Politics

Passing bull 47- Statutory bull

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

Lawyers have given up hope of getting sense out of acts of parliament, but you rarely see bullshit of the quality on display in the CFA Act in Victoria.

s. 6A Accountability of Authority

(1) The Authority is subject to the general direction and control of the Minister in the performance of its functions and the exercise of its powers.

(2) The Minister may from time to time give written directions to the Authority.

The net result is that the heading is misleading.  The Authority is not accountable at all.  The Minister is.  Well we know that.  If the Board doesn’t toe the government line, the Minister fires it.  Why bother to have a board?

Now cop this

s.6B Objective

The objective of the Authority in performing its functions and exercising its powers under this Act is to—

(a) contribute to a whole of sector approach to emergency management;

(b) promote a culture within the emergency management sector of community focus, interoperability and public value.

That is Grange quality bullshit – world class.  They nearly used the word ‘holistic’ in a statute.  It gets picked up in the EBA that may be the final monument to the bullshit of the IR Club.  It is more than 400 pages long.  How would you like to run a business under that kind of diktat?

3.1.5. A joint approach on “productivity policies” that embrace the drivers

and enablers of performance and are consistently applied.

3.1.6. recognising that a productivity model recognises the changing

knowledge requirements of employees covered by this agreement

in all phases of the enterprise activity and also caters for:

(a) increasing requirement for innovation

(b) accelerating adoption of technology

(c) management of risk

(d) motivation of a diverse workforce

(e) working conditions as a work value differentiator

‘Drivers’ and ‘enablers’!  That is premier grand cru bullshit.

But there is a part of the CFA Act that is intelligible.

s. 6F Recognition of Authority as a volunteer-based organisation

The Parliament recognises that the Authority is first and foremost a volunteer-based organisation, in which volunteer officers and members are supported by employees in a fully integrated manner.

How does Danny Boy square that with handing control over the CFA to those who are not volunteers?  Don’t ask Danny Boy.  Ask the Premier of Victoria.  A tiny minority gets a veto over the parliament preferred volunteers.  Danny Boy must have some kind of dispensing power – like James II.

That king got run out of town.

 

Ali again

For the first time I can recall, The Economist obituary ran to two pages.  It contained the following.

Denied entry to diners on a southern tour, he made one of his raps of it: ‘Man, it was really a let-down drag.  For all those miles I had to eat out of a bag.’  Told in a Louisville hamburger joint, when he went in wearing his Olympic gold medal, that they still didn’t serve niggers, he said that was fine; he didn’t eat them.  But under the joshing lay depth upon depth of furious resentment…..Black heavyweights who were not new men like him, still managed by white mobsters and dutifully silent about politics, he called Uncle Toms and ‘great white hopes’, and mimicked their grunts and shuffles…like bears or apes.  It became a habit, turned most viciously against Frazier and Foreman, funny and appalling both at once.

Ali was not a saint.  (Does Islam have them?)  He was just the greatest.

 

Poet of the month: Anna Akhmatova

6

Lightly the weeks are flying,

What has happened, I can’t take in.

Just as, my dearest, the white

Nights first watched you in prison,

So they gaze down

With their warm aquiline eyes and

Of your cross transcendent

And of death I hear them speak.

A Dictator in a Banana Republic

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

 

The people of Victoria want their fire services supplied by people who are subject to the orders of people they elect into government – and not by people who are subject to the orders of unelected agents of the federal government.  The people in Victoria outside of Melbourne – the people in what we call country Victoria – want their fire services provided by people who are dedicated to the cause of country Victorians – the Country Fire Authority – and not by people who are dedicated to the cause of the City of Melbourne – the Metropolitan Fire Brigade.

The MFB and the CFA have as much in common as Venus and Mars.  They are separated by far more than history and geography.  There is a huge and irreconcilable difference in character – or, if you prefer, soul.  The difference can be stated this way.  The CFA are givers; the MFB are takers; the CFA volunteer themselves for their families, friends, and neighbours; the MFB do it for money.

And what money!  MFB firefighters enjoy pay and conditions that most other workers can only dream of.  This is because they play in a sandpit under the umbrella of an Enterprise Bargain Agreement that is enforced by their protectors in the Fair Work Commission.  They are the people who really run the MFB.

The act of the Victorian parliament that regulates the MFB provides for disciplinary action to be taken by the CEO.  I was the Disciplinary Hearings Officer for the MFB from 2002 until 2016.  The MFB declined to give reasons for the termination. The present CEO and his predecessors have effectively discarded the statutory discipline procedure – they have only applied it on about three occasions in six years.  What drove management to down tools – to go on strike?

What does this tell you about discipline in the MFB?  What does it tell you about the management of the MFB?  In what may be the last case ever heard under that act, senior counsel for the accused said that they were applying to the Fair Work Commission to get it to hear and determine the matter – and so perform a function given by the Victorian parliament to the CEO of that statutory authority.  So much for the parliament of Victoria!  How long will it be before the Fair Work Commission officially takes over running the MFB?  When in trouble the firies run off to them every time.  The UFU and the FWC are very close.

You should get hold of the EBA – it will be about ten times as long as the Australian Constitution, and it is a gift from God for casuists and urgers.  The EBA is a thicket to entrap management, and a dead weight of red tape that annihilates initiative, leadership, and loyalty.

In truth, the whole life and work of the MFB has been blighted by a class war that has gone on for generations – as can happen in a closed shop.  Both sides blame each other.  The lawyers have been on a gravy train for decades.

