Passing Bull 107 – Bull about journalism

23/05/201723/05/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me take a few examples from the book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confucius says:

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

Analects 19.13

Why Opera?

19/05/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / 7 Comments

[This is the first of nine extracts from a book Why Opera – An introduction to an art form – Opera in nine easy pieces.]

Opera?

Just over twenty years ago, a Melbourne restauranteur and wine maker, Rinaldo di Stasio, got together with two cooking writers, Jill Dupleix and Terry Durack, to write a book about Italian cooking called Allegro Al Dente, Pasta & Opera. The authors believed that opera and Italian cooking went together. They were dead right, even if the French composer, Hector Berlioz made what Banjo Paterson may have described as a ‘rude remark’ about Italian cooking and opera.

Music for the Italians is a sensual pleasure and nothing more. For this noble expression of the mind, they have hardly more respect than for the art of cooking. They want a score that, like a plate of macaroni, can be assimilated immediately without having to think about it.

Now, we’ll have to confront snobbery and bitchiness in various forms on our journey in this book, but, among other things, it is odd to see a French man putting down the art or role of cooking.

The authors of Allegro al Dente put out a CD with the book. It has fifteen of the biggest hits of opera delivered by a shining gaggle of its biggest hitters back then. The sleeve notes said:

Here is the polished power of Carlo Bergonzi, the seductive charm of Giuseppe di Stefano, the radiant brilliance of Dame Joan Sutherland, the heroic emotion of Mario del Monaco, the sweet honey of Mirella Freni and Cecilia Bartoli, the warmth and colour of Renata Tebaldi, and the state of the art performance that is Luciano Pavarotti.

What a great idea – even if they missed out on my two heroes. I was still engaged in taking my daughters to the opera about five times a year, and wondered if I might write an introduction to opera for them – and anyone else who might be interested. (I had written a short outline of a history of the world for them.)

Until very recently, I wondered how I could write an introduction to opera without knowing what works – such as the arias on that CD – that members of the reading audience might have. You see, I’m a bit slow on the internet. I plead age. But I now find that anyone can access a vast range of opera on the internet for nothing, on sites like YouTube, so that anyone could have access to the equivalent of as many of those CD’s as they like. (Is that why op shops are loaded with CD’s?)

From that discovery comes this little book. It is written on the basis that the reader will accept the invitation to listen to or watch the works of opera that are referred to.

So, roll out the red and white check tablecloth, get out the pasta or the bread and cheese, open the Chianti or Coonawarra Cabernet or Grampians Shiraz, and, as a sports commentator used to say just before the start of a Grand Prix, pump up the volume!

But, rather than ask what opera is, we might ask what art is. You can look up the dictionaries if you like, but to my mind they miss the point. If I ask what Milton, Turner and Tchaikovsky have in common, my answer is that their art is a lyrical reflection of the human condition. The key word there is ‘lyrical’ – their art is the imaginative and appealing way that they bring us to their reflection. ‘To be or not to be’ is a very different proposition to ‘Why don’t I just top myself?’ A sonnet by Shakespeare does carry more clout than a Phantom comic. To use the jargon of the advertiser, the art is the hook that draws us in to get the message.

Well, opera is theatre or drama set to music – so there may be two avenues of lyrical reflection – the drama, or theatre, and the music. When you think about it, you could say the same of most songs. Take the poetry of Robert Burns. You can read it on the page; you can hear it read aloud, or recited from memory; or you can hear it sung to music by, say, Kenneth McKellar. The effect may well be very different. Would the poet be offended if many said that they thought that the last mode of performance was the most lyrical?

Let us look first at music. It is clear that song and dance respond to deep needs in the human condition. Indeed, our music may be one of the critical things that distinguish us from our primate ancestors. Music and dance appear to cross all borders of time and space in mankind. In my kitchen, there is a framed photo of a man with no apparent clothing, very pierced ears, and a very odd haircut. His eyes are shut, and he looks concentrated, but to be at peace. The inscription reads: ‘Photograph of a Maquiritare Indian of Northern Brazil in the 1950s, listening to a gramophone record of Mozart’s music played by the French explorer Alain Gheerbrant during an expedition to the Amazon.’ If you find that to be moving, you will see why I framed the photo.

Let us look then at drama or theatre. More than 2,500 years ago, the Greeks reached a very high stage of development in both tragedy and comedy as modes of theatre that helped them to see their world. The works of Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes are still read and performed. Sigmund Freud was greatly interested in their insights into our psyche, although some would say that symbolism has necessary limits in science. Curiously enough, the Greeks found that the sound of the words carried further when they were sung.

