Passing Bull 62 – Asking the wrong question

26/09/201626/09/2016 / Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

There is one unavoidable axiom of our logic. A thing cannot both be and not be at the same time. If you deny that proposition, you deny logic, and you destroy the possibility of rational thought.

It may be that the one unavoidable axiom or foundation of morality is that like cases should be treated alike. If you deny that proposition, and dictators definitively do just that, you destroy the possibility of a moral system. If you give a dog a biscuit for presenting his paw five times and then kick him, he knows that he has been hard done by. (He also probably knows the difference between an intentional kick and an accidental one.)

This feeling or instinct is fundamental to our sense of fairness, or if you prefer, justice. There is I think a related feeling that we have, and that runs deep in us. This is that somehow we should organise our communal lives so that our reactions to each other are in some way proportionate or reasonable. A lawyer might be tempted to say that it is an implied term of our arrangement that we will at least try to get on with one another.

There is nothing surprising or high faluting about any of this. The propositions I have just mentioned underlie a lot of our jurisprudence.

Communities that persistently breach our notions of fairness or proportion are likely to break apart in what we call revolutions – as happened in the United States in 1776, in France in 1789, and in Russia in 1917.

Let me mention five instances where our sense of fairness or proportion is being breached on a huge scale.

First, some people in this community earn millions of dollars a year while the national average wage is well under $100,000. We have school teachers and nurses doing vital work for us all while we watch bank managers get paid 100 times as much for doing a job that we at best mistrust and at worst view with contempt. This is an affront to sense as well as to decency. The boss of Fox was sued for abusing a female staff member. She got $20,000,000. He got $40,000,000. Is this public money or just in-house Monopoly? I can recall devoting days on the free list in helping a worker get to the High Court because a number of judges who had never got their hands dirty could not bring themselves to describe as ‘serious’ an accident that had mangled his arm and left him marked for life. Can you imagine the uproar if one of their Honours had suffered such an accident at work?

Secondly, what we call the Great Financial Crisis, which threatened all of us and which still hangs over us, was caused by greed, stupidity, and criminal dishonesty. In the United States, the Department of Justice has handed out fines of $40 billion –that is $40,000,000,000,000. So far as I know, not one executive has been jailed. We nightly see or read of big corporations doing deals with regulators whereby the state is bribed to allow shareholders to be milked to allow executives to avoid jail and to trouser their bonuses. The concept of open justice, either the openness or the justice, has ceased to exist for a large part of business. It is a gaping scandal in our public life – and a scandal that runs across the whole of the Western world. Meanwhile, in some parts of Australia, we throw blackfellas into jail for stealing a loaf of bread if that is their third offence. We do this because the legislature has been bullied by shock jocks into confessing its distrust of our judges and imposing on our judges mandatory sentences. They put judges on a conveyor line even though a lot of us think that punishment is just a measure of despair. So, in the year of our Lord 2016, we repeat the moral infamy that caused the English to set up a jail in this land in 1788 and so commence the destruction of its original inhabitants, the people that we have still not learned to look after.

Thirdly, look at the most recent manifestation of the ghastly gun culture in the United States. About once a week now, a black person is shot by a police officer in circumstances that could hardly be repeated elsewhere. This tragedy could yet unwind the Great Republic. This chasm between black and white is the result of a compound of two ideological trainwrecks – Jefferson’s lie about all men being equal, and the juristic nonsense about the right to bear arms warranting the ritual murder of school children by mad or evil people using automatic handheld guns. It is also a grim testament to the power of money and selfish prejudice at the centre of what we nervously call capitalism.

Fourthly, we are witnessing the rise of giant corporations that look to be utterly ungovernable. They absorb or wipe out any competitors and they treat tax like the French church did before 1789 – as a don gratuit, or free donation. The rest of us have to pay more tax because the great and powerful do not. That is a precise description of the main economic propellant of what we call the French Revolution. The Economist issued this warning:

The rise of the giants is a reversal of recent history. In the 1980s big companies were on the retreat, as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took a wrecking ball to state-protected behemoths such as AT&T and British Leyland. But there are some worrying similarities to a much earlier era. In 1860 – 1917 the global economy was reshaped by the rise of giant new industries (steel and oil) and revolutionary new technologies (electricity and the combustion engine). These disruptions led to brief bursts of competition followed by prolonged periods of oligopoly. The business titans of that age reinforced their positions by driving their competitors out of business and cultivating close relations with politicians. The backlash that followed helped to destroy the liberal order in much of Europe.

That should be sobering.

Fifthly, we see the rise of populist leaders like Farage, Corbyn, Trump and Hanson. Their programs bear no proportion to the national interest. In the case of at least two of them, it is hard to avoid concluding that they put their own interests before those of their party, let alone their nation. These people threaten not just the political fabric but the moral fabric of their nation. But when we advert to the evil done in their name by their supporters, we risk making things worse. In the same edition of The Economist, there is an article headed ‘Who’s deplorable?’ The subheading is: ‘It is perilously hard to criticise Donald Trump without seeming to insult his voters.’

Put simply, Mr Trump’s shtick should not be working. In part, that is because he has repeatedly made appeals to bigotry since entering the race more than a year ago. It is dismaying to see so many Americans either nod in agreement or pretend not to hear what he is really saying. To be still more blunt, to anyone with their critical faculties undimmed by partisan rage or calculation, he is obviously a con-man… In short, Mr Trump has brilliantly manoeuvred himself into a place in which fact-checking him sounds like snobbery. As his campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, has bragged: ‘He’s built a movement, and people are proud to be a part of it. When you insult him, you insult them.’

It hardly bears thinking of what kind of person that remark might remind us of. Were the case not so threatening or tragic, it might be a perfect example of what some people are pleased to call ‘identity politics’. Or as Philip Coorey remarked in the AFR, Trump and his ilk did not create this swamp – they arose out of it.

You might be tempted to add a sixth case of a failure of fairness or proportion – it is not offhand easy to identify a trade union in this country that is properly administered to look after the interests of its members and nothing else. Too many have leaders that are on the take financially, on the make politically, or who have just been there too long and are locked into class wars that we should have quit generations ago. That proposition may be a little too sensitive politically, because there must be some good unions, but if it is correct, that is another essential organ of ours that has failed.

Well, all this may be obvious enough, or at least arguable enough. But what does it have to do with the subject of bullshit? Just this – most of our press commentary has failed to blow the whistle on our edging toward the brink of collapse, and it has failed sufficiently to notice the connection between the first four issues and the fifth. A sure way to get the wrong answer is to ask the wrong question.