Whether you blame management or the men – women are in substance banned from the MFB – might depend on where you come from.  But does it matter?  Both sides feed off conflict, demarcation, bush lawyers, and a contempt for women.  The whole body is infected by congealed hate, and you can take your pick for the saddest apostle of hate.

For things to get better in this permanent war zone, there will have to be a sea change in both management and firefighters.  Government must rise above the class war.  At the moment, there is a revolving door for senior management, but the leader of the men appears to have been afflicted with a form of life tenure.  And he looks to have friends in high places.  And after all these years, he still sounds like the loudest boy who cried wolf in Christendom.

There is one step that the government could take right now to start to dispel the class war and put some sanity back in the war zone.  They could start drilling some sense into these men by bringing women up to equal numbers.  That would give us a real chance of breaking the inbred generational chain of hate.

And don’t take my word for just how poisonous this outfit is.  Just ask Sharan Burrow, the former head of the ACTU.  She thought that it was about the worst case of industrial poison that she had seen.  People in the country know all about this poison – it’s in the papers all the time – and they don’t want to be infected by it.

Now you will have some idea of why people in the country are outraged at the suggestion that the MFB might have some say in the fire services that they get.  People in the country like and respect the CFA – at least those who live and serve in the bush; they neither like nor respect the MFB – and that is putting it softly.

Why then are so many in this government so intent on acting against the wishes of so many men and women of Victoria?  Can anyone think of a clean reason why Victoria has been reduced to an adjunct of the Philippines and why the hirelings put into the CFA board will learn the meaning of the word scab?

Which management do you think should go?

Passing Bull 46 – How low can we go?

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 5 Comments

 

It wasn’t hard to guess who were the sponsors of Greg Sheridan’s attack on the Prime Minister in today’s Australian, but the inanity and vulgarity are breathtaking even by our standards.  The white-anting is said to reflect internal grief about the refusal of the PM ‘to campaign on key Liberal issues such as national security’.

The Prime Minister’s decision to tour a mattress factory on Thursday when the coffins carrying the remains of Australian soldiers killed in the Vietnam conflict were returned through the RAAF base at Richmond, in Sydney, has left some liberals astonished, confused.  They regard the politics of this decision-making as bizarre.

The official line, that Turnbull and Bill Shorten stayed away so as not to detract from the occasion, is nonsensical.  A respectful, non-campaigning prime ministerial presence would have underlined the nation’s gratitude to the fallen.

Without any overt politicising, the benefit to the PM of pictures of him welcoming home the coffins would have been very powerful.  Many Liberals think that any recent previous Liberal PM would have been there as a matter of course.

This is worse than bullshit.  It is revolting.  Our politicians are on the nose because they lack decency, taste, and balls.  The typical stunt that revolts us is a politician seeking to gain votes out of a sombre event, one that should never be tainted by politics.  One such event is the public return of our war dead.  Any politician who sought to make political capital of that would most politely be described as a jerk.  Yet when the P M and the Leader of the Opposition reach accord on respecting this basic level of decency, Sheridan says they are being ‘nonsensical.’  He, and his spiteful backers in the party, think that Turnbull should have made capital out of this photo-op, but that he should have done so covertly, rather than overtly.  Get out there and be political – but lie about it.  It takes a disgusting level of chutzpah to seek votes for welcoming back coffins of young men that his political party sent to their deaths on false premises.  The only thing that Sheridan is right about is that any recent previous Liberal PM would have been there as a matter of course.  Of course they would – that is just why they are so much on the nose.

I had proposed to vote informal, but Mr Sheridan has persuaded that I should vote for Mr Turnbull.  He is, I fear, our last best hope for any decency in Australian public life.

Poet of the month: Anna Akhmatova

I

They took you away at daybreak.  Half wak-

ing, as though at a wake, I followed.

In the dark chamber children were crying,

In the image-case, candlelight guttered.

At your lips, the chill of an ikon,

A deathly sweat at your brow.

I shall go creep to our wailing wall,

Crawl to the Kremlin towers.

Passing Bull 45 – The Sick Humour of Mr Dean

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

Mr Rowan Dean edits The Australian Spectator and he participates in political talk shows on Sky News.  He also has an occasional piece in the AFR which purports to be humorous.  Mr Dean is the ultimate partisan.  When Mr Abbott fell, Mr Dean held a well-publicised wake for the True Believers.  The current Prime Minister is too soft on too many things for Mr Dean.

On Saturday, Mr Dean had a ‘Poor Me’ piece mocking seven Australians who have known more success in life than he has.  Here are two examples of what Mr Dean regards as humour.

  1. Adam Baddes: Forced to change his name because the Good Life he presumed he was entitled to had in fact turned out to be really, really Bad thanks to endemic racism, xenophobia, intolerance etc (see above), this hugely talented sportsman and elite athlete soared to national prominence in 2013 when a five-year-old girl poked her tongue out at him and wiggled her fingers in front of her nose, thereby suggesting that Mr Baddes was descended from an obscure species of Bonobo that once thrived in the Serengeti (as indeed we all are.) Not content with having the girl put under house arrest and humiliated for life, Mr Baddes was appointed Australian of the Year and National Treasure in quick succession. The judges were particularly impressed by Mr Baddes’ heartfelt attempts to express goodwill and unite the nation by throwing imaginary spears at crowds of onlookers and by his Australia Day speech in which he poured scorn on all privileged, white, male, Anglo-Saxon, non-indigenous Australians. 10 stars.
  2. Nova Peris-Backbone: Top Olympian and role-model to Indigenous girls, Ms Backbone was more surprised than anybody when former Prime Minister Julia “La” Grillard decided that as an Indigenous female Ms Backbone should a) be catapulted into the Labor Party and b) be catapulted into the Senate despite having no interest in either. With Ms Backbone happily immersing herself in the senatorial largesse provided by mainstream taxpayers, the judges were hugely impressed by her tearful announcement that the only people worthy of criticising her are Indigenous women. 8 stars.

