Poetry

Passing bull 67 – The school choir, gibberish, and hypocrisy at The Australian

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

In The Australian of  24 September, three writers sang as a choir after the Prime Minister made a speech in New York that they liked on a subject that has many Australians very upset.

Greg Sheridan

Malcolm hits his stride with refugee barriers

Turnbull’s clear, strong statements in New York in defence of the Howard – Abbott – Turnbull policies on immigration and asylum seeker policy represent vindication of the distinctive Australian approach.

The effective conversion of the British and German leaders, Theresa May and Angela Merkel, to a similar approach demonstrates the soundness of our policy.

Turnbull sounded this week like the self-confident leader of a centre – right government, moderately conservative but tough-minded, pragmatic and compassionate, who has come to grips with one of the most wicked policy dilemmas in contemporary life.

That is his best register.  It is the hope of his government and to some extent of Australian politics.  It represents a Turnbull liberation from the gruesome shackles of political correctness.

Chris Kenny

Promising signs of good governance as Turnbull’s team sharpens its performance

The split-second volatility of modern political commentary – like the computer-driven peaks and troughs of modern markets – has an ill-defined but undeniable influence on outcomes.  One of the reasons political leadership has been so unstable in recent years is that the media has jumped en masse to polls and prodding, and this has spooked impressionable politicians…

After seizing the job a year ago he [Turnbull] invited upon himself  four significant burdens: a lack of legitimacy because of how he attained the job; inflated expectations as the public and the media invested their hopes in him; the imperative to deliver on economic reform; and the need to retain power by winning an election.……

Post-election, the legitimacy issue no longer lingers (although many conservatives will never forgive his treachery)…

Certainly his rhetoric on border protection in New York this week suggests the Prime Minister is no longer worried about sounding like an Eastern suburbs version of his predecessor…[There is a clear message from Turnbull regarding ‘people smugglers.’]   Staying strong on such issues reassures not only the public but also the conservative MPs in his own party.

To assert leadership and offer comfort to the broader electorate he is also going to have to speak more openly about the issues of domestic Islamic extremism and Muslim integration.

Dennis Shanahan

Look who has rediscovered his mojo in words of unabashed conservatism

Across time, Turnbull has learned to balance his natural lesson-than-conservative nature and real commitment to encouraging social harmony with the hard words that reassure the broader public on border protection and the threat of Islamist terror.…

‘The public are entitled to expect their government will control their borders’, he said after he publicly adopted John Howard’s fundamental line on determining ‘who comes to our country’ as the basis for a strong humanitarian program.

Turnbull doesn’t see the apparent development and correctly says he was always comfortable with the policy of tough border protection.  Of course, and he acknowledged this past week in Parliament, the present success stands on the achievements of Howard and Tony Abbott.

Well, guess which team these boys play for. There is no doubt about what faction of the Liberal Party these three subscribe to, but what do they mean by the word ‘conservative’?  Where did we get this obsession with border protection and Islam and political correctness?  And does anyone on this earth really believe that people like Angela Merkel or Theresa May are influenced by John Howard or Tony Abbott?

All this may be bullshit, but that can hardly be said of these two extracts from Jennifer Oriel.

 

ALP’S ANTI-PLEBICITE DRIVE REFLECTS AUDACITY OF HATE

There is something rather dangerous about the gay marriage debate – and it is not homosexuality or marriage.

It is the view widely held by our political Left that liberal democratic precepts can be overridden whenever they interfere with politically correct ideology.

Not content merely to deny the democratic mandate of millions who endorsed the same-sex marriage plebiscite by voting the coalition into power, Labor is sowing civil hatred as social order.

The abysmal and divisive new ethos of Labor is the audacity of hate.…

It is reframing the plebiscite debate by exploiting fear and manipulating emotion.  In one short week, labour has succeeded in reframing the founding principles of liberal democracy as manifestations of hatred – all in the name of love, of course.

In Labor’s grand lexicon of doublespeak, public reason, active citizenship, and the human right to free thought and speech, freedom of association and religion are mistranslated into forms of hatred.  And the citizen who seeks active participation in democracy by advocating for the same–sex marriage plebiscite is, by extension, hatred personified.

Increasingly it is the case that whenever a question of social reform arises, the political Left reverts to the audacity of hate to coerce people into conformity.

Its default position is to mob and vilify dissenters.

It acts as though Australia were a country under democratic socialism rather than liberal democracy…

During the last week, the Socialist Left position on gay marriage has been promulgated by Labor, the Greens and the state media institutions that consistently prosecute the Left party line: SBS and ABC.

DARKNESS FALLS ACROSS AMERICA

The US presidential race is a tale of two philistines whose common promise is a descent into darkness.  Each has rejected the animating spirit of the traditional Left and Right – the God of reason and the God of grace – whose unity gave birth to the modern West and the free world.

In the place of enlightenment, Hillary Clinton champions emotionalism, unreason and the barbarian fetish for supernatural rule over the sovereignty of liberal democratic people.  Donald Trump rises on a reactionary platform typified by an oppositional stance to anything establishment.  Neither champions reason.  Neither champions the form of freedom.  Neither promises the redemption that America so desperately needs.…

Rather, Trump’s America is a counter-revolution in waiting.  We know what has preceded it: the neo-Marxist march against Western civilisation whose gross dilation finds form in state-sanctified minority supremacy and the political correctness that sustains it.  But no one knows what might proceed from a Trump presidency except a counter-revolution against P C Left culture by the progressive dismantling of its government agencies, the media, the activist judiciary and universities…

Neither Trump nor Clinton augurs the restoration of American greatness.  But Trump is brash and arrogant enough to lead a counter-revolution on the premise of American exceptionalism.  The brutal lesson of Trump’s ascendancy is that to battle the philistines, sometimes you have to act like one.

That is just gibberish.

But the prize for bullshit in hypocrisy goes to Janet Albrechtsen.  She says that an American commentator on Trump ‘understood what so many conceited commentators don’t get.’

Chatting among like-minded people is the surest way to close your mind to reasoned debate.  It inhibits the gathering of knowledge and intellectual honesty.

It fairly takes your breath away.