Nearly two thousand years later, a professional English playwright began writing and performing in plays that would lay the foundation of modern theatre, and in which Europe reached well beyond its ancient sources. The shell-bursts of the genius of William Shakespeare have altered not just how we see drama, but how we see ourselves. Shakespeare was vital to the development of the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi (‘Joe Green’), so much so that he wrote three operas based on three leading plays of Shakespeare. With that fusion of poetic and musical genius, what insights might we get from that lyrical reflection upon our condition?

We might add something more on drama. In a book published in 1949, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of King Lear, by John Danby, the first sentence reads: ‘We go to great writers for the truth.’ Later, the author unloads this zinger:

It is only dramatically that the manner of living thought can be adequately expressed. A discursive philosopher is tied to the script of his single part.

This is a precious insight for our purposes. Later, Danby referred to the well‑known aphorism of Thomas Hobbes that the life of man is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. Some may take that view of life, but where do you think you might better seek enlightenment on the nature of life –Hobbes’ Leviathan or Shakespeare’s King Lear?

So, drama set to music is an obvious candidate for an art form. This book will follow the opera houses’ current practice and focus on four composers – Mozart (1756-1791), Verdi (1813-1901), Wagner (1813-1893) and Puccini (1858-1924). The main operas looked at will be for Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro, Cossi fan Tutte, Don Giovanni, and The Magic Flute; for Verdi, La Traviata, Rigoletto, A Masked Ball, Don Carlos and Falstaff; for Puccini, La Bohême, Tosca, Madam Butterfly, and Turandot. Wagner is a different proposition. Together with The Barber of Seville and Carmen, these operas would all vie today for position in the top bracket for box office or recordings. There will be additional chapters on sources and directions, bel canto, and the twentieth century.

In each chapter references, will be made to extracts from operas that are freely available on sites on the internet – ‘freely’ there including at no cost. This will enable readers to be introduced to the greatest performers that have lit up our stages and enriched the western world – and to the hot shots of now.

Just how you take to opera is a matter for your own taste and capacity. All of the operas that we will look at were composed to be performed live on stage with a live orchestra and no mechanical assistance for the voices. Many opera fans would prefer to take their opera live at the theatre. Presently in Australia, you can generally get a cheap seat at the opera for less than what you pay for a lot of pop concerts or for some seats at AFL home and away games.

On the live stage, you get the suspense of any live performance. Will they pull it off? Or will this soprano buckle under the weight of that big aria in Turandot – as some say happened to Maria Callas? Opera is a bit like Formula 1 – there is complicated technology; big amounts of money; bigger amounts of ego; and huge amounts of bullshit. But – in the end, someone has to get out there on the day or on the night and pull it off – and come mortally close to their limits while doing so – when failure is very, very public, and they have no place to hide.

But, we are so well treated by both recordings and films now. Some years ago, I was watching Pavarotti in a free concert in Central Park. The camera zoomed in as he reached down to hit the high note, and I could see a look of white terror in his eyes that reminded me immediately of the look in Humphrey Bogart’s eyes when he realised that Ingrid Bergman had chosen his gin joint to walk back into his life – and it’s something you only get on the big screen. Then there is the sound quality, both contemporary and reconstructed. I have never seen Victor Trumper bat, but I have seen and heard Enrico Caruso and Maria Ponselle and Nellie Melba sing. I can witness history.

And with opera, as with Shakespeare, and any drama, there are some pieces that you would rather just sit in comfort and listen to rather than go and see it on stage or film. For example, there are problems with staging King Lear – most directors over-cook the storm scene; plucking out eyes is not fun to watch, especially with this script; the fall at the beach is tricky; and this is a play where the cast has to bat right down the order, and some companies outside of England can find that hard. I have seen this play butchered – butchered – in Melbourne, London, and Chicago, and I would need serious provocation to try my luck again – especially if I can hear Paul Scofield or Ian Holm in the comfort of the hearth. You can find similar issues with most of Wagner – before you get to their back-breaking length. And there is an amazing range of material on film. A couple of years ago, I paid less than $100 for a set of 33 disks showing 22 operas of Mozart performed at Salzburg – premium performances of his whole oeuvre for the cost of a reasonable seat for a Figaro at the Australian Opera.

