury service optional, or giving a green light to going through a red light.  This absurd obsession does not fulfil democracy, it mocks democracy.  And, if it matters, some say that it sits on a sad throwback to racism.

12.                        The President is the head of state in the US.  Our Prime Minister is not.  Americans invest much more faith in their President than we place in our PM.  We expect more from the system than Americans do, but we place far less faith in the people actually in office.  At least Australian republicans have a model to avoid.

13.                        Finally, it is too hard to get rid of a dud president.  None has ever been removed by a completed process of impeachment.  Here, we just leave it to the party room.  It has happened too often here recently, and it’s never pretty, but the alternative looks awful.

That’s not a good report card, and it is not just Americans who are paying the price.

Confucius says:

A gentleman makes friends through being cultivated, but looks to friends for support in benevolence.

Analects 12.24

From the next Passing Bull, we shall cease our protest at ‘Western values’ and return to Poet of the Month.

Passing Bull 108 – Timbo back and in form

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Tim Wilson just oozes bullshit. As you plough through the following, ask yourself what part is worse.

Menzies knew there was no contradiction between the values his party embraced…

Monday’s 75th anniversary of the “Forgotten People” speeches, understandably, has prompted nostalgia in Liberal ranks.

In a column in this newspaper on Monday, former prime minister Tony Abbott argued that there were three lessons from Menzies’ work — to “know who you represent”, “your values” and “never shirk a fight in a good cause”. On those he is right, but Abbott’s observations represent only the conservative chorus.

Completion requires the liberal verse — know where you want to take Australia. Menzies’ exceptionalism comes from understanding that successfully prosecuting a political message follows from commanding the context of choices before a country, not just the answers….

His solution was to frame Australia as a nation with an organic society born of individuals, forming families, building community as the foundation for nationhood. It is a citizen-up approach from the middle class to slay the easy temptation of Canberra-down government planning.

He then built a modern, forward-looking Liberal Party to ensure “in a country like Australia the class war must always be a false war”.

In doing so he also knew it was not the only “false war”. So was the debate about whether his party was liberal or conservative, because such a debate starts from a falsehood.

It cannot be a debate about competing or different political philosophies for one very simple reason: conservatism is not a political philosophy. It’s a disposition. A temperament. An approach to bring the best of the past forward with incremental change.

In his memoir Afternoon Light Menzies wrote of taking “the name ‘Liberal’ because we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary but believing in the individual, his right and enterprise, and rejecting the socialist panacea…

After all, a person can be socialist and conservative. They’re called Fabians. Conservatism is the virtue. Liberalism is the vision.

Yet liberalism alone is not a solution. Liberalism is the force of water through a loose garden hose that flaps around indiscriminately after the tap has been turned on. Conservatism is the calming hand that directs the hose towards the plants needing hydration….

Today the symptoms of what must be rejected are obvious, from identity politics, increased dependence on taxpayer-financed welfare, rising public debt, placing the needs of government before households and the corrosion of our culture.

But recharging the nation’s course requires analysing the disease. The disease is the shift of the centre of gravity that was, as Menzies described it, anchored in the ambitions of “homes material, homes human, and homes spiritual” that built the foundations of our society from the citizen up.

In place of the home and family life has been a centre more closely anchored to the ambitions of the academy, state capitals and Canberra, driving a vision of a nation from bureaucracies and institutions down…

The consequence is people of “the left” and “the right” are turning to populism to break the system in an attempt to regain the certainty that comes from being in control of their lives.

For left-progressives the turn to popular brings a silver lining because it creates the opportunity to tear down the institutions that underpin liberal democracy and remake them to achieve their ends…..

You may have noticed that Timbo falls for the cliché ‘left-progressives’ although he quotes Menzies as ‘taking “the name ‘Liberal’ because we were determined to be a progressive party’.  But the two prize-winners – world-beaters – for pure bullshit are ‘Conservatism is the virtue. Liberalism is the vision’ and ‘Conservatism is not a political philosophy. It’s a disposition’ – although the ‘loose garden hose’ deserves a Palme d’Or on its own.