Poet of the Month: Ibsen

Thanks

Her griefs were the hours

When my struggle was sore,–

Her joys were the powers

That the climber upbore.

Her home is the boundless

Free ocean that seems

To rock, calm and soundless,

My galleon of dreams.

Half hers are the glancing

Creations that throng

With pageant and dancing

The ways of my song.

My fires when they dwindle

Are lit from her brand;

Men see them rekindle

Nor guess by whose hand.

Of thanks to requite her

No least thought is hers,–

And therefore I write her,

Once, thanks in a verse.

Passing Bull 61 – Trading insults and labels

22/09/2016 / Geoffrey Gibson / 9 Comments

The trouble with our politicians and political commentators is that this is all they do – they trade insults and labels. Take Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian yesterday. She refers to Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ – which I would think is a fair comment on Trump supporters.

But Mrs Clinton went on to give particulars – ‘racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.’ I agree entirely that these terms are commonly abused in an endeavour to shut people up. The grossest example is calling doubters of Israel anti-Semitic. This is a cowardly smearing by labels.

How does Ms Albrechtsen respond? By the same method – by hurling abuse that is over the top in an attempt to shut opposition up.

In one fell swoop the unplugged Democratic presidential candidate lifted the lid on the neo-fascist Left.

Clinton’s moment of ill-discipline reduced the fraud of so-called progressive politics to a simple illiberal equation: if you disagree with me on race matters, you are a racist…..Rather than engaging in debate, too many on the Left would rather portray disagreement on totemic issues as grounds for a mental disorder with the sole aim of shutting down any challenge to leftist orthodoxy. [You do wonder what ‘rightist orthodoxy’ is, and who speaks for it apart from Andrew Bolt.]……

The end of Liberalism for many on the Left started more than 40 years ago when, by embracing identity politics, they untethered human rights from classical notions of freedom. Sex, sexuality, race and other forms of personal identification trumped Enlightenment freedoms and the very notion of universal libertarian rights…..

We need more people like Baldwin who are honest about the Left’s conversion into loathers of freedom.

So there you have it. Put to one side the usual labels, slogans, and bogeymen, if you call me racist, sexist or homophobe, I will call you a fraud, a fascist, and freedom-hater – and a traitor to the Enlightenment. You have let down Spinoza and Kant!

The political commentators in The Australian fall into three categories – former staffers, mainly Liberals or defectors; people who subscribe to think tanks; and journalists who are close personal friends of Tony Abbott. It is not just that we don’t get comment on issues. We don’t even get comment on politicians. All we get is commentators on commentators, disappearing up their own communal Platonic bum. They commune with the faithful in their own bubble and in their own argot, and they pull faces at and trade insults with outsiders. They are like warriors in paint-balling. It is hard to imagine a more terminally useless bunch of bastards.

And of course s 18C gets wheeled out against the freedom-haters. When people talk about ‘freedom of speech’ they are, I think, using the word ‘freedom’ in the dictionary sense of a ‘faculty or power to do as one likes’. If therefore you can be arrested and jailed for making a certain statement, then to that extent your freedom of speech is limited, because you are prevented from doing what you like.

I could be arrested and jailed if I said to man walking with his wife in the street ‘That sheilah is a fucking slut and all the worse for being an abo.’ Does Ms Albrechtsen want to be free from our laws to say something like that? If so, would she mind steering clear of Malmsbury? If not, what is all the fuss about?

More than sixty years ago, when I was about six, I learned a saying: ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’ I commend the wisdom of children to our politicians and their awful press. Thank heaven that all this bullshit is just nonsensical moonshine to ninety-nine out of one hundred Australians. On this at least, they know better.

PS Followers of this column or just connoisseurs of bullshit may get Numbers 1 to 50 on Amazon/Kindle. I will publish them in batches of fifty.

Poet of the Month: Ibsen

Burnt Ships

To skies that were brighter

Turned he his prows;

To gods that were lighter

Made he his vows.

The snow-land’s mountains

Sank in the deep;

Sunnier fountains

Lulled him to sleep.

He burns his vessels,

The smoke flung forth

On blue cloud-trestles

A bridge to the north.

From the sun-warmed lowland

Each night that betides,

To the huts of the snow-land

A horseman rides.

Passing Bull 60 – Bull about popularity, Hanson, and Trump – and Adolf Hitler

18/09/2016 / Geoffrey Gibson / 6 Comments

If I kill a man without justification, I have done something wrong. And I am guilty of the crime of murder. I do not get to be acquitted of that crime just because some other person applauds my action. I remain guilty of that crime even if twenty million people applaud my action.

A proposition does not become invalid merely because one person denies it or because twenty million people deny it. Put differently, popular support or endorsement of a proposition provides no warrant of its validity. It is in logic a simple non sequitur to suggest that popular support of a proposition implies or warrants any validity of that proposition.

The definitive instance of popular will is the Lynch mob or the Ku Klux Klan – people on the outside who demand what the law won’t allow to them. The principal exponents of popular will are shock jocks such as Alan Jones or Andrew Bolt. It is obviously bullshit to suggest that we should endorse a Lynch mob or Jones or Bolt just because some people believe in them.

For some years, Adolf Hitler may have been the most popular political leader in the history of the world. When Pilate handed over the rebel named Jesus to the mob, he was giving ultimate expression to popular justice. The trouble with popular justice is that it is a contradiction in terms. And it looks like we may now be facing the same problem with democracy.

It is therefore surprising that we are being told that we should respect the opinions of people like Trump or Hanson because many people share and endorse those opinions and for that reason are prepared to vote for those people. It would be absurd to suggest that we might have to regard a ratbag as respectable if we found out that many people look up to, or respect, that ratbag. It is therefore just bullshit to suggest that if someone can get enough people to vote for him, then we must respect that person or the views that he expresses. Respect for a person is not logically entailed by the fact that other people are prepared to give that respect. As my mother, Norma, used to say to me, you would not put your head in an oven just because someone said that it would be a good idea.

Here are four examples to illustrate this bullshit.

There is a killer in the Philippines called Duterte. He was elected President and he currently has about 90% approval in the polls. Do we have to respect this mass murderer?

Adolf Hitler never got to 50% of the vote in a straight election. But he got very close once or twice. Was he to be respected then?

Two great moral issues recently in Australia were the invasion of Iraq and the offshore detention of refugees. The nation was divided but our politicians were united on each issue. Does that mean that we have to respect those political decisions?