Whether you want to go to the opera or not bears on another issue. Many of the operas we see were composed with the assistance of patronage. Most are now performed with the backing of patrons. But no opera that that I know of was created for the benefit of the aristocracy or establishment. But that sadly is not the impression that a lot of people have of opera. They see it as an establishment toy, rather like polo or an exclusive school. This is bloody sad. A leading guide to opera says that many people are put off it by ‘the social exclusivity cultivated by many opera houses, especially in the English-speaking world.’ The guide (Opera the Rough Guide) is English. That proposition would hold for Glyndebourne, but if it holds for Covent Garden, that is not the fault of those now running that house. In Opera, A Penguin Anthology, Stephen Brook says that ‘the duchesses have been replaced by the dispiriting bosses whose companies donate money to the opera house.’ Boy, did he get that right – and not just for England. You can see bank managers shuffling around with their triumphantly defiant wives – at the expense of the shareholders.

The snootiness problem is not so acute in Australia. There I think the issue may lie in uncomely phrases like ‘cringe’, ‘sheilahs’ stuff’ or ‘toffs’. We might hope that by now we might have gone past such hang-ups. Can we proceed in this book on the footing that in order to enjoy opera, in whatever form you like, you do not have to be a toff, a smart-arse, or a fairy? You don’t even have to wear a tie. There is no reason why you cannot go to both the opera and the Melbourne Storm on the same day – although experience suggests that if alcohol is to be consumed, some prudence might be shown about the order of the performances.

So, let’s hear no more of that bullshit about class. Among other things it’s said not to be Australian. Let’s look kindly on those who need to put people in boxes and label their attitudes, and hope that these poor souls find both enlightenment and liberation.

Two points of what might be called housekeeping. You don’t need to know a note of music to enjoy Beethoven’s Fifth – or opera. I suspect that most people who go the opera will have my level of musical literacy – nil, nix, nought, and nothing. For the musically trained, this is a tale told by an idiot – but I’ll lay off the sound and the fury. I started a course on reading music nearly twenty years ago in preparation for a summer school at Oxford. To the consternation of the tutor and myself, I failed – badly. Fortunately, that course was abandoned – and we looked instead at Shakespeare in Verdi – much more to my taste and capacity. (So emboldened, I later took a course on Bach’s orchestral suites at Cambridge – the demons people fear about some subjects that they are in awe of tend to disappear in the daylight.)

Then, if you want a good book-length companion, I recommend the Rough Guide. You can pick it up for a song second hand. It is as complete as it is brilliant. The English are the best at this kind of thing and at dry put-downs. You get a biography of the composers and then for each major opera, there is a synopsis, a commentary, and a recording guide. At the end there are helpful lists of houses, performers and conductors, and a glossary, all written by people who know their stuff. You want to know about Franco Corelli? ‘One of the loudest and most exciting singers of the twentieth century – and almost certainly the most intoxicatingly vulgar.’ (That is not necessarily a put down.) Domingo? ‘The most versatile and most recorded tenor in history.’ What about our Joan? ‘Her large physique highlighted her poor acting, and she was criticised for her poor diction, but no one ever went to hear Sutherland sing to listen to the words.’ This guide is remarkably good, in a market that sees a lot of rubbish.

Let us, then, turn to our first two samples – the duet ‘Io l’ho perduta’ from Don Carlos by Verdi, sung by Jussi Bjorling and Robert Merrill, and the aria ‘Ebben? Ne andro lontan’ from La Wally by Catalani sung, by Maria Callas.

Now, we all know that Verdi was Italian, and it’s a fair bet that Catalani was also Italian – but few people have heard of Catalani, and very few have ever seen or heard La Wally. But many people will soon be at home with the soft pathos of the Callas aria – especially if they have seen the French movie Diva, where this aria is the centrepiece. (And watching the film Diva may be as good a way as any to see the mystique of drama performed to music.) You can feel the dramatic tension build up to the duet, but when it unfolds, it does so with a melodic lilt that you might catch from a rotunda in Sicily on a warm summer day. That is very typical of this composer.

And both these pieces remind us that at heart opera is nothing if not Italian. What do I mean by that? The composers that we admire were not afraid to express emotion and they were not shy of style. They had what footy coaches liked to describe as ‘attitude.’ They come straight at us like Ferrari, Ferragamo, or Maserati. Or pasta al dente and the check table cloth. They are rakishly in your face.

And you have just been exposed to two of the greatest voices that the opera stage has ever heard – and two of the saddest tragedies. Bjorling came from a good musical family, but he was, perhaps like Bret Whiteley, daunted and almost crushed by the weight of his own genius, and he became a helpless drunk. (Bjorling and Merrill have another famous duet, ‘Au fond du temple saint’, from The Pearl Fishers by Bizet. I have seen a grown man cry over that performance after another bad day at the footy.) Callas was adored. She was looked on with awe. She had no peer on the stage. She had the power of Muhammad Ali to change the way that people saw their world. But her personal life got messy, her voice cracked, and she was monstered by a dirty rotten rich pig. In his wonderful DVD, Three Legendary Tenors, Nigel Douglas quoted someone saying of Bjorling that his voice was ‘heavy with unshed tear.’ That beautiful line goes for Callas too, and what you have here in their purest form are the dignity of the human voice and the majesty of drama in music.

