Here and there – Past Political Principles

31/05/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / 1 Comment

In 1926, a series of eight lectures was given at King’s College, London on the political principles of notable prime ministers of the nineteenth century. Learned people spoke of politicians from a different time. The essays were edited by F Hearnshaw and published by Macmillan and Co under the title Prime Ministers of the Nineteenth Century. The lectures make fascinating reading – not least at a time when it is not easy to detect principle in politics anywhere.

Before looking at some of the PMs, one commentator recalled that in Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith spoke of ‘that crafty and insidious animal vulgarly called a statesman or politician.’ Well, we all have a fair idea of what it takes to be a politician. What is a statesman?

There are many politicians; there are few statesmen. A statesman, I take it, is a man who performs some constructive work, who guides a country through a difficult crisis, who restores its prosperity and self-confidence after a period of disaster or distress, whose career marks an epoch in its history.

That seems fair enough, although the ‘epoch’ barrier may be too high. But as the same speaker said, a person can hardly aspire to that status before serving an apprenticeship, generally a long one, in party politics.

In other words, he must be an insidious and crafty animal before he can become something greater and better. He may have all the qualities of a great statesman, but he has little chance of showing them unless he also has the support which the party machine alone can give him, and which he must earn by party service.

The trouble is that a lot of decent people don’t want to be seen getting their hands dirty – they are reluctant to set foot in the swamp, and some get out of it too soon after they have sampled it. These remarks also remind us that although we have electoral laws that deal with political parties, for the most part the parties run their affairs as they see fit. The system of ‘party government which Great Britain has given to the world’ is in large part beyond the control of government. How could it be otherwise?

The first of the PMs is George Canning. He had a disability – his mother. One future Whig PM ‘regarded the son of an actress as de facto incapacitated from being Prime Minister of England.’ His mother, it was said, raised a ‘brood of illegitimate children, but Canning’s uncle sent him to Eton and Oxford.

Canning was brilliant and vain, but he got on. He went over the heads of the party and appealed to the people. The Times demurred. Mr Canning, it said, was ‘acting very improperly in rubbing shoulders with business men, and in exciting the clamours of the crowd.’ You must remember that democracy was a dirty word then, but Canning was seen ‘to be wielding the thunderbolts of an enormous popularity….He had not relied on or made use of the party machine as such. He had smashed it, and that is not an easy thing to do then or now.’

Well we don’t to reflect on a recent U S example, but Disraeli ‘never saw Canning but once’ and never forgot ‘the melody of that voice….the tumult of that ethereal brow.’ Gladstone as a child literally sat at Canning’s feet and said ‘I was bred under the shadow of the great name of Canning.’ We don’t hear talk like that now. Canning’s liberalism shaped English foreign policy until the end of the century. Metternich said Canning was ‘a whole revolution in himself alone’ and Coleridge said that Canning ‘flashed such a light about the constitution that it was difficult to see the ruins of the fabric through it.’

His Grace the Duke of Wellington could not stoop to the swamp. He was ‘suspicious, autocratic, sparing of thanks, possessed of a very long memory for offences, and a very short memory for services….the Duke had an intellectual contempt for his social equals, and a social contempt for his intellectual equals.’ He believed that ‘all reform is bad because all Reform ends up being Radical.’ In short, his Grace was a one man political landslide. But it was in some part his intervention that allowed the great Reform Act to pass, and avert a possible civil war. The English aristocracy would intervene to similar effect again in 1869 and 1911.

Sir Robert Peel is remembered as the man who gave England its police – Bobbies or Peelers – and the man who repealed the protectionist Corn Laws. He had along political career, and an intense sense of duty – national duty, not party commitment. He showed his sense of principal while in opposition. He disclaimed ‘factious’ opposition, and as a Tory he claimed it was necessary to support a Whig government when it espoused Conservative principles. He detested ‘anti-governmental principles’ for their own sake and he preferred the claims of public authority to those of political doctrine. As a corollary, he refused to flirt with Radicals or try to outbid the Whigs and restate the Tory case in radical terms.

A man of principle indeed! We could do with some Orange Peel, as he was of course known, around here. As a result, one colleague described him as ‘an iceberg with a slight thaw on the surface’; another compared his smile to the gleam of the silver plate of a coffin lid. He would be dismembered in the House of Commons by Disraeli.

Lord Palmerston was something of a ladies’ man and was welcomed by the English public as a jingoist. Again, contemporary events are uncomfortable. His lecture is becomingly droll. We forget that ‘though history is about dead men, they were not always dead.’ One critic had described Palmerston in a way that made him look like ‘a cross between a successful bookmaker and Carmen.’ The lecturer then makes the point ‘that it is always easier to find a man’s principles at the beginning of his career than at the end, because in the later stages principles are so lamentably apt to become obscured by practice.’ We are warned of the danger of studying a person’s career from the wrong end – by staring at the end rather than the beginning. And we are reminded of the perennial danger of hindsight with an anecdote from a novel of M. Maurois. ‘Let us remember, we men of the Middle Ages, that tomorrow we start for the Hundred Years War.’

The lecturer has a great line on the statesman’s upbringing:

His formal education, conducted with becoming pomp at Harrow and Cambridge, was of the type that lends dignity to a man’s obituary without unduly modifying his attainments.

A later PM made a similar remark about the impact of Oxford on her career, and a few at Oxford haven’t forgotten it. Palmerston spent a lot of time in the War Office, and he was known to conduct serious controversies with cheery gusto. He once officially informed the Military Secretary that ‘the war will be carried on with as much courtesy as a State of Contest in its nature admits.’

The cornerstone of his foreign policy was national interest. ‘We have no eternal allies and no permanent enemies. Our interests are eternal, and those interests, it is our duty to follow.’ The Americans could learn from this man. He wanted England to be ‘the champion of justice and right’ – provided that she – England – was the sole ruler of what that task might entail.

Here is an anecdote from another source. In his late seventies, Palmerston, the ladies’ man, was cited a co-respondent in a divorce. He was accused of adultery. The aggrieved husband was Mr O’Kane. Polite society had a new gag: ‘While the lady was certainly Kane, was Palmerston able?’

Lord John Russell was another survivor. His portrait reveals an aesthete and man of enlightenment. He could be very prosaic. ‘My dear Melbourne, I am afraid you do not take exercise enough or eat and drink more than enough. One of the two may do, but not both together.’ That’s not the kind of stuff to get men walking over hot coals for you. His greatest achievement, more than thirty years before he became PM for the second time, was to pilot through the great Reform Act of 1832. But for that legislation, the whole course of British history may have been very different. His father, the ninth Duke of Bedford, once reproved him for ‘giving great offence to your followers in the House of Commons by not being courteous to them, by treating them superciliously, and de haut en bas, by not listening with sufficient patience to their solicitations or remonstrances.’ The lecturer says that by ‘study, by diligent attendance, and by frequent and fearless intervention in debate, he had made himself a House of Commons man of the best type.’ But doubtless parts of the swamp repelled him.

Now we come to the first of two undisputed titans. The grandfather of the next PM in these lectures had migrated to England sixty years before he was born. Benjamin Disraeli, the grandson of an Italian Jew, was the leader of the Tory Party, the Prime Minister of England, and he would become the closest confidant and adviser to the most powerful monarch in the entire world, and whom he, Disraeli, would anoint as the Empress of India. It is a truly remarkable story.

It had not always been so smooth. Disraeli had been a frightful dandy, and he had an acid tongue. The queen had called him ‘detestable, unprincipled, reckless & not respectable.’ Her husband had dismissed him as ‘having not one single element of the gentleman in his composition.’ Well, Her Majesty and His Royal Highness may have had held strong views, but they were free to change their mind. And Disraeli could ‘work’ the queen. He said that with her, you had to ‘lay it on with a trowel’ – and he did so, ever so shamelessly; and he was always careful to heap honour and praise on the late Prince. Her Majesty loved it, and she loathed poor Mr Gladstone. She felt like he addressed her like he was addressing a public meeting.

And besides, having a PM with a background in finance might be useful. In 1875, the bankruptcy of the Sultan of Turkey left the Khedive of Egypt wanting to sell his shares in the Suez Canal. The French were in the market. Disraeli was determined to get this stake in the Canal. He could not get the money from Parliament as it was in recess. He sent his private secretary to ask Baron Rothschild for a loan of 4,000,000 pounds. Baron Rothschild asked two questions: ‘When?’, and after eating a grape and spitting out a grape skin, ‘What is your security?’ (The crown jewels?) The money was available next day to the British government at 2 ½ %, and a one-off fee of 100,000 pounds. Disraeli wrote: ‘It is just settled: you have it Madam.’ The Queen was ‘in ecstasies,’ but she was keen to hear how her Prime Minister had got the ‘great sum.’