Let’s look at three problems with ‘Conservatism is not a political philosophy. It’s a disposition’.  First, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy does not agree.  It gives two versions of conservative ‘ideology.’  Its comments are extracted below.  Secondly, if it is hard to define a political philosophy, it is even harder to define a state of mind.  How then do you frame a coherent argument on such loose premises?  (I think the common law can be a state of mind – but I’m careful of where I say that.)  Finally, is this not just a false dichotomy?  Of course a political philosophy can be a state of mind.  How can it – say, Fascism – not be?  Was the man from Quadrant who wanted to bomb the ABC deranged or depraved?  Why do we have to choose?  He is probably both and more – and he’s still got a job.

And when did you last see a Fenian?  At about the time you saw Father Christmas going down the chimney?  And do we think that Timbo has the same feeling about ‘virtue’ as Robespierre?

The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy has the following.

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

liberalism A political ideology centred upon the individual thought of as possessing rights against the government, including rights of due process under the law, equality of respect, freedom of expression and action, and freedom from religious and ideological restraint.

The author then goes on to describe how that ideology is attacked from both ‘left’ and ‘right’, as defined, showing that all those terms are now exhausted and worthless.

 

Confucius says:

The gentleman agrees with others without being an echo.  The small man echoes without being in agreement.

Analects 13.23.

Passing Bull 107 – Bull about journalism

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Last Friday, the press carried two worrying pieces about the crisis facing our journalism.  Adam Creighton in The Australian said:

High-profile job losses at Fairfax in recent weeks are part of a worrying trend. More than 2500 journalists have been laid off by Australia’s media companies since 2011, about a quarter of the total.

Meanwhile, the ranks of public relations, advertising and corporate affairs professionals have swollen by around 19,000 to 91,000, according to ABS statistics. That leaves about 12 PR people for every journalist in the country — and it certainly feels that way when I open my inbox each morning.  These figures exclude the thousands of political advisers working for state and federal governments too.

Unless this army of spinners is entirely useless, such an onslaught must have compromised the quality of what journalists write and say, quite apart from their reduced numbers…..

Journalists are the only effective check on government and large corporations, whose information about, and power over, citizens and customers is probably greater than at any time in history. Their incentives — to call out vested interests — are naturally aligned with the public interest more than any other job.

The author referred to reports that half the populace take their news from Facebook.  The horror of the fading of journalism under inanity and the internet becomes apparent from a piece by Edward Luce from the US in The AFR. 

If America’s political system were working as it should, Donald Trump would be in serious trouble. Either Congress would be taking steps that could ultimately lead to impeachment, or people around the President would have concluded him unfit for office.

But Mr Trump retains an ace up his sleeve. No elected Republican dares cross him. Any who think of standing up to him know they would risk an electronic lynching that could finish their career. Just ask Jeb Bush.

America’s government is at a dangerous impasse. Most people know Mr Trump is unfit to be commander in-chief. But nobody with the power to redress it has found the courage to act.

The tragedy for America – and the world – is that this is likely to persist at least until next year’s US midterm elections. Even overt signs that Mr Trump is trying to obstruct justice, which was the first article of impeachment against Richard Nixon, are glossed over. Between a quarter and a third of Americans are diehard Trump supporters. They have the power to eject rebel Republicans in primary elections.

Trumpians are stoked by a closed ecosystem of news sites that presents the world in a radically different light to the rest of the media. Thus Mr Trump did not fire James Comey last week. The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation resigned, according to Fox News. Likewise, Mr Trump did not disclose vital intelligence to Russia’s foreign minister. Nor did he put pressure on Mr Comey to shut down the investigation into Michael Flynn, Mr Trump’s first national security adviser. These are fake stories.

Most of the sites ignored this week’s revelations and focused on the shooting of Seth Rich, a Democratic staffer who had apparently forwarded thousands of emails to WikiLeaks last summer. Readers were left in no doubt that Hillary Clinton, or people close to her, were involved in MrRich’s murder.

We should not underestimate the power Mr Trump draws from these alternative narratives. Whenever the elites express outrage at his actions, his supporters take pleasure in their anguish. Mr Trump knows how to cater to his base. If that means passing secrets to the Russians the day after firing the man investigating his campaign’s alleged Russia collusion, all the better. Scholars call this ‘‘negative partisanship’’. People no longer join a party because they believe in its agenda but because they despise the other one. By mocking his opponents, Mr Trump is literally delivering on what he promised. It is a mandate for nihilism.