Poet of the Month: Verlaine

 

 

Dusk

The moon is red on the misted horizon;

In a fog that dances, the meadow

Sleeps in the smoke, frogs bellow

In green reeds through which frissons run;

The lilies close their shutters,

The poplars stretch far away,

Tall and serried, their spectres stray;

Among bushes the fireflies flicker;

The owls are awake, in soundless flight

They row through the air on heavy wings,

The zenith fills, sombrely glowing.

Pale Venus emerges, and it is Night.

Passing bull 66 – Fallacies in debate

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

When I started in defamation trials more than forty years ago, there was a fallacy that there was a defence to defamation of ‘gross and vulgar abuse’ – ‘I was full and I didn’t really mean to go over the top like that.’  There was of course no such defence.  The most that you could argue is that in all the circumstances, the words complained of did not bear the meaning contended for by the plaintiff.  Decades later, a young woman starting in politics came to me complaining that on election night her opponent had called her a ‘fucking whore’ in the presence of others.  I suggested that she might cop a lot worse than that before she was finished and that it might be better to get on with her life.  She rang back, and said that she felt affronted as a human being and wanted to sue.  When we did, the other side said he was drunk and that this was merely ‘gross and vulgar abuse.’  The client and I thought this made the libel worse.  So did the court.

Trump has sought to use the same fallacy to excuse his vile sex tape.  You just change the label on the box – a libel becomes mere vulgar abuse; an affront to women becomes mere locker room banter.  It doesn’t work; it makes the original offence worse.  What is ‘locker room banter’?  It’s what men say when there are no women present.  That’s when they are frank, and let their hair down.  That’s when the truth comes out.  Like when they’re full.  In vino veritas.  It is decades since I was in a locker room but the relevant sayings then included: ‘They’re all the same height horizontal.’  ‘They’re all pink inside.’ ‘Hang them upside down and they’re all sisters.’ ‘A rising prick has no conscience.’  So, if this was a locker-room banter, we know that it expresses true feelings.  They are of course absolutely in character here.  What was said was not just offensive to women, but an affront to humanity.  The man is a pig.  And the worst part was the sniggering sycophancy of a member of the Bush family.

A second fallacy was also typical.  The ad hominem response.  ‘She says I’m guilty; she’s more guilty; her husband’s the worst of the lot’.  There was a grotesque parade of complainants.  This fallacy reached the level of insanity.  ‘Yes I exploited a tax loop-hole, but she is also to blame because she was a member of the Senate that failed to block the loop-hole.’  This type of mutual personal abuse is what is killing politics.

The worst fallacy was in calling this televised bullfight or TV ringside a debate.  In a debate, people use rational arguments to try to persuade others of their argument.  A presidential debate would involve trying to persuade others that you have the character, training, and experience to be President.  You hardly see any of that.  All you get is a brawl as part of reality TV.  And the TV stations are up to their necks in promoting it as such.  Why not?  That’s their business.  The result is that there is no meaning to the question who ‘won’ the ‘debate’ because there was no such thing.  If you had a real debate between these two, Trump could never win.  He is morally and intellectually incapable of sustaining a rational argument.  It follows that when people say Trump ‘won’, they are saying that he was the better showman on the reality TV show.  That is of course his real trade.

And that is why Andrew Bolt celebrated Trump’s comeback and denounced the liberal press for not saying enough about the crimes of the Clintons.

Save Our Souls.

Poet of the Month: Verlaine

Dusk

The moon is red on the misted horizon;

In a fog that dances, the meadow

Sleeps in the smoke, frogs bellow

In green reeds through which frissons run;

The lilies close their shutters,

The poplars stretch far away,

Tall and serried, their spectres stray;

Among bushes the fireflies flicker;

The owls are awake, in soundless flight

They row through the air on heavy wings,

The zenith fills, sombrely glowing.

Pale Venus emerges, and it is Night.

Passing bull 65 – Murdoch and Fairfax

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

During a time of great conflict in England between the Crown and the Parliament, John Dunning had carried a famous motion in the House of Commons (in 1780) – ‘that the influence of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished.’  We see the same issue in relations between the government and the press in Australia.

A lot of Passing Bull draws on the Murdoch press.  I have been asked whether I thought that The Age had a left wing bias.  My answer is as follows.

I have trouble with the premise.  The left and right split started in Paris after 1789.  The left came to stand for terrorism.  Since then it has been associated with socialism.  The right was associated with fascism and various other ‘isms’.  I sought elsewhere to see the difference.

The ‘left’ tend to stand for the poor and the oppressed against the interests of power and property and established institutions.  The ‘right’ stand for the freedom of the individual in economic issues, and seek to preserve the current mode of distribution.  The left is hopeful of government intervention and change; the right suspects government intervention and is against change.  The left hankers after redistribution of wealth, but is not at its best creating it.  The right stoutly opposes any redistribution of wealth, and is not at its best in celebrating it.  The left is at home with tax; the right loathes it.  These are matters of degree that make either term dangerous.  Either can be authoritarian.  On the left, that may lead to communism.  On the right, you may get fascism.

In the result, I don’t think that this outworn terminology helps to throw any light on any current political issue in Australia or elsewhere.  The ‘left’ is a word generally applied as a term pf abuse by people who would not be happy to be called ‘right’ wing.  Writers for The Australian are serial abusers.

Nor do I think that the Liberal and Labor parties stand for any doctrinal differences.  Take for example the economy, taxation, education, health, and the aged – what differences in policy driven by the different platforms of the two parties do you see?

If I’m right about this, and most people agree with me, our party politics look unprincipled.  This is one reason why people are going off political parties.  The politicians scrabble around for the middle ground.  They are too scared to take a stand on principle – just look at the invasion of Iraq and offshore detention.  Principled opposition across the community on each issue got almost no reflection in Parliament.  In the eyes of many, this nation stands diminished as a result.  That is a reason why people have gone off politics as a whole.