I regard Cory Bernardi as inane and nasty. I think that he is a blot on our public life. He gets enough votes to be a Senator. Does that mean that I have to respect him?

The only significance of people like Hanson being voted into office by people who others regard as stupid or mean, or both, is that the people then elected are better able to spread their poison. The upside is that we get to see the cancers in our national psyche exposed to the sunlight.

And it may be time to stop pussyfooting and to acknowledge that those who vote for inane ratbags like Trump or Hanson are likely to be stupid or mean or both, and that we are in deep trouble if we allow ourselves to be governed by those who have lost in the great race of life, or who were hiding behind the door when they were handing out taste and sense.

But, yes, I acknowledge that we don’t do that because it would be like serving blood to a tiger. And we would also upset the voices of reaction and be branded as snobbish or elitist by those who have a close acquaintance with each of those terms.

Reactionaries get themselves in knots in defending Hanson. In The Weekend Australian, Chris Kenny, who is authentically thick, has a piece about that awful maiden speech of Hanson. It is headed: ‘Hanson speech reaction reeks of witch trials.’ He even refers to the famous Arthur Miller play. The sub-heading is: ‘A new breed of denouncers is misusing pulpits.’ We get the usual melange of types, brands, abstractions, and labels. The theme seems to be that Hanson can detect and respond to parts of the popular will better than the ‘political media/class’ – presumably excluding Kenny and his mates. He quotes his colleague Greg Sheridan on ‘the new illiberalism as it pertained to the gay marriage debate’ – what we have apparently is an ‘authoritarian ideology of bureaucratic statist liberalism.’ This is an open challenge – find a purer form of bullshit than that. This is fiercely and proudly Himalayan bullshit.

If I may be allowed an ad hominem comment, it is that it is curious that these people who pussyfoot around about the radical reactionary Hanson were the loudest people in condemning Obama and Turnbull for not repudiating radical Islam, whatever that means. Why don’t we just say it as it is? Hanson is a cold hearted and dull witted bitch that no decent person would allow into their own home. Even by the standards of Australian politics, it was nauseating beyond endurance to watch elected galahs line up to embrace this callous bitch.

Trump embodies the vulgarity of new money. He is preposterous enough to have been created by F Scott Fitzgerald. Instead, this is how Lampedusa described the nouveau in The Leopard:

….free as he was from the shackles imposed on many other men by honesty, decency and plain good manners, he moved through the forest of life with the confidence of an elephant which advances in a straight line, rooting up trees and trampling down lairs, without even noticing scratches and thorns and moans from the crushed.

Truly, we go to great writers for the truth.

I have referred to both Trump and Hitler. Hitler may be the ultimate example of the triumph of an abject failure (the kind of person that we are told supports Trump or Hanson). Erich Fromm analysed Hitler and said that he was a man bent on destruction.

Fromm made the following comments about his subject. When Hitler gave his orders for destruction, he was only aware of his ‘duty’ and of his noble intentions; he repressed the awareness of his craving for destruction. Hitler was the perfect example of self-love, or narcissism: he was interested only in himself, his desires, his thought, his wishes; he talked endlessly about his ideas, his past, his plans; the world is real only as far as it is the object of his schemes and desires; other people matter only as far as they serve him or can be used; he always knows everything better than anyone else. He would listen to recordings of himself and ‘throw himself in a big overstuffed chair and enjoy his voice in a trancelike state like the Greek youth who was tragically in love with himself and found his death in the water while admiring his own image on its smooth surface.’

A consequence of this narcissism was an utter lack of interest in anybody or anything except to the extent that was of service to him, and his cool remoteness from everybody. What people believed to be warmth was in fact excitation. Speer said of him: ‘Hitler lacked all the more gentle virtues of man: tenderness, love, poetry were alien to his nature. On the surface he showed courtesy, charm, tranquillity, correctness, amiability, self-control. This outer skin obviously had the function to cover up the really dominant traits with a complete although thin layer.’

Hitler treated his female companion with a complete lack of consideration – in her presence he would enlarge on his attitude towards women as though she were not present: ‘a highly intelligent man should take a primitive and stupid woman.’ Another part of his narcissism was the unshakeable certainty that he felt about his ideas. Hitler could talk glibly and with a claim to knowledge about almost everything under the sun. He was a crashing bore. His biographical memoire emerges as hardly the work of a man with any solid knowledge but as a cleverly – and dishonestly – constructed propaganda pamphlet.

Hitler was kind to his staff and his dog – Hitler could play the role of a friendly amiable and kind man well, not only because he was a good actor but because he liked the role. It was valuable for him to deceive those closest to him about the depth of his own character, and most of all to deceive himself.

In analysing Hitler, Fromm therefore found a number of severely pathological traits.

Which of those observations could not, with any necessary modification, be applied to Trump?

The list might overlook the three most important common denominators.

First, Hitler could be devastatingly wrong on the big picture; so can Trump.

Secondly, Hitler in the end viciously betrayed his own people, and the amoral self-loving Trump shows every symptom of having just that capacity.

Finally, Hitler did not attach and Trump has not attached any meaning much less value to the concept of truth. Hitler was committed, and Trump is now committed, to preside over an era of ‘post truth’. Both recall the outburst of Louis XVI: ‘It is lawful because I wish it!’ And then there was the proposition attributed to the Sun King, Louis XIV: ‘L’état, c’est moi.’ ‘I am the State.’

What are the differences? Hitler sought to murder a race. Trump wants to lock one out. Hitler was much smarter than Trump – at least on detail. Hitler was better at masking his dark side; Trump’s dullness and ego prevent him from doing the same. Hitler could remain very focussed while Trump has no powers of concentration at all. But the worst thing is that no one, including Trump, knows what he might do next – and if elected, Trump will have access to sources of destruction beyond the gaudiest dreams of the Fuhrer.

The most polite thing that could be said about Trump is that he is an idiot who was hopelessly spoiled as a child and who has never grown up to get any sense or manners. The most polite thing that you could say about those who believe in him is that they are delusional.

But as was the case with Hitler, so it is with Trump – no one – not one person – will be able to say that they have not been warned of the evil that this man might do if he is put in a position of power over others. It is just childish to suggest that Trump could be trusted in any such position, just as it is pure bullshit to suggest that this spoiled brat might pose as the champion of the downtrodden and oppressed. He will drop every one of them on the first call of his alpine ego. Loyalty is another word that has no meaning for this oaf.