These were the days of great debates with Gladstone and others about affairs in Europe and elsewhere. They really were titans the like of which we have not seen. Disraeli was instrumental in settling the affairs of Europe – and Bismarck greatly admired him at the Congress of Berlin. ‘Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann.’

Not long after this, the French nation would be convulsed by controversy over the fate of a Jewish officer named Dreyfus, and it is more than a little difficult to imagine the third generation of a migrant Jewish family becoming Prime Minister of any country in Europe at that time.

As a baptised Jew, Disraeli had a mature view of religion. He saw his religion as a fusion of two faiths and had a definition of the Church that appeals to me immensely – ‘a sacred corporation for the promotion and maintenance in Europe of certain Asian principles’. I wonder how that went down in drawing rooms in Bath.

The lecturer drily observes that Disraeli ‘escaped the permanent infantile paralysis which is often the consequence of a public school curriculum.’ (These lectures were given in 1926 – it looks like the Great War had shattered faith in the English education system.) He once said that ‘we put our money on the wrong horse’. As the lecturer, the editor, says ‘he perhaps did not sufficiently realise that in the Balkans all horses are wrong horses. The pitiful victims of atrocities lack nothing but opportunity in order themselves to become atrocious. That is a truth which the painful experiences of the last half century have taught us.’ Too many have not learned that truth about the Middle East even after the painful experiences of the last half century.’

Disraeli also comes down to us as the Tory who effectively brought democracy to England with the ‘leap in the dark’ of the reform laws in 1869. The Tories were becoming Conservatives.

Gladstone was different in so many ways. The Whigs were becoming Liberals. All this was before the Labor Party was thought of. Gladstone was a man of the most formidable intellect, integrity and industry. He had one very English trait. The Spectator said of him: ‘Mr Gladstone has done less to lay down any systematised course of action than almost any man of his political standing.’ As the lecture says, ‘He was essentially an empiric, docile to the teachings of experience.’ That is precisely the instinct of the common law – don’t look at questions in the abstract; wait until the issue arises on the evidence.

He started off opposing reform in 1832 and defended slavery, but conscience and intellect led him to radical change, and, as the lecture said, ‘his courage forced him to accept the teachings of his conscience, at whatever cost to himself.’ There is the key to the man. This intensely religious man came to the view that the enforcement of a State religion was not right in a modern state. He advocated the removal of Jewish disabilities. ‘I am deeply convinced that all systems, whether religious or political, which rest on a principle of absolutism, must of necessity be feeble and ineffective.’ That I think is a liberal way of thought. But he repudiated laissez-faire and he would not ‘hesitate to apply the full powers of the State to ameliorate social anomalies.’ How does that square with our Liberals? Or his wish to nationalise the railways? He was never a Little Englander, and he learned to appeal straight to the people, saying that he preferred liberty to authority.

On foreign policy, he challenged he challenged Turkish rule ‘not on the ground of national interest, but in the name of justice to the oppressed.’ The lecturer said: ‘There cannot be much doubt that, but for Gladstone, the England of the seventies would have accepted the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria as placidly as we have accepted those in Armenia.’

The last of these PMs, the Marquess of Salisbury, is the model of a true and decent Conservative politician – and statesman. Unusually in English politics, Salisbury was an intellectual. He survived the brutality of Eton, but he never lost his horror of the mob. ‘First-rate men will not canvass mobs; and mobs will not elect first-rate men.’ That is archetypal Victorian snobbery – until you look at people like Farage, Hanson, and Trump, and the people who vote for them.

Salisbury had the attitudes of the by-gone squire. He distrusted book learning and experts. He was another matter-of-fact man. ‘I would not be too much impressed by what the soldiers tell you about the strategic importance of these places. It is their way. If they were allowed full scope, they would insist on the importance of garrisoning the Moon in order to protect us from Mars.’ The stain comes from the Conservative contribution to the Irish tragedy, and their fixated opposition to change by Home Rule.

So, there is the twentieth century looking back to the nineteenth. The urbane style of the lectures is something we miss; indeed, we just about miss all style now in this kind of discussion. The story of the emergence of the parties known as Conservatives and Liberals may tell us a lot at a time when those parties no longer stand for much at all. There was a focus on character and leadership that we don’t feel now. The competition for the top job is there throughout, as is the disdain of theory or ideology, but the job of climbing the greasy pole does not seem to have annihilated statesmanship as much then as it does now. Why that may be so is a proper subject of inquiry. You can almost hear the rush of the cascade of clichés. In truth, you can almost see them on your television as we speak.

The Nationalists

11/05/201711/05/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / 4 Comments

An occasional series on the new nationalists – dingoes and drongos like Trump, Farage, and Bernardi – and other Oz twerps.

XII

A hit, a palpable hit!

It is hard to see the French election as anything but a hit for Marine Le Pen – and Mrs Theresa May. A two to one result does suggest real and lasting antipathy to this so called right wing nationalism in France. Does that hostility really go back to Vichy France and the collaboration with the Germans?

It’s certainly a bad result for Britain, because Europe will now have its tail up. The right is faltering in Germany, and Frau Merkel looks to be in charge there. And you cannot help wondering about the extent to which the frightful squalor of the Trump presidency and the fractured aimlessness of the English is putting people off flirting with the gutter.

Apart from giving a big check on nationalism, the result in France does two things. First, we have now seen a major election won by a literate candidate who correctly says that all that stuff about Left and Right has gone out with hessian drawers. It’s bullshit. Secondly, it shows that you can elect someone who is not aligned to either mainstream party, but who is not an idiot or a bully.

Speaking of an idiotic bully, here are four tweets that Trump issued after a former Acting Attorney-General gave sworn evidence that she warned the White House that its Director of Security was a security risk and susceptible to Russian blackmail.

“Director Clapper reiterated what everybody, including the fake media already knows- there is ‘no evidence’ of collusion w/ Russia and Trump.”

“Sally Yates made the fake media extremely unhappy today — she said nothing but old news!”

“The Russia-Trump collusion story is a total hoax, when will this taxpayer funded charade end?”

“Biggest story today between Clapper & Yates is on surveillance. Why doesn’t the media report on this? #FakeNews!”

It is idle to suggest that such an idiot and bully might manage the corner store, much less be President of the United States.

People are collecting empirical evidence on the educational levels of people who follow nationalists. I suspect that similar trends will be found in the U S, France, Britain and Australia. But Trump supporters may be the worst off. Polling shows that 96% of his supporters think that he is doing a good job. Those figures are very worrying, and show problems above and beyond intellect. It’s under this masque that Trump can maintain his assault on liberal values and honesty.

Now I see that Trump has fired the FBI head who was investigating him in part on the advice of an Attorney General who had to stand down because of his ineptitude. This was a typical Trump job – misconceived, no judgment, and worse taste. The Trump letter was hideously self-serving, ungrammatical and full of lies. The war between the President and his law enforcers will get worse. The notion that this administration could fire someone for ‘miss-speaking’ is hilarious, but not as hilarious as the notion that Comey was fired because of what he did to Clinton. The real reason is probably that Trump was jealous of Comey’s air time on TV. Do people in America see how low their star has fallen?

Still, it looks like Trump is now a bored captive of generals and billionaires, and – like Kim Jon Ung – that he is only at peace when he is applauding himself in front of the adoring mob. Given that nationalism now appears to be in check in Europe also, and that Britain may have to wait years to find out the cost of her frumpy defenestration, we might suspend this column for a while.

The immediate successor will be a nine part introduction to opera that I have had much pleasure in preparing. The first part will be with you soon.

Passing Bull 104 – Australian values

27/04/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

The hypocrisy and intolerance in our public life is getting worse. A week after telling us that migrants should share Australian values, government ministers are doing hand-stands because someone said something of questionable taste that offended part of our secular faith. Nor are our leaders in the slightest put out that those complaining the loudest about this allegedly offensive behaviour are also the ones that cry the loudest when the law is invoked against offensive words. You can apparently be as offensive as you like – until you offend a true blue Aussie. Why don’t we go for the full Monty and set up a House of UnAustralian Affairs Committee? I can think of a number of thick thugs who would be ripe to emulate the U S model.