Everything in those two pieces looks to me to be self-evidently true.  Now we know that when people hand over what brains they have to Facebook, we get people like Farage, Le Pen, Hanson, and Trump.  It’s no wonder that Hitler was so popular.  He backed up his seduction and fraud with murder and terrorism.

But the decline is not all down to the internet.  Bruce Guthrie came through the ranks to be fired from top positions with both Fairfax and Murdoch.  His book Man Bites Murdoch (2010) offers sad insights into a world of pettiness, bitchiness, triviality, greasy poles, gossip, jealousy, ambition, deceit, and downright bastardry.

On the evidence of this book, there is not much to choose between Murdoch and Fairfax.  The first suffers from an ethics deficit, but it is better run because it is run like an African dictatorship.  Its attitude to staff could be described as feudal, although many medieval barons probably felt more loyalty to their vassals than Murdoch feels to his serfs.  Fairfax has not been satisfactorily owned or managed.  Its board is currently paying a former journalist about $7 million a year to fire as many of his former colleagues as possible.  There is no prospect of his handing back any of those pieces of silver.

No sane person would wish to work for either Fairfax or Murdoch.  The insecurity just gets passed down the chain brutally.  Some bullies posing as executives talk nonsense about ‘creative anxiety.’  The distrust is massive and mutual.  Loyalty is at best suspect and at worst dirty.  The atmosphere reminds me of that in Paris near the end of the Terror.  They finally got up the nerve to bring down Robespierre after someone bustled about saying ‘they say he has got a list, and I hear that your name’s on it.’  It was a very dark and nasty place.

This is a tragedy for Australia as well as for its journalists.  Only ideological fanatics deny that journalism is essential to the rule of law.  Just look at what is happening in the U S now – and what was not permitted to happen in Germany in the 1930’s.  We are looking at a threat to journalism that has already found itself sitting on shifty and seedy marshes.

Let me take a few examples from the book.

Murdoch’s capos met at Aspen in 1988.  These must be like party meetings under Stalin.  All eyes are on the boss.  The pall of possible death is everywhere.  The revolting editor of the revolting paper The Sun boasted ‘We don’t report the news, we make it.’  Guthrie thought the speech was appalling.  He then made a serious tactical mistake.  ‘Tom.  Do you have any ethical framework at all at the London Sun?’  The whole place erupted with hilarity, revulsion, or amazement.  The answer was no.  The boss was not amused.  There would be no more talk about ethics (which Guthrie says later was thought in the Murdoch empire to refer to the county of Essex).  ‘I would have thought it’s news if the captain of the England cricket team is taking barmaids up to his room the night before a Test match.’  Later the boss said about that stupid question to one of his capos: ‘I see we have a Fairfax wanker in our midst.’

I despaired of getting any moral or intellectual sense out of The Australian years ago, but there in that anecdote you can see the cancer that has infected Australian journalism.  The whole outfit is coarse, venal, inbred, tribal, brainless and vicious.

Then you have the politicians.  Their closeness to the press has been incestuous, and incest is not tolerated by any human tribe.  Hawke and Keating were each notorious for ringing editors and abusing them with that fruity language that such people associate with machismo.  The unseemly memoirs of Chris Mitchell showed just how demeaning those relations would be with a later generation.

Kennett prefigured Abbott by loathing Fairfax and the ABC with a passion.  (It’s ironic that he brought himself undone by suing Murdoch and losing the unlosable libel action – presumably because the jury thought as little of him as did the electorate.)  Kennett was backed by Murdoch and 3AW.  He was so close to 3AW that he thought he had exclusive rights.  Kennett was outraged when 3AW gave the opposition leader air time.  Kennett grabbed the program director Steve Price in a corridor, pushed him into a room, slapped his face, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and demanded ‘What about loyalty, mate?’

It’s just revolting, isn’t it?  Later when Guthrie and Kennett were in a shitfight of correspondence, the Premier of Victoria though to dignify his office by writing ‘your mighty organ is very limp indeed.’  (Indeed, as you read this, Kennett starts to look more and more like that ghastly oaf Trump.)

It looks like more of the editors’ time is spent worrying about business and profits than news and journalism.  The partners of large law firms will recognise this dilemma.

Finally there are the corporate partners – back scratching for profit, and an inducement to go soft on an issue that may annoy someone you are in bed with.  Partners of law firms know about this, too.  But when Fairfax let Michael West go, it was hard to resist the inference that he was silenced because his insights into the underside of big shots at the big end of town had become intolerable.