Trump has been nominated for President of the U S for the Republican Party and he might be elected. Does that mean that we have to respect Trump? Those who vote for him have a legal right to do so, but must we then respect the way in which they exercise that right?

Poet of the month: Ibsen

Thanks

Her griefs were the hours

When my struggle was sore,–

Her joys were the powers

That the climber upbore.

Her home is the boundless

Free ocean that seems

To rock, calm and soundless,

My galleon of dreams.

Half hers are the glancing

Creations that throng

With pageant and dancing

The ways of my song.

My fires when they dwindle

Are lit from her brand;

Men see them rekindle

Nor guess by whose hand.

Of thanks to requite her

No least thought is hers,–

And therefore I write her,

Once, thanks in a verse.

Passing Bull 57 Bullshit about sport and money

24/08/2016 / Geoffrey Gibson / 3 Comments

Australians do not like sports administrators. That is putting it softly. They were revolted by what the Panama Hat Brigade did to our Dawn and at Kevan Gosper’s spoiling Kathie’s night by presenting her medal. Now we have to put up with John Coates. Is there anyone in this wide land who likes or respects this man? He is a lawyer from Sydney with tenure with the IOC and AOC longer than that of most African dictators and he pulls down north of $700,000 a year so that he can schlep about the planet in the right part of the aircraft and then point the bone at everyone but himself for any perceived failure. If the Australians have ‘failed’, whatever that means, at the Olympics, who could be more responsible than John Coates?

For reasons given by David Crawford and others in The Australian today, I think that our athletes did incredibly well at Rio. The problem was that people had created unrealistic expectations that put an unfair burden on our chosen few. Another problem was that the games should never have been held there. Another problem was that the Russians should never have been let in, and the athletes were left to repudiate their minders. This combination of ineptitude and corruption blights and typifies the IOC and taints anyone inside their shadow.

Yet this Sydney lawyer waffles on – before the games have ended – about Australians not getting an adequate return on their capital investment. Not in my bloody name, Sport. I don’t pay taxes to swell the egos of professional entertainers or to gratify couch-dwellers with an unabashed nationalism that would make Kipling look like a shy novice. I don’t sponsor spoiled brats with no brains and less manners to pose as tennis players or any other over-paid service-provider.

Does any sane person think more of the Poms or the Japs now that they are in the business of buying Gold and puffing their chests through the medium of the IOC? Do the English not see that they have destroyed their national identity in football through that moral and intellectual trainwreck called the English Premier League? Is that not sufficient warning of the dangerous futility of spending treasure on circuses and colosseums for the masses? Why don’t we apply our capital for sports facilities for kids at the bottom rather than adults at the top? Do these people not see an almost universal revolt against what people call inequality and elitism and entrenched hierarchies – all qualities made flesh in John Coates?

After the women’s sevens, the unsurpassable highlight at Rio for me was Chloe Esposito. (The women may yet save rugby in Australia – God knows that the Wallabies need all the help that they can get.) Chloe’s was a colossal achievement in areas where European nations are so much stronger. It was an achievement to match that of Michelle Payne – and Chloe, God bless her, has the same sunny, Australian plainness of outlook and speech. We can all be mightily proud of Chloe and her family – and it would be so much worse than vulgar even to mention money in the same breath. I may just add that her brother finished seventh – the place filled by Chloe in London. This could be the start of a dynasty!

Mr Coates was also quoted as saying that the issue of crime was not addressed in Rio’s submission to stage the games. I went there in about 1989. Most parts were no-go and we were advised not to wear watches. A few years later urchins spewed out of the sewers and overran the beaches. Criminality in Rio is notorious around the world.

It is time for Mr Coates to move on. One of those ghastly gaming companies that blight sport on TV would give you long odds against his doing that sans dynamite.

Poet of the Month: Kenneth Slessor

Adventure Bay

Sophie’s my world… my arm must sooner or later

Like Francis Drake turn circumnavigator,

Stem the dark tides, take by the throat strange gales

And toss their spume to stars unknown, as kings

Rain diamonds to the mob… then arch my sails

By waterspouts of lace and bubbling rings

Gulfed in deep satin, conquer those warmer waves

Where none but mermaids ride, and the still caves

Untrod by sailors…aye, and with needle set,

Rounding Cape Turnagain, and take up my way,

And so to the Ivory Coast…and further yet,

Port of all drownéd lovers, Adventure Bay!

Passing bull 56 – Bullshit about manners, taste and identity: Part II

17/08/2016 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

In his piece about identity politics, Mr Kelly wrote about the reaction to the Four Corners program about the abuse of young aboriginals in detention in the Northern Territory. Mr Kelly said that the media had been reluctant

….to mention, let alone canvas, the underlying causes – the breakdown of the indigenous social and family order through a range of issues including family dislocation, neglect, violence, parental abuse and drunkenness.

Mr Kelly referred to a commentator who referred to ‘the politically correct ‘selective outrage’ and [who] told the ABC that ‘Blackfellas’ had ‘to take responsibility for their own children,’ and another indigenous commentator who told the newspaper that ‘this was primarily about children who had been failed by their families rather than race’. Mr Kelly said that ‘then an honest debate had been sanctioned.’

Australia, once famous for its straight talking, seems a frightened country.

Why were the alleged failures of parents of black children relevant to a story about revealed cruelty and mistreatment by government of the products of those failures? We are again talking at a very general level but how does the suggestion that children have been let down by their parents bear on the actual mistreatment shown in the program? I don’t get the point. Are we, God-like, apportioning some kind of universal blame? I don’t know.

Perhaps the problem comes from the author’s reference to ‘the underlying causes’ – causes of what? The mistreatment of aboriginals in detention, which was the subject of Four Corners, or the miserable condition of blackfellas at large? If the latter, how do you avoid going back to 1788?

The cartoonist, Bill Leak, had a cartoon depicting three figures in the outback. A Northern Territory copper holds a kid by the scruff of the neck before his father. Both blackfellas are depicted as ugly – some would say Neanderthal – and in bare feet. Dad holds a can of beer. The copper says: ‘You’ll have to sit down and talk to your son about personal responsibility.’ Dad replies: ‘Yeah, right, what’s his name then?’

What that cartoon means to you will probably vary on where you come from. It will mean some things to some white people and some other things to some coloured people. What it suggests to me is that blackfellas are drop-out drunks incapable of being responsible for their children. On that meaning, the cartoon is plainly racist, since it denigrates a people by reference to their race. I find it hard to see how you could avoid saying the cartoon is tasteless and, yes, offensive. How would you like it if someone said that about you?