Well, here is my go at some real Australian values where we could well be world leaders.

Holding without trial a person fleeing from persecution in a nation ruined by a war that your nation entered under false pretences.
Imprisoning young aboriginal offenders for stealing bread, under laws of mandatory sentencing passed to deal with aboriginals by legislators who do not know as much as the judges and who do not trust them, while their rich mates crookedly deprive people of millions of dollars and routinely go uncharged.
Refusing to change taxation laws in an effort to enable young people who are not so well off to buy their first home – not just an Australian value but what we used to call ‘the Australian dream’ – for fear that such a law might be against the interests of those who are well off, in particular those members of parliament who invest in land and use the tax laws for that purpose – what used to be called ‘the ruling class’ or ‘the landed gentry’.
Supporting bodies that claim to be in sport but which are in truth trading corporations in the entertainment industry that at least in part live off the earnings of gambling, another form of business that has brought hardship and misery to countless Australians, commonly those who are not so well off or who are not so good at looking after themselves.
Having legislatures refuse to limit the gambling business that does so much harm to their voters, because their governments are now hooked on the easy money coming in as revenue derived in large part from human misery.
Refusing, for reasons of pure self-interest, to make laws to contain the spread of this evil, and to ban advertising of products that bring as much misery as cigarettes.
Refusing to investigate or prosecute people who in public offend aboriginal footballers on the basis of their race on the ground that such action would impede the freedom of speech of the abuser, or on the ground that a single instance of abuse does not constitute harassment – or professing inane political theories that leave them open to this silly suggestion.
Maintaining a system of government that blatantly prefers one religion to all others by requiring its head of state to be in communion with one sect of one religion – by the law of a foreign nation that we hapless and timid Australians have no power to alter.
Forbidding members of a government from voting in parliament on an issue of social equality apparently favoured by a clear majority – on the reasoning like that of a spoiled brat who is a bad sport and who just picks up his bat and ball to spite the winner.
Acquiescing in a body of laws on taxation that are at best incomprehensible, but which offer the wealthy more avenues of evasion than poor people.
Coming too late to the conclusion that allowing a bank manager to be paid one hundred times what a bank teller gets paid is as bad for the rest of Australia as is their practice of encouraging their managers to boost their incomes by engaging in bad and illegal banking practises that hurt those who are less able to look after themselves.
Refusing to sanction a decent inquiry into these evils because it might be bad for business! (This is the bell ringer of all bell ringers.)
Failing to see that it is blindingly obvious that the widening gap in incomes and housing wealth is undermining the fabric of the nation in the same manner that has produced such ghastly political disruption elsewhere.
Having politicians who generally behave in such an appalling fashion that at any given election, a majority of voters will be clearly against the party that has the misfortune to be elected to govern.
Habitually going off to wars and losing them as a payment of protection money to Uncle Sam, and not only refusing to acknowledge that fact, but positively lying and denying it.
Allowing blockheads – seismically stupid people – to favour a warped ideology of fanatics against the evidence of science to endanger our hold on the planet and to rob our children of their heritage.
Having a political system that is so decrepit that a rational literate liberal leader is soon reduced to a crass scared vote-chasing follower.
Living in philistine cities of the plain where more people will go to watch a single match of football, in a code that has not been and never will be exported beyond our sunlit plains extended, than go to see all the operas and plays put on in those cities over the whole year.
Being in a nation that likes to see itself as ‘sporting,’ and having a major sporting body aligned with one of the most corrupt entities on the planet, whose head has a tenure exceeding that of most African dictators, whose income has blue sky (more than $200,000) between it and that of the Chief Justice of the High Court, and who when challenged descends to the gutter in a manner that should have got him sacked on the spot.
After more than two centuries of white settlement, not having found the means to stop such jerks worming their way into positions of trust and reducing the rest of us to illness or tears.
Having politicians who are so low and unprincipled that they will go out and spruik bullshit about Australian values in an effort to get a transitory lift in the polls, and who either do not see or do not care that we see them for what they are.

You do wonder how our values might be different to those of the English, French, Americans, Chinese, Kenyans, Chileans, Indonesians, or North Koreans, or what school of diplomacy you should attend before pointing out their deficiencies to their face.

But, on reflection, I think there may be one real Australian value – anyone who uses that term with a straight face is a no good bullshit-artist and, worse, probably a politician to boot.

Confucius says:

I am not so impertinent as to practise flattery. It is just that I so detest inflexibility.

Analects 14.32.

The Nationalists

22/04/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

An occasional series on the new nationalists – dingoes and drongos like Trump, Farage, and Bernardi – and other Oz twerps.

Nationalism on a rampage

It’s been a swell week for nationalists; utterly bonzer. Mrs May has suddenly felt the need to consult the people again. Mr Turnbull has done a Trump and discovered Australian values and Australia first. The world holds its breath hoping that France will do to Le Pen what Holland did to Gilders. The only downside for the nationalists was that the Trump armada suffered the same fate as the Spanish armada – it just went badly off course – and Mr Sean Spicer has turned the West Wing of the White House into a studio for the Marx Brothers.

If Mrs May has achieved something in calling the election, she has shown that she can’t be trusted. She is just another politician who is just as malleable as the rest of them. She was put in a difficult position by a popular vote obtained by fraud, but she had steadfastly denied that she needed to go to the people to get a vote for herself. Now she has changed her mind for patently political reasons. The so-called opposition has blown itself up.

But three things come out of this rude reversal of course.

The first is that Mrs May and those behind her now concede that there may be circumstances in the divorce process that warrant taking the opinion of the people again. That might hardly seem to be surprising in an exercise that is said to be about that curious thing called sovereignty, but it is important. Why shouldn’t the final decision be subject to a final vote – when the full implications of the lies of the leaders of the winners have been revealed?

The second thing is that Mrs May looks determined to have history repeat itself in the worst possible way. The referendum was disarmingly simple, but it was disastrous in providing no guidance about how to go about the divorce. What’s more important – free trade or closed immigration? Mrs May wants to repeat the process and get a blank cheque. ‘Mother knows best. Trust me with uncounted money – I’m a politician. I will get you the best available result.’ What would be wrong with candidates from any of the parties campaigning on the basis that they will if elected support a bill to require Parliamentary approval of any deal? How do those who support the sovereignty of the people object to this manner of its revelation?

The third point is that as matters stand, Europe looks to be in a decidedly better negotiating position. The English representatives will have what used to be called plenipotentiary powers. The European negotiators need the approval of 28 governments. Ask the Canadians what that means. ‘I personally think that your position is entirely reasonable, Madam, but I am afraid that the Moravians and the Bohemians just won’t stand for it. They are, frankly, determinedly odd way out there and so far east of Calais’.

Mr Trump suffered another loss, apart from that of his armada. His friend and ally, Bill O’Reilly, was forced out of state owned TV, Fox News. This devout Christian, who met the Pope the other day, had been preying on women. Trump will never understand how he demeaned his office by giving character evidence for such a creep. O’Reilly said that the allegations were utterly groundless. If that’s so, the directors of Fox have become accessories to blackmail by handing over $13,000,000 for nothing. That is one hell of a lot of hush money – but it shows how sick we are, that it is $5,000,000 short of what this jerk got for a year’s pay. This is not about O’Reilly and sex, or Murdoch and morality. It is about the abuse of power, and it is about the actions of decent companies like BMW and Mercedes standing up for their women employees and talking to Rupert Murdoch in the one language that he understands – dollars.

Fox News is a corrupt body. It has now lost its head and its figurehead for the same offences. Each for his sins was sent off with tens of millions of dollars, when each deserved to be a guest of Uncle Sam to allow him to cool off and to warn off other vicious predators.

Still, this does look like a net win for all of us. It’s unlikely that this fall will trouble Trump supporters, but you never know – some at least must now be counting up the breaches of promise, while Trump is about to unveil tax reductions for the filthy rich – while continuing to renege on his promise to hand over his tax returns.

Meanwhile, a lot of Australians have been left feeling like they should wash their hands by the embrace by their Prime Minister of Australian values. It’s at about the time of Anzac Day each year that we get subjected to bullshit about Australian mateship – as if the Turks did not have any friends. When will our government release a manifesto of our values toward refugees and corporate tax and, indeed, tax avoidance? Victoria has a statute that says: ‘A person must not by a deliberate act or omission evade or attempt to evade tax.’ If you get caught breaking this law – and there is no definition of ‘evade’ – you can get two years in the slammer. Is that an Australian value or just a Victorian aspiration? Can you imagine what might happen if some idiot sought to enforce that law?