This is worse than bullshit.  It is vile.   Mr Dean is an ideologue who proudly asserts the rights of bigots, and says that we should all be free to insult or offend people because of their race.

I do not believe that this kind of stuff has any place in a quality newspaper.  I have written to the Editor, Michael Stutchbury, as follows.

….. I wish to complain about Rowan Dean in your newspaper.

Take Saturday’s piece.  It is not just that it is not funny – it is tasteless, and it is predictably so.   The man is, like Andrew Bolt, fixated on race.  Four targets of the Saturday piece are people of colour.  The article oozes jealousy.  His targets have done something.  Mr Dean comes across as a man who leers, sneers, and jeers. 

A colleague of mine described the letter as puerile bigotry about people who have achieved more than the author could ever hope to do.

Shouldn’t we have lost this undergraduate tribalist view of politics, that some call ‘culture wars’, back in the ‘50’s?   When I heard people like Bolt and Dean last year saying that the crowd abuse of Adam Goodes was not related to his race, I knew that they lived in their own sealed world.  I wonder whether either of them has ever stood in the outer at the AFL or NRL and heard the abuse directed to Aboriginal footballers?

I subscribe to your newspaper because I like it and I respect it.  It is close to being nauseating to find someone like Rowan Dean in the same space as Laura Tingle, Tony Walker, or Phillip Coorey.  May I suggest that your readers deserve better?  It is hard enough enduring another ghastly election without this sort of rubbish.

Frankly, it gives me no pleasure to write like this, but I think that I should.

Other people whose opinion I respect have expressed much stronger views.

Poet of the Month: Anna Akhmatova

The first husband of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova was one of a large number of people shot in 1921 under the government of Lenin.  During the worst of the purges of Stalin, known by the Russians as the ‘Yezhov terror’, Akhmatova spent seventeenth months in prison queues trying to get news of her son.  This great poet was therefore well-placed to write of terror in Russia.  The people of Leningrad in 1940 would soon be able to compare the brutality of Hitler to the terror of Stalin.

Akhmatova wrote of the period of terror in a masterpiece called a Requiem.  The extracts for this month come from that poem.  The translations are by D M Thomas in this year’s Folio Edition.

In the Epilogue of the poem the author speaks of the others outside the jails:

I should like to call you all by name,

But they have lost the lists….

I have woven for them a great shroud

Out of the poor words I heard them speak.

She said that she would accept a monument if it were placed

….here, where I stood for three hundred hours

And where they never, never opened the doors for me.

 

Here, then, is the first extract from Requiem by Anna Akhmatova.

 

Prologue

In those years only the dead smiled,

Glad to be at rest:

And Leningrad city swayed like

A needless appendix to its prisons.

It was then that the railway-yards

Were asylums of the mad;

Short were the locomotives’

Farewell songs.

Stars of death stood

Above us, and innocent Russia

Writhed under bloodstained boots, and

Under the tyres of Black Marias.

 

 

Passing Bull 44 – Outstanding hypocrisy in the Press

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Politics and politicians are on the nose all around the world.  There is a savage reaction in the West against political parties and political elites.  Since the system as we know it has been worked by political parties run by elites, the results may be disastrous, if not terminal.  Corbyn was bad enough, but Trump is a genuine nightmare.

In Australia there is a very unhappy union between politicians and journalists.  There is much to be said for the view that our press is in large part responsible for the awfulness of our politicians.  They are far too cliquey and close to their subjects; the worst kinds of would-be journalists are tribal, and feed themselves on hits from other followers of the cult on the Internet.  The real disasters are former political staffers who then want to pose as journalists.  Instead, they become boring and loaded cheerleaders.

Two of the worst examples are Chris Kenny and Niki Savva.  They could not hope to pose as being objective, but they sadly think that that they are intelligent.  They live in confined echo chambers quite cut off from the world, just like the politicians in Canberra.  They are part of a useless but self-appointed elite that is quite out of touch with what they call the mainstream.

It was therefore quite a surprise to read the following from Chris Kenny in The Australian last Saturday:

There is a great and pernicious divide in Australia.  It is not between the eastern seaboard and the western plains, or between the rich and poor, city and country, black and white, or even between established citizens and refugees.  The divide is between the political/media class and the mainstream.

There is a gulf between those who consider themselves superior to the masses and want to use the nation’s status to parade their post-material concerns, and those who do the work and raise the families that make the nation what it is.

That is a reasonable statement of the problem, even if it comes from one of the worst examples of those who give rise to the problem.  And what on earth is a former Liberal staffer – attached to Lord Downer; no wonder his syntax is shot – and employed by The Australian and Sky doing referring to ‘the masses’.  Has Mr Kenny ever met one of them?  But then it all becomes clear when we get this:

In this election we are seeing the chasm open up, like a parting of the seas, as the media elites and their preferred left-of-centre politicians seek to determine what issues should be decisive.  They lecture and hector the mainstream.  Worse, they try to dictate what facts can even be discussed.  They seek to silence dissent.  They have compiled an informal list of unmentionables, facts that should not be outed: the truths whose name we dare not speak.

