Australian Politics

Not signing on to a liberal culture

Lawrence Auster, in a post on film awards, makes this significant criticism of mainstream conservatism:

And this is central to the deeply inadequate "conservatism" we have today. That conservatism rejects a few liberal political positions, while automatically signing on to the hyper liberal culture in which we are immersed. 

It's a useful reminder to all of us. It's much easier to reject liberalism at a formal political level than it is to resist the influence on us of the liberal culture we are daily immersed in.

In other words, it's not only important to keep ourselves politically distinct, but to live our lives distinctly as well. And that includes such matters as the values we seek to impart to our children, the manners and mores we adopt and model to those around us, the arts and culture we choose to support and the nature and quality of the inner life we seek to hold to.

The overlooked intelligentsia?

I had an interesting conversation with a left-wing acquaintance the other day. He suddenly blurted out his fears that Australia was going to get crushed by the forces gathering around it. He thought the Asian powers like China and India would continue to develop whilst Australia would fall behind. He also complained about stagnant wages and the high cost of housing in Australia.

I thought his comments significant because liberals have traditionally staked their politics on the idea of progress. And perhaps it was once possible for liberals to seriously believe in progress. There was a time, after all, when the liberal Western nations were ascendant in the world and when the average man could look forward to rising wages and a shorter working week. In these circumstances, people might have imagined that liberalism was delivering on its promise of progress.

But my acquaintance no longer held out much hope for this. He clearly thought things were going backwards. Hopefully, this means that liberalism will seem far less attractive a philosophy for the younger generations.

My acquaintance also had a theory for the decline. He did not blame an excessive individualism, or problems in the family leading to low birth rates, or the move offshore of industry due to neoliberal economics or the effect on the economy and society of open borders. For him, the underlying problem was a lack of respect for intellectuals and intellectualism.

And in this he is stuck in an old-fashioned headspace. One in which intellectuals feel alienated from society because they don't get to rule society to the degree they think is due to them.

This despite the fact that the modern West, the one my acquaintance thinks is declining, is largely a product of a secular liberal intelligentsia.

Greer: feminist revolution yet to begin

Want to hear the latest from Australian feminist icon, Germaine Greer?

Well, she's written a column for the Melbourne Age. It starts off predictably enough. She celebrates the decline of the traditional family, calling it "the most important change in the last 40 years".

She then throws in a bit of liberal autonomy theory. She wants women to be careerists because this makes them more independent of men. In support of this position, she argues that from the 1960s men could no longer afford to support a wife on a single wage anyway, given all the new gadgetry such as fridges and vacuums that had to be paid for.

That's all standard feminism. But then she ups the ante. She gets very nasty toward women who don't do as feminists want them to do:

Working for your living is part of an honourable grown-up existence. Nobody wants to be a parasite.

Greer thinks that women who stay home to bring up children and care for their families are parasites. So much for the idea that feminism is just about choice and letting women do what they want.

And there's more. Greer interprets the high divorce rate as a progressive thing, as women exercising their independence to ditch cruel and abusive men:

As women's economic independence increased, their tolerance of infidelity, cruelty, neglect and emotional and physical abuse on the part of their spouses dwindled steadily. Divorce rates throughout the developed world rose in unison.

The Australian rate plateaued at the current rate of about 40 per cent of marriages ending in divorce.

She then interprets the rise of cohabitation rather than marriage as another progressive development, as it allows relationships to be "negotiated" (i.e. something we can self-determine or self-direct in line with autonomy theory):

Many such couples have children, and will refer to a cohabiting relationship of many years as an engagement. One way of interpreting this trend is to see it as keeping the relationship in a state of constant negotiation, in which nothing can be taken for granted and both partners are equally involved in decisions affecting family life.

Then she goes back to divorce. She claims she didn't expect divorce rates to be so high. She thinks that women have it much tougher than men after divorce, so much so that if a woman opts for divorce,

she faces 15 or 20 years of poverty and unremitting hard work, both inside and outside the home.

But Greer thinks that women are to be praised for choosing divorce as it means preferring an honourable life over a servile one:

Women who face this fate with equanimity have my unstinting admiration. They are choosing a tough but honourable life over a servile and dishonourable one.

I do know a woman who divorced because of her husband's infidelity. And I do admire her efforts to raise her children in difficult circumstances. But Greer here is praising divorce in a general sense as a pathway to an honourable life over a servile one. I can't help but feel that once again what she is admiring is the act of autonomy itself, a woman's willingness to act for herself even if it makes her life more difficult, over the goal of family stability.

Greer didn't always follow the line of "divorce is great". Back in 1991, perhaps when she still felt more keenly her own failure to marry or have children, she took a very different line. She wrote that "Most societies have arranged matters so that a family surrounds and protects mother and child" and complained of "our families having withered away" with relationships becoming "less durable every year".

Finally, Greer lets us know that the massive transformations in family life and relationships over the past 40 years count for hardly anything compared to what must come in the future:

The feminist revolution has not failed. It has yet to begin. Its ground troops are fast developing the skills and muscle that will be necessary if we are to vanquish corporate power and rescue our small planet for humanity.

What an absolute fantasy world Greer inhabits. She has some kind of unreal idea of transformative revolution in her mind.

And she believes that feminism will help to vanquish corporate power. What a joke. She herself wants women to place themselves increasingly at the service of the corporate world. To the point that she calls women who want to devote their energies elsewhere "parasites".

Greer was catapulted into fame and fortune after writing The Female Eunuch because her views fitted those of the liberal establishment. She is an establishment intellectual and not the iconoclast she imagines herself to be.

We're sceptical too Elizabeth

Elizabeth Gilbert has written a new book titled Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage.

Laura Wood gave it a hostile review over at The Thinking Housewife:

Contrary to its title, this book is not at all about making peace with marriage, at least not marriage to a man. It’s a misty-eyed paean to feminine independence and an ignorant and misleading appraisal of the institution of marriage. It is shockingly anti-male ...

As Laura Wood points out, it's odd that people should accept marriage advice from someone like Elizabeth Gilbert. She was married in her 20s, but divorced when she decided she never wanted to commit to children. She has finally settled aged 40 with a 55-year-old Brazilian man and some dogs.

There are two highly objectionable messages in her book. The first is that women should marry as late as possible, the later the better:

Marriage is not a game for the young. Wait as long as you humanly can to get married, and your odds of staying with one partner forever will increase dramatically. If you wait until you are, say, 35 years old to get married, your odds of success are pretty terrific.

She justifies this by claiming that 85% of women who marry before the age of 23 will divorce and that the divorce rate continues to decrease for women in their 30s.

The statistic is misleading. It's true that there is a high divorce rate for teen marriages, but the risk declines rapidly for those in their early 20s:

According to a 2002 report from the Centers for Disease Control, 48% of people who enter marriage when under age 18, and 40% of 18- and 19-year-olds, will eventually divorce. But only 29% of those who get married at age 20 to 24 will eventually divorce—very similar to the 24% of the 25-and-older cohort.

Furthermore, the risk of divorce for those marrying in their 20s is much lower if the participants are not high school dropouts, if there is a reasonable income, if the parents are not divorced, if there is church attendance and if the couple wait until after the wedding to have children. Depending on these factors the chance of divorce can vary from 10% to 90%.

I would agree that it's probably better not to marry as teens. Most people are still developing into their adult personalities at this time, so the potential of people growing unexpectedly apart is much greater.

But the idea of women waiting until the last possible moment to marry is dramatically wrong. It will lead many women to end up just like Elizabeth Gilbert herself: childless and settling with a much older man. Women are at the peak of their fertility, beauty, sexuality and emotional responsiveness in their 20s. It's when they have the most opportunity to marry well and have children.

And if women wait to the last possible moment, then men are likely to have already adapted to a bachelor lifestyle and be much less suitable husband material.

The second flawed message in Elizabeth Gilbert's book is that women are held back from marriage by a Marriage Benefit Imbalance. She claims that marriage benefits men much more than women - and again she argues her case with some questionable research:

Interviewer: Do you think marriage is more beneficial to men or women?

Elizabeth Gilbert: This is not my opinion, but a fact backed up by every conceivable study: Marriage is far, far more beneficial to men than women. Married men perform far better in life than single men, and are happier than single men, and live longer than single men, and earn more money than single men.

Married women, on the other hand, make less money than single women, suffer more from depression than single women, don't live as long as single women, and are more likely to be the victims of violence than single women. This has always been the case, which does fly in the face of the mythology and romanticizing of marriage that is epidemic in our culture.

The "Western Style Problem" my friend Ting in Laos describes is the moment that women start deciding that they might want to delay or even defer marriage - understandable, given the facts - which tends to throw a wrench in the workings of traditional family structure. Social conservatives lament this, but maybe the bigger question needs to be, "How can we create family and marriage structures where women don't lose so big?" Maybe if that were the question being confronted, more women might be interested in embracing marriage again.

What nonsense. Her claims are not "backed up by every conceivable study". There is plenty of research showing that women, too, benefit from marriage rather than "losing big". Consider, for instance, the following information from a Maggie Gallagher column.

First, on the issue of violence:

Marriage lowers the risk that both men and women will become victims of violence, including domestic violence. A 1994 Justice Department report, based on the National Crime Victimization Survey, found that single and divorced women were four to five times more likely to be victims of violence in any given year than wives ...

On longevity:

Married people live longer and healthier lives. The power of marriage is particularly evident in late middle age. When Linda Waite and a colleague, for example, analyzed mortality differentials in a very large, nationally representative sample, they found an astonishingly large "marriage gap" in longevity: nine out of ten married guys who are alive at 48 will make it to age 65, compared with just six in ten comparable single guys (controlling for race, education, and income). For women, the protective benefits of marriage are also powerful, though not quite as large. Nine out of ten wives alive at age 48 will live to be senior citizens, compared with just eight out of ten divorced and single women.

On wealth:

Married people not only make more money, they manage money better and build more wealth together than either would alone. At identical income levels, for example, married people are less likely to report "economic hardship" or trouble paying basic bills. The longer you stay married, the more assets you build; by contrast, length of cohabitation has no relationship to wealth accumulation. On the verge of retirement, the average married couple has accumulated assets worth about 0,000, compared with 7,000 for the never-married and 4,000 for the divorced. Couples who stayed married in one study saw their assets increase twice as fast as those who had remained divorced over a five-year period.

On mental health:

Marriage is good for your mental health. Married men and women are less depressed, less anxious, and less psychologically distressed than single, divorced, or widowed Americans. By contrast, getting divorced lowers both men's and women's mental health, increasing depression and hostility, and lowering one's self-esteem and sense of personal mastery and purpose in life ...

Wives are also much less likely to commit suicide than single, divorced, or widowed women.

Consider what Elizabeth Gilbert is really arguing. She is claiming that despite all the hard work and sacrifices that men undertake for their families, that women would be better off single. What kind of a message does this send men? It suggests that men ought not to make the effort to begin with.

The truth is that Elizabeth Gilbert did not recoil from marriage because of a Marriage Benefit Imbalance. She did so because she was brought up with a liberal ideal of autonomy for women - an ideal that she is now struggling with: she is sticking with it even whilst she wonders what life would be like with some other more traditional ideal.

I'll go on to discuss this in a future post.

Is Virginia any better as a feminist mother?

Back in 2002, Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger wrote a newspaper column titled "The sins of our feminist mothers". It begins with the following description of her feminist upbringing:

As we worked our way through high school and university in the '70s and early '80s, girls like me listened to our mothers, our trailblazing feminist teachers, and the outspoken women who demanded a better deal for all women. They paved the way for us to have rich careers.

They anointed us and encouraged us to take it all. We had the right to be editors, paediatricians, engineers, premiers, executive producers, High Court judges, CEOs etc. We were brought up to believe that the world was ours. We could be and do whatever we pleased.

Feminism's hard-fought battles had borne fruit. And it was ours for the taking.

Or so we thought - until the lie of super "you-can-have-it-all" feminism hits home, in a very personal and emotional way.

The idea was to be autonomous, hence the slogan of "doing and being whatever we pleased". However, since it was careers which made women independent, women were to aim not at doing whatever they pleased but at a powerful professional career.

And Virginia Haussegger succeeded at this. She became a high profile news and current affairs journalist on Australian TV. But at a cost. She had a loving marriage but when she worked in a different city to her husband the relationship foundered. After her divorce she embarked on a series of casual encounters with men. By the time she met her second husband in her mid-30s, her fallopian tubes had been damaged beyond repair by chlamydia. She had lost the chance to have children of her own.

She wished that she had received a different message from her feminist role models:

The point is that while encouraging women in the '70s and '80s to reach for the sky, none of our purple-clad, feminist mothers thought to tell us the truth about the biological clock. Our biological clock. The one that would eventually reach exploding point inside us ...

And none of our mothers thought to warn us that we would need to stop, take time out and learn to nurture our partnerships and relationships. Or if they did, we were running too fast to hear it.

For those of us that did marry, marriage was perhaps akin to an accessory. And in our high-disposable-income lives, accessories pass their use-by date, and are thoughtlessly tossed aside.

Frankly, the dominant message was to not let our man, or any man for that matter, get in the way of career and our own personal progress.

Autonomy and careers were what mattered. Men were "accessories" to be tossed aside if they got in the way of a woman's "personal progress".

But, in the long run, it didn't seem worth it. A career and a single girl lifestyle made for a comfortable but alienating existence:

The end result: here we are, supposedly "having it all" as we edge 40; excellent education; good qualifications; great jobs; fast-moving careers; good incomes; and many of us own the trendy little inner-city pad we live in. It's a nice caffe-latte kind of life, really.

But the truth is - for me at least - the career is no longer a challenge, the lifestyle trappings are joyless (the latest Collette Dinnigan frock looks pretty silly on a near-40-year-old), and the point of it all seems, well, pointless.

I am childless and I am angry. Angry that I was so foolish to take the word of my feminist mothers as gospel. Angry that I was daft enough to believe female fulfilment came with a leather briefcase.

It was wrong. It was crap.

And now Virginia Haussegger herself is playing the role of a feminist mother, being the guest speaker and "chief feminist flag waver" at an event at the Australian National University. And what advice did she give the young women?

The same advice that she called "crap" back in 2002. She thought it great that the young women had a strong sense of entitlement; she highlighted professional success as what mattered; and she spoke at length of women being held back from achieving career success and pay parity.

Think about this. In 2010 she is telling young women that they will be oppressed by their lack of career and pay opportunities. In 2002, it was a very different story. She admitted then that she and her friends had not been held back at all in their careers and income. They had great jobs, high incomes and a glamorous, comfortable lifestyle. But she had learned that career and money weren't enough for fulfilment. She should not have treated men and relationships as secondary, as mere "accessories".

So why not tell the next generation of women this? Why not spare them from making the same mistake? Why not let them know that they can be oppressed not so much by discrimination but by failing to take the time to nurture relationships? That career and money alone can seem pointless?

Worst of all, why discuss motherhood in such negative terms, as a "breeding creed" that might upset a woman's "career and income ambitions"?

Virginia, aren't you repeating the sins of your own feminist mothers?

She married him

Simon Downer is a thug. He plunged a knife into the stomach of a girlfriend and got six years in prison. Whilst there he met another woman, Tracey, a single mother in her late 30s.