Most of business is now horrified – yet again – about what its so-called government is doing. On any big issue they have developed the knack of going straight to the edge of the wrong answer. You know that we are in deep trouble when a party that calls itself the Liberal Party shops business for its grubby mates like Bernardi and Hanson and Abbott.

Let me tell you how bad the trouble is. About one third of Australians don’t trust and won’t vote for the Liberal Party or for the Labor Party. The balance floats at about 50-50 for the other two. That means that a clear majority of Australians will not have voted for and will not trust either the Liberal Party or the Labor Party if it wins office at the next election. The reasons are obvious, but not many appear to accept that the system is broken – and that our model of democracy is about as useful as a T model Ford. The smile of the Prime Minister just keeps getting more watery with every flip or flop. And am I the only one who thinks that Mr Shorten looks more revoltingly insincere every time that he opens his mouth – like a wind-up doll under a hard hat and with a luminous jacket? I wonder if he ever had a job that required him to get his hands dirty – literally?

Still, Andrew Bolt was thrilled to bits. He thinks that Mr Turnbull has vindicated the nationalism of himself and his unattractive mate and ally, the Sniper. I wonder if Mr Bolt, in the privacy of his bedroom and before a full-length mirror, celebrates these little wins with the silly walk of John Cleese? And I wonder, too, what is the preferred second language of Mr Peter Dutton? When people start speaking of that train wreck as a possible leader, we experience the full horror of Mr Kurtz at the heart of darkness.

Passing Bull 103 – Bull about poverty

18/04/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

In doing a course on line from Cambridge about Queen Elizabeth I, I had occasion to look at Elizabethan poor laws. This led me to put on the following note.

‘This woman (Queen Elizabeth I) for me stands for leadership and tolerance. The first is in very short supply, and the second was brutally attacked in various parts of the world (including mine) last year. The other thing that struck me again was how much more rigorous was the education provided back then to those who would prefer to watch Shakespeare than to read Phantom comics or watch Days of Our Lives. (That last comment really shows me as an old fogey.)

But I am now engaged in reading Dickens’ novels for the second time. I have just finished Bleak House again, and I recalled that poor Jo appeared to die from poverty. The poor were always before Dickens. What about in the time of Queen Elizabeth I?

I recalled my amazement about thirty years ago when I was hearing tax cases, and I had to hear my first case about whether a body was a charity.

Where do I find the law on that?

If the tribunal pleases, you look to find the spirit and intendment of the preamble to a statute of Queen Elizabeth I.

The First Elizabeth? Are you serious?

Counsel was – the act is 43 Eliz. c 1 (1601). The act’s preamble contained a list of purposes or activities that the parliament believed were beneficial to society, and for which the nation wanted to encourage private contributions. That list then formed the foundation of the modern definition of charitable purposes, which was developed through case law. The ‘relief of the aged, impotent, and poor’ stand high in the list in the preamble. Poor Jo would have been a proper object of bounty.

I recalled this old law – which still very much underpins the relevant law where I live – when I was looking at what Lloyd George said in introducing the People’s Budget.

These problems of the sick, the infirm, of the men who cannot find a means of earning a livelihood, are problems with which it is the business of the state to deal.

Was he quite mad? Was he really saying that ‘it is the business of the state’ to deal with the sick and the unemployed? Had this little Welsh son of a cobbler forgotten what happened to the first man who said that the meek shall inherit the earth?

Well, Churchill and Lloyd George got the budget through, but only after persuading a reluctant king to threaten to create enough peers to force it through. The aristocracy thought that this move was revolutionary – and it may have looked like pure heresy across the Atlantic – but once again, the British aristocracy pulled back and avoided revolution – and kept itself alive.

But now I think it was not revolutionary to say that it was ‘the business of the state’ to deal with the poor. In my view, the English had come to that position more than three centuries ago. In the Oxford History of England (J B Black, The Reign of Elizabeth, 1558-1603, 2^nd Ed., OUP, 1959, 265), I find this:

The official attitude to the whole fraternity of vagabonds had always been, and still was, one of fear driven ferocity: they were the true ‘caterpillars of the commonwealth’ who ‘lick the sweat from labourers’ brows. But the impotent poor, the poor by casualty, who were poor ‘in very deed’, were acknowledged to be a charge on public benevolence.’ The vital question was what form this public maintenance should take. Slowly and painfully the state was being driven by the colossal dimensions of the problem to the conviction that responsibility in the matter could not be left to the conscience of the individual, but must be enforced by law on everyone.

The author points to a prior act of 1563 acknowledging the need for a compulsory levy for the maintenance of ‘impotent, aged, and needy persons.’

Now, these Elizabethan conceptions and laws do not look small to me now. We still have debates about vagabonds – often called ‘dole bludgers’ here – but it does look like some nations may now regret not having done enough for their ‘poor by casualty’ who, at least in the eyes of some, have recently succumbed to snake oil salesmen and false gods. The various categories of vagabonds of Elizabeth – or Dickens – still look familiar. They could be the leading lights of a major Australian political party. (You can raffle that one.)

But whatever else the Puritans took with them on the Mayflower, it was not the idea that the poor were acknowledged to be a charge on public benevolence. The Puritans were long on the individual and covenant, rather than on status, and they never let spirituality stand between them and Mammon. Never. The attitudes to the business that the state has with the sick and poor are very, very different in the U S compared to England, Europe or my country.

And the English and European response is not driven by Christian charity, but by a political view of the integrity of the community. Charity has been secularised – that is, made the business of the state. These laws were made in the light of hard experience, as is the English wont, and they cannot be upheld or cast down by the pronouncing of some theory or nostrum or label. And if you want to know one thing about Oz politics, it is that the simplest form of suicide here is for a politician to even hint at reducing health benefits or pensions, the ‘entitlements’ derided by those who won’t ever need them. Australians follow the English in distrusting theory and rejecting ideology. The question is simpler. What kind of community do you want to live in – one that stops to pick up those who have tripped up, or one that doesn’t?

So, a common historical stock can produce very different fruit. Perhaps it’s just as well, and inoculates us from boredom with changelessness. How you see it depends on where you stand. I am hopelessly prejudiced. I was born here and raised here. Last year I was diagnosed with an illness that is frequently terminal. After many rounds of tests, examinations, diagnoses and treatments from some of the best doctors, surgeons and technicians with the best facilities in the world, the issue is well under control and not life threatening. I have not seen anything like a bill – except for drugs – and I now suspect that that protection against becoming ‘poor by casualty’ goes back not just to the Welfare State, or to the People’s Budget, but to the poor laws and laws of charity and the good sense of the parliaments of Queen Elizabeth I.

I’m sorry this got so long, but you may sense some bêtes noires being aired.’

The tutor, Dr Andrew Lacey, reminded me that the Puritans thought that poverty was a sign of disfavour in the eye of God – how un-Christ like does that sound? – and that therefore the poor could therefor look after themselves. He also reminded me that the poor laws went backwards in Victorian England. Poor people were given no favours. They were more likely to be punished. That is why Dickens wrote so much about them, and why Lloyd George and Churchill were involved in a secular revolution. The governance of England was much more civilised about the poor in 1570 than it was in 1870.

The question is what kind of community do you want? And labels and ideologies – ‘nanny state’ or ‘socialism’ – are just so much bullshit. So is the old Left/Right distinction, or IPA nonsense about ‘soaking the rich.’ If you swallow that nonsense, does it follow that the poor must suffer to save the rich? And what kind of person allows ideology to kill kindness?

Judging by the homeless on our streets, our kindness level here is currently pitched somewhere between that of England at one time or other between 1570 and 1870.

Volume 2 of Passing Bull – Items 51 – 100 – is now available on Amazon Kindle.

Confucius says

The small man, being ignorant of the decree of heaven, does not stand in awe of it. He treats great men with insolence and the words of the sages with derision.

Analects, 16.8.

The Nationalists

09/04/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

An occasional series on the new nationalists – dingoes and drongos like Trump, Farage, and Bernardi – and other Oz twerps.