I don’t read The Age for politics.  The only people in the mainstream press that I read on our politics are Laura Tingle and Philip Coorey in the AFR.  They are in my view both professional and sensible in ways that I don’t see in The Australian.  Anyone who says that they are left wing is mad.  (Anyone who says that the editorial is left is beyond madness.)  I don’t regard The Age political reporters as unprofessional.  They just seem to me to be anaemic or bland and predictable.  If anything, I don’t think The Age goes in hard enough.  I may be quite unfair in saying that.

But I do get the impression that writers and readers of The Age are more willing to confront the Coalition than those at The Australian.  That is not saying much.  The readers of The Australian who write to it overwhelmingly support the Coalition and the status quo.  And they do so with fervour. (Two litmus tests of the different attitudes of readers of the two papers are John Howard and renewable energy.  I see no ideological link there.)

But to some extent, I suppose that The Age may be said to be partisan.  I don’t see it that way.  I see the role of the press as being to watch and criticise government, and I don’t see The Age as being inhibited in discharging that function when Labor is in office.  Indeed, I have friends in that party who never forgave that paper for savaging it at both state and federal levels during various phases of my maturity.  One thing you won’t hear alleged is that the Murdoch press has a more principled position on Australian political parties than the Fairfax press.

But let us say that The Age may strike some as partisan.  The difference remains.  It does not suffer any of the three defects or vices that run through contributors to The Australian and which provide such a ripe source of bullshit.  As I have remarked: ‘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.’  Those factors appear to me to drive the failures of professionalism in the journalism of that paper.  Do they not all come together in Mr Mitchell’s breathtaking accounts of confidential discussions between a Murdoch editor and our fawning and insecure prime ministers?  What could be better guaranteed to nauseate us against our leaders and our press?

The ABC is commonly referred to as a fellow traveller of Fairfax.  I have a bias here.  I acted for the ABC for more than 25 years.  I did not see political bias.  On the contrary, they were terrified of such an allegation.  They went of their way to present both sides.  The ABC is a very large body that has no commanding editorial voice.  It is unthinkable that it could openly endorse a political party as organs of the media run for profit do as of course.  The notion that the ABC is somehow left wing, whatever that means, has always told me more about the accuser than the accused.

People in the Murdoch press are wont to say that the ABC is taxpayer funded.  That adds as much to the discussion as saying that the Murdoch press is funded by capitalists.  Both rely on funding by the public, but there is always likely to be a massive difference in culture between those who own and work for the ABC and those who own and work for News or Sky.  That is a fact of life for which we all may fairly thank heaven.  If the national broadcaster were one quarter as partisan as the Murdoch press, it would have been wound up decades ago.  And when will we get a poll that tells us which of the ABC and Murdoch press most Australians put more faith in?  To my mind, it is just silly to suggest that Aunty might be as slippery as Rupert.

The attributes of the writers for The Australian that I have referred to make that paper susceptible to bullshit that in many quarters makes it just laughable.  The nostrums about ‘classical liberalism’ that they salute are pure bullshit.  The tendency to descend to ideology is of itself enough to put off most Australians.

Currently, there are three aggravating factors.  First, those on the side of reaction are fixated on four issues that they find it hard to discuss rationally – climate change (their reaction to the South Australian blackout has been hilarious), gay marriage, extremism in Islam, and s 18C.  On each issue, they look like bad losers and it is hard to see history smiling on them.  It is hard to see any ideological foundation for their obsession.

Secondly, the personal relationships that some writers have with Tony Abbott and the failed rump of the Liberal Party produce exactly the same effect.  As a result, they now threaten to do to the Liberal Party what the DLP did to Labor – with the keen support of a loaded press.

There is a third aggravating factor.  The constant harping and bitching about the ABC and Fairfax is grossly unprofessional.  Grossly.  I have never seen Q&A but The Australian can claim credit for putting its ratings through the roof.  If a doctor or lawyer spent so much time slagging off at others, you would fire them.

You can see all these factors in play to a degree that is comical on various programs on Sky twenty-four hours a day.  It is like listening to a Magpie supporter after another losing Grand Final.  It would be childish to suggest that these cheerleaders are behaving like professional journalists.  They must get sick of hearing the same old tune as soon as the needle settles into the groove.  And they love talking about the ordinary bloke of the street being alienated from the system when they are an integral part of both the system and the alienation.  Some of the Abbott mourners on Sky still keep re-enacting their own passion play every night.  You don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

That is why I think that the Looney Tunes have in the last generation moved from Labor to Liberal, and that is why the Liberal Party is now suffering more internally than Labor.  Paradoxically, Murdoch is undermining Australian conservatives.

And that’s also why I’m so bloody glad that most Australians think that all this is just so much bullshit.  The downside is that we put up with it.

Poet of the Month: Verlaine

Circumspection


Give me your hand, still your breath, let’s rest

Under this great tree where the breeze dies

Beneath grey branches, in broken sighs,

The soft, tender rays of the moon caress.

Motionless, and lowering our eyes,

Not thinking, dreaming. Let love that tires

Have its moment, and happiness that expires,

Our hair brushed by the owl as it flies.

Let’s forget to hope. Discreet, content,

So the soul of each of us stays intent

On this calm, this quiet death of the sun.

We’ll rest, silent, in a peaceful nocturne:

It’s wrong to disturb his sleep, this one,

Nature, the god, fierce and taciturn.

Passing Bull 64 – Doing nothing

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

We don’t like being left in doubt or uncertainty.  We feel exposed or somehow guilty if we face a problem and elect to do nothing in response.  One simple rule is that if you have nothing to say, it’s best to shut up – but we have trouble in extending that maxim into the realm of action.  We tend to be biased in favour of action over inaction.  One maxim might be that if you can’t predict the outcome of a proposed course of action, but it is one that may hurt you or others, hold your hand, unless circumstances dictate that you have no reasonable alternative but to pursue that option.

An Israeli researcher into psychology evaluated penalty shoot-outs in soccer.  The ball takes a fraction of a second to go from boot to goal.  The goalkeeper can’t assess the trajectory and then decide which way to go.  He has to commit before the ball is kicked.  Strikers opt for three options more or less equally – go to the left, go to the right, or shoot straight at the centre.  Staying in the middle would be a reasonable option for the goalkeeper, since that is where about one third of shots go, and where they have the best option of blocking the shot.  But most dive to the right or left.  Why?  Because you look stupid if you are seen to do nothing and just watch the ball sail past.  The study confirmed that goalkeepers are biased in favour of action.