Tracey fell head over heels in love, married the violent criminal on his release and brought him home to live with her 8-year-old daughter. The married couple were very happy together.

Until they had an argument one night, just three months after their marriage. Simon Downer shoved aside his stepdaughter, stabbed his new wife fatally in the heart telling her "that's what happens if you push it with me".

Most women would not have married the thug. Even so, there has been a spate of reports in recent times of women, sometimes quite respectable professional women, choosing to have relationships with violent criminals.

One thing this tells us is that the ruling idea of human nature in Western societies is mistaken. John Kekes describes this ruling idea as follows:

The view of human nature at the core of the liberal faith is thus that human beings are by their nature free, equal, rational, and morally good.

If you accept this view of human nature as adequate, then you will think it not only possible but desirable to leave each individual to arrive at their own moral view. The ideal will be a society of free, equal and morally elevated individuals, untouched by any external restraints on their choices.

But the liberal view of human nature hasn't brought us closer to a society of independent, high-minded gentlemen and women who freely, and therefore most virtuously, choose to discipline their lives to some morally elevated purpose.

Look what happens, for instance, when the "no rules" principle is applied to women like Tracey Downer. Her sexuality is liberated from the influence of traditional morals, which then unleashes a destructive attraction to violent, dangerous men. The result is disastrous.

The problem is that we are not equal in our natures. Not everyone has the same level of moral conscience, prudence and self-discipline. Nor are we entirely rational in our natures. We are moved too by passions and loves, which for both better and worse define the human experience in important ways.

Liberals worry that if a society sets a moral standard, or if we are influenced by the culture we live in to be good, that we are acting like automatons, and losing the virtue of freely choosing the good. A liberal wants to feel morally elevated because of his own autonomous character.

I think this fear is mistaken. There will always be the possibility of acting badly, no matter how great the influence of society. Our moral free will to choose for the better or the worse will always be there. All that a society can do is to bolster the voice of moral conscience and encourage prudence.

Second, it can be argued that it's the liberal view which undercuts the need for character and moral will. After all, if people are naturally and equally good, then doing the good will come easily. It's only if you think that human nature is fallen, with each individual struggling to follow the better part of his nature, that our acts of goodness become achievements of character.

Liberalism itself intolerant?

Harriet Harman, the British Minister for Equality, has introduced a new Equality Bill which she hopes will build "a new social order".

One feature of the Equality Bill is that it will allow companies to discriminate against white men in order to boost the number of female or ethnic minority employees.

This effectively means that people will be chosen on the basis of race and ethnicity rather than merit, but Harman doesn't want to admit this. At the government website we're told that employers will be allowed to take "positive action" to hire women or ethnic minority applicants, but that:

Positive discrimination (employing someone because of a characteristic regardless of merit) will remain illegal.

In other words, they want to maintain the fiction that they're hiring on merit even when they're practising affirmative action. A necessary self-deceit perhaps.

Anyway, the Equality Bill was criticised by the Pope as it could potentially be used to force the Church to hire job applicants who acted against the Church's teachings.

Enter Simon Jenkins, a writer for the very liberal Guardian newspaper and a former editor of the Times. He decided to back the Pope in a column which I think is revealing of contemporary liberalism. It's revealing because it demonstrates the difficulty that a liberal like Jenkins has with religion, whilst also being an admission that contemporary liberalism has become intolerant.

This is how Jenkins frames the issue:

The ­Roman Catholic church may be a hotbed of religious prejudice, indoctrination and, somewhere in the United Kingdom, social division. But faced with Harriet Harman's equality bill and her utopian campaign to straighten all the rough timber of mankind, the pope's right to practise what he preaches needs defending.

A hotbed of religious prejudice? Is that how a former editor of the Times looks on the Catholic Church? I wouldn't describe my local parish that way. It usually strikes me as overly sedate and casual and flavoured heavily with a social justice doctrine derived more from secular liberalism than from Catholic orthodoxy.

Jenkins later describes the Church in these terms:

The church's historic aversion to religious debate and dissent, its pathological conservatism, its veneration of relics, its cruelty to its own adherents and its necrophilia make the pope's plea for tolerance ring hollow.

Pathological conservatism? Cruelty to its own adherents? Necrophilia? Again, I find it disconcerting that someone from the upper echelons of the media would write this way. (And why is the veneration of relics an act of intolerance - what is happening in the liberal mind here?)

Jenkins does not, though, support the use of the Equality Bill against the churches. He believes that this only furthers the imposition of state control. He goes so far as to admit that,

British liberalism has had a good half-century, but has begun to lurch into the intolerance it purports to oppose. It should loosen up and acknowledge that some communal space must be allowed the old illiberalism.

I'm not entirely sure how to react to this. Jenkins does recognise that liberalism has become intolerant, but his alternative is merely that we non-liberals be granted "some communal space". So much for liberalism supposedly being neutral. It is revealed here as the governing principle of society.

Nor am I sure how to respond to this attempt at sympathy toward traditionalists by Jenkins:

There are still large numbers of Britons who are uncomfortable with those whose behaviour diverges from what they see as traditional norms. These conservatives have swallowed much this past half-century, as authoritarianism has been steadily eradicated by liberal legislation on homosexuality, abortion, divorce and free speech.

Occasionally the liberalism has looked more like intolerance, as over smoking and aspects of "hate speech". Indeed to some people, liberalism's onward march has seemed more like a jackboot in the face. A few have reacted by retreating into a know-nothing fundamentalism, as witnessed in many parts of America.

Jenkins has already admitted that liberalism has become intolerant in imposing itself on society. So it's not really a case of liberalism ushering in a less authoritarian society, thereby upsetting traditionalists. There is still an authoritarianism, a liberal one, combined with the divergence from traditional norms.

Nor is the most significant reaction against liberalism a "know-nothing fundamentalism". What's more important is the growing sense of division between the liberal elite and the rest of society. Many people now have the sense of no longer being truly represented by the political class.

Charlie & Boots

A brief film review for Australian readers.

I saw Charlie & Boots on DVD last night. It's a road movie in which a father and son reconnect. I have to give credit to those involved: there was not even a moment of guilt mongering in the film, unlike so many recent Australian releases. The film isn't that deep, but I enjoyed the humour and the scenery - it works well as light entertainment.

I'd give it a 7 or 8 out of 10.

If you've already seen it, feel free to add your own comments.

Does this justify the left-liberal bias on campus?

It's a common complaint of conservatives that universities have a left-wing bias.

Jere P. Surber is a professor of philosophy at the University of Denver. He is a left-liberal who agrees that the arts faculties are strongly biased to the left. But he thinks that there are three good reasons for this.

Before I summarise these three reasons, just a quick point on terminology. Surber distinguishes between a "liberalism" which dominates the arts faculties and a "conservatism" which dominates the business faculties. By "liberalism" is meant what we would call in Australia "left-liberalism". And the "conservatism" in the business faculties is really a kind of economic liberalism, a right-liberalism.

So why does Professor Surber think it natural and reasonable for the arts faculties to be dominated by left-liberalism?

1) Envy

It's best if I let Professor Surber explain this one:

First ... virtually all instructors in the liberal arts are aware of the disparity between their level of education and their financial situation. There's no secret that the liberal arts are the lowest-compensated sector of academe, despite substantially more advanced study  ... You don't have to be a militant Marxist to recognize that people's political persuasions will align pretty well with their economic interests. It's real simple: Those who have less and want more will tend to support social changes that promise to accomplish that; those who are already economic winners will want to conserve their status.

I don't mean to suggest that issues of conscience beyond the confines of crass self-interest don't play an important role for many in the liberal arts, but their basic economic condition virtually assures that those in the liberal arts will be natural-born liberals. Who, after all, would want to preserve a situation in which others who are equivalently educated and experienced—doctors, engineers, lawyers, scientists, colleagues in other areas, and, yes, chief executives—receive vastly more compensation ...

Every time I read this I'm left speechless. If Professor Surber were working in Australia he'd be on 5,000 a year. He'd also enjoy some perks of the job, such as frequent trips overseas for academic conferences. Yet, in his mind, he's not getting what he's entitled to, given his splendiferous level of education ... because someone else is getting more.


2) The evidence of history

According to Professor Surber, it is left-liberals who study history; therefore it is left-liberals who discover the truth that history is all about the struggle against oppression; therefore the only respectable intellectual position is that of left-liberalism:

A second reason that liberal-arts professors tend to be politically liberal is that they have very likely studied large-scale historical processes and complex cultural dynamics. Conservatives, who tend to evoke the need to preserve traditional connections with the past, have nonetheless contributed least to any detailed or thoughtful study of history. Most (although, of course, by no means all) prominent historians of politics, literature, the arts, religion, and even economics have tended, as conservatives claim, to be liberally biased. Fair enough. But if you actually take the time to look at history and culture, certain conclusions about human nature, society, and economics tend to force themselves on you. History has a trajectory, driven in large part by the desires of underprivileged or oppressed groups to attain parity with the privileged or the oppressor.

Consider the Greek struggle against Persian tyranny, the struggles to preserve the Roman Republic, the peasant uprisings of the Middle Ages, the American and French revolutions, the abolitionist and civil-rights movements, and now movements on behalf of other groups—women, Latinos, homosexuals, and the physically impaired. As President Obama recently put it, any open-minded review of history (and perhaps especially American history) teaches at least one clear lesson: There is a "right side of history," Obama said­—the side of those who would overcome prejudice, question unearned privilege, and resist oppression in favor of a more just condition.

If you don't study history, whether because it doesn't pad quarterly profits, isn't sufficiently scientific or objective, or threatens your own economic status, then you won't know any of that. But most of those in the liberal arts have concluded that there really isn't any other intellectually respectable way to interpret the broad contours of history and culture. They are liberal, in other words, by deliberate and reasoned choice, based upon the best available evidence.

They are liberal by deliberate and reasoned choice? This is myth making. The embarrassing truth for left-liberal professors is that liberalism is a long-standing orthodoxy that most Western intellectuals fall into. The idea that every professor just happens to end up agreeing with the orthodoxy after a process of "deliberate and reasoned choice" is incredible.

Note too that Professor Surber wants things both ways. He wants to hold to the pretence that intellectuals adopt liberalism via "deliberate and reasoned choice" rather than it being the orthodoxy, whilst at the same time claiming that liberalism is the only "intellectualy respectable way" to interpret history, i.e. that there can only be a liberal orthodoxy.

To rephrase this: we are supposed to accept that there can only be a liberal orthodoxy, but that it is accepted not as an orthodoxy but via the deliberate and reasoned choice of each intellectual. Yeah, sure.

Note too just how reductionist Professor Surber's understanding of history is. History is nothing more than the movement to overcome prejudice, question unearned privilege, and resist oppression in favor of a more just condition. This is obviously a reading backward of the political programme of the liberals of today into centuries past.

It also provides more evidence of the relatedness of left-liberalism and Marxism. It was, after all, Marx who wrote that, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Isn't Professor Surber as a left-liberal pushing a similar idea?

And look at where Professor Surber's reductionism leads him. The Middle Ages gets reduced to the peasant uprisings; the history of America to the civil-rights movement. There is a view of man embedded in all this. Professor Surber assumes that the ideal man, who contributes to the trajectory of human history, is the one who agitates against privilege. So if German peasants have any historical meaning it was in their uprising against the landowners.

But this is a very limited view of man. I would like to think that a man might conceivably be measured by his strength of character, by the quality of his loves and attachments, by his productive contribution to society, by his success in raising children to adulthood, by his cultivation of knowledge, by his appreciation of culture, by the quality of his spiritual life, by his creativity and inventiveness, by his virtue, by his appreciation of the ordinary pleasures of life, by his ability to perceive beauty and goodness and so on.

If we have a more sophisticated view of man, then we can look at past societies and see more than occasional agitations for political reform.

3) Values

Professor Surber's final argument is that professors in the humanities,

have trained ourselves to think in complex, nuanced, and productive ways about the human condition 

It is this "open perspective on what types of values can be considered legitimate" that helps to explain why so many professors in the arts faculties are left-liberals.

If only. As I've already discussed, Professor Surber does not think in a complex way about the human condition but in a remarkably and disastrously reductionist way. Nor does he have an "open perspective" on "what kind of values can be considered legitimate". He told us earlier in his essay that there was only one "intellectually respectable" way to look at history, namely via left-liberal values. And later on he tells us that there is considerable agreement in the arts faculties "on what constitutes the good life," based on "some sort of a broadly liberal point of view."

I don't see how you get from this insistence that left-liberal values are the politically correct ones to the idea that left-liberals are unique in having an "open perspective on what types of values can be considered legitimate".


(Hat tip: David Thompson)

Male & female

Male and female are more than biological realities. They are spiritual essences and cultural ideals.

Laura Wood puts this well. So well, that I can imagine liberals hyperventilating on reading it.

Liberals take autonomy to be the highest good. This means that we are supposed to be self-determining creatures, i.e. we are supposed to create who we are for ourselves. But this means that liberals are committed to making our sex not matter. We don't get to determine what sex we are, therefore it's thought of by liberals as a negative restriction on individual autonomy.

Here, for instance, is a brief exchange I had at a men's rights forum with someone calling themselves "Atomic parrot".

Atomic parrot: The "provider" role espoused by the author of this article is as damaging to men as the "housewife/mother" role is/was to women. People are individuals, we're smarter than our biology, we need the freedom to live our lives as we see fit, not to be forced into a narrow role defined by social conservatives. Some people really don't even want kids and a family ... Live and let live, stop trying to define yourself by your gender alone.

Me: Your gender is a more meaningful aspect of who you are than your job, your hobbies or your consumer choices. It's not some kind of negative restriction, it's something that can potentially make you feel more connected in your personal identity.

Atomic parrot: I'd argue that gender is less meaningful than the choices you make - because your gender is something you didn't choose, something that just is - but what you choose and do defines you more than something you were born with.

Me: Atomic parrot, that's a clearly set out reply. It's modernist philosophy in a nutshell. I disagree with it though. The fact of something being predetermined doesn't make it less of a good. I didn't choose my nationality and yet that's important for my self-identity. I didn't choose my sexuality, but that's important too. The things we get to self-determine are mostly limited in scope: career, consumer choices, travel destinations, hobbies. What we inherit is often of greater significance, even though it's not something self-created.

Atomic parrot is an orthodox liberal. He believes that freedom is the choice to self-create. He therefore looks down on the fact of his sex because it's something that is pre-created, something that "just is," rather than something self-chosen. It loses meaning for him as a liberal, and is associated in highly negative terms with "forced" or "narrow" life paths.

What a distance there is between the modernist liberal and traditionalist conservative viewpoints. For us the fact of being a man or a woman is part of the essence of who we are. It is a deeply meaningful aspect of our personal identity, one that rightly generates some of the ideals that we live by.

But for a liberal like Atomic parrot it's something that just is, a mere fact of biology that is dangerously limiting. Freedom for Atomic parrot is not the fulfilment of our masculine or feminine selves, but the transcending of our gender, our making it not matter in our lives.

There's not much common ground here.

And where does Atomic parrot's liberalism take him? He declares that he doesn't like to date women who know whether they want children or not:

cfisi79: So, do you only date women who also aren't 100% sure whether or not they want kids?

Atomic parrot: My current GF isn't sure either - I like not having "set" expectations for the future.