The war games of a TV watcher

We already knew two things. The Middle East is far too complicated for poor Donald Trump – it is way above his pay level. But TV propaganda can be very effective on people with susceptible minds. Nothing in a ghastly civil war that has been going on for six years had changed, but a few minutes of footage on state owned television (Fox News) was enough to change the mind of the President of the United States – diametrically, and on many fronts. So like a bored spoiled child on a dull Boxing Day, he opened one of his more expensive presents and spat his dummy. And he killed a few more Muslims in Syria. After three times invoking the God of the Christians. (The notion that Trump might believe in God is just silly – and an affront to God.) This was a war game made by television and for television. The hero of the people, the Strong Man, would show the whole world how he deals with red lines. (And, yep, poor old Greg Sheridan bought that bullshit, too.) And Trump is now defending his decision by murdering the English language on Twitter. The Syrians keep burying their dead while the President of the United States takes his finger off the trigger and plays golf at that temple of vulgarity, Mar a Lago. And having killed more Syrians in the name of humanity, the President gets ready in the name of Trump to seek to uphold his ban on any refugees from Syria getting anywhere near the Statue of Liberty.

Now, some photos of war crimes in Vietnam – especially one involving a child – helped to shift public opinion about that cruel war over time – but that is very different to causing a President to reverse major policies and attack a former ally within about forty-eight hours. To repeat, the war has been on for about six years; to the agonies of wars about religion, the U S and Russia have now decided to use the theatre for their own proxy wars; about 400, 000 have been killed; only a tiny fraction of those deaths were caused by chemical weapons. The U S, as has been its sad wont, has been propping up a brutal dictator – until the other day, when it turned on him and bombed him. The U S and Russia have both decided that the sufferings of the Syrian people could be alleviated by deploying the world’s two biggest air forces to drop even more bombs on them.

The questions arising from the brash hubris of this attack, so entirely characteristic of its manic author, include the following.

Under what municipal law of the U S was this act of war undertaken? As is so often the case, when Trump takes a position, we can find him saying exactly the opposite. He had said that the U S should not even be in Syria; that Assad had to stay; and that only Congress could authorise a war – all three were hit clean out of Trump’s ground by some brooding clips on Fox News. I gather that the answer of Congress is that he might be allowed this one strike, but for any more he will have to consult them.

Under what international law were these killings undertaken? If France offends Germany, can it just take out the Eiffel Tower in response? If the answer is no, what is the difference?

Finally on lawfulness, were the intelligence agencies – which two months ago Trump regarded as less reliable than Vladimir Putin – as ‘slam dunk’ confident about chemical weapons in Syria as they were about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

We should, though, remember that it’s in poor taste to ask legal questions about this administration – it’s yet to get one right.

Now for some matters of substance.

If you want to intervene in a civil war that your main enemy is also in, is it a good idea to have your army and airforce attacking one side and your navy attacking the other? How can you hurt Assad without helping I S? How can you attack I S without helping Assad? Does this not tell the world that once again the U S does not know what it is doing in the Middle East?

If the war crimes of Assad are such that the U S is entitled to make war on him in the name of both God and humanity, how could the U S ever agree to leave that person in power over these poor people after having intervened in their war? If the answer is that they could not, does this mean that they now support regime change – with all of its fearful history in the Middle East and North Africa – and that they now accept some responsibility for the resolution of the Syrian civil war? If so, how do they avoid head-on conflict with Russia, and do they accept that they will have to be involved in Syria for a longer period than they were in Iraq, and for longer than they or the Russians were involved in Afghanistan?

If the first object of the U S is to combat terrorism, do they agree that botched attempts at regime change and the sight of Christians killing Muslims have been two of the main causes of our current scourge?

Those I think were some of the reasons why President Obama did not intervene in Syria – plus the fact that he was elected on that very basis, and that the American people had no interest in going into another war in a faraway land. And that they couldn’t afford more of such wars. Mr Obama understood the simple truth that being a little engaged in a war is as simple as being a little bit pregnant.

We can only hope that other nationalists like Farage and Hanson just stay out of this. Their poisonous loathing of Muslims is part of the problem. The hypocrisy of Trump about Muslim or Syrian refugees is beyond words. And Mrs May has started the process that will reveal to the English the fearful costs of their own nationalism – and the venom of people like Farage.

Well, we may wonder what part Mr Kushner, or his wife, played in all this, or whether Mr Kushner passed a rude remark to Mr Bannon while Mr Kushner was coming in, and Mr Bannon was going out. A lot of acid has been seen dripping out of the White House.

Finally, although it’s none of my business, might someone suggest to Trump that he might leave the God of the Christians out of all this? This is after all a war between Muslims, but in what sense are children of God different to the children of Allah? And then there is the danger that if he keeps talking about the God of the Christians and the people of Damascus, it may be just a matter of time before some bunny mentions the word crusade.

Passing Bull 102 – Bull about sin and being offensive

07/04/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Rupert Murdoch has not done the U S or us a favour by setting up Fox News. It is dishonest and loaded against Democrats or people with sense or manners. Trump would probably have not got where he is without them, and under his White House, Fox News looks like State Owned Television – like the television stations controlled by his mate Vladimir Putin.

The station’s biggest drawcard is a revolting religious bigot named Bill O’Reilly. He and the network’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, have paid about $13m in settlements to five women who accused the anchor of sexual harassment or verbal abuse. The women accused O’Reilly in cases from the past two decades. According to The New York Times, the settlements were made ‘in exchange for agreeing to not pursue litigation or speak about their accusations’. In other words, they bought silence.

The report comes after a difficult year for Fox News. In July, their Chairman was eased out after a very expensive settlement of sexual harassment allegations.

‘The reporting suggests a pattern,’ the Times report said. ‘As an influential figure in the newsroom, Mr O’Reilly would create a bond with some women by offering advice and promising to help them professionally.

‘He then would pursue sexual relationships with them, causing some to fear that if they rebuffed him, their careers would stall.’

Fox News released a statement to the Times.

‘21st Century Fox takes matters of workplace behaviour very seriously,’ the statement said.

‘Notwithstanding the fact that no current or former Fox News employee ever took advantage of the 21^st century Fox hotline to raise a concern about Bill O’Reilly, even anonymously, we have looked into these matters over the last few months and discussed them with Mr O’Reilly.

‘While he denies the merits of these claims, Mr O’Reilly has resolved those he regarded as his personal responsibility. Mr O’Reilly is fully committed to supporting our efforts to improve the environment for all our employees at Fox News.’

O’Reilly said on his website: ‘Just like other prominent and controversial people, I’m vulnerable to lawsuits from individuals who want me to pay them to avoid negative publicity.

‘In my more than 20 years at Fox News Channel, no one has ever filed a complaint about me with the Human Resources Department, even on the anonymous hotline.

‘But most importantly, I’m a father who cares deeply for my children and who would do anything to avoid hurting them in any way. And so I have put to rest any controversies to spare my children.’

‘Those of us in the arena are constantly at risk, as are our families and children,’ he said. ‘My primary efforts will continue to be to put forth an honest TV program and to protect those close to me.’

You would think at this level, they could serve up better bullshit than that drivel. Thirteen million dollars among five complainants would average more than $2.5 M for each complainant. And what does it mean to deny ‘the merits’ of the claims? And what do you have to do to get fired by Murdoch if you are a money spinner?

The world being what it is, O’Reilly’s ratings will probably go up, although decent companies like BMW are withdrawing their support. He does have one supporter and defender. Donald Trump. So, here we have one dirty pussy grabber looking after another dirty pussy grabber.

Trump, too, buys silence. He recently handed over $25 million to settle fraud claims. And being the idiot that he is, he would have no idea of how shockingly inappropriate it is for the President of the United States to descend into the gutter to shelter a partner in the gutter press.

Mark Latham got sacked here for being offensive on TV. Naturally, a lot of people mentioned some nonsense about ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘the right to offend.’ The sad truth is that a lot of people – generally those who have not done so well in life with the cards that God dealt them – really get a kick out of watching rude people on TV offend others. And the equally sad truth is that rude people offending others is what delivered such wins as they have achieved to rude and offensive people like Farage, Hanson, and Trump.

The gutter is not a pretty place.

Confucius says:

Confucius sat with a messenger and asked him, ‘What does your master do?’ He answered, ‘My master seeks to reduce his errors but has not been able to do so.’