And, yes, for the removal of doubt, I am not just a fan or acolyte of Bjorling and Callas – I am an addict. Either can render me lachrymose at the drop of a hat – irrespective of what happened at the footy, and with not a drop of red in sight.

May I then go back to the Indians in the Amazon? The book that the photo came from, Mozart and his operas, by David Cairns, says that when the French explorers approached the Indians with various records on their portable gramophone, there was at first no response. They stayed shyly but stubbornly inside. Then the French put on ‘their beloved Mozart’, and out came the Indians immediately, as the author says ‘compelled – like man and beast in The Magic Flute – by the Orphic power of the sounds.’ David Cairns concluded his Prologue this way.

We too are under the spell. A contemporary of Mozart said that his music would ‘speak to unborn generations when the bones of kings have long since crumbled to dust.’ More than two centuries after his death, it speaks as never before. Precisely how it does so we cannot, finally, say. But it speaks, surely, not so much through the charm of its perfect patterns as through its comprehension of life, its penetrating knowledge of women and men, its profound humanity.

Does it not look to be the case that people who go to God without having drunk freely from this cup have sold themselves short – sadly and badly?

Passing Bull 106 – Bull about the budget

16/05/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

Leap to the Left and a nasty new battle

Paul Kelly

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

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

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

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

All eyes will be on the next Newspoll

Dennis Shanahan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ignore grandchildren’s peril, does anyone care?

Chris Kenny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confucius says:

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

Analects 12.6.

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 105 – More on Australian values

07/05/2017 / Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

Having someone head the Australian Olympic Committee for longer than an African tyrant is emphatically an Australian value. It symbolises our distaste for busy bodies that get on the gravy train. The AOC has shown itself to be incurably corrupt. In the name of God, they want another Olympic Games here. How corrupt do you have to get? John Coates now ranks with Kevin Gosper in the unpopularity stakes.

But the loathsome Abbott, the prince of snipers, has trumped them all, and is now more loathed than Kevin Rudd. The poor man sees ‘cultural cowardice’. Presumably this means that some people are afraid to speak for fear of offending others. He said that our leaders had failed to promote the ‘virtues and benefits’ of western civilisation. It was this kind of parochial bullshit that led us to put Confucius at the end of these posts. (We will shortly revert to the poet of the month.) Those ‘virtues and benefits’ include ‘Gospel values and free speech.’ What if you don’t subscribe to the Gospels? How many Australians do? What if you are a Muslem, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or a card-carrying atheist? And we now know that free speech stops at offending Australian values. The hypocrisy of the free speech crowd is as nauseating as it is preposterous.

Here is the sniper.

Whether it’s official persecution of Queensland students for a bit of justified sarcasm, state governments promoting gender fluidity programs in schools, or a federal-government approved activist being disrespectful of Anzac Day, there’s this pervasive ambivalence verging on hostility to our country and its values from people who should know better. Overwhelmingly our people believe in our country – but it’s hard for them to have faith in politicians when the politicians and those they promote don’t believe in the things they do. If you are an Australian, you have to believe in Australia. This is what most of us believe. But only some of those in authority believe it; and those that do, don’t state it nearly often enough.

Well, there is the political love child of John Howard and Bronwyn Bishop groping his way back to 1984. What is more worrying – its inanity or its sickness? It has all the coherence of a dictatorial rant.

And as for not respecting Anzac Day, some of us remember the appalling way that we treated our soldiers returning from one of our failed wars. (Abbott voted for another one.) One Vietnam veteran got spat on in St Kilda Road – twice. He was in a wheel chair because of war wounds. And who led this revolting unkindness? The RSL. Most RSL branches refused or discouraged admission and membership to Vietnam veterans. ‘Yours wasn’t a war, mate! You didn’t fight in the trenches. You were on a twelve-month holiday.’ It took about a generation for these men to march on Anzac Day and when they did, many grown men wept compulsively. Our conduct to these men was a crime against humanity, and the worst culprits were our self-appointed heroes. When did we abandon these Australian values? Let us bury that term forever.

As for faith in politicians, we might recover some when we forget that we were led into the failed wars in Vietnam and Iraq by their lies.

Confucius says

The Master said ‘Make it your guiding principle to do your best for others and to be trustworthy in what you say…..When you make a mistake, do not be afraid of mending your ways’

Analects 9.25.

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