This bias is the bane of small shareholders.  They keep thinking that they should do something when their best strategy is to acquire stakes in good businesses and just collect the dividends and watch the market go up and down – volatility is different to risk.  But there are buildings full of people whose whole   livelihood depends on people not being content to sit on their investments – their business depends on other people’s trading in shares.  Their business depends on people being busy.

In his book, The art of thinking clearly, Rolf Dobelli quotes the main adviser to Warren Buffett: ‘We’ve got discipline in avoiding just doing any damn thing because you can’t stand inactivity.’  In the Epilogue, Dobelli says that ‘Negative knowledge (what not to do) is much more important than positive knowledge (what to do).’  And he again refers to the Buffett adviser: ‘Charlie and I have not learned how to solve difficult business problems.  What we have learned is to avoid them.’  We just find it hard to resist the suggestion that doing something is better than doing nothing.  That position is commonly dead wrong.  The French philosopher Blaise Pascal memorably said: ‘All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’  Investors should remember that advice of Pascal.  Its proof lies in Donald Trump.  Warren Buffett says: ‘Inactivity strikes us as intelligent behaviour.’

Keats found the answer in Shakespeare:

At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

The need to do something – anything – is behind most of the mistakes the west has made in intervening in the Middle East.  A parliamentary committee has just condemned David Cameron for deciding to bomb Libya.  The English parliament refused to endorse action in Syria.  The problem of intervention is obvious – when can you leave?

As I follow it, we are engaged in bombing Syria.  Putin and Assad are targeting civilians and hospitals.  We are aiding them.  The evidence coming out of Aleppo is beyond horror.  Put to one side whether we are accessories to war crimes including ethnic cleansing, common humanity demands that we get out of Syria.  Whatever interest we may have had in our own self-defence, it cannot stand up against the horror of Aleppo.  We cannot be a party to the greatest failure of humanity since the Third Reich.

 

Poet of the month: Paul Verlaine

 

 It rains in my heart

 

It rains in my heart

As it rains on the town,

What languor so dark

That soaks to my heart?

 

Oh sweet sound of the rain

On the earth and the roofs!

For the dull heart again,

Oh the song of the rain!

 

It rains for no reason

In this heart lacking heart.

What? And no treason?

It’s grief without reason.

 

By far the worst pain,

Without hatred, or love,

Yet no way to explain

Why my heart feels such pain!

Passing Bull 63 – A fine miscellany for Grand Final weekend

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 10 Comments

 

1

The CBA boss makes more than $12 million a year.  (Perhaps I should say that he gets paid that much.)  A quarter of his bonus would be a lot more than what we pay our Prime Minister or Chief Justice.  It will now turn on a reference to ‘diversity, inclusion, sustainability and culture’.  Not surprisingly, some in the market thought that this formula was at best bullshit, and at worst a ruse.  The bank, in which I have shares, responded in kind – with bullshit.

CBA occupies a special role in the Australian economy and society and it is important to ensure our executive remuneration hurdles can adapt and reflect the views of a wide range of stakeholders, including employees, partners, customers and the community more broadly.

The introduction of the people and community hurdle as part of the long-term incentives for our executives does not reduce the focus on long-term shareholder interests and forms part of our social licence to operate.

We believe strong performance in this area, similar to that of customer satisfaction, leads to strong and sustainable shareholder outcomes in the long term.

Well there is a bit more to it than a licence, either social or legal.  The banks are privileged – we stand behind them, so that their executives, with no capital at stake, cart home millions in bonuses, under cover of our guarantee.

And as any partner of a law firm will tell you, if you think you can award bonuses on any criterion except money, you are stroking yourself shamelessly.

(Footnote.  The US bank Wells Fargo is in big trouble for having false accounts.  That’s not good for a bank. A Senate hearing asked why the bank had fired 5,300 employees but taken no action against executives.  The WSJ says that the CEO has now forfeited US $41 million, about a quarter of what he has earned over 35 years.  Now, here’s the question.  The bank operates on public money and it trades on public trust.  The CEO has presided over a public scandal.  How could the bank find its CEO culpable to the tune of $41 million and not fire him?  Is capitalism as we know it disappearing up its own bum?)

2

In The Australian, Mr Greg Sheridan said that there is a determination across the leading figures of government ‘that the immigration program should not import trouble’.  We will ‘minimise the number of Middle Eastern Muslims, especially young men, who can come permanently to Australia.’  The ‘special provision of 12,000 extra people to be taken from Syria will comprise a majority of Christians.’  And our government is doing all this ‘without breaching Australia’s long-standing non-discriminatory immigration program.  It has also done so without any minister or representative making any statement which could remotely be described as anti-Muslim.’

Even Saint Augustine or Saint Aquinas would have had trouble in explaining how we could prefer Christians to Muslims without discriminating against Muslims – but, apparently, stealth covers all.  It takes your breath away.  The shortest poem of my mate Chris Wallace-Crabbe says: ‘Whatever Christ meant, it wasn’t this.’

3

The State of Arizona runs posses.  That’s right – posses.  That of Maricopa County is a 1,000 person force of volunteers who buy their own uniforms and guns and sometimes their own marked patrol cars.  Its Sheriff is an 84 year-old who has been elected five times.  He calls himself ‘America’s toughest sheriff.’  In 2011, he assigned a five-member ‘cold case posse’, funded by ‘conservatives’ (= nuts) across America to investigate whether his president had faked evidence of his birth in America.  The Sheriff announced his conclusion the following year – the certificate released by the White House was a ‘computer-generated forgery.’  A federal judge has recommended that he be prosecuted for contempt for defying court orders to stop racially biased policing.

The sun is setting in and on the West.  It must have been quite a night in Honolulu when the Arizona posse descended from the sky.

4

The RAND Corporation has inquired into the Immigration Department. They are WBP (World’s Best Practice) bull artists.