Analects, 14.25

Passing Bull 101 – Willing offenders and insulters

31/03/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Tim Wilson and David Leyonhjelm are like little boys caught playing with matches. Having spruiked their own bullshit, and having backed the Murdoch press in its claims for more power over you and me, they now find that they have burnt their fingers. Their targets have exercised their right to free speech, and what do you think is the result of that kind of democracy in action? The greedy ratbags – a lot of them bloody foreigners – want to widen the law and make life tougher for people like Andrew Bolt and Pauline Hanson.

Now, I, in common with most other people, am bored stiff by a debate that looks to have only one side and is going nowhere – except to help the ALP at the next election. But some of the sulky bullshit unloaded today by Wilson and Leyonhjelm – two exercises in inanity sponsored by you and me – require an answer.

To recapitulate – the law seeks to preserve our freedoms; but my freedom stops when you get hurt. We make laws against insulting and offending people in public for two reasons – that conduct can hurt people, and our law is involved in limiting our capacity to hurt others, and that kind of behaviour can lead to fights or worse, and the first object of the law is to preserve the peace. It adds nothing to say that such a law restricts freedom of speech – it doesn’t even illuminate the relevant issue – which is whether the restriction is warranted.

So, if one man approaches another man in the street with his wife and says ‘You are a coward and a poofter and your wife is a slut’, the police must have the right to intervene immediately. That’s always been the law and it always will be.

If the culprit claimed that his freedom of speech was being infringed, he would risk an adverse reaction from both the wallopers and the stipes. People would think he was mad. And you would hardly be thought to be any saner if you suggested that the law should be changed so that the police could not intervene unless the infringement could be described as ‘harassment.’ We don’t want to burden our police with fine judgments in rough houses that they have coped with for centuries.

None of this has anything to do with race or religion. It is an accident of our legal history that our Commonwealth Parliament made a law about offending or insulting people on the ground of race. Our state laws have always been adequate on the general law – of course those laws apply to insults or offence offered on the ground of race or religion. To do so on either basis only makes the underlying offence so much worse. The conduct is more hurtful, and more likely to start a fight.

Those who have been arguing to restrict the federal law never mention the state law. This is because they don’t know about it or because they are so driven ideologically that their thinking is warped.

But it is not surprising that people who value the protection of both federal and state laws should think of seeking to extend that protection in light of the sustained campaigns to reduce them. So, a federal MP suggested that the federal law be extended to cover misconduct on the ground of religion as well as race. She has an obvious point. ‘You’re a dirty Muslim’ is at least as harmful and dangerous as ‘You’re a dirty Arab.’ Both of course are unlawful under our existing state law, but Wilson either doesn’t know or has forgotten that fact – which renders the rest of the discussion academic, or, as they say in the U S, moot.

But Wilson goes in with the roistering debating skills of a high school student. He says this would be a law on blasphemy. Just as he said the present law is one of censorship. Well, we do have a law of blasphemy, but you don’t deal with an argument by pinning a label on it. What is the answer to the question of the MP?

Then Wilson offers us some gratuitous legal advice. He opines that arguments about s 18 D, the defence under which made the Leak controversy so dishonest, are ‘fallacious’. His legal arguments are as good as my diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

Then he descends into the political ad hominem dustbin by talking of pandering to ‘victimhood.’ The IPA crowd are scarred for life. He accuses Mark Dreyfus QC, who at least knows what he is talking about, of ‘hypocritical incoherence’, but in doing so, he gets lost in his own labels. He may, though, be able to detect perhaps an iota of hypocrisy in contending that the present law offends freedom of speech, but a law based on harassment would not.

Unfortunately, the Leyonhjelm piece is worse than stupid. He is worried not about religion, but ethnic groups.

The debate over S 18C is much greater than free speech. It is, in fact, a fight for the votes of people who have different values from those of traditional Australia. Instead of embracing the values of their adopted country, these ethnic, religious and immigrant representatives want Australia to become more like the countries they left behind….

After World War II, immigrants who arrived in Australia either abandoned their historic grievances or chose not to share them with others. Millions of post-war immigrants from dozens of countries integrated, assimilated and did their best to become true-blue Aussies. For their part, Australians welcomed these immigrants as ‘‘New Australians’’ and embraced their food, music and dance….

The fact that leaders of immigrant, ethnic and religious groups are now flexing their political muscle in pursuit of different values is a major concern. Not only does it threaten traditional liberal values, it fuels opposition to immigration among the community and gives credence to demands to block certain types of immigrants.

This is obnoxious bullshit. ‘Traditional liberal values’ presumably relate to ‘Western civilisation’, and can you imagine anything worse than spending a night with ‘true-blue Aussies’. Like members of federal parliament? In Othello, we find this exchange:

Brabantio: Thou art a villain.

Iago: You are a senator.

Leyonhjelm refers to some history and to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He doesn’t say that our laws are justified in the exceptions to the right to freedom of expression in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. That right is expressly subject to ‘such… restrictions or penalties prescribed by law and… are necessary in a democratic society…for the prevention of disorder or crime.’

Nor does he refer to the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789.

Liberty consists of the power to do whatever does not hurt others….The law has the right to forbid only actions that are harmful to society….No one is to be disturbed because of his opinions, even religious, provided that their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.

Quite by chance I’m reading Germaine Greer on Shakespeare and I find this.

We no longer feel, as Shakespeare’s contemporaries did, the ubiquity of Satan, but Iago is still serviceable to us as an objective correlative to the mindless inventiveness of racist aggression. Iago is still alive and kicking and filling migrants’ letter boxes with excrement.

From about 1596 to 1986 – these things don’t change.

So, it is bullshit as usual for these two very ordinary politicians, but one is more obnoxious than the other. We should have heard the last of ‘freedom of speech’ in this context, but our weak Prime Minister has now climbed into the same basket as Andrew Bolt and Pauline Hanson.

And on that sainted day when these heroic freedom fighters finally achieve emancipation, after they give their feu de joie, who will be the first they insult or offend on the ground of race?

Confucius says:

The Master said, ‘I suppose I should give up hope, I have yet to meet the man who is as fond of virtue as he is of beauty in women’.

Analects, 15.13

The Master said, ‘If one sets strict standards for oneself and makes allowances for others, when making demands on them, one will stay clear of ill will’.

Analects, 15.15

The Nationalists

30/03/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

An occasional series on the new nationalists – dingoes and drongos like Trump, Farage, and Bernardi – and other Oz twerps.

Flailing nationalists everywhere

The President of the United States said of health care that ‘it’s an unbelievably complex subject; nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.’ He was possibly the only person in the world who didn’t understand how complicated the issue is – morally, politically, and economically. With his infamously terse attention span, Trump will never come to grips with the economic or political issues; the moral issues are way beyond his ken and above his pay level. He showed this immediately he got rolled. He put on his spoiled child routine and picked up his bat and ball to go home. He blamed the Democrats! For not agreeing to repeal their biggest achievement. He said that from now on, health care was the Democrats’ problem.

He simply has no idea about what government entails. You, Mr Trump, are the President. The party that you claim to represent has majorities everywhere – so much so, that discipline is out of the question. You made promises that some were silly enough to believe. You might at least be up to demolition – but you couldn’t even manage that.

And now you are coming to face the same problem as your predecessor. You are confronted by people elected to make laws who refuse to do just that. They are only interested in choking the system. They are wrecking balls. What can this president do with those pesky fanatics? Well, one thing he can’t do is just run away.

The myth that Trump is a good businessman was as silly as the notion that if you have succeeded in business, you will be good at government. Trump didn’t write The Art of the Deal. His inane tweeting shows he can’t put a sentence together. Time magazine ran an interview that showed that disability to an alarming degree. Trump inherited a fortune. Despite bankruptcies, and settling a fraud suit for $25 million, he has, by not paying taxes, apparently kept the inherited fortune to about the extent that it would be had it been invested in an index fund. He may have had some success where he could throw his weight around, with no regard for truth, but reports say that people only dealt with him once. He is, at face value, not a person to be trusted, and he has a God given capacity to offend people. Just look at his appalling behaviour with Frau Merkel. You don’t succeed in business by slapping people in the face. On that point, business and politics are in sync.

It’s interesting that in both the U S and in Australia, big business and others are despairing of government doing something sensible – say, governing – about energy and pollution. Big business is now urging Trump to adhere to the Paris accords. He is intent on having the U S challenge China as the smog centre of the world. As the U S shrinks its world footprint, China is stepping up as the leader of the world in free trade and climate control. Which nation do you think is being made great again?