Mr Kelly has a very different and very clear view. He says that Mr Leak has made clear the purpose of the cartoon.

… If you think things are pretty crook for children in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, you should have a look at the homes they came from. It wasn’t hard to get. But the fascinating thing about Leak’s piece was the feedback he got that people couldn’t understand his cartoon.

That’s right, they didn’t get it – surely a victory for a politically correct, dumbed down education system and the spread of identity politics culture where such images turn the brain into a non—functioning, non—computing defence mechanism.

Well, if that was Mr Leak’s purpose, he failed to make it clear to me. And what does it add to the Four Corners story to say that the victims of the government were worse victims of their own upbringing. How is that allegation relevant? Well, it might be relevant if you are trying to spread responsibility for the unhappy fate of these people. ‘Responsibility’ is the dominant word in the cartoon; Mr Leak omits it from his description of his purpose; Mr Kelly says that the cartoon depicts an ‘irresponsible indigenous father who couldn’t recall the name of his son.’

The real problem with the cartoon is that it can have no relevance to the news story unless the shoddy beer-can-bearing black father is said to be typical of blackfellas – and on no view is any such proposition attractive. And the problem for Mr Kelly is that his inability to see how other people might react differently to the cartoon reveals that he is used to speaking to the true believers who are happy to share the same bubble.

Mr Kelly then offers himself some gratuitous legal advice, saying of s.18C that ‘on racial issues, the test is subjective – whether the individual is offended.’ Mr Kelly wants a reference to ‘community values’. If it is the law that a person can succeed under this statute simply by saying that ‘I personally am offended – at being described as of Scottish descent when I’m really Irish – even though no reasonable member of the community in my place would be offended’, then I agree with Mr Kelly that the law needs some attention. But I very much doubt whether that is the law.

As it seems to me, at the core of people’s worries about this statute, is the fear that ‘offensive’ is too plastic or personal or variable to be safely made the criterion of a law. People think that the law should be made of sterner, clearer stuff. They fear that it will be too hard to draw the line. People might then be inhibited in what they say – the law may have ‘a chilling effect’.

The answer is that exactly these kinds of issues arise a lot of the time in all areas of our law without giving rise to the suggestion that as a result the relevant law should be abolished. So much of our law is founded on moral questions of degree or issues of current standards or practice. Was he honest? Was she careful? Did he break his word? Did she intend to be legally bound? Did he mislead her? Did she lie to him? Would what he said make others think less of her? Did he mean to hurt her when he said that? Was she offended by that remark? What did he mean when he said that? In that meaning, was it true? Was it fair comment? Will he get a fair hearing? Will my renovation annoy my neighbour? Will it be bad for the amenity of the area? Was her purpose proper? Was he acting with a good conscience? On a bad day, a judge might ask you whether you have come to court with clean hands. (That is the very wording of the law.)

Dealing with the issue of whether conduct is offensive in a legal sense is neither harder nor easier than any of those questions of degree that have either a moral base or that relate to conduct in the community at large – if you like, community values.

And of course there will be laws against offensive behaviour – such as a depraved professional man ogling or pawing schoolgirls on a tram; or a jilted suitor standing outside a church shouting that the bride is a slut and that her mum is worse; or a bystander abusing veterans in an Anzac Day march as war criminals; or a drunken blackfella bursting into the best pub in Kununurra and throwing up in front of a busload of Japanese senior citizens. We have laws to allow police to intervene in such behaviour because in our opinion, it would be uncivilised for any of our citizens to be exposed to the hurt caused by that kind of offensiveness without protection from their government.

The other reason for these laws is related to the first – these kinds of offensiveness constitute a breach of the peace in themselves, and they are likely to lead to worse breaches of the peace if people ae left to help themselves.

And, yes, these laws could be abused, and they were abused by the police in the past before compliant magistrates, but the answer is to control the abuse, and not to abolish the law. All this seems obvious. Do those who want to abolish s 18C – Mr Kelly is not one of them – want to exclude behaviour that offends on the grounds of race – when that kind of offence is likely to be the most wounding and also the most likely to start a fight?

And, yes, laws against offensive language or behaviour do have an inhibiting effect – or, if you prefer, a chilling effect – on the way people behave. Most laws are made for precisely that purpose.

Finally, where and when was the Golden Age of Mr Kelly’s ‘old Australian character’ when the nation was ‘famous for its straight talking’? Assuming that Mr Kelly is not talking of the time of the White Australia Policy, when did we use to talk straight, and when did we stop?

If Mr Kelly is talking of times before laws were made against offensive language or behaviour, he will have to go back before the First Fleet to seek his Arcadia.

Poet of the month: Kenneth Slessor

Waters – Part I

This Water, like a sky that no one uses,

Air turned to stone, written by stars and birds

No longer, but with clouds of crystal swimming,

I’ll not forget, nor men can lose, though words

Dissolve with music, gradually dimming.

So let them die; whatever the mind loses,

Water remains, cables and bells remain,

Night comes, the sailors burn their riding-lamps,

And strangers, pitching on our graves their camps,

Will break through branches to the surf again.

Passing Bull 55 Bullshit about manners, taste and identity

10/08/2016 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Do you know about identity politics? Have you never heard the phrase? Could you give a damn?

If I were to sit down to dinner with Paul Kelly of The Australian, I suspect we could agree on a lot of political issues. But I don’t think that we could agree on how to write about them. Most of what Mr Kelly writes sounds to me like waffle – or bullshit.

Here are extracts from a piece on Saturday under the heading Race, gender: the risk of identity politics; Political correctness is stifling debate and dissent.

Identity politics, pursued in the U S and on display within university campuses and at the recent Democratic National Convention, is about laws, norms and etiquette to protect and advance identity causes.

A powerful movement with deep cultural roots, it testifies to the revolution within leftist and progressive politics since the failure of Soviet communism and the supplementation of class consciousness with identity based on race, sex, gender and ethnicity. This is fused by historic grievance suffered by such identities and their contemporary demand for redress.

The rise of politics based on the question ‘who am I?’ poses further problems of voter fragmentation for both the Coalition and Labor, though Labor has proved astute in channelling some of this sentiment.

This movement proves the ideological creativity of the Left, the manipulative power of human rights law and the perversion of the idea of justice – seen in this country in section 18 C of the Racial Discrimination Act where individuals can initiate legal action because they are ‘offended’ by others.