This is the way that the logic of the liberal position unfolds. If a masculine role is thought to limit our autonomy, then why wouldn't a parental role? A parental role, after all, is also linked to the fact of biology. It's not a uniquely chosen life path.

And so it's no surprise that Atomic parrot should finally declare himself against a masculine role, a marital role and a parental role,

Monogamous marriage partnerships are kinda out dated at this point, especially since more and more people just don't want to have kids.

For someone who didn't want to be limited, Atomic parrot is placing a lot of significant life experiences out of bounds here.

And it's not exactly a recipe for an enduring civilisation. It's an unsustainable form of individualism, one that can't carry on for long. A philosophical dead end.

Did feminism betray Zoe Lewis?

When Zoe Lewis was a young woman she followed the feminist life path expected of her:

I was part of the 'golden generation' of women who expected to go to university, have careers and enjoy our sexual freedom.

In our 20s, my friends and I pursued casual relationships, thinking all the 'serious stuff' would come along when we'd reached the peak of our success - i.e. in our 30s, when Mr Right would be attracted like a moth to the flame of our blazing glory.

This is what you might describe as a faulty compromise. According to feminism, the highest good in life is autonomy. Therefore, what matters most for a woman is preserving her independence. A woman can achieve this by following a single girl lifestyle based on careers, casual relationships, travel and consumerism.

The instinct to marry and have children, though, runs deep. So most women did not reject marriage and family entirely as life ambitions, even though these require both men and women to sacrifice a degree of autonomy. Instead, marriage was delayed as a life goal and made secondary to other ambitions.

With often disastrous results. It's not so easy for a woman to successfully marry and have children in her 30s - many will miss out. Zoe Lewis is one of those women who left things too late:

My own late 30s have been spent in an inelegant stumble towards validation - quickly trying to do the thing that defines a woman: have a baby.

And I found myself scratching around in the leftovers of my single male peers to find a partner with whom to have a child before it got too late.

It didn't have to be that way. She rejected many men when she was in her 20s:

Had I had this understanding of my inner psyche in my 20s, I would have mentally demoted my writing (and hedonism) and pursued a relationship with vigour.

There were plenty of men and even a marriage offer from someone with whom I would have happily settled down. But no, I wasn't prepared to give up my dreams, the life I had been told was the right and proper one for a modern woman.

She has friends in the same boat:

Sas Taylor, 38, single and childless, runs her own PR company. 'In my 20s, I felt as if I was invincible, unstoppable,' she says. 'Now, I wish I had done it all differently ...'

Nicki P, 35, single and also childless, works in the music industry and adds: 'It was all a game back then. Now, it's serious, and I am panicking. No one told me having fun isn't as much fun as I thought.'

So what has Zoe Lewis decided to do? She reluctantly, as a last resort, went to Denmark to be artificially inseminated. She's now six months pregnant. Her child will never know its father.

She doesn't think of this as a great act of feminist independence. She feels scarred by her experience of being a feminist modern woman, so much so that she didn't want to bring a girl into the world:

I'd convinced myself it was a boy because I felt I'd be better off with a male child. I didn't want my daughter to have to struggle with the pressure of trying to 'have it all' as I have. The sad and uncomfortable truth is that being a woman has often made me unhappy, and I didn't want my daughter to be unhappy either.

She could have done things differently. If she had aimed to marry well in her 20s, she might have had a husband to help support her literary aims - as well as a more fulfilled personal life. She herself seems to recognise this:

I wish I had been given the advice that I am now giving to my sister, who is 22. If you find a great guy, don't be afraid to settle down and have kids because there isn't anything to miss out on that you can't go back and do later - apart from having kids.

In the future, I hope there can be a better understanding of women by women. The past 25 years has been confusing for our sex, and I can't help feeling I've been caught in the crossfire ...

I have always felt an immense pressure to be successful, to show men I am their equal. What a waste of time that was...

And how does Zoe Lewis now feel about feminism? She has rejected the feminism of her mother's generation. She doesn't think that autonomy (choice, sexual liberation, the single girl lifestyle) should always be the overriding aim in life. Love and family are what matter in the end:

My mother - a film-maker - was a hippy who kept a pile of dusty books by Germaine Greer and Erica Jong by her bedside. (Like every good feminist, she didn't see why she should do all the cleaning.) She imbued me with the great values of choice, equality and sexual liberation.

As a result, I fought with my older brother and won, and at university I beat the rugby lads at drinking games. I was not to be messed with.

But, at nearly 37, those same values leave me feeling cold. Now, I want love and children, but they are nowhere to be seen.

When I was growing up, I was led to believe by my mother and other women of her generation that women could 'have it all', and, more to the point, that we wanted it all. To that end, I have spent 20 years ruthlessly pursuing my dream of being a successful playwright. I have sacrificed all my womanly duties and laid it all at the altar of a career. And was it worth it? The answer has to be a resounding no.

Ten years ago, I wrote a play called Paradise Syndrome. It was based on my girlfriends in the music business. All we did was party, work and drink. The play sold out and I thought: 'This is it! I'm going to have it all - success, power - and men are going to adore me for it.'

In reality, it was the beginning of years of hard slog, rejection letters and living on the breadline.

 And this:

I wish a more balanced view of womanhood had been available to me. I wish that being a housewife or a mother hadn't been such a toxic idea to middle-class liberals ...

Increasing numbers of my strongly feminist contemporaries are giving up their careers and opting for love and children and baking instead. Now, I wish I'd had kids ten years ago, when time was on my side. But the essence of the problem, I can see in retrospect, is not so much time as mentality.

It's about understanding what is important in life, and from what I see and feel deep down, loving relationships and children bring more happiness than work ever can.

It's about understanding what is important in life. That does seem to be the crux of it. Is autonomy always what matters most? Or are there other goods in life which deserve our attention and which should be formative in shaping our character and life decisions?

Red Ted's low act

I doubt if there has ever been a worse leader of the Victorian Liberal Party than Red Ted Baillieu.

I'll briefly summarise the current situation. There has been a spate of attacks on Indian students in Melbourne. The Indian Government and media have blamed the racism of Anglo-Australians for the attacks. However, in all of the high profile cases, there has been hardly an Anglo-Australian in sight. In fact, in the most recent cases, the perpetrators turned out to be Indians themselves.

For instance, in January an Indian man claimed that a group of racist men had poured petrol on him and set him alight in the Melbourne suburb of Essendon. The Indian media reacted predictably:

Victoria police say, “there is no reason at this stage to consider this racially motivated.” If the statement had been calculated to enrage, it could hardly have been more provocatively phrased ...

Canberra has been far behind the curve on this issue right from the start ... When you set a person on fire that is like a statement. It goes far beyond a crime of opportunity. The act of burning is likely to be interpreted as a wider symbol of intolerance and ethnic cleansing. If that happens we can say goodbye to rational debate and practical, sober responses. Canberra’s obtuse, insensitive attitude is laying the ground for serious damage to bilateral ties.

It turned out that Mr Singh accidentally burned himself while torching his car for an insurance claim.

Do these false claims of racist violence perpetrated by Anglos on Asians matter much? They matter a great deal. There is a significant public opinion in nations like India and China which is dangerously hostile to white Australians. If you visit the chat forums of the Chinese and Indian media, you quickly get a sense of what is at stake.

Here, for instance, are just a few of the comments I collected from a brief visit to the chat forum of the China Daily. They're in response to stories not only about attacks on Asian students by white Australians but about the "stolen generations":

Comment 1: SUBHUMAN. Seriously, Anglos don't belong in the 21st century. Their war crimes throughout history show they belong in cages, perhaps in a zoo as feed for the animals ... Anglos are illegal immigrants from Schleswig Holstein ... They are the lowest form of crap there is ...

Comment 2: In terms of evolution, these white Australians display streaks of atavism ... So much was given them by providence, a mere smidgeon of humanity was expected of these white Australians, so little they give in return. A disgusting people!

Comment 3: It beggars belief. What kind of crap would separate all the children from their parents? What kind of turd? What kind of excrement?

Comment 4: every single anglo sucks

Comment 5: white Australians are rather good at character assassination, dissembling and, sometimes, just downright lying. Then again, what else can they do when presented with factual accounts of their racist nature but lie? A sad, sad nation peopled by a sadly misguided people. Petty minded and mean spirited.

Comment 6: Australia is a very nice place, except that Australians live there. If the Australians were deported to, say, Nigeria, and then Asians moved into Australia, it would be a good and nice place and productive too.

We ought to take the existence of this kind of sentiment seriously. They are the kind of views which might be used to justify harsh treatment against us. And we are a relatively small community with a declining position in our own country and facing the growing power of nations like China and India.

So what do we call a white Australian who reinforces the prejudices against us? Who unfairly blames the attacks on Indian students on white racism? Who places at some considerable risk the fate of our children and grandchildren?

Enter Red Ted Baillieu, the Liberal Party leader. He made a speech to the Australia India Business Council, in which he promoted the idea that racists in Melbourne were "creating fear and terror for many who live in our community".

What a foolish and low act for an Australian politician. The Labor Party Premier, Mr Brumby, made the correct response:

The Premier hit back, with his spokeswoman saying Mr Baillieu should know better than to use divisive and inflammatory comments that he knows are not true. "Mr Baillieu's deceptive treatment of this issue makes things worse not better," spokeswoman Fiona Macrae said.

What might be motivating Ted Baillieu? Political opportunism springs to mind. He has been making a big pitch to Indian voters here in Melbourne, visiting temples and even writing his own regular column in one of the local Indian newspapers. Perhaps he thinks the future of the Liberal Party lies with the growing Indian electorate.

If so, he is acting at our expense. When there is already a public opinion in powerful nations that Anglo Australians are subhumans who ought to be shipped out, you don't go about reinforcing such prejudices to bolster your own credentials.

How can we expect those in other nations to have a better regard for us, when our own "elite" is so quick to condemn us?

What are we to make, for instance, of Melbourne Anglican bishop, Philip Huggins, asking for forgiveness on our behalf for "our prejudice and indifference" toward people from other countries, "especially Indians" who are "oppressed in our land"? Why would a Christian bishop mimic the secular leftists in assigning whites the role of oppressors? Why would he fuel a sense of racial grievance against whites, when this racial grievance looms so dangerously on the horizon? It's grossly irresponsible and lacking in conscience toward his white parishioners.

And what about the writers of the popular soapie Home & Away, whose Australia Day episode had this plot line:

on Australia Day a bunch of hooligans wearing flags assault the new Muslim character in town, call him a terrorist, tell him to go home and then, when he hides in the Diner with his friends, they burn down the Diner.

So the white Australian political class is happy to present a vicious image of rank and file Australians to the world, which then feeds into a dangerously hostile attitude toward us in overseas countries.

In this circumstance, special pleading isn't going to do much to help. Talking about how you as an individual Anglo aren't racist isn't going to have much of an effect. You'll just be accused of dissembling.

Things will only change when we put our own house in order. We need to call out those individuals, like Ted Baillieu, who seek personal advantage at the expense of their own community. We need to identify this not as high class paternalism but as low, unconscionable behaviour.

High flying conservatives or globalist liberals?

So historian Niall Ferguson has left his wife and children to live with his mistress Ayaan Hirsi Ali. What's curious about this story is that the three key figures are all high flyers in the mainstream conservative movement. So what do these three people tell us about the state of the "conservative" parties?

I'll begin with the wife, as she is the least controversial. Susan Douglas is one of Tory leader David Cameron's closest friends. She has had a successful career in publishing and she is in the running to become an MP:

Ms Douglas is seen as one of the Tory Party’s rising stars, and is on the A-list of aspiring Parliamentary candidates. She is said to be in the running to contest the Tory stronghold of Stratford-upon-Avon at the next General Election.

She's in her early 50s and is seven years older than her husband. I don't know much about her politics, although she did tell an interviewer that the first thing she reads to start her day is The Guardian, an unusual choice for someone aiming to become a Tory MP.

She doesn't seem to have managed to balance her career and her family. She told the same interviewer that work required her to have an early start (4am) and that she got back home late. This at a time when her three children were aged ten, nine and five and when her husband was living on a different continent in pursuit of his own career.

It hardly seems an ideal arrangement. It strikes me more as a "lifestyle of the rich and famous," with the children presumably being raised by a nanny and not seeing a lot of either parent.

But it's not Susan Douglas who seems most distant from a rank and file conservatism. It's her husband, Niall Ferguson. He too is influential in mainstream conservatism:

Ferguson is on the board of the Centre for Policy Studies, the leading Right-wing think-tank, and works as an unofficial adviser to Mr Cameron, in particular on how to promote ‘Britishness’. He also worked as an adviser to John McCain at the beginning of his election campaign...

Ferguson met his mistress at a party thrown for the "100 most influential people in the world". He is well-connected not just in politics and academia but in the financial world as well:

By this stage he had moved to America, having accepted a chair in history at Harvard. It was then that he also started advising some of the world’s leading hedge-fund managers...

‘There was a point when it was not impossible for me to get 0,000 for a one-hour speech at some extravagant hedge-fund manager conference in an exotic location,’ Ferguson recalled. While he lived a jet-set lifestyle, his wife stayed at home with the children.

So did he use this influence to promote conservatism? No, for the simple reason that he is not a conservative and doesn't even pretend to be one. He calls himself a "liberal fundamentalist":

I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Gladstone. My fundamental tenets are concerned with freedom of the individual; the market isn't perfect, but it's the best available way of allocating resources...

As you can see, I'm just a doctrinaire liberal at heart ... I'm just a liberal fundamentalist.

He is a right-liberal who believes that the best way of regulating a liberal society is through the free market. Ferguson is, in fact, so liberal that he thought John McCain ran an unacceptably conservative presidential campaign:

he became, for a time, one of John McCain's foreign policy advisers. "I must say that since he won the nomination, which I was very happy about, I've played virtually no role. In fact, I've played no role. Because, uh" - he is suddenly, uncharacteristically halting - "how to describe it? - I felt much less ... enthused, I think is probably the word, now that it's between him and Obama. And I felt much more uncomfortable with some of the positions he has had to take in order to secure the conservative vote."

Ferguson's right-liberal commitment to the market issues forth in these kinds of comments:

I want to show you that money is the foundation of human progress, and the ascent of money has been indispensable to the ascent of man

He is committed to globalism - to the free movement not only of capital and goods but labour as well. He admits that open borders harm the prospects of the least educated, but believes that people should just be told that they have to compete with waves of immigrants or sink:

Proponents of a new generation of anti-global measures claim to want to protect vulnerable native groups from the ravages of competition. They point to studies that show the biggest losers from immigration to be high school dropouts. Other evidence shows that it's unskilled blue collar workers who are most likely to lose out ...

It makes no sense to jeopardise the benefits of globalisation to protect the employment prospects of high-school dropouts. So here's a modest counter-proposal ... why not ... get this simple message across to the kids in America's high schools: If you flunk, you're sunk. Yes, boys and girls ... Drop out of education without qualifications, and you'll be lucky to get a job alongside the Mexicans picking fruit or stacking shelves.

A commenter at View from the Right responded as follows:

I find this attitude utterly detestable. As far as I am concerned this man is the worst kind of neo-con. I want to live in a society of fellow compatriots, who are valued for being a part of my culture and are brought up to believe they have worth as human beings. To tell them at such a young age that they must compete down at the bottom with people from the third world or perish is my idea of a heartless, cultureless society in which people's worth is defined solely by whether they can stack more cans for less money than the people in the local immigration centre.