And then Mr Kenny goes on to ‘lecture and hector’ those poor souls who share his echo chamber, the true believers who know that Satan masquerades as the ABC and the Fairfax press.

This is all as boring and predictable as anything said by Mr Kenny in The Australian or one of those ghastly Sky chat shows that demonstrate that the chattering classes, the former chardonnay socialists, have long ago swapped sides graphically and terminally.  We reached a new all-time low recently when Peta Credlin joined Andrew Bolt for a nocturnal tryst on Sky that will be sure to upset at least three dinners a night.  It might all be boring, but the hypocrisy of Mr Kenny takes your breath away.

We get some idea of the problem from the article immediately beneath that of Mr Kenny.  It comes from the paper’s former editor, Chris Mitchell.  Mr Mitchell looks like he may be as unattractive in the flesh as he is in print.  On the same day, Mr Coorey in the AFR – part of the Anti-Christ and my paper of choice – referred to those journalists who scramble like Spitfire pilots when someone says something rude about the Liberals.  Mr Mitchell gives us a roll call of those he invokes to defend that brute Dutton – Paul Murray, Judith Sloan, Mark Latham, Andrew Bolt, Peter van Onselen, Paul Kelly, Chris Kenny, and other pilots in The Oz or Sky squadrons, the usual suspects.  There is apparently honour among sellers because Mr Mitchell informs us that Peta told Andrew that she would not criticise Niki over her bestselling book.  Here surely was grace that passeth all understanding.  And guess what – Peta’s ‘appearances throughout the week were sure-footed and incisive.’  Has tribalism got any lower than this?

And Mr Mitchell gives us an insight into the light years between him and the ‘masses’ when he says:

Latham sees Labor being trapped in a world in which the Left rejects the notion of observable truths, but ordinary voters see Safe Schools as an extreme attempt to reconstruct gender.

In the sweet name of the son of the carpenter, is there any bastard outside the Canberra bubble who knows what ‘reconstructing gender’ might mean?  Does any decent Australian give a bugger about the alleged Left/Right divide or any other of those profoundly stupid chat shows called ‘culture wars’?  Have they not yet seen that everyone else rejects all this bullshit and all those who want to wallow in it?  Does the press just not get that they are an essential part of the package that people are rejecting all around the world?

Then there is poor sad Gerard Henderson who looks like he has never smiled, let alone laughed.  Gerry must be the text-book example of a man who preaches – and, like Mr Kenny, and most of these cave-dwellers, he does preach – only to the converted.  It looks like the lawyers may have been at Gerry’s piece, because he wants to say that the Royal Commission is loaded against our George, but he concludes by saying that their behaviour raises issues of fairness.  His sub-editor said the Commission ‘fails the test of fairness.’

And Gerry has come up with some hard evidence.  Someone on the Commission staff had worked for the ABC!  Worse, Gerry had followed that person’s journalism – no ABC journalist ever escapes the gaze of either Gerry or God – and Gerry ‘happened to know that he was a vehement critic of the theological conservatives in the Catholic Church, such as Pell, layman B A Santamaria and more besides’.  Just think of it – an ABC journalist being a critic of Bob!  But the case is even worse!  Gerry just happened to run into this one-time journalist in the street – the corner of Phillip and Bent streets.  For some reason, Gerry was surprised to see the man.

Crittenden was dressed in a fine suit, well-pressed shirt and tasteful tie.  I asked him how it came to pass that a one-time left wing ABC journalist [really, Gerry, the left-wing part was otiose – we and God know they all are left-wing at Auntie] looking so CBDish so early in the morning.

Good heavens – an uppity socialist!  And what in heaven has the earliness of the morning got to do with this dastardly conspiracy?  But Satan can be devious with his disguises – just look at that unfortunate incident in the garden when he got us all damned, and one half of humanity proscribed for the ages; it was a bugger of a day for the girls.

Having mounted this massive case about his surprise ‘that a Pell critic such as Crittenden had been appointed to a senior position at the royal commission’, Gerry delivers the coup de grâce.

It would have been like appointing Andrew Bolt to a senior management position at the royal commission into trade union governance and corruption.

Poor, sad Gerry – he does not understand, and he never will, that very many Australians, including me, think that his mate Tony Abbott did a lot worse than that in appointing his mate Dyson Heydon to run that royal commission.

And Gerry – that other royal commission can say what it likes about George, but nothing they say will come anywhere near to causing the damage that George has brought on himself and his church.

And finally, Gerry – in addition to harbouring Bolshie views, I’m a ghastly snob; I only wear shirts from Jermyn Street; I only wear ties by Hermès or Ferragamo; and I have just acquired a Zegna scarf to add to the Hermès number – so you can put me down as a card carrying communist who should go straight to the head of the Watch Lists maintained by Opus Dei and the Society of Jesus.

A Big Thank You…

….to the person who kindly sent me that wonderful hamper.  Your graceful note did not disclose your identity.  I recall some reference to being saved from the communists.  Was it, you, perhaps, Gerry?  God does after all work in mysterious ways.

Poet of the month: A D Hope

The Apotolesm of W B Yeats

Such a grand story

Of Willy Yeats,

Keeping his warm bed

Under the slates

To a tale of milkmaids

His friend relates:

 

‘At churns in Sligo

The wenches hum:

Come butter, Come butter,

Come butter,

Come! 