The book has a splendid vignette on the managerial incompetence and gutlessness of Fairfax.  The board appointed Zelman Cowen as Chairman.  Why would any sane business entity want a garrulous know-all law professor at the helm?  Guthrie briefed the board.  He sensed unease.  Cowen asked Guthrie if he wanted to restore the paper’s reputation for scrutiny.  ‘Yes.’  ‘That’s all very well, but it will be positive scrutiny, won’t it?  We don’t want any of this negative stuff.’

That bullshit could have made Goebbels blush.  When I was seeking to adopt a child, a church agency asked me if I had a positive attitude to religion.  That was the end of that application.

Through The Australian, Murdoch is at risk of doing to conservatism in Australia what he did to conservatism in America through fox News.  This is the view of The New York Times.

….nobody did more than Ailes [the late head of Fox news] to broaden the reach of conservative ideas among the American public, at least nobody since Ronald Reagan.  Except in this respect: If Ailes broadened, he also debased.  The man who did so much to engineer the ascendancy of conservative media paved the way to its moral and intellectual decline…..

Nor does the network have any fixed set of ideas that it seeks to champion or disseminate, other than an ostentatious patriotism that has the distinct feel of a marketing campaign.

What Fox is mainly in the business of doing is hating the left. In the manner of Ailes himself, its convictions stem from its resentments – and shift accordingly. It is sympathetic to military intervention when the left is against it (Iraq) and hostile when the left is for it (Libya); anti-Russia when President Barack Obama was reaching out to Russia, pro-Russia when Obama started getting tough on the Kremlin.

….Populism is not conservatism, which by definition entails resistance to public whims. Conservatives who use populism for their own ends make a Faustian bargain.

We are now living with the consequences of that bargain in the form of Donald Trump’s presidency. ..No network has put itself so wholly in the service of a candidate and the resentments he espouses as Fox.

No president has done more to harm the reputation of conservative ideas as this one. This, too, is Ailes’ legacy, unintended but fateful.

God save us – and our journalists – from idiots, crooks, ratbags, and real dead shits.

Confucius says:

When a man in office finds that he can more than cope with his duties, then he studies; when a student finds that he can more  than cope with his studies, he takes office.

Analects 19.13

Passing Bull 106 – Bull about the budget

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Last week, the French elected a president who said that the old Left/Right divide was bullshit.  Then the Australian government announced a budget that said that the old Labor/Liberal divide was bullshit.  The parties in government finally worked out the punishing the banks would make them less unpopular – that is, would lose them less votes – than punishing the poor, the sick, or the aged.  (Although the government gave the poor a spray for the sake of old times.)

This was all too much for the usual suspects at The Australian.  Common sense could put the Liberal flops, Labor rats, and IPA clowns out of business.

If you can bring yourself to read some of it, you might think that you are reading about what the Masons are doing in their Lodge, or what churchgoers are doing in their parish.  It is frighteningly tribal and predictable.  Out come the same old labels and war cries – the Green Left, polls, populism, and the political class.

We will just have to scrap the word ‘populist’.  In a democracy you win government by appealing to the people and becoming popular.  You lose government when you don’t appeal to the people and you become unpopular.  It’s a bit rich for journalists who live on polls and rumours of coups – and who promote both – to accuse politicians of being populists without principles.  It’s even richer to accuse them of moving on from their Liberal past.  It’s not just that the world has moved on, or that Bob Menzies gets cited to support any political position short of Communism – no, it’s that the other Liberal leader they invoke – Little Johnnie Howard – was the greatest disponor of political patronage in the form of middle class welfare in the short history of this nation.  He could have given Walpole, the first British Prime Minister, and the Duke of Newcastle a real run for their money in buying votes from a venal populace.

Leap to the Left and a nasty new battle

Paul Kelly

This week may go down in history as a turning point in Australian politics

Australia is undergoing a decisive change in its political values — Malcolm Turnbull has reinvented his government as a pragmatic, populist, public investment vehicle and Bill Shorten in reply has taken Labor even further to the populist, ideological left.

The edifices of Australia’s aspirational politics and market-based reforms are being torched in an end-of-generation bonfire. Occasionally in a nation’s history you can identify a point of transformation and it is likely that this week is such a marker.