Then there is the mistress, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She was born in Somalia, won asylum in Holland and became an MP there in a centre right party. She became a critic of the treatment of women in Islamic countries, had a fatwa placed on her and was forced to live under police protection. She was then appointed a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, usually described as a "conservative think tank". As mentioned earlier, she made Time magazine's list of the one hundred most influential people in the world.

So does she represent a rank and file conservatism? No. She describes herself as a liberal, and from her statements it's clear that she is radically liberal. For instance, she sees Catholicism as a dangerous ideology, akin to Nazism:

METRO: Do you see any positive sides to Islam?

HIRSI ALI: That’s like asking if I see positive sides to Nazism, communism, Catholicism.

She has called for an immigration restrictionist party in Belgium, the Vlaams Belang, to be banned, equating it with an Islamic terror group:

I would ban the VB because it hardly differs from the Hofstad group [a Jihadist terror network in the Netherlands, involved in the assassination of Theo van Gogh]. Though the VB members have not committed any violent crimes yet, they are just postponing them...

The Vlaams Belang is a parliamentary party, the largest in Flanders, which has never called for violence - yet Ayaan Hirsi Ali wants it outlawed as a terror group.

What struck me on reading about these "conservatives" is how distant they are from representing a genuine conservatism, not only because they self-identify as liberals, but because they belong to something like a "new global elite," with very little connection in their values or manner of living to rank and file conservatives.

(Lawrence Auster has written on the same issue here.)

The limits of liberal morality

Morality is a problem for liberals. That's why it's still something of a work in progress for them.

The difficulty is this. Liberals believe in individual autonomy as the highest good. Autonomy is thought to define our very humanity.

Therefore, the moral thing is to be free to do whatever we have a will to do; the immoral thing is to have our will impeded.

Liberalism therefore has a tendency to be libertine, permissive and even transgressive, as it will be thought morally heroic to break taboos which restrict what individuals might choose to do.

That's one side of the ledger. The other side is that liberals still have to make moral judgements. What if people choose to act against liberal values? How will liberals morally condemn this? And what if the "do as you will" philosophy creates damaging outcomes? How will liberals set limits to behaviour, when the underlying idea is that autonomy, a freedom to choose, is what determines the morality of our actions?

Liberals sometimes try to resolve the problem by raising the issue of "authentic wants." Let's say that Person X chooses to do something that a liberal doesn't like. In theory, the liberal should accept that the act is moral as it is Person X's choice to do it. But the liberal can argue that it wasn't an authentic choice, it wasn't what Person X really had a will to do. Perhaps Person X was somehow influenced by other people in his choice, or by tradition, or by advertisers.

This hasn't been an effective tactic. All that Person X has to do is to turn to the liberal and affirm that their choice is, indeed, authentic. For instance, a woman who becomes a stripper can talk about her choice being empowering, an expression of her independence, as being motivated by her own sexuality and life goals and so on. And Person X then wins the argument.

So liberals seem to have moved on to Plan B, which is to insist that moral actions be respectful. Here in Victoria the Labor Government has actually appointed a Minister of Respect in response to the wave of crime in the CBD.

Why such an emphasis on respect? The idea of respect places only indefinite, general, subjective limitations on our moral agency. There remain no specific, objective moral truths or inherently superior forms of personal character to guide our behaviour in a certain direction.

Respect works better as a strategy than authentic wants. It does encourage people to think of others when making moral choices. But I doubt that it can work strongly enough to hold the line. Is a young man who sets out to create violence in the CBD likely to change his mind by being told to respect others? Will this really have purchase on him?

And what happens when the notion of respect collides with the idea that "the fact that it's my choice makes it OK". Let's say a woman decides to be a football groupie. It's her choice to do so, so in her mind it's a moral thing to do. Are the football players who encounter her and others like her going to respect her? Is mutual respect likely to flourish in such a social milieu? Is it even reasonable to ask people to show her the same respect as a suburban mum raising a family? (Wouldn't this require people to suspend or suppress their moral instincts? Should we really show equal respect to people regardless of how they choose to behave?)

To illustrate this problem, consider the views of Charmyne Palavi, a rugby league groupie in Sydney. She clings to the "no limits" side of liberal morality, as when she describes herself as,

a single woman who can have sex whenever, with whomever, I choose.

She knows that the rugby league players don't respect the groupies:

Group sex happens ... The reality is there are women out there who do hunt footballers down, are prepared to have sex with them in nightclub toilets ...

Anyone who thinks the culture is going to change just because the story's out there however are kidding themselves.

I was messaging a young player, a Facebook friend, last week and asked what he was doing.

He replied: "Learning how to respect women. LOL (laugh out loud)."

I wrote back: "Yeah, and I'm still a virgin."

But she still believes that "respect" is the solution to managing interactions between the players and the groupies they have sex in toilets with:

People seem to be ignoring the bigger issue here while they look for someone to blame. That is - the disrespect for women inherent in the clubs.

She wants to behave in an unrespectable way and yet be treated with respect. Again, this shows a danger with the "equal respect" mantra. It has the potential to further undermine people's moral sense, by asking us to give moral assent to people regardless of how they behave.

The level of respect we show for others rightly varies according to the kind of personal character they display. It's not something that can be assumed to be permanently booked in.

There's one other liberal approach to morality that deserves a mention. Liberals will often discuss moral issues in terms of discrimination. A liberal can deem a moral action to be wrong if it discriminates, since the discrimination will be thought to limit the life aims (and therefore the autonomy) of some other person.

There was a curious example of this in yesterday's Age. A banker was caught out looking at a racy photo of a model on his computer during a live telecast on TV. He was temporarily stood down by the bank, but has returned to his job.

Cordelia Fine, a research associate at the Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics (a liberal way of describing moral philosophy) at Macquarie University, wrote a lengthy column about it. Remember, liberals are committed to a "if I choose it, it's moral" philosophy, so Cordelia Fine can't really argue that there is something inherently wrong with the banker looking at a racy photo.

Nonetheless, she makes a detailed argument that looking at the photo was an immoral act. Why? Because it fosters discrimination against women in the workplace, by harming the pursuit of careers by women. According to Cordelia Fine, a man looking at a racy photo in the workplace can undermine a woman's performance at work because she has to,

expend mental energy unconsciously suppressing the unflattering stereotype, and this interferes with the task at hand.

Think of the consequences of this approach to morality. It is an invitation to intrusive, petty, bureaucratic regulation of our day to day interactions with other people. Who doesn't suffer some kind of discrimination in their efforts to achieve their life aims? And how would you set about preventing it happening? Morality here takes the path of social engineering.

And so you end up with a mix of the libertine and the intrusive. Autonomy once again generates a contradiction. To be autonomous means rejecting external limits on what we might choose to do; but creating conditions of autonomy requires highly regulated social settings that are experienced as unnecessarily intrusive rather than individually free.

The power to intimidate?

One of the big topics in Australian politics this week was a comment by Tony Abbott in a woman's magazine. The Leader of the Opposition was asked what advice he would give his daughters about sex before marriage. He answered:

I would say to my daughters, if they were to ask the question, I would say … it is the greatest gift that you can give someone, the ultimate gift of giving and don’t give it to someone lightly, that is what I would say.

I would have thought most fathers would answer along the lines of "not too lightly". But Abbott's answer unleashed a furious response from the left. Jill Singer, for instance, wrote an outraged article in which she compared Abbott to Osama bin Laden, complained that his response was "pervy," "creepy" and "icky" and raised the spectre of chastity belts.

I was reminded by all this of the way that the left sometimes tries to shut down free discussion of an issue by using its prominence in the media to mock and ridicule opponents. The intent is to intimidate anyone from taking an opposing view.

There are other ways, too, that the left seeks to prevent discussion of an issue from ever getting off the ground. Here, for instance, is Karen Brooks's preferred way of dealing with Tony Abbott's comment:

Seriously, Abbott is entitled to his views, he's entitled to raise his family as he wants and instill in them his faith ... but what he's not entitled to do is discuss "women's issues" (which in many instances are also men's issues - we live together in this society), as if they are homogenous, framed by a Catholic or Christian principle, and as if he, with his very narrow and privileged world-view and experiences, holds the answers.

She's suggesting that someone with a conservative stance on the issue is entitled to hold their views privately but not publicly; that it's more legitimate for a non-Christian than a Christian to express their views publicly; and that it's more legitimate for a worse off person than a better off person to express their views publicly.

It has to be said that these tactics have worked at times for the left. This was particularly the case in Australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the left dominated politically. The tactics don't work as well now; there are some prominent right-liberal voices in the mainstream media and alternative sources of opinion on the internet and talk back radio.

Still, it's interesting to witness the left try it on.

Not so stolen generations

Should we Australians be ashamed of our past? For years we have been told that we should be ashamed of the treatment of the "stolen generations". The claim is that Australian authorities forcibly removed whole generations of Aboriginal children from their parents with the racist aim of breeding out the Aboriginal population.

Keith Windschuttle has written a new volume of his important work The Fabrication of Aboriginal History which investigates these claims in detail. He has presented some of his findings in a brief newspaper article, which is well-argued and well worth reading in full.

I'll try to summarise some of the key information. The historians who originally set up the idea of the stolen generations made some key assertions, including:

• that 50,000 Aboriginal children were forcibly removed
• that authorities aimed to seize children as young as possible with the aim that they should lose their Aboriginality and never return home
• that the children were forcibly removed solely because they were Aboriginal
  
  

Windschuttle quotes some leading historians of the stolen generations making such claims:

In his 2008 parliamentary apology, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd endorsed the estimate by Peter Read, the university historian who first advanced the concept of the Stolen Generations, that 50,000 Aboriginal children were forcibly removed in the 20th century.

Read had written that governments removed children as young as possible and reared them in institutions isolated from any contact with Aboriginal culture. "Welfare officers, removing children solely because they were Aboriginal," he said, "intended and arranged that they should lose their Aboriginality, and that they never return home."

The majority were allegedly babies and infants. The SBS television series First Australians claimed most of the 50,000 were aged under five. Henry Reynolds explained the rationale: "The younger the child the better, before habits were formed, attachments made, language learned, traditions absorbed."

But are these claims true? Windschuttle provides some strong evidence that they are far from being true. First, it's not true that most of the children removed from their families were aged under five. Windschuttle looked at the NSW records and found that only 10% were under five, most were teenagers.

Second, it was not "generations" who were removed from their families. For instance, at the Moore River settlement in WA, only about 10 children per year were removed at a time when the Aboriginal population of the state numbered 29,000.

Third, the children were not removed "because they were Aboriginal" but because of concerns for their welfare:

Rather than acting for racist or genocidal reasons, government officers and missionaries wanted to rescue children and teenagers from welfare settlements and makeshift camps riddled with alcoholism, domestic violence and sexual abuse.

In NSW, WA and the Territory, public servants, doctors, teachers and missionaries were appalled to find Aboriginal girls between five and eight years of age suffering from sexual abuse and venereal disease. On the Kimberley coast from the 1900s to the 1920s they were dismayed to find girls of nine and 10 years old hired out by their own parents as prostitutes to Asian pearling crews. That was why the great majority of children removed by authorities were female ...

Government officials had a duty to rescue children from such settings, as much then as they do now.

The prevailing policy of the time was not assimilation but the racial preservation of the Aborigines. It's true that there were two regional officers who did propose assimilation policies: they wanted to marry half-caste Aboriginal women to white men. But they did not have government support for these plans. The plan was rejected in cabinet in 1933 and in 1934 a commonwealth minister declared in parliament that:

It can be stated definitely, that it is and always has been, contrary to policy to force half-caste women to marry anyone. The half-caste must be a perfectly free agent in the matter.

The prevailing policy was expressed by J. F. Bleakley, the chief protector of Aborigines in Queensland and the author of the commonwealth policy of the 1920s and 30s, when he wrote of Aborigines that:

"We have no right to attempt to destroy their national life. Like ourselves, they are entitled to retain their racial entity and racial pride."

This is the opposite of genocide. It is a clear statement that the government of the time wanted Aborigines to continue their own distinct ethnic existence.

There's much more in Windschuttle's article, including evidence that those Aboriginal children who were placed in welfare institutions were not cut off from their families or their Aboriginality and were treated in a similar way to white children in similar circumstances (e.g. sent out to complete apprenticeships).

We're fortunate that Keith Windschuttle has made such a determined effort to write authoritative books on Aboriginal history. He may not be a traditionalist conservative (he's more of a right-liberal) but he's provided an important contribution.

The shock, the horror!

How did the Melbourne Age celebrate Australia Day? It offered us four opinion pieces, none of which celebrated the historic culture and tradition of Australia.

The first, by Greg Day, called for a process of reverse assimilation in which the host population are supposed to assimilate into the culture of the newest arrivals:

Another example of government spin gone tragically wrong is the latest Australia Day Council advertisements, urging us all to barbecue like never before.

The advert, in the style of a 1970s Maoist propaganda poster, features three bronzed Aussies gripping their chops and snags close to their hearts in readiness for the ritual fry-up.

One can only gasp in horror at the meaning this might have for people of the Hindu faith - this is tantamount to saying throw another sacred cow on the barbie, mate.

The Age, in its wisdom, also thought it a good idea to publish a column on Australia Day criticising flag-abusers. Roel ten Cate wrote:

To an anti-social minority, every display of the flag means a vote in support of violence-based nationalism. We all know who this minority is. They can usually be seen on Australia Day with their shirt off, beer can in hand, often wearing the flag as a cape, and being generally loud ... But they are not solely to blame. All those who choose to publicly exhibit the flag - whether they have pure intentions or not - are inadvertently encouraging these flag-abusers.

Not too much joy on Australia Day from The Age so far. And the kill-joy trend continues with Stephanie Dowrick's column. She begins promisingly by stating that "we have countless reasons to be grateful". But then we get the following:

It is anyway barely possible to regard Australia Day as an unconditional celebration ... Aboriginal population ... unreflective racism and colonialism ... how difficult it is for first-generation migrants to feel at home ... exacerbated when people look and sound different...

She then offers us the prospect of an inevitable "social revolution" in which there cannot be a stable national identity:

At every level what it means to be an "Australian" is in a state of flux ... It is one of the markers of 21st-century life that populations are on the move ... While this social revolution is unrolling, we can't predict how it will alter our conceptions of nationality and belonging. But we can recognise the inevitability of this change .... A common reaction to such fears [of change] is defensiveness and bigotry.

So there's a revolutionary movement of change that will alter our conceptions of nationality. But if you question it, claims Stephanie Dowrick, you are showing mere defensive and bigotry.

At least she admits that the liberal programme is a radical one. Of the several radical/revolutionary political movements of the twentieth century, the liberal one is the sole survivor. A pity we couldn't have seen it off with the others.

So what are we to do for a national identity? Stephanie Dowrick thinks it should be based not on racial or cultural origins but on traits such as generosity, respect, neighbourliness, resourcefulness and kindness. But, as she herself admits:

These are human qualities, not national ones.

So they cannot then define a distinctively national identity. They cannot be the basis of a stable national tradition.