The politics of identity speaks to deep human need. Yet its application veers towards narcissism, censoring of public debate, vicious campaigns of intimidation and a diminished public square. It is extraordinary to see how many institutions and prominent figures buckle before the campaigns of identity politics, too weak to stand on principle.

The author then refers to the Four Corners program on the shocking abuses of indigenous children in the Northern Territory and says that politicians and the media were reluctant…

The author then refers to an aboriginal commentator who referred of ‘the politically correct ‘selective outrage’ and [who] told the ABC that ‘Blackfellas’ had ‘to take responsibility for their own children,’ and another indigenous commentator who told the newspaper that ‘this was primarily about children who had been failed by their families rather than race’. After those disclosures, the author says that ‘then an honest debate had been sanctioned.’

Australia, once famous for its straight talking, seems a frightened country.

The author then referred to the cartoon by Bill Leak ‘depicting an irresponsible indigenous father who could not recall the name of his son.’ The author refers to the outrage this cartoon provoked, including that of one Minister who said that it was racist, and said that the cartoonist had pointed out the purpose of the cartoon:

Is this Australia’s future? It is certainly the future the progressives want…

…The essence of identity politics runs as follows: because you haven’t shared my identity, you haven’t shared my own oppression and you cannot understand my pain and if you cannot understand my pain you have no right to tell my group how to behave. Identity politics, therefore, is hostile to ideas and debate. Indeed, it mobilises the argument of ‘offence’ as a disincentive to debate and to challenge the right of others to engage in vigorous or provocative public discussion.… Yet it is driven by powerful idea whose essence is ‘respect my identity and don’t offend me.’

….The parallel mechanism is social media – used to brand institutions and people as racist and sexist as a means of destroying them by mass hysteria. In this climate the spirit of Orwell and Voltaire face a slow but sure death. Let’s hope there is still sufficient left of the old Australian character and courage to turn back the tide.

What is going on here?

There is hardly one assertion of verifiable fact in this piece.
What we get are general comments on the kinds of behaviour of kinds of people. There are two levels of abstraction – the kinds of groups of various people, and the different ways in which membership of such groups are said to affect their behaviour. In effect, Mr Kelly is applying labels to groups of people and then more labels to their perceived behaviours. There is no room for you or me as individuals – we only get verbal constructs – that represent phantasms from the fear zone of the author.
What are the criteria for the author’s groups? ‘Race, sex, gender, and ethnicity.’ The first and last look to be identical. The author also mentions class. For reasons we are not told of, any distinctions between groups of people based on caste, class, creed, wealth, sexuality, health, education or age do not qualify for creating issues of ‘identity politics’. Why not? Each of them has been or is poisonous in Australia as setting up barriers between people. Each label has been invoked to deny the individual dignity of real people and not just that of pictured groups.
What is the alleged problem with the behaviour of these groups? People inside the group say that people outside it do not and cannot understand them and are therefore precluded from commenting on them. This is the broadest generalization of all. Many French historians get very close to this precipice when discussing ‘their’ revolution’, but any Chinese, Jewish, gay, Muslem, aged or poor person who made such a claim in Australia would be plain bloody silly. Would they accept the apparent converse – that they might be incapable of understanding or commenting on their estranged critic? Of course white people have trouble following what is happening with blackfellas in the Northern Territory. Most white people in Australia don’t have the faintest idea of how blackfellas live – and most of them are desperately keen to keep it that way. It is the same with refugees. But is absurd to suggest that as a result, white people are not qualified to discuss either. If you want to attach a label to that kind of silly suggestion, one would be ‘racist’.
Mr Kelly does not claim to be standing in the middle on all this. He has a position, or, if you prefer, an agenda. He names his opponents – leftists, progressives, the Left, perverted views on human rights and justice, and the politically correct. The reader is taken to understand what those terms connote. My understanding of them, which is limited, is that these terms have no intellectual content at all, but are code for the labels applied to those who follow Fairfax or the ABC. I gather that the label for the conflict as a whole is ‘culture wars.’ I find it hard to imagine anything more sterile or unbecoming.
May I say something for the term ‘politically correct’, the Antichrist of Mr Kelly? Most people are conscious of differences between themselves and people of a different race; very few think that their group is inferior; most proceed on the contrary basis; there is therefore the basis for conflict between people of different races. We tend to describe such conflict as ‘racist’ or ‘racial’. To take a religious example, it would seem safe to posit that very few Muslems think that their Islam is inferior to the religion of Judaism, Hinduism, Voodoo, or Christianity. The best that we can hope is that people are brought up well enough to avoid showing their feelings to people of a different race in a way that will offend them.
Now, what good manners or courtesy may require are matters of degree in time and space. They are matters on which reasonable people may differ. The phrase ‘politically correct’ is I think too often a label used to obscure if not smear the role of courtesy in discussing sensitive issues like differences in colour or creed or sexuality. We might think that some people go too far and get too precious, but that is no reason to discard courtesy altogether. Courtesy and cutlery are what separate us from the apes. I can well remember a gentle Catholic man at Blackwood telling me he thought a black footballer had gone too far in complaining of being called a black cunt, and I nearly fell over when I read that a former federal minister (Amanda Vanstone) could not understand why Adam Goodes objected to being called an ape, because we are all descended from them! (It is I suspect reactions like these, which I regard as absurd, that cause some blackfellas to say that you have to at least have lived like a blackfella before you can understand how wounding white people might be to them.) But debates at the edge do not warrant the abolition of the centre.
Mr Kelly does not need to explain a lot of his terms because he is using language familiar to most of his readers – who are expected to share his assumptions and to adopt his values. We are then talking in club. At a guess, could that group exceed one in twenty of the adult population? Put differently, could say ninety-five per cent of adult Australians give a bugger about any of these plays on words? What do these questions tell us about the relevance of the Australian press to our politics? Is this a perfect example of the kind of intellectual elitism the wholesale rejection of which has led to the uncomely rise of people like Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Marine le Pen, and Pauline Hanson?
Some of Mr Kelly’s judgment, and it does read a little like a judgment, is not without condescension. We get references to the failure of Soviet communism, the fusion of historic grievances, and the ideological creativity of the Left. We are told ‘the politics of identity speaks to deep human need.’ Well, survivors of the holocaust, or any other genocide, would agree. But would they then ‘veer towards narcissism’? Is this sweep not a bit large? If, as we are, told the question is ‘who am I?’, may not the enquirer face the question put by Snow White when she looked at their mirror? And what is wrong with ‘respect my identity and don’t offend me’? Is that not just to put as a prayer in the first person an injunction normally expressed in the second? How many people walk about asserting the contrary – ‘just walk all over me and get right up my nose?’
And as for the invocation of Orwell and Voltaire, could we have done a bit better with the Enlightenment than Voltaire? What about Kant, who said that each of us has a dignity that derives solely from our humanity? Or are human rights inexcusably suspect? As for Orwell, he said this about political language.

Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

And if you are looking for snobbery, we may put to one side ‘the mass hysteria’ of social media – of which I am blessedly ignorant – but it is hard to overlook ‘the politically correct dumbed down education system.’ Dear, dear, dear – a slogan and a cliché, and some of the poor buggers may have been exposed to government schools.

That is enough for this post. What we have so far is, I suggest, pompous drivel, or, in the style of Mr Kelly, a rant from the Right. I will come back later to deal with the cartoon, the references to the alleged failures of parenthood within the indigenous community, the complaints about s 18C, and Mr Kelly’s invocation of a Golden Age.
May I just mention a piece in The Saturday Paper that made verifiable allegations of fact about aboriginals in the N T? We are told that the Territory has the population of Geelong but that they at Geelong don’t face the same problems – thirty per cent of the population are indigenous, not literate, speak another language, and suffer from various disadvantages. It is then alleged that the government spends more on white people in Darwin than on black people in the sticks. It then offers other critiques of government based on evidence that at least leave me better informed.
Finally, surely the big lesson from recent events in the U K and the U S is not that white people do not know enough about coloured people, but that they don’t understand enough about their own white people outside the current version of the Pale. In short, the complaint is the old one – people who live in Mr Kelly’s bubble don’t know how real people live. They haven’t got the foggiest idea.

Since writing the above, I have watched the Four Corners program. The brutality is horrifying. Authorities gassed children held in close detention; two who thought they were being killed, huddled under a sheet and said good bye to each other; this was just one of the reminders of the hell of prisons described in For the Term of His Natural Life. We have gone backwards since this country started as a barbarous jail. We committed crimes against humanity against children. We now stand further indicted of dismissing those crimes with the claptrap pf Mr Kelly and his colleagues about political correctness and identity politics.

Poet of the Month: Kenneth Slessor

Chessmen

Chafing on flags of ebony and pearl,

My paladins are waiting. Loops of smoke

Stoop slowly from the coffey-cups, and curl

In this fantastic patterns down the room

By cabinets of chinaware, to whirl

With milky-blue tobacco-steam, and fume

Together past our pipes, outside the door.

Soon may we lounge in silence, O my friend?

Behind those carven men-at-arms of chess

Dyed coral-red with dragon’s blood, and spend

The night with noiseless warfare. Queens and rooks

With chiselled ivory warriors must contend

And counter-plots from old Arabian books

Be conjured to the march of knights and pawns.

Passing Bull 53 Bullshit about banks

05/08/2016 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

People go into business to make profits. Banks are publicly listed companies in which shareholders subscribe capital and the directors manage the business to maximise the return of profit to those shareholders in the form of dividends. If they run the business for another purpose, they break the law.

People running a general store in a country town do so to make profits. But they also provide services that the community needs – bread and milk, newspapers, and postal facilities. If they drop some of those services because they are not profitable enough, they will lose trust and goodwill. In a bad case they may be driven out of business.

Any business has to pay some attention to its customers. The banks certainly have to. They occupy a privileged and protected position. They are licenced by government, and de facto guaranteed by government. A government body also controls the price of the basic commodity of banks – borrowed money. That is a very unusual intervention into the market in what is said to be a capitalist economy. It sounds like a kind of ‘dirty float.’

Banks are money lenders. They borrow money at x% and lend it out at y%. The difference between x and y is their profit (or loss). The higher that y is over x, the more profit the bank makes, and the more dividends go to shareholders.

In principle, it would be quite wrong for the bank to prefer the interests of its customers – the borrowers – and take less back from them, because that way they would be putting the interests of bank borrowers ahead of their shareholders. They bank directors are not allowed to do that.

Yet that is what we hear governments asking them to do by passing on the full fall of the cost of money to the banks to the borrowers rather than doing what they can to maintain profits for shareholders. The bank directors have to make a business judgment about their standing in the community and its effects on the profitability of their bank, but otherwise government ministers howl for show. Even our Treasurer might see that.

People don’t like moneylenders, and they have lost faith in Australian banks. They stop us getting access to real people who know us and what they are doing. They are offering incentives to their people to cheat and they are paying people more than five times what we pay our brain and heart surgeons. They ruthlessly exploit silly people who borrow long on credit cards, and they in fact derive a lot of their capital from timid investors who think it is better to deposit their money in a bank rather than profit from investing in it. Macquarie Bank makes people very ill because it makes big profits from dodgy deals like those that brought on by the GFC – while you and I stand behind it. As a mate said during the GFC, if Macquarie falls over, it will have been worthwhile.

Yes, banks are ugly and untrustworthy, but they are not there to be ordered around by government. Leave that to Mr Putin. We are said to believe in competition.

Poet of the Month: Kenneth Slessor

William Street

The red globes of light, the liquor-green,

The pushing arrows and the running fire

Spilt on the tongues, go deeper than a stream;

You find this ugly, I find it lovely.

Ghosts’ trousers, like the dangle of hung men,

In pawn-shop windows, bumping knee by knee,

But none inside to suffer or condemn;

You find this ugly, I find it lovely.

Smells rich and rasping, smoke and fat and fish

And puffs of paraffin that crimp the nose,

Or grease that blesses onions with a hiss;

You find this ugly, I find it lovely.

The dips and molls, with flip and shiny gaze

(Death at their elbows, hunger at their heels)

Ranging the pavements of their pasturage;

You find this ugly, I find it lovely.

Passing bull 52 – Problems with labels

26/07/2016 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

One of Andy Warhol’s more confronting works was a painting of a can of Campbell’s soup. Was that art? Well, it depends on the criteria you apply to fix that label. And that reminds us of the remark of George Bush Senior that labels are what you stick on cans of soup.

Here in Cambridge for a Summer School on revolutions, you see historical labels used in the conventional way that they are applied by historians. But we must remember that there was in fact no such thing as ‘the French Revolution’ or ‘the English Revolution’. Those terms are merely labels that we apply to series of events – and there is great disagreement about which events satisfy that label for the French case, and where it, the revolution, started and finished – let alone how and why.