Every lump as

Big as my bum!’

 

A milkmaid mounting

The poet’s stair;

A blackbird trilling

His country air;

Butter and bottom,

The muse was there.

 

Sheep in the meadow,

Cows in the corn;

Come Willy Butler

Blow up your horn!

Out of such moments

Beauty is born.

Passing bull 43 – Bullshit about insults

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Election time is a very bad time to be an Australian.  We are now squarely in the world-wide pattern of rejecting major parties.  I would prefer to avoid politics, and observe that most of our first white boat people in the First Fleet were illiterate, and undesirable, but some ideologues refuse to lie down.

More than twenty years ago, I attended an IBA conference in New York.  It had been scheduled for Nairobi, but the venue was changed to New York because of terrorist unrest in Kenya.  (The Kenyans said this was all a CIA plot.)  Our media law section was to have a session with the editor of The Kenya Times.  My American colleagues were First Amendment lawyers and ‘free speech’ fanatics.  I, not being a fanatic, was asked to look after the editor in the debate on the rostrum.  The room was packed with coloured people, and it soon became obvious that my man, the editor, who was coloured, had the numbers on his side.

The editor produced that day’s morning edition of the Murdoch tabloid of New York. The front page had a crude, full-on full-page swipe at the love life of the then wife of a crude lout called Donald Trump.  The back page hurled abuse in giant headlines at the Yankees and said: ‘Stick a fork in them.’  The front and back pages were therefore colossal and provocative insults.  They were standard fare for New York but the editor said, entirely credibly, that if he had published either of those pages in his paper, there would have been blood on the streets of Nairobi before the sun had set.

This was a sobering reminder that our tolerance of insults varies from place to place and time to time.  There are still many places in the world where I could be executed for saying that God does not exist.

Any society that has laws will have laws against killing people or physically hurting them.  We have laws, civil and criminal, about assault.  What about when the assault is verbal?  Do we have laws against insulting language?  Yes – at least where the insult is made in public.

What is involved when one person insults another?  The key meaning in the OED is ‘to assail with scornful abuse or offensive disrespect; to offer indignity to; to affront, outrage.’  If you look at the OED, for both the noun and the verb, you will see the link between ‘insult’ and ‘assault’.  An insult is a verbal kind of assault or attack by one person on another.   To ‘outrage’ someone is to do something they resent so much that they are enraged.  The usual reaction of the victim is to seek revenge.

We have laws against verbal assaults called insults because we realise that verbal assaults can be just as wounding as physical assaults.  We also know that one of the primary objects of the law is to keep the peace, and that one easy way to produce a breach of the peace is for one person to insult another, just as it is for one person to strike another.  In many cultures, an insult could lead to a duel and death.  In many cultures, a religious insult, or an insult to a family, will lead to death without the formality of a duel, much less a trial.

So, if in Australia one person approaches another in public and says ‘Your father is a coward and your mother is a slut’, that person has committed a criminal offence.  It would be silly to say that the father and mother should be left to a civil action in defamation, if they have one, or that the person directly insulted, and outraged, might inquire of a lawyer whether he or she has any form of action at all.  We think that the police should have the power to make an immediate arrest in order to keep the peace.  And it would be just as silly to say that such a law affects something called ‘freedom of speech’.  Most laws do, especially if the law expressly refers to speech.  It adds nothing to this conversation to state that inevitable result.  The question is whether such a law is warranted.  Very few people think that such a law is not warranted.

Most see such a law as essential to keeping the peace in a civilised community.  Similarly, most people think they should be able to walk down the street or go the football with their family without having to listen to or read obscenities.  There is no great issue of policy much less ideology here – we are just talking about keeping the peace.  Most people know what that is and what we should do to achieve it.

We in Australia therefore have these laws about insulting people in public.  We are much more sceptical about any suggestion that we should outlaw insulting religion or the nation.  But that scepticism need not disturb our dealing with what we regard as plain cases of insult that the law must deal with.

Similarly, laws against insulting or offensive language have been abused before.  If the coppers could not think of anything else to charge a protester with, they used to produce a ‘sheet of language.’  They don’t do that now, and abolishing a law may be an extreme way to deal with the abuse of it.

So, the Australian states have various laws about insulting or offensive behaviour in public.  Well, then, what if an insult or offence is directed at someone because of their race?  In addition to our general state laws, there is a federal law for insults based on race.  That law says that you must not publicly insult or humiliate people because of their race (Racial Discrimination act, 1975, s. 18C).  Unlike the state act, the federal act does not create a criminal offence.  You can go to jail for insulting behaviour without more under the state law, but if you insult a person on the ground of their race, you cannot be imprisoned or even charged with a breach of the law under the federal act.  The remedy for a breach of this law is a complaint to a government agency.

We are then left with an intellectual curio.  People do not complain about a law that makes publishing insulting words a crime, but they do campaign against a law that doesn’t make such an act a crime, and is confined to cases where the insult is made on the grounds of race.  That qualification if anything would make the insult more wounding, provocative, and dangerous.  What is the explanation of this puzzle?

You cannot help wondering whether an obsession with ideology distorts people’s views so that they lose contact not just with how ordinary people think, but with reality.

Just think of the laws covered by the following exercises involving speech.

I steal your Ph D thesis and claim it as my own.