The final opinion piece, by Prasanth Shanmugan, is another attempt to redefine the national identity. Like a few recent migrants he feels lost in a multiculture and has picked up on how superficial it all is:

I do not agree with the policy and theory of multiculturalism, as it is defined and practised. I believe it is flawed with its narrow focus on diversity and on the other. And sadly its meaning was never elucidated beyond tasting a different cuisine each night.

But what kind of national identity does Prasanth Shanmugan endorse? He calls for a nationalism based on "attitude" rather than an ethnic nationalism based on historic kinship. According to Shanmugan, it doesn't matter what passport you hold or where you were born. What matters is simply a "clear commitment to Australia".

Unfortunately for him, he quotes former PM Bob Hawke in his support:

The commitment is all. The commitment to Australia is the one thing needful to be a true Australian.

And what does this commitment consist of? According to Hawke:

An Australian is someone who chooses to live here, obey the law and pays taxes.

You're a committed Australian simply by virtue of the fact that you choose to live here rather than somewhere else. As one commenter put it in response to Hawke:

According to Hawke, Australians have no distinct ethnic or cultural identity. In fact, they have absolutely nothing to define them as a people - no history, traditions, ancestors, customs or heroes. To be an 'Australian' is not to belong to a distinct national community; it simply means you live here and pay tax.

In short, it seems that Hawke is saying that 'Australians' don't really exist in any meaningful sense.

So there you have the four opinion pieces gifted to us by The Age on Australia Day. That is the range of thought The Age considers reasonable to offer to their readers in order to celebrate a national holiday. There's not much joy in it and certainly no sense of a tradition to be celebrated.

Silly, but makes a serious point

This is from a defunct US sitcom called Coupling. I don't think the series ever made it here to Australia.



Leftists want to be thought of as rebels or dissenters, when in reality they form a core part of the political establishment.

Hat tip: Useful fools

Australian of the Year

Who should be Australian of the Year? Here are some worthy nominations:

Dick Smith     A leading figure from the business world who has come out against open borders. He has called Government plans to increase the population by 13 million via immigration "ridiculous" and says the policy is opposed by 9 out of 10 Australians. He is working on a documentary on the issue. He loses points, though, for limiting his opposition to population increase to environmental grounds and for suggesting that women be limited to two children (the already low birth rate is one of the excuses used by the Government for large scale immigration).

Kelvin Thomson & Kevin Andrews     A joint nomination for the only two MPs to have taken an independent line on immigration. Kevin Andrews is a Liberal Party MP who wants the immigration level taken down to a population replacement level of 35,000 per year. Kelvin Thomson is a Labor Party MP who has called for a return to the more modest immigration levels of the 1990s.

But I declare the winner to be ...

Kurt Fearnley   It's hard not to admire this man's efforts. He does not have the use of his legs, but nonetheless completed the gruelling 90km Kokoda Trail dragging himself along on his hands. He did it to raise funds for two men's health groups.

Were there any obvious contenders I missed? Feel free to make your own nominations in the comments section. (They don't have to be from the field of politics.)

Tony Abbott prattles on about conservatism then adopts radical liberal policies

Tony Abbott, leader of the "conservative" opposition, is at it again. Abbott is a man who talks the conservative talk but then walks the liberal walk.

Consider the issue of nationalism. If you were to read the following, you might think that Mr Abbott was a traditionalist conservative:

Scruton, probably the English-speaking world's finest conservative thinker, evokes a conservatism that's founded on an instinctive love of country.

Conservatives are engaged in their country's history, proud of its symbols, concerned for its welfare, attached to its values and vigorous in its defence. The instinct to defer to authority and to respect tradition - the sense that each individual has been shaped by the past and will influence the future, having both ancestors and descendants to keep faith with - is deeply ingrained in human beings, even if it's under-appreciated by intellectuals. A conservative apprehends how so much modern thinking is actually in revolt against human nature.

But all these fine words come to nothing. It turns out that his version of keeping faith with his ancestors is to promote the fastest possible demographic change to his country via mass immigration:

My instinct is to extend to as many people as possible the freedom and benefits of life in Australia. A larger population will bring that about provided that it’s also a more productive one

So we're to have as many immigrants as possible and work harder. That's the gist of Mr Abbott's policy.

In the same speech, Mr Abbott rewrites history and denies that a distinctly Anglo-Australian nation ever existed. It seems that apart from the Aborigines, everyone else has been an immigrant and part of a multi-culti society and culture:

Except for the half million or so who identify as Aboriginal, every other Australian is an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants since 1788. Unlike any other, we are a nation of relatively recent immigrants ... This means, of course, that the immigrant who feels like a stranger in our midst is really at the heart of the Australian story.

To the extent that it is a celebration of our nation, Australia Day is necessarily a salute to an immigrant culture.

How does Mr Abbott manage to combine conservative sounding rhetoric with such radically liberal outcomes?

Mr Abbott is a member of a right-liberal party. Like all liberal parties the basic principle is "freedom" understood to be the pursuit of individual self-determination. This is Abbott explaining what the Liberal Party is about:

Edmund Burke once defined a political party as people working for the national interest according to a particular principle on which they all agreed ... The essential principle animating the Federation Fathers (whether conservative protectionists or liberal free traders, they mostly ended up in the first version of an Australian liberal party within a decade) was citizens’ greater freedom to pursue their individual destinies within the framework of a new nation.

And in the same vein:

The dream of greater personal freedom is probably the Liberal Party’s nearest equivalent to a “light on the hill”

According to Abbott a liberal is someone who embraces this freedom straight up, whereas a conservative is a bit more cautious, more of a slow learner:

In a world where nothing exists in isolation and everything is connected, “liberalism” and “conservatism” turn out to be complementary values. The difference between a “liberal” and a “conservative” is not that one values freedom and the other doesn’t or even that one asserts and the other denies that freedom comes first. The difference between the ways liberals and conservatives value freedom is, perhaps, more the difference between love at first sight and the love which grows over time.

The problem with making a freedom to self-determine the key principle is that it undermines many important traditional goods, including those of family and nation.

We don't get to determine the basic form of the family, so therefore the traditional family becomes for liberals a restriction on our personal freedom. What liberals want instead is a variety of family types for individuals to choose from, none of which is to be preferred over another. Abbott is no exception:

Supporting families shouldn’t mean favouring one family type over others. We have to resist yearning for “ideal” families and “traditional” mothers. Every family is a source of nurturing and security for its members.

Note that Abbott is not just saying here that we need to accept that there will be people who find themselves as single parents and that we should support their efforts to do their best for their families. He's going much further than this and saying that we cannot even uphold the traditional family of dad, mum and the kids as an ideal to aim for.

If he were a straight up liberal you could at least concede that Tony Abbott was being true to his principles here. But consider the way he praises the Howard Government (in which he was a minister):

An examination of the Howard government's signature policies shows deep concern for personal responsibility, individual choice, reward for effort, the protection of families and respect for traditional institutions and values.

He asserts that respect for traditional institutions is a praiseworthy good but then argues that we must resist supporting the ideal of the traditional family. Isn't the traditional family a traditional institution? Isn't it a key traditional institution? His position lacks coherence.

The liberal principle of individual self-determination also undermines traditional nationalism. We don't get to choose our own ethnicity, so nations that are based on a common ethnicity will be thought an impediment to individual freedom and equality by liberals. Instead, liberals often argue for a "civic nationalism" based on citizenship, or for a "proposition nation" based on shared ideals or values.

Abbott is a proposition nationalist:

Notwithstanding their frequent inability to articulate them, men and women live by ideals. Shared ideals and enduring values are what turn crowds into communities and peoples into societies and ultimately civilisations. They form the bonds of kinship and common purpose which constitute the social fabric and which allow diverse individuals to find a sense of place and belonging in something which transcends themselves.

So it's no longer kinship which forms the bonds of kinship, but rather shared ideals and values. There are many problems with this form of nationalism. First, liberals are understandably reluctant to specify the ideals and values too closely. To do so would risk excluding people who don't share these beliefs from the definition of the nation. Abbott even goes as far as to reassure migrants that:

Australia makes very few demands of its immigrants. There is no ideal of Australian-ness to which they are expected to conform.

Abbott has turned here abruptly from the idea of "shared ideals" forming a sense of Australian-ness to there being "no ideal" of Australian-ness.

A second problem with proposition nationalism is that it's much the same from country to country. When liberals do talk about the shared ideal defining the nation, it's usually some kind of liberal value. So all of the Western liberal countries end up being defined much the same way. A person could just as easily be defined as an American, or an Australian, or a Canadian.

And yet we want our national identity to be distinct in some way. Abbott makes a lame attempt to make it sound as if Australia is somehow uniquely defined as an immigrant nation:

Unlike any other, we are a nation of relatively recent immigrants. New Zealand has a proportionately larger indigenous population and North America has been settled for almost two centuries longer.

Sure. Every liberal Western nation is busy defining itself as an immigrant nation, but Australia gets to define itself as such more than the others because we were settled later and have a smaller indigenous population. It's clutching at straws. If we define ourselves as an immigrant nation, then we are not unique, but interchangeable with all the other Western national identities.

Proposition nationalism also suffers from being unstable. Not only can the demographic nature of a country change over and over under proposition nationalism through limitless immigration, but there is no reason for the national state itself to stay in existence. If Australia, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific nations all share the same values, then why not merge them into a new regional state, if there are political and economic advantages in doing so? Why not join together the European states into a single superstate?

There's one final consequence of proposition nationalism I'd like to mention. If what binds a nation together is a shared ideal or value, then you will want to base your political party on this shared ideal or value.

But this then leads to distortions in your understanding of politics. It means that Tony Abbott can't do what a real conservative has to do in order to conserve his own tradition, which is to set himself in a clear and principled way against liberalism. Instead, he has to try and show that liberalism and conservatism are only superficially different and really on the same page. Otherwise, the belief in the national "shared value" as promoted by your party falls apart.

There's more to say on all this, but I'll leave it for a future post.

Follow her where?

Just one year ago Liz Jones was lamenting that young women were not following in her feminist footsteps:

what we all really need now ... is our very own brand of New Feminism ...

A young journalist I used to mentor got married, much to my annoyance, in her mid-20s and decided to go part time. I asked why she had not followed in the previous generation's footsteps and she said: 'God, I wouldn't dream of working as hard as you do. Who would want your life?'

The problem is that my generation of women, the one after the bra-burning trailblazers, moaned too much about how tiring it was 'having it all'.

Even those of us who, like me, chose a career over a family ... and therefore didn't even try to 'juggle' have turned out not to be an inspiration for well-educated girls.

But would it really be wise for these well-educated girls to take the feminist Liz Jones as a role model? Should Liz Jones really be the one to inspire them?

Liz Jones herself admits that the second wave feminists were too hostile to men:

OK, I admit that feminism the first time around made mistakes. It turned us into man haters (I still, to this day, whenever I am told my BMW needs a new tyre, say, yell at the hapless man serving me: 'You wouldn't dare treat me this way if I were a man!'), and set impossible standards.

As Rosie Boycott, founder of Spare Rib magazine, admitted last week on Woman's Hour: 'In the Seventies feminism was too narrow, it bore no relationship to my life: I liked men.'

Liz Jones herself did a lot of the things feminists were supposed to do. She pursued a single girl lifestyle, with a glamorous career, much shopping and travel, and a freedom to do as she pleased.

But is this pursuit of individual autonomy enough to build a life on? It doesn't seem to have been for Liz Jones. Yes, she tried to get enjoyment out of consumerism:

yesterday, with my niece's smart London wedding only days away, I went on netaporter and ordered an Yves Saint Laurent draped jacket for £1,225 and a hand-painted Vera Wang dress for £2,750 - but it really is gorgeous. Ooh, and a Bottega Veneta clutch for £602 ... I am stroking my Bottega bag now, like a pet.

But this finished when she ran up a huge debt, despite her well-paid job.

And what about relationships? Again, she did the modern girl thing. She didn't select men on the basis of their suitability for marriage. She chose them for being edgy, cool and interesting:

I think in the Nineties I fell in love with three black men partly because it was fashionable and gave me a veneer of ‘cool’ that, as a boring Essex girl, I didn’t possess.

She did finally marry when she hit 40. But it was a modern kind of role reversal marriage:

Our marriage was, on reflection, a very modern one. I am 14 years older than him. When we met I was earning a huge salary ... he was an intern on a local radio station.

He is Indian and moved, aged 26, straight from his mum's house into mine.

At first I believed that love would conquer all, that our bond was so strong that none of these things mattered. He told me he didn't want children ... I hid the fact that I did.

... I told him to give up his job so that he could write a novel: 'Take six years. What's the rush.' I took a job where I worked 75 hours a week to support us both.

Her husband had a number of affairs before leaving her for a "young, slim, pretty, Indian woman" he wanted to have children with. She by now had passed by her childbearing years.

Liz Jones had thought her husband was a feminist "new man," who would take a back seat and accept that he was not needed by his "fabulously" independent wife. But he turned out to be something else:

New men, metrosexual men, men who are in touch with their feelings, who are willing to take a back seat, supporting and nurturing you, don't exist.

They might pretend to be able to cope with you but they are, instead, storing up anger and will hate you for being fabulous, for being independent, for not needing them in your life but just wanting them to be there.

And now? Liz Jones is living a lonely existence on a farm with seventeen cats. She wrote a column about her experiences this Christmas. It makes for odd reading, as it swings between a continuing belief in the "do your own thing" philosophy, attacks on traditional family life and an admission of her loneliness and isolation:

Just over half of all women under 50 have never been married, double the figure of 30 years ago. Dubbed the 'freemale' in the lifestyle pages of magazines and newspapers, this is a breed of woman who has actively rejected the notion that we are destined to grow up to nurture, to be wives and mums and carers.

And while I would count myself firmly in this camp, having always put my career and my own selfishness first, there are certain things that still trigger a lump of doubt in my throat: James Stewart hugging his brood of children beside a Christmas tree in It's A Wonderful Life, say.

And this:

Loneliness is a resilient, persistent little beast. For most of the year, those of us who live alone can rub along pretty well.

We tell ourselves everything is fine, that it's better to live alone than in a loveless relationship, that we enjoy the peace and quiet and the freedom ...

We are beholden to no one. Even that other big examination of whether or not you have passed life's fulfilment test  -  the summer holiday  -  can be cleverly crammed for: you can relish the opportunity to choose your destination with supreme selfishness, content in the knowledge you will be able to finish that book on the beach without interruption, or book one of those 'activity' holidays  -  walking in the Himalayas, learning to cook like a peasant in Puglia  -  that cleverly masks the solitude.

Liz Jones tried to find community by moving from the city to the countryside, but it didn't work:

I moved to the countryside, where I thought there might be more of a community (in London, I never did find out the name of the girl who lived next door).

I was wrong, as it turned out, and have found I can go from one week to the next without speaking to a soul.

I have written my three Christmas cards: to my mum, who lives 200 miles away and has dementia; to John the postman; and to the dustbin men, a lovely trio who often bypass my house because I have so little rubbish.

People can find themselves alone for all sorts of reasons. And, of course, there are feminists who do marry and have children. Even so, it's not difficult to see the connection between Liz Jones's feminism and her current situation.