The purist might therefore be unsettled to read that he is doing a week’s course on ‘John Milton and the English Revolution’ when the same tutor is giving a lecture on the Friday on ‘Was there a revolution in 17^th century England.’ Well, most historians would say that there were at least two series of events that would warrant that label, but what if the lecturer answers no? Have we been walking on quicksand all week?

Similarly, one essay topic is ‘Did the Terror save or betray the Revolution?’ ‘Terror’ is another label for a series of events, and current events show just how slippery it is. How does one label ‘save or betray’ anything, let alone another label?

Playing with abstractions is an occupational hazard at any university – or indeed in any profession.

Poet of the month: Keats

Ode on a Grecian Urn (41-50)

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Cambridge –a big night out

25/07/2016 / Geoffrey Gibson / 3 Comments

It was like a Breughel painting. A graphic Hades.

The last time I came to Cambridge for one of these summer schools, people were invited to arrive on the Sunday, since courses start at 9 am on Monday, and some bastard forgot to open the bar. There was ill feeling. There was serious ill feeling, and some very rude remarks about the English.

Today, Sunday evening, I was assured by the porter at Selwyn College that the bar would be open at 6 pm. A Presbyterian sense of determinism led me to the off licence to buy some insurance.

Sure enough, as I got near the bar at the appointed time, the porter told me that the bar would not be open tonight. She suggested that I show for dinner at half six. I repaired to my room and consoled myself with the insurance of the bottle shop. I was annoyed. One of the reasons I have gone to Oxford and Cambridge – the choice of tense is not accidental – was to enjoy the company of people who know they have a lot to learn. I have done about half of a dozen at each, and I know something of what is on offer.

So, at half six, I approached the appointed place at the college hall not expecting grace in Latin, or at all, as I used to get at Maddingley Hall, but a reasonable meal with reasonable wine in good company. My heart miss-gave as I heard a racket emerging from the hall. I could recall eating in the hall. It is one of those stately halls garbed in timber, but it has some modern portraits of people who look frankly fascist, and a column embraced proscenium where you think some impeccably dressed white gentleman might do something unfortunate to a goat. Tonight the hall could have hosted a pregame function for Man-U.

It was choc-full, like a footy crowd, with cafeteria service. Start with the pudding, Dear, then choose between ravioli and roast chicken, and you can add chips, and one of those little bottles of sham red with little round glasses that you used to get on TAA in the fifties. Which you pay extra for – remember, Ducky, the bar’s shut.

I bore my tray to a spot where I spied some room for my plate, and wine, as unworthy as they both were, and I sat down. When one of a group of aquiline matrons told me that there was no cutlery in my spot. I recall now it was the end of the table. I was – really – minded to ask whether she had adored Jefferson to utter such a self-evident truth, but I was morbidly preoccupied by wondering whether the excision under her bottom lip had been transposed to the top of the nose. Before she moved away – not without ostentation – she told me that that since I had been to Cambridge before, she might tell me that people had previously been seated in the hall by reference to their standing, or words to that effect, but that that rule had been recently relaxed. She just wanted me to know that I was in a state of grace. But that I should know better.

I fled.

Now, this kind of balls-up happens. And we chuckle about it after a few drinks, and we try to put the outrage to good use. That which does not kill us makes us better, some say.

The whole overturn now going on in the West refutes that silly saying. As does the decline and fall of the Roman Empire – or anybody that whose time is up.

This balls-up at Selwyn College was an outrage. This insolence of office is not good enough. And it is a terrible symptom of our times. People who should know better are just failing us – and the revenge of the losers looks frightful. If this kind of insult can be put on us at Selwyn College, Cambridge, what hope have we?

My late father – God bless him – told me that he was used to being insulted, but that he preferred to be insulted by experts. Tonight I learned again what Mac meant.

Passing bull 52 – Asking the wrong question

15/07/2016 / Geoffrey Gibson / 3 Comments

A simple way to go off the rails and descend into bullshit is to ask the wrong question. As it happens, the law applied this technique to allow courts to interfere with administrative decisions of government. Judges can’t override government just because they disagree with the decision, but they can set aside a decision if the government department did not have the power to make such a decision – and if the judges thought that the department had asked the wrong question, then they might find that it had acted beyond its powers in reaching its answer to that question. On that ground, the court could set aside the original decision.

The FBI has just decided that there was insufficient evidence to charge Hillary Clinton over her emails. They plainly had power to make that decision. They then added that she had been careless. Where did they get the power – some might say ‘right ‘ – to ask a question that could lead them to decide to make and publish that judgment?

There is a clear trend away from the traditional two party system in Australia and the UK, and to a lesser extent the U S. That being so, you might very well be asking yourself the wrong questions if you analyse current election results in two party terms. Yet that is what most commentators have been doing after the federal election just concluded. So many seats turned on the role of small parties and independents, and one major party is rejoicing even though it barely secured a little more than a third of the overall vote.

So far as I know, Laura Tingle of the AFR, who is in my view our best commentator, is the only one to have said so.

What happened in Eden-Monaro on Saturday night is once again a talisman for this election campaign, but not in the traditional sense.

For, like almost every other seat that has definitively changed hands so far in this election, the real story was not about a swing from one major party to the other but a complex story of shifting minor party votes and preferences.

Understanding what has happened in these seats – and we obviously won’t have a complete picture until the count is complete – is important to understand the lessons of the election.

But it also makes much of the commentary about the strengths and weaknesses of both major parties’ campaigns in recent days fairly farcical…….

What the primary votes suggest is that what was noted throughout the campaign – that neither side of politics had really been able to engage a lot of swinging voters – proved true on polling day; that a myriad of other, often very local factors, had as much of a role in determining the outcome as any national message, and that disillusioned voters turned very deliberately to minor parties instead.

Winning and losing candidates from both major parties report seeing an unprecedented level of local issues affecting votes from booth to booth, whether it be council amalgamations, mobile phone towers and in some smaller centres the ‘Mediscare’…….

Both sides – and both winners and losers – talk of all the voters who quite knowingly voted for minor parties in a vacuum of trust of either leader, and a vacuum which also extended to the Greens…….

In this environment, the election outcome became more of a lottery than normal as the differing preferences of minor parties played out, often against each other.

…….. much of the post-election discussion continues to be conducted as if it were a two horse race.

Poet of the month: Keats

Ode to a Nightingale – Part VIII

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintiff anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now ‘tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music – Do I wake or sleep?