A man telephones the mother of a child to tell her, falsely, that he has just seen the child run over on the way to school and killed.  He does so purely to hurt the mother.  She miscarries and loses her next child.

A man at a huge religious rally in the Punjab seeks to cause panic by shouting that religious opponents are attacking from another quarter.  He does so merely to test his power and to observe the chaos and death.  Hundreds, foreseeably, die.

A young man tells his best mate in strict confidence that he is gay but that he does not propose to come out in the near future.  His mate immediately goes online to tell the world.  He says that he is doing so to save his mate from cowardice and hypocrisy, and because he believes in freedom of speech.

Someone offers you a fortune to bomb the P M.

A man approaches a husband and wife in the street and abuses the wife and says she is an Asian slut.

A woman approaches the same husband and wife and says that the husband has been having an affair with her for years but she is going to terminate it because he is lousy in bed and has issues with personal hygiene, false teeth, and prostheses.

A man walks around a muslem wedding ceremony with a sign saying that the ceremony is as fake as the faith of its participants.

A man having a dispute with a highly strung Sikh neighbour calls him over to the fence to tell him in front of his family that his culture is intellectually, morally, and spiritually bankrupt.  He does so with the purpose of causing the Sikh to retaliate and so lose face in the neighbourhood, and enable him to go to law against his adversary.

A politician deliberately fans racial division to get elected.  At one rally, he says that the coloured people are the missing link with the apes.  He succeeds, but the banlieues are in flames

A blackfella goes into a bar in Alice Springs and quietly and methodically and soberly begins to insult both white and coloured people at the bar by reference to their race.

In each case, the person making the statement is intending to cause harm to another person.  Is there any moral or political difference in those cases of insult where the insult is based on race?  Has the phrase ‘freedom of speech’ any application in any example?  Should the law be silent for any of these cases?

The French Declaration of Rights of 1789 said in article 4: ‘Liberty consists of the power to do whatever is not injurious to others.’  Some principle like that must underlie any legal system of a nation that says that its citizens are free.  My freedom of speech does not give me a licence to hurt others.  It does not override my liability for using speech to break a contract, commit a crime, make a nuisance, breach the peace, or defame someone else – or for any other form of speech that the law makes unlawful or illegal.

We can argue about the extent to which any crime or civil wrong may impinge on our right to freedom of speech, but singing a hymn to that ‘freedom’, or proclaiming yourself a warrior in its defence, does not advance the argument.  The warrior is left to declaim loudly to the birds – if you seek to settle the differences that arise from conflicts between people by reference to some grand ideological prescription, the most polite word for your world view is bullshit.

If I got booked for speeding between Wodonga and Albury, and I complained that this ticket infringed my right to the absolute freedom of trade and intercourse conferred by s. 92 of the Constitution, I would be making much more sense than if I said that proceedings against me for insulting or offensive words in public infringe my right to freedom of speech.  They would both be bullshit, but there are, after all, degrees of bullshit.

So, when recently someone put out a banner up at the footy that was offensive to people of one faith, there was a general and quick display of anger and a popular wish that the law be enforced to remove the offensive banner.  And the ideologues sensibly said nothing.

Poet of the month: A D Hope

The Sleeper

Our birth is but a sleeping and a forgetting…

When the night comes, I get

Into my coffin; set

The soul’s brutal alarm;

Pull the green coverlet

Over my face; lie warm,

Deaf to the black storm.

 

Ah, but the truce is vain;

Then Chaos comes again;

The Mind’s insatiate eye

Opens on its insane

Landscape of misery,

And will not let me die.

 

A gunshot tears the brain –

That one quick crash of pain

Pays for a lasting sleep.

Be finished with it then!

What argument can keep

You from that step?

 

The argument of fear,

A whisper that I hear

A voice that haunts my bed:

‘The only sleep is here;

Suffer your nightmare; dread

The daylight of the dead.’

Passing Bull 42 – Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Refugees and Us

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

 

Many people outside Australia want to come to it because they are threatened or oppressed in their own country.  They are prepared to risk death to do so.  We say that their attempts to come here are illegal – unless they can afford to fly – and we use our navy to stop them.  We then justify our stopping them by saying that we have saved them from the risks of the voyage.  We are doing these people a favour.  Then we lock them up in lands that are brutal or corrupt or both.  We employ private institutions to do our SS work.  And we wait for the refugees to start burning themselves to death.

Have I missed something or is this why I will be again reminded in Cambridge that Australians are pariahs in Europe?  This is not just bullshit.  It is not just an offence against the mind.  The offence is against humanity.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer made the following remarks at the beginning of 1943 after he had been many years in a Nazi jail.  They look to me to apply to Australia word for word in its attitudes to refugees in 2016.  Has ever such a rich country been so utterly mean?

There is a very real danger of our drifting into an attitude of contempt for humanity.  We know quite well that we have no right to do so, and that it would lead us into the most sterile relation to our fellow men.  The following thoughts may keep us from such a temptation.  It means that we at once fall into the worst of blunders of our opponents.  The man who despises another will never be able to make anything of him.  Nothing that we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves.  We often expect from others more than we are willing to do ourselves.  Why have we hitherto thought so intemperately about man and his frailty and temptability?  We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer…..

We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretense; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical.  Are we still of any use?  What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men.  Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?

When I look with disgust on the sloganeering dope and the dull thug who have been in charge of this cruelty to people worse off than us, I am deeply ashamed of my own complicity.  What is the difference between me and the citizen of Munich who preferred to look the other way when Dachau was mentioned?