Now it’s the turn of Mrs May to face a problem that is unbelievably complicated. She too has to try some juggling act because expectations of gullible people have been raised by politicians who were as happy to lie as they were to get down into the gutter. Some in England still believe they can block the towel-heads – just think of that revolting Farage ad – while eating cheap fish and chips. Sad delusion!

And the populi in Scotland and Ireland are getting restive. How does a government put there by the people with a nationalist cause, and confronted by a Labour Party just about wiped out by popular intervention, deny the nationalist urges of different peoples? Is that mythical word ‘sovereignty’ only good for some, but not something that the natives can be trusted with? (Remember what his grace the Duke of Wellington said of the Irish – they could put a good army in the field, as long as they had white officers.)

Meanwhile our very own rats and idiots have been scurrying and scuppering. Abbott and Bernardi had a little putsch on China. Their well-known sensitivity on human rights, and their deathless devotion to Gillian Triggs, stirred their consciences mightily – at least as mightily as Harry’s conscience was stirred when he decided it was time for a spousal trade-in. They didn’t think we should have an extradition treaty with a nation with a criminal justice system like that of China. They don’t appear to know what they are doing. We have such a treaty with places like the UAE, Indonesia, Venezuela, and the Philippines. Do we trust their justice systems? Do we do more business with them?

Poor Greg Sheridan got the hot flushes again. He said that the result was a victory for democracy. What bullshit. This national embarrassment was just his good old mate Tony Abbott stirring with some of his old mates.

Abbott may well now be more loathed even than Rudd. If you think about it, that’s quite an achievement. In the past, Abbott had supported the treaty with China, and, reports say, he had told the Chinese just that. When this was put to Abbott, he said that he had had no intention of honouring his assurances. A former prime minister admits to lying to the leaders of a major trading nation. I think Abbott has form for this on guns. Just where do we go from here? Can we go lower?

Amid all this gloom, there come two flashes of light. Sky News has fired Mark Latham for being rude. Now for Rowan Dean and Ross Cameron who are ruder – and silly enough to say that calling them out for rudeness would be that phantom of ‘political correctness.’ Well, at least these people show how silly it is for people to seek a licence to insult and offend others on the ground of race.

More importantly, and much, much better, we see a seamless and affable transition in beyond blue, a substantial mental health institution, from Jeff Kennett to Julia Gillard. We see people after politics doing what they seemed incapable of doing while in office – working sensibly across party lines to achieve a common good. And there is no doubt that that’s just what this institution does. It saves and improves lives. We might all have different views of these two people in office, but some of their features that got on people’s nerves before will serve them and us very well now.

We should be grateful that people who have gotten on are giving back to us. Mr Kennett in particular deserves our highest thanks and recognition for sixteen years in one of the most important jobs in the country. It’s enough to make you think that we might even be civilised.

Finally, the people who are outraged by the notion that it is okay to break bad laws might indicate what they think of Socrates, Jesus Christ, Galileo, Luther, More, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Pankhurst, Cavell, Ghandi, Bonhoeffer, Mandela, King, Ali and the great number of others who are secure in the pantheon of most people in the west.

Passing Bull 100 – A century of bullshit – and identity politics

24/03/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Greg Sheridan has been at it again. Being wrong. Read the piece set out below and see if you can pick out one statement of verifiable fact.

What is ‘identity politics’? Like most labels, it is usually used as a form of abuse, but it is likely to be misleading even when used without malice, or without looking down the speaker’s nose (as is plainly the case with Mr Sheridan here – and as is the case disturbingly often elsewhere).

I looked up ‘identity politics,’ and I gather it means a set of political views or attitudes held not by the community at large, but by a group of people who have something in common.

If that’s right, I’m not clear why this phenomenon is so feared and rejected by those at The Australian – and we have seen that Mr Paul Kelly frets awfully about identity politics. What’s wrong if people of, say, a given faith get together to express views about, say, refugees, or gay marriage, or head scarves? Business groups and union groups and sporting groups and religious groups do it all the time. I’ll put think tanks to one side, but look at the Jewish community here and in the U S. They are renowned for their formidable capacity to advance what their community sees as the best interests of its members on, say, human rights and other issues of importance to the nation at large. Is there something wrong with the Jewish community?

The Economist, a quality newspaper to which I subscribe, doesn’t appear to be troubled by the phenomenon of identity politics. In discussing the Dutch election and the merciful rejection of Wilders and his ‘vicious brand of anti-Islam populism’, the newspaper sees hope. It says that the election result shows that ‘identity politics is not the preserve of the far right.’

Well, that just shows how tricky these labels are. I rather think that Mr Sheridan and Mr Kelly see identity politics as the preserve of the Left – another label we would do better to avoid. The Economist says a telling moment came during a debate when candidates were asked whether Holland was doing enough to ‘protect its own culture.’ That, you will know, is the kind of thing that the people at The Australian bang on about endlessly. (And that ghastly phrase ‘Australian values’ is the purest IPA bullshit.) Viewers of the debate awarded the prize to a thirty year old Green Left Leader who said he agreed with the proposition and went on to describe a vision of national identity ‘centred on tolerance, openness, and internationalism’ that he said was under siege from the right. The Green Left Chair saluted a ‘new kind of patriotism.’ That to my mind shows this was just bullshit on bullshit, but the author then went on to talk of ‘the right’s failure to resist the populist temptation’ – doubtless looking over the Atlantic at the same time. The author notes that M. Macron has a similar platform, and concludes: ‘This is hardly the beginning of the end for the anti-immigrant identity-politicking right. But it is worth watching.’

Well, let’s go back to people joined by something in common to advance shared political views. I think I may add from my reading two other elements to what is said to be ‘identity politics’. The first is that these people often feel rejected. Indeed, they are frequently plastered with another mocking label – the politics of victimhood. The second is that they are the white hats, not the black hats. They have God or Right on their side. They are unquenchably convinced of their own righteousness – so much so that they quite forget what a pain in the arse self-righteous people are.

Allow me therefore to introduce you to a political identity group par excellence. They are the people at The Australian on the subject of hate speech and a few of their other demons, like the ABC, climate change, gay marriage, immigration, royalty, coal mining, Islamic terrorism, and the workers and their unions.

Let us count the ways from the piece of Mr Sheridan below.

These people at The Australian are brought together by their common employment and membership of the profession of journalism. Their views on the relevant law and its regulators are seamlessly consistent. (I and most lawyers I know disagree with them entirely, but we can put that to one side.) The Australian shows no sign of permitting or publishing any dissent – which is a little awkward since they claim, dishonestly, to be defending freedom of speech.

And, boy, do they feel rejected and despised – and downright persecuted. And, boy, have they got Right on their side. Bloody buckets of the stuff.

The scandal of the persecution of Bill Leak and of the wholly innocent Queensland students has led to a partial, temporary retreat. These cases were so insanely excessive and managed to achieve such unusual public notice that they became indefensible. But if this wicked legislation survives intact it will inevitably be used to prosecute the destructive agenda of modern, ideological identity politics.

Poor old Bill Leak. He was just walking down the street one day minding his own innocent business and whack!, he got mugged by the black hats. And now he’s dead, and another white hat said that he died from the stress put on him by the black hats. Well, as Ned Kelly said, such is life.

Let’s look at some other features of this tawdry kind of identity politics. The language is rarely measured. Their side can do no wrong and the other side can do no right. A law cops ‘wicked’ twice. And this hauteur often comes with a lofty claim of personal intellectual superiority – which in turn leads to a heavy sulk if the claim is rejected. A bull-headed Donald Trump spoiled child sulk.

I have had a bit to do with human rights commissions in Southeast Asia. Without exception, a key priority for the genuine ones is freedom of the press and free speech. In our country, the Human Rights Commission is the enemy of free speech and the enemy of a free media.

That’s a bad sign, for it shows a nation that has lost sight of what human rights actually are and has substituted the narrow, toxic aims of ideological conformity instead.

Does anyone out there really swallow this sort of bullshit? It’s the usual old sulky rant. And it is mind-numbingly boring, like a scratched old 78 rpm vinyl record. Don’t the people at The Australian just get downright bored saying the same nothings day after day? When was the last time someone said something novel?

And the last quotes show a very tired devotion to labels and communal put-downs. As do the following:

But if this wicked legislation survives intact it will inevitably be used to prosecute the destructive agenda of modern, ideological identity politics.

I have spent a lot of time in nations whose chief civic identity is communal rather than citizenship-based. It’s never very pretty. It is a sign of the derangement of our times that we now push in that direction. In some senses, fighting identity politics is as important, or more important, than the arguments about free speech.