She is clearly ideologically opposed to the idea that a woman might sacrifice a measure of autonomy in order to enjoy the benefits of a traditional family life. She chose, instead, like so many of her generation, to pursue a single girl lifestyle when she was young and at her most attractive. Then, in her 30s, she selected men not for their likely stability as husbands and providers, but for being edgy, cool and in fashion. When she did finally, in the last moments of her potential child-bearing years, choose a husband it was on the basis of "love conquers all" rather than a sober assessment of their likely compatibility.

She wants young women to follow in her footsteps. I think young women are wise not to do so.

Not owning up?

Are leftists willing to own their own politics? I ask this having had yet another frustrating exchange with a leftist, who seems unwilling to own up to the real content and the real consequences of leftist politics.

The debate was supposed to be about Maxine Beneba Clarke's poem on the Haiti earthquake. If you remember, Clarke imagines in the poem that God and Jesus must be white men to have visited such disaster on brown people. She imagines the "pale trinity" feeling good about crushing the Haitians with an earthquake, and other brown peoples with tsunamis, lava and hurricanes.

To me the poem is clearly hostile to whites. It conjures up images of white powers maliciously visiting acts of evil upon others. But my leftist commenter, "anon contrarian" (AC), just couldn't see this at all:

AC: I think the poem in question is an entirely reasonable and 'human' response to a disaster

Me: No, it's a poem that clearly vilifies whites. Just like many other poems by Maxine Clarke, on many different themes.

AC: No, in reality I challenge you to find a word in there that 'vilifies' anybody, without relying on the tortured logic of somebody with a persecution complex.

Challenged to find a word? Surely, the whole poem vilifies whites by suggesting that they would enjoy inflicting terrible disasters on other people? In what way is this a "tortured logic"?

AC also argued that Maxine Clarke's poem wasn't significant as it would only be read by a few thousand people. I replied that it was significant because the underlying ideas were held widely on the left, "including the idea that whites are uniquely guilty of racist oppression of others".

This is a key concept in "whiteness studies" courses being taught on many campuses. The idea is that whites invented race as a social construct in order to gain an unearned privilege over others. Racism therefore becomes tied to the idea of white oppressors and non-white victims. Whites are assumed to be dominant and the goal for progressives is to deconstruct whiteness. Whites who object are assumed to be motivated by a desire to uphold "white supremacy".

This is standard fare on the left. But AC is in full denial mode:

Me: AC, you really think that there are no leftists who believe that white guys are bad and cause the suffering of others? Really?

AC: You're straw-manning the argument again. No leftist on earth pushes the line that only 'whites' are capable of evil, whilst everybody else is innocent.

I'm not sure that AC really understands what's going on here. Whites are held to be uniquely evil and everybody else innocent in the particular way I described above. It was whites who supposedly invented race and racism to gain privilege at the expense of the non-white other. It is therefore whiteness which needs to be deconstructed and disallowed in order to create justice and equality. It is therefore whites who are jumped on as defenders of "supremacy" if they happen to defend their own ethnicity.

What happens if you take this left-wing politics especially seriously? You become anti-white to a radical degree. Consider, for instance, the views of Professor Robert Jensen:

White people can be human sometimes, but only if we turn our backs on being white: We can be human, or we can be white.

Are you likely to hear such a thing said by a professor about non-white races? If Professor Jensen had said it, for instance, about Asians, would he still be a professor at the University of Texas?

Here's another choice comment from Professor Jensen:

White Americans are mean and uncaring, morally bankrupt and ethically flawed, because white supremacy has taken a huge toll on white people's capacity to be fully human.

In the professor's mind whites exist in a condition of white supremacy. That's our identity and collective purpose. It makes us less than human.

Again, how often do you hear such things said about other groups?

I'm not suggesting that most leftists would take the underlying ideas as far as the radical formulations uttered by Professor Jensen. But they do mostly share the underlying ideas.

Which brings me to the final point. AC reacted in the following way when I described leftists as categorising whites as dominant and non-whites as victimised:

Me: whites are the ones to be categorised as privileged, dominant; non-whites as historically victimised

AC: In what way are whites 'victimised'? I mean, seriously. Is it like jews in the holocaust, kulaks under Stalin, Catholics in Belfast, Aboriginals in the early years of white settlement? ... It's like a kind of victim-envy here.

My complaint was that leftists always make whites out to be the oppressors. AC interprets this as me preferring the role of victim; he queries how whites could be victims.

It's another odd question to ask. Of course whites have been victims at times throughout history. There were Australian soldiers and nurses who were victims of Japanese atrocities during WWII. There were Russians who were victims during the Tatar yoke. There were south-eastern Europeans who were victims during the rule of the Ottomans. There were many thousands of whites who were the victims of the Barbary corsairs.

But, most of all, whites are the victims of leftist (and liberal) politics. Not in the sense of suffering violent persecution, but in having our group existence delegitimised. If whiteness is a false and oppressive category, harmful to others and productive of injustice and inequality, then it must be cut down so that it no longer casts an influence on society.

And so Jennifer Clarke, who teaches at the Australian National University, can write an article titled 'White' Privilege in which she describes Australia as a "regionally anomalous white enclave run largely by white people to our own advantage", in which anti-discrimination laws should be applied more effectively so that "a majority of Australians would no longer be of northern European ethnic heritage".

It's a program of "getting rid of" the group thought to be responsible for social ills, not via violent pogroms, but by demographic change.

Even at a personal level, it's a kind of low-level persecution to go through life being held responsible for the ills of the world and being portrayed negatively as a privileged oppressor. It's particularly problematic for young people who have little choice but to accept what is put before them at school and at university.

We can do better, but this means making a clean break with the underlying assumptions of leftism.

Prophets of change

Lawrence Auster has been leading an interesting discussion of gnosticism over at View from the Right. The influence of gnosticism on the modern world is certainly worth considering. Two of the most influential liberal thinkers of the period 1860 to 1930 were self-declared gnostics, not only in the political sense, but more directly in terms of their religious beliefs. Both men rejected Christianity and sought to replace it with a religion which combined humanism and gnosticism.

The two men were J.S. Mill and H.G. Wells.

Mill thought it possible to hold in conjunction a belief in a "religion of humanity" with a belief in Manichaeism - a gnostic religion centred in Persia which thrived for several hundred years (3rd - 7th centuries A.D.)

Wells's religious beliefs have been described in detail in an impressive article by Willis B. Glover. Like Mill, Wells rejected Christianity:

Wells ... reacted violently, even as a child, against the evangelical faith of his mother. This hostility continued throughout his life and included both Protestant and Catholic Christianity. (p.121).

Wells was so opposed to Christianity that he envisaged strict methods to circumscribe it in his future utopia:

Wells does not hesitate to picture an ideal society of the future in which the propagation of the Christian faith, if persisted in, would be punishable by death; and he justifies this by analogy with legal requirements for vaccination. (pp.123-124)

In 1917, Wells advanced his ideas for a "modern religion" in his work God the Invisible King:

The content of the religion which Wells heralded with such confidence and enthusiasm is an amazing concoction of humanism, Christianity, Gnosticism and a kind of Promethean dualism to which Wells later called particular attention as giving him affinity with the Manichaeans. (p.125)

There is a lengthy description of the theology of this religion on pages 125 to 128. It includes an opposition between a "Veiled Being," who is the author of nature, and a finite God whom we are to worship:

Wells begins by distinguishing the God of his faith from the "Veiled Being" who is behind and in some sense responsible for the universe in which man finds himself ... the Nature for which this being must be held responsible is the real enemy of man, the source of his suffering and the obstacle in the way of his progress.

The God of H.G. Wells was a finite God who had a beginning in time but who was outside space. God was a person who was the Captain of Mankind ... God had come into existence "somewhere in the dawning of mankind" and "as mankind grows he grows".

With our eyes he looks out upon the universe he invades; with our hands he lays hands upon it ... He is the undying human memory, the increasing human will.

The enemy ... was Nature ... God stands over against not merely the ultimate being who is referred to as Darkness or the Veiled Being, but also against the Life Force, which is a lesser being coming out of the Veiled Being ...

... for the present God and mankind are in a state of opposition to the universe and to the Life Force within it. God is described as an unfilial, Promethean rebel ...

Wells frankly accepted the dualistic character of his religion and even after the failure to launch a new religion of mankind he referred to his own religious outlook as Promethean, Manichaean, and Persian.

As Glover notes, the new religion didn't take off and Wells retreated from pushing a theology.

What would this kind of religious gnosticism have contributed to? Possibly to a radical rejection of the world we live in as being false, dark and oppressive, a creation of the Veiled Being and the Life Force, from which we seek to escape as a species as the agents or co-workers of a divine purpose.

If this is your religious view, then it makes sense to be hostile to tradition, to look for a revolutionary change in the conditions of life (a transfiguration of reality) and to want a central world government to direct human affairs.

You get a sense of this in an article about Wells by Fred Siegel titled The Godfather of American Liberalism. Wells appears to have had a significant influence on American (and Anglosphere) thought:

By 1920, The Nation could describe Wells as “the most influential writer in English of our day.” ... For many, noted historian Henry May, Wells was “the most important social prophet.” The social critic Randolph Bourne described Wells’s “religious” impact, his “power of seeming to express for us the ideas and dilemmas which we feel spring out of our modernity”—a power that was nothing less than “magical.”

And this:

Orwell nonetheless recognized Wells’s extraordinary impact. “I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language, influenced the young so much,” Orwell wrote. “The minds of all of us . . . would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed.”

And this:

“Without doubt,” wrote Brooks, “Wells has altered the air we breathe and made a conscious fact in many minds the excellence that resides in certain kinds of men and modes of living and odiousness that resides in others.”

This too:

Other major public figures in the U.S. acknowledged Wells’s impact. Margaret Sanger ... believed that the author had “influenced the American intelligentsia more than any other one man.” The naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch, looking back on the 1920s, noted of Wells that “a whole surviving generation might appropriately sing in the words of the popular ballad of their days, ‘You made me what I am today.’ ” To assess Wells and George Bernard Shaw, Krutch asserted, “would come pretty close to assessing the aims, the ideals, the thinking and one might almost say, the wisdom and folly of a half-century.”

Wells's influence was for transformative change. Literary critic Floyd Dell wrote:

Suddenly there came into our minds the magnificent and well-nigh incredible conception of Change. . . . gigantic, miraculous change, an overwhelming of the old in ruin and an emergence of the new. Into our eternal and changeless world came H. G. Wells prophesying its ending, and the Kingdom of Heaven come upon earth; the heavens shall be rolled up like a scroll, and all the familiar things of earth pass away utterly—so he seemed to cry out to our astounded ears.

Wells himself placed great hope in Theodore Roosevelt as an agent of change:

“My hero in the confused drama of human life,” Wells wrote in The Future in America, “is intelligence; intelligence inspired by constructive passion. There is a demi-god imprisoned in mankind.” ... Wells presented TR as the demigod incarnate, the very symbol of “the creative will in man.” Here was the man of the future—“traditions,” noted Wells, “have no hold on him” ... “I know of no other,” said Wells, “a tithe so representative of the creative purpose ...

There's not much room in this for a sympathetic defence of tradition in general, let alone particular national traditions. It's all to be cast off to liberate the "creative will" or the "creative purpose" in man. 

Wells is an example of an influential thinker within the liberal tradition, whose gnostic and humanistic beliefs set him radically at odds with real, existing, particular traditions.

A destructive white god?

Maxine Beneba Clarke is a woman of West Indian descent living in Melbourne. She responded to the Haiti disaster by writing a poem, which was published on the website of Overland, a leading left-wing literary journal.

The gist of the poem? God and Jesus must be white men. That would explain their visiting of death and destruction on brown people. She asks the "pale trinity" if crushing Haiti felt as good as similar acts visited on coloured peoples, such as the tsunami.

The poem attracted one comment, from a white reader, which was just as bad as the poem itself:

I think destruction comes naturally to us white men. It is almost like a religion to us that we will worship, forever creating new and more devastating ways to blow shit up.

The bonus is, when armagedon comes, it will be us what brings it and we’ll dance and sing and laugh at all the pretty flashing lights caused by the world falling to pieces as lava advances on the homes of those too poor to fly off to the moon where the best seats for the show will be.

That’s very well said Maxine, personally I don’t like to point the finger at God for natural disasters. Maybe because I’m a atheist.

Right. So white men worship destruction like a religion. We'll laugh when we finally destroy the world, just before we fly off to the moon, leaving the poor to their fate.

Overland, by the way, gets funded by the Federal Government, the Victorian Government, Arts Victoria, Victoria University and the Australia Council for the Arts.

Update: The actor Danny Glover has claimed that the Haiti earthquake is a consequence of global warming. A reader, Ned Wilobane, has written some lines to Gaia in response. His poem is beautifully subversive of Maxine Beneba Clarke's original:

The new ideal for the left should be ....?

Talk about a surprise ending!

I've been researching the connection between Marxism and liberalism. One interesting document I've found is a paper by an American academic, David Bholat, titled Beyond Freedom and Equality.

Bholat writes as a Marxist (despite teaching at a Jesuit university). However, he wants to take Marxism in a different direction. Up to now, Marxists have understood the ideals they are aiming at to be freedom and equality. They took these ideals from liberalism, but believe that unlike liberals they can truly realise these ideals. Bholat thinks these ideals have their limitations and should now be replaced. His proposed replacement is highly interesting, but I won't reveal it now.

According to Bholat, what both Marxists and liberals understand by freedom is individual autonomy:

In the passage cited at the beginning of this essay it is clear that by freedom Marx means individual autonomy. This is indeed what most of us mean when we use this word ... in our context, freedom clearly is a category relating ideas about individual choice and self-determination. (p.27)

Liberals claim that the market allows for individual autonomy as it is based on free contract; Marxists don't think there is a genuinely free choice as workers have little option but to sell their labour:

There are a number of ways the link Marx makes between freedom and capital can plausibly be read. The standard interpretation of his critique is that the depiction of capital as freedom is false. The semblance of free contract between workers and bourgeois conceals that workers have no other choice but sell themselves if they want to survive. The policy implications for Marxists become clear: give workers greater control over the means and distribution of production as the pre-condition for real autonomy. (pp.28-29)

The standard interpretation of Marxism means that Marxism and liberalism share the same basic aim (autonomy) but dispute the conditions for achieving it:

So framed, Liberals and Leftists share a substantive end (individual freedom) while disagreeing about the means for achieving it. The debate then is really a contest between ‘negative (Liberal) freedom’ and ‘positive (Socialist) freedom’ (Berlin 1998) with Leftists arguing that the legal and electoral rights of Liberalism need to be supplemented with a set of resources required for any real autonomy: food, housing, healthcare, education and so forth. (pp.29-30)

Marxists go to more radical lengths in criticising the inadequacy of the market in achieving true autonomy:

The standard Marxist version of the argument is pressed slightly further. Capital is posited as inherently antagonistic to the goal of self-determination since no one can be free if they are required to sell their labor.

Socialism is identified as a society where ‘humanity’ is finally realized: a historically unique animal whose life activities are not pre-determined by innate nature, nor directed towards subsistence, nor coercively to satisfy others, but determined by individuals in ways meaningful for them. (p.30)

You can see from the above why traditionalists don't like to take individual autonomy as the ultimate aim. If our life activities cannot be predetermined by an innate nature, then we cannot act according to such inborn qualities as our masculinity or femininity. And what about the idea that we have to determine what is meaningful for ourselves? Doesn't this take away meaning by basing our activities on what we subjectively make up for ourselves rather than on something objectively meaningful existing outside of our own wills?