Poet of the Month: A D Hope

The Pleasure of Princes

What pleasures have great princes?  These: to know

Themselves reputed mad with pride or power;

To speak few words – few words and short bring low

This ancient house, that city with flame devour;

 

To make old men, their father’s enemies,

Drunk on the vintage of the former age;

To have great painters show their mistresses

Naked to the succeeding time; engage

 

The cunning of able, treacherous ministers

To serve, despite themselves, the cause they hate,

And leave a prosperous kingdom to their heirs

Nursed by the caterpillars of the state;

 

To keep their spies in good men’s hearts: to read

The malice of the wise, and act betimes;

To hear the Grand Remonstrances of greed,

Led by the pure; cheat justice of her crimes;

 

To beget worthless sons and, being old,

By starlight climb the battlements, and while

The pacing century hugs himself for cold,

Keep vigil like a lover, muse and smile,

 

And to think, to see from the grim castle steep

The midnight city below rejoice and shine:

‘There my great demon grumbles in his sleep

And dreams of his destruction, and of mine.’

Passing Bull 41 – Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Folly, Donald Trump, and not a few locals

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

My compliments to the Commissioner of the NYPD who commented on the call by Senator Cruz ‘to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighbourhoods.’  The Commissioner said: ‘We don’t need a President that doesn’t respect the values that form the foundation of this country.  There are more than 900 Muslim offices in the NYPD, many of whom also serve in the US military in combat – something that Cruz has never done.’  That is what I expect from New York’s finest – giving the bird to a bumptious Texan senator.

Well, Cruz has gone, tearily enough for a Strong Man, unloved by most, and loathed by those that knew him best in his own party.  If Trump revolts most people, Cruz frightens those best placed to assess him.

The apparent accession of Donald Trump to the position of nominee for the Presidency of the United States will do irreparable damage to the standing of that nation.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent many years in Nazi jails before the Nazis hanged him just before the end of the war.  He was a man of ferocious moral courage and an intellect to match that spirit.  In a series of notes headed ‘After Ten Years’ made for New Year in 1943, Bonhoeffer made observations about the state of the nation of Germany – at the beginning of 1943 – and himself.  In the part headed ‘Of folly’, Bonhoeffer made observations that apply word for word to Donald Trump.

‘Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil.  One can protest against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force.  Evil always carries the seeds of its own destruction, as it makes people, at the least, uncomfortable.  Against folly we have no defence.  Neither protest nor force can touch it; reasoning is no use; facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved – indeed, the fool can counter by criticising them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions.  So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied; in fact, he can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make him aggressive.  A fool must therefore be treated more cautiously than a scoundrel; we shall never again try to convince a fool by reason, for it is both useless and dangerous.

If we are to deal adequately with folly, we must try to understand its nature.  This much is certain, that it is a moral rather than an intellectual defect.  There are people who are mentally agile but foolish, and people who are mentally slow but very far from foolish – a discovery that we make to our surprise as a result of particular situations.  We thus get the impression that folly is likely to be, not a congenital defect, but one that is acquired in certain circumstances where people make fools of themselves or allow others to make fools of them.  We notice further that this defect is less common in the unsociable and solitary than in individuals or groups that are inclined or condemned to sociability.  It seems, then, that folly is a sociological rather than a psychological problem, and that it is a special form of the operation of historical circumstances on people, a psychological by-product of definite external factors.  If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of the others.  It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacity for instance, become stunted or destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgement, and – more or less unconsciously – give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.  The fact that the fool is often stubborn must not mislead us into thinking that he is independent.  One feels in fact when talking to him, that one is dealing, not with the man himself, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like, which have taken hold of him.  He is under a spell, he is blinded, his very nature is being misused and exploited.  Having thus become a passive instrument, the fool will be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.  Here lies the danger of a diabolical exploitation that can do irreparable damage to human beings.’

Dietrich Bonhoeffer had the authority to make those observations, and we have the obligation to listen to them, because he was a man of spellbinding courage and he paid for it very dearly.  On the day that Hitler became Chancellor, Bonhoeffer gave a public address about the dangers of false leaders.  The Gestapo turned off the sound.  Bonhoeffer, a man of God, gave his life to resisting a false leader.

Poet of the month: A D Hope

Easter Hymn

Make no mistake; there will be no forgiveness;

No voice can harm you and no hand will save;

Fenced by the magic of deliberate darkness

You walk on the sharp edges of the wave;

 

Trouble with soul again the putrefaction

Where Lazarus three days rotten lies content.

Your human tears will be the seed of faction,

Murder the sequel to your sacrament.

 

The City of God is built like other cities:

Judas negotiates the loans you float;

You will meet Caiaphas upon committees;

You will be glad of Pilate’s casting vote.

 

Your truest lovers still the foolish virgins,

Your heart will sicken at the marriage feasts

Knowing they watch you from the darkened gardens

Being polite to your official guests.

Movies – Trumbo and Goya

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 3 Comments

 

So far as I know, no people or culture has welcomed informers.  Betrayal is a very black act, and it is worse when the people betrayed have put their trust in the informer.  Denunciation was an evil encouraged by regimes like the Spanish Inquisition, or the reigns of terror of Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler.  Few people deserve denunciation, and a regime that not just encouraged denunciation but enforced it would be Un-American.  It is therefore odd that the body that did just that in the U S in the 1950’s lives in infamy as the House of Un-American Activities Committee.