A significant review of detention capability is under way….A departmental report is in the process of being finalised that will provide recommendations to further strengthen the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of detention operations as well as recast the role of detention into a more strategic context, connected to detention priorities and focused on the detention of higher-risk persons while enabling status resolution of others in the community.

Also being implemented are a new detention placement model and better risk assessments and management of detainees….Efforts are under way to address all aspects of the detention system.

Such areas as escapees, the wellbeing of detainees (with a particular focus on the protection of children and families) and the mental health of detainees are being considered within the newly developed documentation……

Investigations are hindered by the lack of unified platforms, including integrated information technology systems…. The ongoing intelligence integration at the department level has yet to be fully pushed down to the regional commands…. Building of a single department culture has been hindered by lack of progress in the learning and development area.  Infrastructure – particularly related to detention activities – was cited as another issue requiring attention…..All of these shortfalls have a direct effect on the ability to conduct investigations in the field.

There is a risk that I’m being unfair and that some of the above may have been taken out of context, because I have taken it from a press report, but I can’t help thinking that the Soviets should have called on RAND to bless the gulag.

5

The markets closed higher after the first Clinton and Trump debate. Mrs Clinton was seen to have won.  Trump was thought to have done poorly.  (The Huffington Post only found sixteen lies by Trump in an hour and a half.)  Still, what would the markets know about Trump?  Look at BREXIT.  Trump is America’s answer to Sam Newman.  The more like an animal he gets, the more popular he becomes.

Martin Wolf is a conservative columnist for a conservative paper, The Financial Times.  Mr Wolf says this.

Sometimes history jumps. Think of the first world war, the Bolshevik revolution, the Great Depression, the election of Adolf Hitler, the second world war, the beginning of the cold war, the collapse of the European empires, Deng Xiaoping’s ‘reform and opening up’ of China, the demise of the Soviet Union, and the financial crisis of 2007-09 and subsequent ‘great recession’.

We may be on the brink of an event as transformative as many of these: the election of Donald Trump as US president. This would mark the end of a US-led west as the central force in global affairs. The result would not be a new order. It would be perilous disorder.

The fact that Mr Trump can be a credible contender for the presidency is astounding. In business, he is a serial defaulter and litigator turned reality TV star. He is a peddler of falsehoods and conspiracy theories. He utters racist calumnies. He attacks the independence of the judiciary. He refuses to reveal his taxes. He has no experience of political office and incoherent policies. He glories in ignorance. He even hints at a federal default. He undermines confidence in the US-created trade order, by threatening to tear up past agreements. He undermines confidence in US democracy by claiming the election will be rigged. He supports torture and the deliberate killing of the families of alleged terrorists. He admires the former KGB agent who runs Russia.

Mr Wolf therefore shares my astonishment.

I may add that in my view there is a failure of logic in a lot of the opposition to Mrs Clinton.  I entirely agree that she has form for lying and has a history that leaves her untrustworthy.  But to my mind it does not follow that therefore Mrs Clinton is unfit to hold office as President of the United States.  As presidents of the U S go since Harry Truman, Mrs Clinton would be at least par for the course – look at Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush (senior), Clinton, Bush (junior), and Obama.  To my mind, the first and last of those and Bush (senior) would be the three that Mrs Clinton would have most trouble in bettering.  And all that is before you look at what is said to be the alternative.

This failure of thought is why the U S is fading as the leader of the west, and why Putin and Xi are rubbing their hands.  H L Mencken is credited with saying that no-one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.  He was speaking of tabloid newspapers that were directed at the less well educated, what Mencken called ‘near-illiterates’.  What he in fact said was:

No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

Trump is a tabloid politician who directs himself to people who think that the more lies he tells, the better placed he is for high political office.  It will be interesting to watch their faces if he wins and then turns his back on those silly enough to back him.

6

Meanwhile the same-sex marriage issue sputters toward moral and intellectual bankruptcy.  People are bored stiff, but the mess of this inability to govern shows exactly how far our politicians have failed us.  The mess was started by factional desperation in the Liberal Party and it is now being made worse by appalling opportunism in the Labor Party.  (The more I see Shorten, the more I think that he is as unprincipled as he is spineless, like a school prefect beetling off to the Headmaster to finger a class-mate.)

The factional desperation of the Liberal troglodytes looks to be driven by religion on this issue.  It is at best ironic that these are the same reactionaries who fret so much about fanatics in another faith, and the inability of subscribers to that faith to keep their religion out of politics.

As Gough said to a minder at a function where someone got his name or office wrong, ‘Comrade, we are surrounded by savages.’

7

Finally, here’s some good news.  Do you remember the hysteria when we bought Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles?  And the bullshit – ‘my five year old could do better.’  According to the AFR, we just insured it for $350 million.  Gough paid $1.3 million for it – about one tenth of the annual package of the CEO of CBA.

Note: after the poem there is set out the current book catalogue of the author.

 

Poet of the Month: Ibsen

 

Gone

 

The last, late guest

To the gate we followed;

Goodbye — and the rest

The night-wind swallowed.

 

House, garden, street,

Lay tenfold gloomy,

Where accents sweet

Had made music to me.

 

It was but a feast

With the dark coming on;

She was but a guest —

And now, she is gone.

 

Book Catalogue

Five books printed

  • The Journalist’s Companion to Australian Law
  • The Arbitrator’s Companion
  • Law for Directors
  • The Making of a Lawyer
  • The Common Law – A History

Twenty-six books on line

History (16)

  • A History of the West: (Five volumes: 1. The ancient West; The medieval world; 3. The West awakes; 4. Revolutions in the West; 5. Twentieth century West)
  • Parallel Trials
  • The German Nexus: The Germans in English History
  • The English Difference? – The Tablets of their Laws
  • Terror and the Police State: Punishment as a Measure of Despair
  • A tale of two nations – Uncle Sam from Down Under
  • Looking down the Well: Papers on Legal History
  • Some History Papers: Essays on Modern History in England and Europe
  • Listening to Historians: What is Truth?
  • Events in France 1789 to 1794
  • Some Men of Genius

Autobiography (4)

  • Confessions of a baby boomer
  • Confessions of a barrister
  • Summers at Oxford and Cambridge
  • Up your North

Literature (3)

  • Windows on Shakespeare
  • Some literary papers: Tilting at windmills
  • Top shelf, or what used to be called a Liberal education.