The ideal of autonomy is also radically at odds with an appreciation of tradition. We are told that Marx did not even recognise a properly human history as beginning until after the revolution had created the conditions for individual autonomy:

The point for Marx is not to move us toward the telos of History, but to get out from under all that so that we may make a beginning—so that history proper, in all their wealth of difference, might get off the ground. This, in the end, would be the only ‘historic’ achievement. And here universality and plurality go hand in hand. For only when the material conditions exist in which all men and women can be freely self-determining can there be any talk of genuine plurality, since they will all naturally live their histories in different ways. (Terry Eagleton, quoted by Bholat, p.25)

Bholat thinks it's time for the left to start criticising the overvaluation of autonomy. His criticism, though, is not the traditionalist one. He thinks that the left doesn't really believe in extending autonomy to everyone anyway and should be more upfront about this:

let me suggest that today it is possible (even necessary) for Leftists to concede what our opponents have long suspected and declare that we are not really for freedom tout court. So much is evident already in the (justified) limits of Leftist tolerance of misogynists, capitalists, and racists (among others) to self-expression. (p.30)

Why else is there a "problem with freedom as a description for the project of the Left"? Autonomy suggests that the emphasis should be on removing impediments to the pursuit of self-interest. But the left has attempted to appeal to such interests without success:

In sum, conceptualizing a Left agenda around freedom and self-determination today seems part of the problem rather than its remedy. The sage Left strategy of making people aware of their ‘authentic’ (individual/class) interests has proven a dead-end. (p.32)

What is more, the left is going to align itself with the third world and against the first world. Therefore, they are going to have to persuade first world peoples to act against their own self-interests:

Contra the principle of identity and interest politics then the progressive gesture is for those living in advanced capitalist states to act against their self-interest and do so aware that this is neither transcendentally required nor necessarily generative of the collective attachments which motivated Romantic communitarians.

... such a progressive gesture means making the struggle of those on the periphery of global capitalism our own ... Within standard theories of just accounting, these people have no legitimate claim to the wealth created by capitalism. And yet only by making common cause with them can the Left have any meaning or chance in the 21st century. (p.33)

So what then should the ultimate ideals of the left be? What ideals will a post-capitalist society be based on? Here I'll reveal Bholat's stunning answer. None:

an aspiring Left might proudly declare that post-capitalist society is one without ideals. (p.37)

The logic of this answer is as follows:

What Marx suggests in Theses on Feuerbach is that the appearance of an ideal realm necessarily signifies an unsatisfactory resolution to contradictions in reality. A parallel can be drawn to the analysis Freud gives of dreams. Dreams come to us in sleep to express what in our waking lives is repressed. The appearance of dreams, like abstract ideals, suggests something is frustrated from achieving empirical actuality. (p.37)

The argument is that if people get what they want in real life, they don't need ideals. But is the ideal of no ideals really an escape from the "bourgeois" liberal aim of equal freedom? It seems to me to be an intensification of it.

Bholat is suggesting that in the Marxist utopia there will be such "equal freedom" (absolute autonomy for all) that we'll be able to make what we want and need an "empirical actuality". We won't be repressed or frustrated in getting what we want. Therefore, ideals as an expression of what we'd like but can't have will simply wither away.

Anyway, if the left want to proudly declare that their new utopian society will be one without ideals, let them do so. I do find it interesting, though, that Bholat as a Marxist/leftist finds it so difficult to envisage an ideal that doesn't involve autonomy as an ultimate end.

Final Post

Dear readers, thanks for visiting the L Party, this will be my last post. Present priority and interest changes have prevailed and piloted me to this decision.

Though it was not the primary reason for beginning this blog, I have admittedly harbored more than a casual interest in entering the political fold by seeking pre-selection or perhaps working in a behind the scenes role. Indeed, the future is still open to this - change is a constant.

Only recently, I weighed up the question in a broad mode taking into account a whole gamut of factors including but not limited to, the impending cost to family in terms of the time and effort required, the potential loss of privacy due to my sometimes-audacious nature, and remuneration factors. On that last note, while guarantees go begging, let us assume that I did in future become a Victorian MP. One of my conundrums stems from my present salary as a train driver for the much maligned and not so endeared Connex. Yes, I know, the latter may come as a revelation to those outside my immediate sphere of acquaintances and family. Though I hardly find the role inspiring, it pays well, in my case, pre-tax and pre salary sacrifice earnings fast approaching 0K this financial year. When I compare this to an MP’s base salary of around 4,000 I begin to fathom what Age political reporter Melissa Fyfe meant in an August article, “If you pay peanuts”:

"Victorian MP’s gets a 4,360 base salary … That is about twice the average Australian wage, but it is not an endearing sum to a well-established professional or even a higher-level public servant. The result, some argue, is that only two types of people will go into Parliament: those who think 4,360 is a great wage and have few other prospects of earning that money elsewhere, and those who are independently wealthy".

I am compelled to add, that I am not one of the "two types" that Melissa refers to.

Why did I consider the question so thoroughly you ask? Only a short time ago, I was courted by a party member and official with far more than a common measure of clout. Names are not necessary, let’s just say that this person is part of an influential fold of Melbourne’s inner eastern Liberal party cluster. After two face to face meetings what followed was not exactly a concrete offer, in this game that’s not how it works. Rather, I was presented with a genuine window of opportunity to begin building the necessary bridges – profile – required for a successful tilt at pre-selection at a future date and furthermore, in the electoral seats that really matter. Though I declined the offer this time around, I was and remain, both honored and immensely grateful for having being seen in such light.

Finally, much like my previous blog American Interests, I recognize the role The L Party’s content plays in the larger ecosystem of related insight and information; accordingly, its contents will not be removed from blogosphere just yet.

Therefore, as I continue tendering to the needs of a modern family, which includes pushing trains around Melbourne’s rail grid and pontificating the vicissitudes of politics and the Liberal party, I would be somewhat insincere if I told you that I did not - at least intermittently - feel frustration of the kind felt by a certain, David Larkin.

I rest my oars ...

Addendum:

For those wondering whether Melbourne’s train services will get better when Connex is replaced by Metro Trains in December, the short answer is no. Moreover, here is why. The new company will have to make do with a limited capacity to improve services due to years of government neglect that has resulted in an infrastructure capacity that is limited at best. However, this is only part of the story, that bloated left wing bureau mass known as the Department of Transport and its two of supporting constituent bodies – can you name them? – will ensure that mediocrity prevails behind the glossy facade. A veneer made possible by MTR’s winning a staggering sum of taxpayers’ money - 4 million to run the service per year compared to 8 million for Connex.

I am of the belief that ultimately, it’s the quantity and quality of people that matters most.

In the case of our public transport establishment; it is littered with pretenders and baseless types and nothing is expected to change. At the least, they are grossly hypocritical and in just about all cases, second handers that are great at acting as speed humps for those that do wish to excel. As someone more qualified than me once said:

"How often have we heard it, about being part of a brain based economy where the best assets are your people, but how many leaders appreciate what this means? In the interests of doing something, anything, they create diversions, give the impression that they’re actually doing something, they fool around with the latest management fad, they re-structure, engage in deal making more oft than not, to consolidate their own arrangement … Organization doesn't really accomplish anything. Plans don't accomplish anything, either. Theories of management don't much matter. Endeavors succeed or fail because of the people involved. Only by attracting the best people will you accomplish great things. In a brain based economy, your best assets are your people. We've heard this expression so often that it's become trite. But how many leaders really "walk the talk" with this stuff? Too often, people are assumed to be empty chess pieces to be moved around by grand viziers, which may explain why so many top managers immerse their calendar time in deal making, restructuring and the latest management fad. How many leaders immerse themselves in the goal of creating an environment where the best, the brightest, the most creative are attracted, retained and - most importantly - unleashed?"

On the question of establishment quantity, one could scale back numbers to the tune of 20% and you would not notice, save saving the taxpayer a bundle.

Victorian Government cache of annual reports

3AW launches Our Afghanistan heroes site

We will ever be grateful for all they have done for us, may God bless them all. Lest we forget…


I have always held the greatest respect for our members of the armed forces past and present. Those with the courage to stand against that which threatens the peace and security of this world and ultimately, the way of life we enjoy. They are highly regarded, as General JAMES N. MATTIS, the NATO Supreme Allied Commander for Transformation & Commander, U.S. Joint Forces Command once wrote, “We Marines would happily storm hell itself with your troops on our right flank.”

In a noble gesture, 3AW has launched a new site “Our Afghanistan heroes” to honor those fighting our war in Afghanistan. On it, you will find just some of the faces that have given the ultimate sacrifice to keep us safe and free. The words of Steve - an early site commenter – are most fitting:

They, like our forefathers forge the ideology, freedom of speech & choice, supporting your brothers, sisters & mates which is 'the Australian way'... It is from their sacrifice that we live in the best country in the world & why the rest of us are proud to be Aussie... Never forget what they do for us and lest we forget the fallen ones...

See also: Australian Special Air Service Regiment (SAS): Strengthening the Alliance

Victoria: "On the move" no more

“So are you saying that we’d be better off under the Libs”? “Ah yes, I am”, and so a discussion with acquaintances concluded on a mid August night this year. In the end, agreeing simply to disagree on the question of a Liberal Government versus a Labor one here in Victoria. With strong conviction, my friends - yes I do have friends that do not see eye to eye with me politically – added, “I don’t remember anything good about Kennett, he killed off teachers, schools, the country, and the railways just about everything.” I tried telling my audience that the cuts were necessary after the economic disaster left by Labor, which included a budget deficit in excess of billion and over billion of public sector debt, how else I added, “Could we reign in the economy without some radical budget cuts.”

After some time I realized my words were to no avail, Labor it seemed was deemed good and righteous, the morally superior body, the socially just, and fairer of the two, a perception that prevailed, in spite of some cold facts in relation to economic management issues.

Originally intending to sway my audience during our planned next get together, over the next few days, I penned some notes about some of the more palpable policy failures of the Bracks- Brumby Labor Government hoping to use such to sway opinion. To some degree it worked however, it must be said, excerpt for perhaps one, my audience seemed to consist of those inbred, casehardened Labor for life political types which constitute some 30% percent of the electorate. It was only in the last few days, while planning a meeting with a local federal branch Chairman that I revisited the observations made in August and decided to post them here, albeit in a more coherent written point form. Hence, a concise and I might add, only partial listing of the Victorian Labor Governments failures.

Education - Victorian students have the lowest basic skills levels in the nation according to OECD’s latest analysis. Three quarters of our 1,250 schools have over 0 million outstanding in maintenance issues. The Brumby Gov’t spends less on students per head than any other state (~,800 vs. SA at ~ ,000)and in spite of high population growth, school enrolments at public schools have fallen since 2001. We spend less on TAFE than any other state and have raised fees for TAFE training at a time when we are supposedly in the midst of the greatest economic crises since the great depression – the significance being, workplace training should be encouraged to maintain employment levels during harsh economic times.

Law and Order - One only has to scan Monday’s papers to know that Victorian crime statistics are flawed and yet the state Gov’t continued to use these figures well into 2009 to peddle the notion that we have the safest streets in Australia. Labor has failed miserably in addressing levels of hooliganism and general crime especially assault, on both our streets and public transport. On a per head basis, we spend less than any other state on police and consequently have fewer police on the field that the other states with patrols falling 20% in the five years to 2007.

Public Transport - As someone in the know, I can reveal firsthand the levels of inadequacy with respect our train system. Shortcomings that include, massive levels of overcrowding, cancellations, delays, and poorly managed and maintained infrastructure. While the Gov’t is all too happy in blaming the service providers they in turn pin the blame on everything else including trade unions, drivers, rolling stock reliability, adverse weather, ill passengers, and trespassers. Fact is, much like our water crises the Gov’t has failed to plan effectively or provide for adequate funding in the management and maintenance of our train system. They have been far too slow when comes to ordering the new much needed trains with only one coming into service this year. Road infrastructure has also failed to keep pace with both economic and population growth resulting in Melbourne now having the slowest evening peak time average speed of any capital city at under 38 km/h.

Water - The Gov’t hopeless inaction during its first 7 years in office has contributed to our present water shortages and will ultimately be the reason why Melbournians will soon pay up to 60% more for water. The result of the inaction is a haphazard response with the hugely unpopular and very expensive desalination plant decision. What is also remarkable is that in spite of our very protracted drought conditions Victorian Labor has invested less per head than all states bar one (SA) over the past two years in water infrastructure

Country - Regional unemployment levels remain unacceptably high and second only to NSW. We have spent less than 50% of the allocated amount under the promised Regional Infrastructure Development Fund (2 million of 5 million) with less than 2 years remaining on the decade long program. Bushfire prevention has been almost criminal like with constant squabbling over correct levels of fuel reduction in the most bushfire prone areas. Labors burn-off policies have fallen well short of the benchmark. The Gov’t has failed to adhere to the advice provide by a 2008 inquiry into the impact of public land management practices on bushfires as tabled in Parliament in the same year.

Economy - Our economic growth rate is below the national rate and earlier this year Access economics predicted that both the Victorian and NSW economies could actually contract in 2009 Business investment is the weakest of all states on last available figures for 2008. Exports are also well down on other states growing at less than 5% compared to 35, 70, and 38% for some other states. This alone clearly demonstrates Labors gross neglect in terms of maintaining our international competitiveness. Just last year we were the only state to lose jobs as the job market shrank for the first time since, you guessed it, 1992 when we were governed under Kirner. Infrastructure spending has also been less peer head than other states and we will have to significantly increase debt to catch up.

Health - The provision of services has continued to deteriorate with the number of sick patients having to wait for long periods in hospital emergency departments still too high. Almost 1 in 3 Victorians needing semi urgent elective surgery were not seen within 90 days and The Government needs to explain to ordinary Victorians why it sees it fit to conceal and distort hospital performance data.

To the list of mediocrity, we can add waste and mismanagement. Where do I begin? Let’s just say that in its nearly decade of power state Labor has mismanaged major project costs leading to cost blow outs in excess of .5 billion – the major offenders being the East link toll way, Myki smartcard, channel deepening, Wimmera- Mallee pipeline and the State library redevelopment to name a few.

With hospital figures manipulated, crime figures inaccurate, ministers accused of corruption in addition to failures in most nearly all major portfolios, state labors ineptitude is cemented. What is even more amazing is that the Gov’ts poor record of service delivery has coincided with a period of unprecedented levels of revenue inflow. The tax grab from stamp duties, land tax, GST funding, payroll tax, gambling tax and new records in speed fine revenue from our roads has resulted in a massive 0 billion windfall for the Victorian Government. Moreover, I have not even mentioned, the Brumby Gov’ts proposed Growth Areas Infrastructure Contribution tax that has many landowners screaming as I type. A new tax that labor says will raise yet another 2 billion in revenue over 20 years.

Care to add to the list?

As I see it, the Victorian Labor Government has squandered years of opportunity and I find it shameful that we Liberals have largely failed to hold them to account in a manner fitting of the scope and depth of failure in some key policy areas.