Golly. He gets about, doesn’t he? And do you see how pessimistic, how neurotic, is this world view? How very different from that of The Economist? You would need years of industrial strength Prozac to get over it. It’s a truly tragic level of victimhood.

But then there is the ultimate in hypocrisy.

And, of course, identity politics, or communal politics, is always accompanied by a hysterical, populist fear campaign.

I have set out my views before on the shocking way in which this newspaper has sought to exploit the death of an employee for a cheap political trick. This newspaper has been running a ‘hysterical populist fear campaign’ on hate speech for bloody years.

Backhanders of absurd lengths are handed out to political enemies – which include all ALP and all unionists – on the ideological hot spots of Mr Sheridan and other members of his identity group.

Our naval ship builders will need independent back-up generators in South Australia, which Premier Jay Weatherill has reduced almost to Third World status as an investment destination.

The ACTU lady has been the subject of a beat-up by this claque, but Mr Sheridan administers his dose after dropping the F-bomb – ‘fascists’ – by condescending to inform us that he is aware of a distinction in ethics that would be way over the heads of the workers. You would need to follow the ontological argument for the existence of God and Kant’s celebrated refutation – existence is not a predicate – to understand Mr Sheridan’s most gracious reference to the distinction between ‘unjust’ and ‘unconscionable.’ (I have no idea what he means. That is doubtless my fault. I’m just an equity lawyer whose training in philosophy at Melbourne and Oxford has not equipped me to enjoy the metaphysics of counting how many angels can dance on the point of needle.)

Then there is the lament about the loss of faith in democracy. Has that come from the awfulness of our politicians and the incestuous proximity of their compromised commentators?

Finally, there is the simple failure of advocacy that blind devotees of a political cause are prone to commit. If you have a point – and I don’t think The Australian does – make it, and don’t bugger it with a dud.

It is no small thing that a former prime minister, Tony Abbott, and a former Labor Party leader, Mark Latham, have both called for the Human Rights Commission to be abolished.

In the sweet name of the son of the carpenter, I don’t have the libel protection that Mr Sheridan enjoys, so I will content myself by saying that each of those politicians was sacked, and remains entirely unmourned, for reasons that grow more obvious and compelling day by day.

Similarly, the relentless ideological denigration of Western civilisation in the humanities departments of our universities betrays a loss of self-confidence. Even Australia Day is attacked.

Not for Mr Sheridan, but certainly for other contributors to that paper, ‘Western civilisation’ is code for white supremacy and a crude rejection of the faith of Islam, just as ‘libertarian’ is code for fascist.

And just how do you attack a bloody day? With a musket? With a bayonet? And why should I be sent into transports on the anniversary of the day that the English opened their slammer here and started to rob the blackfellas?

It’s all so very, very sad. I wonder if Greg now regrets knocking back that plumb job and broad sunlit uplands that his good mate Tony offered him all those years ago?

Well, that’s one way to bring up the ton. The second volume will shortly be on Amazon’s electric shelves. As with the first volume, most of the bullshit has been kindly donated by Mr Rupert Murdoch, that ageless walkabout construct of true Australian values.

Confucius says:

The Master said, ‘Men of antiquity studied to improve themselves; men today study to impress others.’

Analects, 14.24

WE MUST BEWARE HOW MUCH RUIN IS IN OUR NATION

Poor fellow my country.

I have spent a good proportion of my professional time in Third World and developing countries, most on the way up, some on the way down, and some bobbling up and down. You get to see a lot of things that distinguish a successful country from an unsuccessful one, and particularly one on the way up from one on the way down.

Australia is a rich and successful society. But we are starting to go wrong. Perhaps nowhere more fully fits Adam Smith’s observation that there is a lot of ruin in a nation. Now, with the latest being the likely defeat of the Turnbull government’s amendments to the truly wicked section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, there are too many signs of things going badly wrong.

Here are telling signs of a country going backwards.

That’s a bad sign, for it shows a nation that has lost sight of what human rights actually are and has substituted the narrow, toxic aims of ideological conformity instead. It is no small thing that a former prime minister, Tony Abbott, and a former Labor Party leader, Mark Latham, have both called for the Human Rights Commission to be abolished.

The likely preservation by parliament of the worst elements of 18C is similarly a sign of the increasing dominance of identity politics and the always related desire to move the control of political discussion, wherever possible, into the hands of the judiciary or government tribunals that ape the judiciary. The legislation, though always foolishly drafted and bad in principle, did not cause too much damage in the past because most people were unaware of it and identity politics had not become the toxic threat to universal citizenship and a proper understanding of our universal and intractable humanity that it has recently become.

But if this wicked legislation survives intact it will inevitably be used to prosecute the destructive agenda of modern, ideological identity politics.

And, of course, identity politics, or communal politics, is always accompanied by a hysterical, populist fear campaign. That’s how you get people to identify primarily on the basis of communal identity rather than common citizenship. The Labor-Greens activist alliance will now presumably run just this kind of dishonest, dangerous fear campaign among ethnic communities.

This is one reason why the Liberals cannot declare their position and then keep quiet.

They must campaign and persuade actively, endlessly and energetically among ethnic communities themselves.

This is not a burden. Their failure to do so generally is one reason they are so far behind.

Beyond these sorts of issues there are numerous other signs of distress among Australia’s national political culture.

The majority of young Australians, according to a Lowy poll, no longer believes democracy is the best form of government. I have seen up close a number of longstanding political systems topple. A loss of belief in your system is a typical precursor.

Similarly, the relentless ideological denigration of Western civilisation in the humanities departments of our universities betrays a loss of self-confidence. Even Australia Day is attacked.

There are more mechanical signs of policy distress.

One of the most common features of a Third World country not making it is an inability to provide reliable electricity supplies. A leader determined to fight that often has to build, hastily and uneconomically, new small power plants to plug the gaps, as Fidel Ramos did in Manila in the early 1990s. Our naval ship builders will need independent back-up generators in South Australia, which Premier Jay Weatherill has reduced almost to Third World status as an investment destination.

Policy analysts often lament the impoverishment of nations that make big foreign investment projects ever more difficult. The grotesque saga of the delays, the veritable crippling by delay, of the Adani investment in Queensland is a textbook case. All levels of government want this project to succeed, the foreign investor has spent an enormous amount of money and wants to spend much more, thousands of Australian jobs would be created, but the ideological power of an essentially nihilist Green activist vision of development manages to make such an investment all but impossible.

This is also a sign of what we might call the “deep state” of bureaucracy and tribunals becoming ever more ideological and impervious to the normal democratic decisions.

Countries going backwards often find their budget out of control. Our Senate has now made it impossible to control government expenditure. Left-wing populism will never countenance any meaningful spending cut, beyond gutting national defence. Rightwing populism typically concedes, slowly, on expenditure and makes its stand instead on identity issues.

Perhaps the most ubiquitous sign of a country that cannot function in a modern, decent way is that certain powerful interests decide that obeying the law is entirely discretionary. I have had former finance ministers in some countries tell me they simply did not have the power to compel certain entities to pay tax.

Sally McManus, the new ACTU secretary, says she and the union movement are entitled to break a law “when it’s unjust”. That means they are only obliged to obey the laws they think are just. There is a lot in common with the historical attitude, if not the methodology, of street-fighting fascists here. They too said they would only break laws that were unjust. And McManus was speaking in relation to what could be described as the militia force of the ACTU, namely the CFMEU.

A nation failing the development test often finds the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force is contested by powerful groups with economic and ideological objections to obeying the law.

This has nothing to do with traditional civil disobedience, or the considered refusal to comply with an instruction that is not merely unjust but wholly unconscionable. The distinction between unjust and unconscionable is an old one in ethics, but ethics don’t matter if your main consideration is power. The union movement has never represented fewer workers but is richer and more powerful than ever before. Sections of it now have the smell of an institution in love with power and increasingly untroubled by the rules of law.

I have seen all this before. Put it all together. Poor fellow my country.

With Compliments

Geoffrey Gibson

Politics

Here and there – Past Political Principles

The Nationalists

Passing Bull 104 – Australian values

The Nationalists

Passing Bull 103 – Bull about poverty

The Nationalists

Passing Bull 102 – Bull about sin and being offensive

Passing Bull 101 – Willing offenders and insulters

The Nationalists

Passing Bull 100 – A century of bullshit – and identity politics