During one of those communal nervous breakdowns that the U S undergoes now and then, people got scared of communists, and a black list was prepared to deny work to suspected communists in the film industry.  People would then be compelled by subpoena to attend this form of inquisition conducted by McCarthy at the HUAC and be required to inform on people, including mates.  If they refused, they could be jailed for contempt of Congress.  They had committed no previous crime.  They were not even suspected of committing a crime.  They were suspected of holding political views that the majority did not favour.  If ever the word Un-American could be used decently, it would be to describe this despoliation of due process.

Yet it went on, and some prospered under it.  One upcoming politician made his name as one of the witch-hunting ferrets.  Another prominent union official ratted on his members and was a stool pigeon for the FBI.  The first was Richard Nixon.  The second was Ronald Reagan.  Both became two term presidents, and the second is still held in some regard even though he was a rat.  American politics are, after all, very different.  As I remarked elsewhere about Arthur Miller, who wrote The Crucible:

The failure of due process before the HUAC takes your breath away, but it got worse before the courts.  When people were charged with contempt for refusing to answer, the trials did not take long.  The prosecution called expert evidence. They called an ‘expert on Communism’ to testify that the accused had been under ‘communist discipline’.  When Miller’s counsel announced he was going to call his expert to say that Miller had not been under discipline of the Communist Party, Miller noticed ‘that from then on a negative electricity began flowing toward me from the bench and the government table.’  Miller thought his expert was good, ‘but obviously the tracks were laid and the train was going to its appointed station no matter what.’  The nation that would have been entitled to see itself as having the most advanced constitutional protection of civil rights on earth had been scared out of its senses by a big bad bear that existed mostly in the minds of the tormented.

All this is looked at in the film Trumbo, about a prominent writer on the black list.  The film was too much of the black hats v white hats and too hammed up for my taste, and it is too long, but it is an important story.

And the film touches on another weakness of the American legal system that we have been reminded of recently.  Their Supreme Court is appallingly political, and death can change the numbers and the legal climate.  Trumbo and others were advised that they would succeed in the Supreme Court.  But a judge on their side died, so they had to go to jail.  That form of lottery is not how the justice system should work.  And you wonder why a nation that wears its Christianity on its sleeve wanted to jail people for refusing to commit the crime of Judas.

The film Goya is one of those events that make you wonder why we didn’t think of it before.  You take a great painter, and put him up on the big screen, so that we can get up face to face with genius and see the brushwork in action.  The results are wonderful.  The film follows the documentary style of movies on Mozart and Beethoven, but the show is about the paintings.  You get close to the mystery.  For example, the painting of the Duke of Wellington is not a portrait of an imperious general – it is a portrait of a man who knows what apprehension, if not fear, is.  It is so different to portraits of Napoleon.  They were very different.  Wellington was not prodigal with the lives of his men.  Nor was he bent on wars of expansion.

According to the movie, Goya taught himself how to paint.  That is humbling.

I have just reread Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London.  I read a fair chunk of it while undergoing the ritual humiliation of delay in a doctor’s waiting room.  One phrase caught my eye.  He refers to an ‘embittered atheist’ – ‘the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.’  I’ve seen a few of those – and you get them now politically with people who loathe what they call ‘liberalism’.  The Tory Party in the UK and the Republican Party in the U S are disintegrating because they cover too wide a field.  There are rumblings about that here from some Looney Tunes, but we don’t take ideology seriously – and thank God for that.

Passing Bull 36 – Defending your legacy

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Tony Abbott says that he is entitled to defend the legacy of ‘his’ government.  So do his mates in the press.  What do they mean?

A legacy is a gift that you make in a will to take effect on your death.  Mr Abbott may be the only person in Australia who is yet to acknowledge that he is relevantly ‘dead’ – or even that his government is dead.

Well before the time when the Olympic Games were held in Melbourne, my late father told me to be careful about blowing my own trumpet.  That was good advice.  What else is Mr Abbott doing now but blowing his own trumpet?  Well, he may be attempting to do a number of other things, but none of those things does him any credit, or does any good for the political party that he is supposed to serve.

Of course Mr Abbott is free to blow his own trumpet – just as he is free to say that climate change is crap or that he will not let his religious beliefs interfere with his politics.  He is perfectly entitled to talk bullshit as much as he likes.  But not on my time, or while he is on my payroll.

One of the reasons that the parliamentary colleagues of Mr Abbott sacked him was that he talks bullshit all the time, and that he does not realise it.  That is still the case.  Even the other day, he was still talking about ‘stopping the boats’.  That was bullshit too – he hasn’t yet revealed to us what we should do with the people who were on the boats that we stopped.  It’s not the boats that worry us – it’s the people on them.  This was just one of his mantras.

The verdict of his party is in, and we already knew that Mr Abbott cannot face reality, and that he would not accept the decision of the umpire, his party.  So, the next time you meet a galah that has been fired, ask them what they are doing to protect their legacy.  The answer could be quite a hoot.

Poet of the month: Judith Wright

Weapon

The will to power destroys the power to will.

The weapon made, we cannot help but use it;

it drags us with its own momentum still.

 

The power to kill compounds the need to kill.

Grown out of hand, the heart cannot refuse it;

the will to power undoes the power to will.

 

Though as we strike we cry ‘I did not choose it’,

it drags us with its own momentum still.

In the one stroke we win the world and lose it.

The will to power destroys the power to will.