Philosophy (2)

  • The Humility of Knowledge: Five Geniuses and God
  • Different Minds: Why are English and European Lawyers so different?

Language and logic (1)

  • Passing Bull

Passing Bull 62 – Asking the wrong question

/ 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

/ 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

/ 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 59- Bull about banks

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

 

The Bendigo bank, of which I am a shareholder, made a number of mistakes with my account.  As a result, I am now fending off rude or disappointed suppliers, and speaking to people over the ocean who call me ‘Joffrey’ to explain the penalty I will have to pay, after the computer has offered me a sighting of their privacy policy.  The most disappointing thing was that while unravelling these mistakes, and there were a few of them, I never once heard the word ‘sorry’ uttered at the local branch.  Has the computer banished courtesy as well as humanity?  Are all bank officers, even those in the sticks, just flak-catchers now?

My reasons for leaving the NAB are set out in the two letters to the then CEO which are set out below, and neither of which drew any response.

I’m now in two minds about the Royal Commission into banks.  The main argument against it for me is the insipid opportunism of the proposer.  The main argument for it is the astonishing ignorance revealed by many company directors and many in the financial press about who is responsible for the culture in public companies.  Some people say it is a matter for the CEO, and not the directors.  That is bullshit.  The Law says so in as many words.  Directors may be able to delegate, but they cannot absolve themselves of the ultimate responsibility for the management of the business of the company.  Just imagine someone at Melbourne Grammar School saying that the culture of that school was a matter for the Principal and not the Council.

23 March 2012

Mr Cameron Clyne
Chief Executive Officer
National Australia Bank
Reply Paid 2870
MELBOURNE, VIC.  8060

Dear Mr Clyne

SALES TEAM D

You don’t know me.  Neither do any of your employees.  Since you have been my banker for 60 years, I think that that is very sad.  Don’t you think that is very sad, Mr Clyne?

When I bought my present house, I was subjected to treatment by some of your operatives that in part caused me to write the attached paper on ‘The Decline of Courtesy and the Fall of Dignity.’  You will see that your bank has the misfortune there to be compared to Telstra and Qantas.  That is not good company to be in, Mr Clyne.  The part that really got me was the threat – that is exactly what it was – to pull the pin – that was the phrase – on a bank cheque.  Your staff could give a customer a heart attack threatening to do that to them on the day that they are settling on a house purchase.  A bank threatening to renege on its own paper?  It is hard to imagine a better example of how banks have lost their way – how once respectable business houses have now become unrespectable counting houses.

Being minded to move home, I thought I should confirm my leeway with your bank before making an offer.  I drew Sales Team D in the lottery.  I said I was happy to go to your Kyneton Branch and talk face to face, but, no, Sales Team D told me they were on top of my case.

Your staff can fill you in on the sad results, Mr Clyne.  I had to prove my identity – at least twice.  Sad after 60 years, is it not?  The property I am looking at is worth under half of a city property that I can offer for security.  The increase to the existing facility is modest.  For any bank that knew me as its customer, and wanted to look after me, the proposed transaction would hardly raise a query.  Not so with Sales Team D, Mr Clyne.  I was required to produce tax returns, and then told I would have to surrender one credit card and submit to a reduction on the remainder.  I began to feel for the people of Greece.  Now, Sales Team D wants to go beyond the tax returns, and I now have two accountants wondering just what has got into Sales Team D.

How would you or your fellow directors like it if they were treated like this by someone they have been doing business with for ten minutes, let alone 60 years?  In the course of more than 40 years’ legal practice, I have held various statutory appointments, including running the Taxation Division of the AAT, later VCAT for 18 years.  Some people – including Her Majesty the Queen in right of the State of Victoria – therefore felt able to take me at my word.  But not Sales Team D.  Do you know why, Mr Clyne?  My bank does not know who I am.

Perhaps they are worried about my recent expenditure on credit cards.  Let me assure you, Mr Clyne, so was I.  Very worried and very annoyed.  I bought a CLK Mercedes about six months ago at a very good price.  I just needed to extend a borrowing facility by six thousand to get the $26,000.  I got handballed around four operatives, having to prove my identity along the way.  I got referred to various teams.  Most asked my occupation.  (Sales Team D the other day asked if I was still a member of a firm I left about ten years ago and which ceased to exist the other day.)  I was told my case was difficult because the facility was secured.  Then I was asked to produce tax returns to support a request to extend a secured facility by six thousand dollars.  That is when I gave up, and used the credit card to buy the Mercedes.

I do not blame any of the few employees you have left.  They are trained – programmed – to be automated and not to think.  They also know that the market, which can never be wrong, values their contribution to the bank at about one hundredth of yours.

Do you know what I think, Mr Clyne?  George Orwell was wrong.  It is not big government that is tearing up the fabric of our community by Big Brother – it is Big Money, and Big Corporations.  I think that you and your fellow directors should be ashamed of yourselves.

If it matters, I hold shares in the bank, and I am not a happy shareholder either.

Yours sincerely

Geoffrey Gibson

 

3 April 2012

Mr Cameron Clyne
Chief Executive Officer
National Australia Bank
Reply Paid 2870
MELBOURNE, VIC, 8060.

Dear Mr Clyne,

SALES TEAM D

Well, they did it for you.  Sales Team D – may we just call them STD for short? – stopped me from buying the new home that I wanted.  It was not perfect – it was just ideal.  Ideal for me, Mr Clyne.  But, then, what is a mere home to someone like me to a great Australian banker?

How did STD manage to pull it off, you may ask, Mr Clyne?  Quite simply really.  They did not know me, and they did not know what they were doing.  This all became sadly but inevitably apparent when a roaming STD cell-commandant opened his phone talk with me after my first letter to you with the gambit that my problem was that I had overstated my income.  Really, Mr Clyne, your attack-dogs and flak-catchers would want to be on the highest level of dental insurance if they want to go around behaving like that.  No wonder you forbid them to meet your customers in the flesh.