Politics is now a contest about the nature of tax increases, the scope of monumental social spending initiatives and the type of government intervention. Australia is becoming yet another Western-world laboratory for the antimarket, populist revolution fuelled by resentment towards finance and corporates, the breakdown of the social contract, big-spending social democratic reforms and a drumbeat for redistribution and equality.

All eyes will be on the next Newspoll

Dennis Shanahan

The PM and Treasurer will soon find out whether their gamble has paid off

Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison can’t take the credit for producing such a “very political document” — as John Howard described the budget — and for dumping traditional Liberal principles without taking the responsibility if it doesn’t work.

Bill Shorten has called for them and the government to be dumped if the banks “pass on a single dollar of this tax to Australian families”, which seems harsh given he has backed the $6.2 billion levy and trousered the receipts already. But the essence of the Opposition Leader’s demand is legitimate.

The Prime Minister and the Treasurer in the 2017 budget have broken with decades of Liberal Party principles and economic precepts. They have gambled all on this budget because they knew they were in deep trouble.

Underlying principles, longterm outlooks for reducing debt, and savings measures have all been abandoned or sidelined.

There is no doubt the Coalition’s aim is to get the Newspoll two-party preferred figure back to at least 50-50 as soon as possible, hopefully with an immediate improvement on the existing 52-48 per cent in Labor’s favour.

This is Turnbull’s last opportunity; if there is no improvement in government fortunes, speculation about leadership change will return with a vengeance.

Ignore grandchildren’s peril, does anyone care?

Chris Kenny

Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison clearly have shifted to the green left

As George Orwell noted, the quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. Our political class has surrendered on fiscal repair, ending the war against debt and deficits.

Our politicians, en masse, have shown they are not up to the task. After milling around like a mob of bewildered sheep for a decade, they have trundled off along the path of least resistance……

Every indulgence we have allowed ourselves under a string of deficit budgets has been rung up as debt for future taxpayers. We have given ourselves paid parental leave, expanded childcare, school halls, pink batts, extra funds for all schools, a National Disability Insurance Scheme, more public servants, renewable energy projects, an expanded public broadcaster and goodies from stadiums to virtue-signalling overseas junkets; but we have not paid for them…..

After delivering a budget that Wayne Swan would have been proud of (extra spending, increased taxation, nods to fairness and significant infrastructure investment) Scott Morrison delivered the traditional address to the National Press Club. It is worth unpicking an important section of the speech: “Australians are tired of the politics. They want the politicians they elect to get things done. That’s what matters. Not the ideology and the politics and the personalities and all the things so many people in this place focus on endlessly. But outside of here (Parliament House) they don’t. They want to know what we’re doing here to get things done for them and increasingly that means in this parliament, wherever we can, meet in the middle to make sure that happens.

“That means many of us have to move from positions we’ve been holding previously. We have to. Otherwise we all just run around this building making excuses as to why nothing has happened, and that won’t cut it in this new reality of Australian politics.”

This is a positive spin on what the government will claim as a new pragmatism. But it means the Coalition is presenting only policies that are acceptable to Labor and the Greens. This is a shift, but not to the centre. It is a shift to the green left. Rather than produce a centrist consensus, it triggered The Rocky Horror Picture Show response from Bill Shorten: just a jump to the left. This is the main hope for the Coalition; that Labor puts itself way out on a leftist time warp. Labor and the Greens like the bank levy. Shorten’s only quibble with the Medicare levy is to limit it to the top two tax brackets. Labor welcomes the government’s Gonski funding but wants to go $22bn further while mocking and blocking corporate tax cuts.

We remain sickened by the stale banal hypocrisy of it all.  In truth, it is as hard to distil traditional Liberal Values as it is traditional Labor values – especially when you look at politically and intellectually amorphous types like Little Johnnie Howard or Little Bill Shorten.  They could swap platforms, and not know the difference.

And then the feu de joie.  The rival papers had blaring headlines yesterday about the polls.  With completely contrasted results.  And then – may God have mercy on their souls – Tony and Peta separately warned us that government based on polling is bad.  Even by our standards, that is very rarefied bullshit.

Confucius says:

When a man is not influenced by slanders which are assiduously repeated or by complaints for which he feels a direct sympathy, he can be said to be wise.  He can at the same time be said to be far-sighted.

Analects 12.6.