But I suppose that the ADs and FCs of STD kept you safe from my letter.  You would prefer to stay like Achilles gleaming among his Myrmidons, except that you would not stay sulking in your tent – no, you would be glowing over all that lucre.

You and the people at STD are a real threat to business in this country, Mr Clyne.  You should be helping the flow of capital.  The big Australian banks are doing just the reverse.

And you should really stop those ads that tell the most dreadful lies.  Lies like your people are free to make decisions, or that the big banks like competition.  Nothing could be further from the truth, Mr Clyne.  The people at STD know that they are forbidden to think, much less make decisions, and STD shut up shop completely, and have been in a surly sulk ever since I told them I was talking to another bank.  (Although they did ring the other bank to inquire – without my consent – about what I was doing.)  The major Australian banks are just a collusive cartel operating sheltered workshops that rely on the people of Australia to bail them out whenever they balls it up – and then they pass on their guilt and paranoia to those same people by refusing to lift a finger for their customers when they need a bank.

Those people do not hold your staff responsible for the shocking fall in the standards of our banks, Mr Clyne.  They hold you and your like responsible.  You do after all get paid about one hundred times as much as the folk of STD.

If you and your board step outside your cocoon of moolah, minders, and sycophants, you will not find one Australian – not one – that has a kind word for any of you.  What all those people should do to the big banks is to take their business elsewhere.  That is what I will do.  You never know, Mr Clyne, I may meet a real person in the flesh, one who might know what they are doing, and who will even know who I am.

Yours sincerely,

Geoffrey Gibson

Dastyari

The Press have it in for this man, across the board.  He was very stupid when someone waved money at him.  The Chinese must have had trouble believing it.  But was he any more stupid than Sinodinos when someone waved money under his nose?  Arthur’s problem, as it seems to me, is that the amount waved under his nose had a few more zeroes at the end.  And he now has form as a messy bag man.

The perils of drink

Someone gave me a book called Order, Order!  The Rise and Fall of Political Drinking.  It is the kind of book you can take on a long flight.  One anecdote is worth recalling.  It relates to a George Brown who was a very serious drinker.  Somehow he became Foreign Secretary.  He turned up heavily under the weather at the Brazilian President’s Palace of the Dawn for a diplomatic reception for visiting dignitaries from Peru.  The setting was sumptuous.  It is alleged that Brown made a beeline for a ‘gorgeously crimson–clad figure’ and asked the person to dance.  The reply is said to have been: ‘There are three reasons, Mr Brown, while I will not dance with you.  The first, is that I fear that you have had a little too much to drink.  The second is that this is not, as you seem to suppose, a waltz that the orchestra is playing, but the Peruvian national anthem, for which you should be standing to attention.  And the third reason why we may not dance, Mr Brown, is that I am the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima.’

That makes me feel a lot better.

Poet of the month: Ibsen

 

To the Survivors

Now they sing the hero loud; —

But they sing him in his shroud.

 

Torch he kindled for his land;

On his brow ye set its brand.

 

Taught by him to wield a glaive;

Through his heart the steel ye drave.

 

Trolls he smote in hard-fought fields;

Ye bore him down ‘twixt traitor shields.

 

But the shining spoils he won,

These ye treasure as your own.–

 

Dim them not, that so the dead

Rest appeased his thorn-crowned head.

Passing Bull 58 – Bullshit about being well informed

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

 

It is curious that the Looney Tunes of politics and what used to be called the chattering classes have over the last generation or so gone from one side of politics to the other.  Formally it was the Labor Party that was plagued with theorists and purists – now it is the Liberal Party.  If anything, the Liberal Party is suffering more from internal dissension now than used to be the case with the Labor Party.  If, like me, you can recall how toxic Labor Party politics were in the generation leading up to 1972, this is an appalling conclusion.  But I think it is correct, and it is one of the main reasons why this country is becoming ungovernable.  The decline does now look to be vicious – the more people distrust mainstream politicians, the more likely they are to vote for people who will really merit that distrust – and revulsion.  Just look at people like Farage, Trump, Corbyn, and Hanson.

Let us take Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt as examples of the chattering classes on the side of reaction in Australia.  (They like to call themselves ‘conservatives’, but that offends me – so do I.)  They see the world as split between those who can look at issues like Islamic terrorism and ‘freedom of speech’ clearly for what they are and those whose thinking is warped by what they call ‘political correctness’.  They live in a world of labels and slogans.  Their thinking is inhibited and their minds are closed.

There is another division that you can see.  It is between those who belong to or subscribe to the chattering classes and those who do not.  Would you agree that less than one in, say, twenty Australians happily take part in this kind of discussion?  A far smaller number knows ‘the Canberra bubble.’

There are currently four issues agitating people like Bolt and Jones – gay marriage; climate change; free speech and section 18 C; and the republic.  What thread can you trace between those four issues except reaction?  Would more than one person in twenty Australians want to spend more than five minutes talking about the lot?  If you sought to raise any of these issues – except perhaps the monarchy – in any pub I know, the best result you could expect would be a very funny look.

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong in a person reacting, but it does look a little hard to avoid the impression that it is just a matter of time before these people are run over by the bus of history on each of those four issues.  (Was it Trotsky who spoke of people being thrown into the dustbin of history?)

And you can see how much trouble the reactionaries are causing the Liberal Party.  While he was Prime Minister, Tony Abbott was the very dux of reactionaries on each of the four issues I have mentioned.  (Indeed, it was his fawning adulation of the monarchy that finally convinced the nation that he was about as sane as Don Quixote.)

The new Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has a very different view on each of the four subjects – his view is flatly opposed on each to that of Abbott.  His view is I think closer to the temper of the nation, but he has been placed behind bars put up by the forces of reaction. The result is a disaster for the country.  And it does seem a bit hard for the reactionaries, who are the core of most problems facing the Liberal Party, to blame Mr Turnbull for the lack of leadership that has bedevilled this country since the fall of Paul Keating.  In truth, the Liberal Party has been arrested if not hijacked by troglodytes.  It is grimly fascinating to watch Corbyn’s people do the same thing to the other side in England.

Mr Shorten is powerless to help.  He is the reverse of passionate intensity – he lacks all conviction.  He looks like a school prefect whose mum has dressed him and combed his hair, but who has lost his way to school.  I call him the Kelvinator Kid.  He can’t pass a refrigerator without opening the door to feel the light shine upon him.  And speaking of galahs who lust after the limelight, has Canberra seen anything more repellent than Sam Dastyari, the reincarnation of Edward G Robinson, the big screen’s standard hood?

There is another division that we can see.  It is between those who are well educated and those who are not.  You see it most plainly with Trump.  Most people I know would not allow Trump into their house – not because he is a stupid, lying, racist bully, but because he has no manners at all – he is just a spoilt child who never grew up.  Whenever he comes on to the screen, I have to suppress a feeling of nausea.  Then my eye goes to my copy of The Great Gatsby and I think of that immortal line:

It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people – with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

We therefore wonder how anyone could vote for a man like Trump to become the President of the United States.  And for once, I’m happy to say that nothing like that could happen here.

Well, my view is that most of these people who are taken in by Trump are watchers of reality TV.  They are not too bright and are not very attractive – the sound and vision of the public addresses are very unsettling – there is a fever pitch of hate. It is very redolent of fascism. But we tend not to say things like that – first, because it would be impolite, and secondly, because it would be unhelpful: Trump and his followers feed on rejection.  But if you stand as the champion of those opposed to the elite, you may have to face the possibility that you are the champion of the gutter.  If the elite are the chosen, their opponents will come from those who have been rejected.  The trouble is that these rejects glory in their own martyrdom.

This division in education was well illustrated by Professor A C Grayling in discussing our gay marriage plebiscite.  (I incline to the view that this unholy imbroglio was devised by Satan to bring out the worst in our politicians and in our clergy.  If so, this is his biggest win since the apple.)  Grayling compared the history of this plebiscite with that of the British referendum on the E U – a prime minister making a bad promise to appease a faction of reaction in his own party.  He said that the result was terribly divisive ‘and tremendously unsettling to most informed opinion.’  That is certainly the view in places like Oxford, Cambridge, and London.  It is the view of most people I know here or in England.  They see the result as a very sad aberration.

The trouble is that the success of people like Farage, Corbyn, Trump, and Hanson shows that people of ‘informed opinion’ have utterly failed to come to terms with the views of people who are not so well informed on issues like migration and refugees. It is like the problem we have with our politicians – they get out of touch with what the proverbial people in the street or on the land think, and too many of them have never had a real job.

That last proposition does not go for people like Jones and Bolt – the less well-informed are precisely those to whom they appeal.  And the appeal consists of labels and slogans.  ‘Freedom’ is bonzer for any label – except for choosing the sex of the person you want to marry.  (This issue does put a bit of a dent in the aspiration of the reactionaries to call themselves ‘libertarians’.)

There was a beautiful example on a BBC panel show.  On the burkini issue, one very conservative commentator gave Milton and John Stuart Mill chapter and verse.  ‘I choose what I wear – not the government.’  Well, that is fine.  But any slogan has its limits.  Try giving that answer to the copper who arrests you on Piccadilly for wearing a T-shirt with the words ‘Freedom or Death’ – and no further garments.  And if you can be arrested for wearing too little in public, it might seem a little odd if you could also be arrested for wearing too much.

The truth is that these theoretical arguments about ideas are not welcome to us down here.  Australians distrust ideology – the distrust is visceral.  That is why propaganda coming from think tanks is so dangerous for either major political party.  It is just, as I said, that at the moment it is the Liberal Party that is suffering the most from this form of political infection.

Not only do Australians not like ideology, they reject by and large the idea of being preached at by ‘intellectuals.’  The term ‘intellectual’ is almost as much a term of abuse as the term ‘academic’ or, God save us, ‘scholar’.

These aversions are not native to us in the Antipodes.  They come from more than 1000 years of history in the development of the English law and constitution.  The English have never asked whether a proposal to change or add to the law accorded with a theory.  They just asked whether it worked – and if it did, then later on someone might be bothered to invent a theory as window dressing.  Rousseau preceded the French Revolution; Locke came after the English Revolution.

This difference between the empirical approach of the British and the rationalist leanings on the other side of the Channel runs very deep through so many aspects of our public life.  It is why we and the Americans get into trouble when we try to impose some overarching absolute – like section 92 of our Constitution – on a quilt made out of centuries of hard, gritty experience.

So, on a slogan that is as plastic as that of ‘freedom of speech’, the English experience is to ask not whether a law accords with a theory or a political scheme, aspiration, or slogan, but whether it works.  We therefore put high theory or aspiration to one side and ask how long we would last without tearing ourselves apart like enraged Yahoos in a state of mayhem if we abolished all laws relating to offensive and insulting speech, and the police were then left powerless to deal with someone marching outside the front of a convent with a placard saying ‘All the women inside this building are sluts,’ or someone marching outside the Shrine on Anzac Day with a placard saying ‘All Anzacs are war criminals and cowards,’ or someone marching outside the Bendigo mosque with a placard saying ‘These Towel-Heads are not Religious – They are Mad’.

It is really a source of wonder that some people get so wrapped up in their own bullshit that they lose all contact with the rest of us.

Poet of the month: Henrik Ibsen

In the Picture Gallery

With palette laden

She sat, as I passed her,

A dainty maiden

Before an Old Master.

 

What mountain-top is

She bent upon? Ah,

She neatly copies

Murillo’s Madonna.

 

But rapt and brimming

The eyes’ full chalice says

The heart builds dreaming

Its fairy-palaces.

 

The eighteenth year rolled

By, ere returning,

I greeted the dear old

Scenes with yearning.

 

With palette laden

She sat, as I passed her,

A faded maiden

Before an Old Master.

 

But what is she doing?

The same thing still–lo,

Hotly pursuing

That very Murillo!

 

Her wrist never falters;

It keeps her, that poor wrist,

With panels for altars

And daubs for the tourist.

 

And so she has painted

Through years unbrightened,

Till hopes have fainted

And hair has whitened.

 

But rapt and brimming

The eyes’ full chalice says

The heart builds dreaming

Its fairy-palaces.