Not surprisingly, not one of my acquaintances bothered to recognize the economic benefits of the Kennett governments capital-works projects, such as the restoration of Parliament House, construction of the Melbourne Museum, the Melbourne Exhibition Centre, the National Gallery of Victoria, refurbishment of the State Library of Victoria, a new Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre and Federation Square, the Docklands redevelopment and Citylink project.

One final note, the Brumby Governments level of spin is almost frenzied; unremittingly we hear (or see) those ads – the one’s ending with the words -"authorized by the Victorian Government Melbourne”? Moreover, how much is this alone costing?

John Howard: Losing in Afghanistan would embolden the enemy ...

" ... the end game is even less attractive if there is not a greater commitment. the greater the commitment the more likely it is the game will end sooner ... the great worry I have is that we will just drift along unwilling to pull out because that would be an overt admission of failure but unwilling to make a decisive additional commitment ... "



It's time for the President to lead - something he doesn't seem to know how to do - but, when you have troops in the field and the generals ask for reinforcements, you provide them or you go home. I cannot under stand Obama's hesitation in light of comments made in 2008:

“Our bill calls for the redeployment of U.S. troops out of Iraq so that we can focus more fully on the real war on terror, which is in Afghanistan.”

Said Nancy Pelosi on March 8 of 2007, soon after, both houses of Congress passed a bill for ending the war in Iraq, arguing that it was a distraction from the “real fight.” The opinion implicit in that resolution — that Iraq was a war of choice and, hence, the “wrong” war, while Afghanistan was a war of necessity, thus the “right” war — was echoed by the three leading Democrat candidates for the presidency at the time, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards.

Thus if its the "right war" what is the problem? I suspect that whatever decision is ultimately made will have implications for Australia.

Update: As Dr Geoffrey Garrett founding CEO of the United States Studies Centre and Professor of Political Science at the University of Sydney, rightly pointed out:

Amid all the heady global diplomacy at the United Nations and the G20 last week, one issue was conspicuous by its absence - Afghanistan. The reason is clear. Afghanistan is now Barack Obama's war, a war other world leaders want to distance themselves from, and a war over which Obama is paralysed ...

Read the rest here

Say "NO" to an ETS

I was recently asked to explicate my support for the Liberal Party. As always my response was both fluid and spontaneous, describing the party as the foremost political force that, least historically though hardly perfectly, best upholds conservative ideology and Judeo-Christian values that are, for the most part, consistent with my own. Furthermore, I added, Liberals, though perhaps not all, believe in economic liberalism where the role of markets and competitive forces alike, are left to dictate the strength of the economy and the state merely provides the framework in which markets can operate effectively with minimal interference, pertaining or conforming to the principles or practices of laissez faire.

In relation to this last sentence, consider if you will, how an emissions trading scheme runs completely contrary to what the party purportedly stands for. Not least, the Government model proposes to harm the industries in which we have our greatest comparative advantage. Politician’s need ask why we are one of the biggest emitters of carbon dioxide per head of population? Think coal fired power stations, the mining, and export of coal and minerals. Moreover, I have not even touched on anything about minimizing the regulatory burden on Australian business, which, last I read, forms part of the party federal platform. I also expressed regret that the ETS discussion has not sufficiently included debate in a manner consistent with the platform as opposed to just, ‘denier’s vs. believer’s ideology.

Also disappointing is how Malcolm Turnbull has allowed himself to be lured into the wrong debate, that of accepting the proposed ETS but simply adding amendments in preference to exploring new lines of discourse even if, and I say this unwillingly, based on the notion that carbon is causing the problem. Those who have visited this blog in the past will know that I do not subscribe to anthropogenic contention.

Let us be perfectly clear, based on the present flawed community consensus, if the party resolves to do nothing it is going to pay a heavy price at the polls. However, I firmly believe that consensus will in time shift for at least a couple of reasons:

• Copenhagen shall not deliver anything other than a new date for a follow up talkfest
• We will witness an increase in anti-consensus publications and Media/film releases and
• Climate models gross disagreement with observations & the discrepancy (something that is becoming more evident with each passing year) will in due course garner greater attention and scrutiny of global warming adherents

I expect that the October 18 release of “Not evil just wrong” will serve to alter the playing field whereby robust, and cogent examination will filter through to mainstream 24/7 news/opinion cycles thereby diluting the lefts hold on the debate. Those that have already seen the film have written, “Not evil just wrong” will do for the AGW/Carbon caused/Al-Gore/Kevin Rudd/Penny Wong case, what Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 did for George W. Bush.

In the interim, that is ahead of Copenhagen and the consensus shift to which I refer, fear not the Double-D, for if Liberals fail to fall in line with Malcolm Turnbull then, with or without him, the party must begin crafting and structuring the debate with the purpose of contributing to viable policy options. At least provisionally, and in the interests of commonsense and effective PR, there is nothing wrong with exploring policies that seek to curtail greenhouse emissions without the tax/regulatory burdens of an ETS. They could for example, investigate some of the solutions recently proposed by a panel at the Copenhagen Consensus on Climate which opposes ETS in favour of technology based climate engineering solutions. I feel compelled to add, the expert panel included three (3) Nobel Laureates, which reviewed 21 research papers submitted by climate economists. See the 11 solutions proposed here - I am not advocating any of the solutions, what I am doing is highlighting alternatives to an ETS.

I honestly admire Malcolm Turnbull’s latest posturing, there are leadership qualities within, but the admiration stops well short of subscribing to his progressive views on climate change. At any rate, Malcolm’s recent bravado will finally bring the party’s climate change debate to the fore. I say to any Liberal still vacillating, consider the very recent (posted: October 01, 2009) words of Ross McKitrick, a professor of environmental economics at the University of Guelph, and coauthor of Taken By Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming:

I have been probing the arguments for global warming for well over a decade. In collaboration with a lot of excellent coauthors I have consistently found that when the layers get peeled back, what lies at the core is either flawed, misleading or simply non-existent. The surface temperature data is a contaminated mess with a significant warm bias, and as I have detailed elsewhere the IPCC fabricated evidence in its 2007 report to cover up the problem. Climate models are in gross disagreement with observations, and the discrepancy is growing with each passing year. The often-hyped claim that the modern climate has departed from natural variability depended on flawed statistical methods and low-quality data. The IPCC review process, of which I was a member last time, is nothing at all like what the public has been told: Conflicts of interest are endemic, critical evidence is systematically ignored and there are no effective checks and balances against bias or distortion.

I get exasperated with fellow academics, and others who ought to know better, who pile on to the supposed global warming consensus without bothering to investigate any of the glaring scientific discrepancies and procedural flaws. Over the coming few years, as the costs of global warming policies mount and the evidence of a crisis continues to collapse, perhaps it will become socially permissible for people to start thinking for themselves again.

Fascinating how the next party room meeting falls just 48 hours after the, “Not evil just wrong” premiere. Let’s hope that many party powerbrokers, MP’s, Senators and members alike, view the film ahead of the meeting, and who knows, it might just, for all intents and purposes loom as a de-facto leadership ballot.

Stay firm, say no to an ETS in all its forms and guises. Let us begin steering the debate away from those who seek to enhance the present social democratic project. Progressive policies that put Government at the coronary centre of the economy reveal the lefts way of centralizing power in the hands of a few who claim to know what is best for us; all of us!

You may also wish to read:
Climate Change: Modelling the Modelers and Novel Science

Foreign Policy Primer

Much has been made of the success of Rudd’s G20 forum success and in particular, his efforts to enhance the forums authority as the main vehicle for developing global economic policies at the expense of the G8 group. Unlike the latter, the G20 members account for some two-thirds of the world's population and 85 per cent of its economy. Our Prime Minister may see it fit to expand the cooperative multilateral base of existing economic forums, which sits right with his visions of greater interconnectedness and cooperative methodologies in relation to global macroeconomics and more loosely, greater spread of international state power. However, what is the long-term price for shifting the geopolitical-economic power architecture away from the present order? That is, away from the established power circle of which present day America is at the helm. Needless to add, Obama’s present foreign policy directions may add to the coming storm …

With this in mind, I present a thought provoking read taken from the Sublineoblivion blog that speculates on how the first half of this century might pan out.

In conclusion, the geopolitical winds are shifting. There is a gathering storm that will sweep away the current liberal globalized order, and a new reality of econo-political blocs competing for markets, land and resources will take its place. The root cause is the accelerating fiscal and economic collapse of the system’s underwriter, the United States. (The even deeper reason would be that limited oil and energy reserves would be more efficiently used in China to make things than spent on American gas-guzzlers).

However, these changes will appear to observers as an incomprehensible cascade of failings of the international system and spreading chaos: jihadi successes (mounting losses in Afghanistan, continuing terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda’s “franchises”, the possible collapse – or radicalization (Turkey?) – of moderate Muslim governments); state collapses (peak in world food prices, out-of-control insurgencies, falling revenues from energy exports and climatic catastrophes like drought – watch Pakistan, Mexico); the confrontation with Iran (whether or not it ends with a Middle Eastern war, this saga is only beginning to get played out); the Russian resurgence (may be manifested in renewed expansionism in the post-Soviet space – Georgia, Crimea and the Baltics are potential flashpoints – and the race of countries like Germany, Finland, Turkey and / or Japan to reach some kind of accommodation with Russia, contrary to US interests) and the continuing secular ascent of China (due to its gradual nature, this is unlikely to result in any “big events” (although a flareup over Taiwan or the South China Sea is always a possibility) – that said, in the longer run this is going to be one of the most significant geopolitical trends).

By 2019, we will look out upon a new world as different from 1989, as 1944 was from 1914, or 1991 was from 1961. A partially revived American superpower will face a real “peer competitor” in China, though their competition will be restrained by domestic troubles and a shared concern for global stability and the future of industrial civilization. Many of the world’s least developed regions will have begun to fall apart, forsaking the torturing lights of civilization for the comforting darkness of simplistic barbarism. The European Union will have fallen apart under the stresses of its contradictions and its constituent nations will have reverted to their traditional balance-of-power rivalries, while Japan decides it would be better off band wagoning with China. A more insular, nationalist and powerful Russia is a wildcard, either in the throes of demographic and economic stagnation – or enjoying new, unprecedented power accruing from its energy wealth and warming landmass. By then, the clouds will be gathering for an even greater storm – the point sometime in 2030-2050 when the limits to growth make themselves really felt, and industrial civilization falls into its moment of greatest peril. The shifting winds will have become a gale.

While this may be overstated we are gradually reaching a historical crossroad of great implications with the creation of a world leadership that may not by design, be able to handle the new sketchy order of global internationalism. Asian together with the weaker second world states may enjoy some superficial benefits in the short term, but if traditional western powerhouses fall by the wayside, they may not be able to handle the global and regional problems that may ensue. We must hope that the new collective leadership is not so raw as to let this go unrecognized.

Globalization needs to be kept in check with nation based hierarchical rules based on military and economic power. Let us not rush into eroding the established order with haste, as I argued in 2008, "is it realistic to believe that consensus between nations can maintain order through a system in which states voluntarily abide by rules? History alone would dictate a negative response. States cooperate because there is an in-balance of power between them not the reverse...."

Globalization is, for better or worse, a happening phenomenon that is set to expand. In light of this, and hence, this forms the core of my argument, I call on G8 policymakers to expand the currently narrowly focused grand plan to something far broader like, securing the future in accordance with the existing order by taking control of the process via a, “recalibration of interaction through positive leadership”.

Understandably, globalization has raised some alarm bells with many questioning whether the principle drivers of international affairs are no longer nation states but rather, some sort of evolving worldly system. The problem here is that it assumes a global system that somehow manages itself, when in reality; the enforcement of political and economic needs must always be underpinned by rules to resolve differences and conflicts; only powerful nation states have the resources and authorities to manage/enforce agreements, to deal with international threats and inter-state rivalries. Tomorrow’s all-inclusive global strategy must, apart from the aforementioned challenges and promotions of democratic regimes, address the consequences of unbridled dilution of the present geopolitical and economic order.

Related:
America and Globalization: Strategy for a New Century
America and Globalization: Strategy for a New Century - Part 2

NOT EVIL JUST WRONG - The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria

"...The world-wide premiere is to be held on October 18, and we already have numerous screenings arranged around Australia, including Federal Parliament..."

" ... Now on the eve of action on proposed legislation to cap CO2 emissions more than ever, cogent and levelheaded reasons as to why global warming theories deserve real scrutiny as opposed to automatic acceptance is imperative ... "

Not Just Evil But Wrong is a feature length documentary which shows how extreme environmentalism is damaging the lives of vulnerable people from the ban on DDT to the campaigns on Global Warming ...

“In the history of science it has often happened that the majority was wrong and refused to listen to a minority that later turned out to be right.”

Behold the words the now retired American Physicist Freeman Dyson, having been for most of his life a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. The good physicist has also publically said, “The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm.”

We often hear that the global warming debate is over because a "scientific consensus" exists. Indeed, at social gatherings I have time and again been looked upon as being out of touch or out-and-out uninformed for just suggesting that the consensus might be wrong. Fact is, when I question I am merely acknowledging that great body of science that propounds the same question, indeed a great and highly credentialed body of science questioning whether Carbon is the driver of any climate change in the first instance. This is not to suggest that all scientists believe the planet will be ok since vigorous debate continues, it’s just that we rarely hear of it in any meaningful way through mainstream and 24/7 news cycles.

Finding the right way through the emotional nonsense and narrow-mindedness is almost impossible. Sure we have had plenty of good books pointing the way in addition to films as “The Great Global Warming Swindle” but the establishment still rules that the world is in peril, and it’s our fault.

Now on the eve of action on proposed legislation to cap CO2 emissions more than ever, cogent and levelheaded reasons as to why global warming theories deserve real scrutiny as opposed to automatic acceptance is imperative. With this in mind, I am grateful to Australian expat Tim Andrews who alerted me to the impending release of the film, “Not Evil Just Wrong”. In his words:

… a groundbreaking new movie on the true cost of global warming hysteria … At its essence, Not Evil Just Wrong applies rigorous investigative journalism and cutting-edge cinematographic techniques to create a documentary that is not only a compilation of scientific data regarding 'climate change', but also includes personal stories that highlight the very real danger of climate-change hysteria presents. The worldwide premiere is to be held on October 18, and we already have numerous screenings arranged around Australia, including Federal Parliament …

Mind you not just any release, as the website suggests:

Help Us Make History! Be Part of a World Record for the largest ever simultaneous film premiere … OCTOBER 18th 2009 8PM EST

Indeed, I am impressed with the films unconventional yet brilliant distribution strategy, one that we shall all soon learn about.

If the fate of our planet is truly at stake, it is nothing short of critical that all perspectives are considered. The broad communities of the civilized world, and particular so, here in Australia have not made an informed decision, by definition they could not have, if they only listened to one point-of-view, I refer to the stance espoused by the establishment.

In addition to exploring the films website I recommend all readers promote this post, even if you must recycle according to your own needs.

If you are an organization, website, school, church, charity, think tank, university, glee club and think Global Warming Hysteria is a real threat you can help make the premiere of Not Evil Just Wrong on October 18th 2009 the world's largest simultaneous film screening in history, by becoming an affiliate and help raise money for yourself or your organization at the same time.

Finally, I present another related clip:

Australian Conservative Book Shop

Helping to drive that, "elegant collapse of consensus ..."

Click here or image to visit Book Shop

Sign of the times – the fiscally mad times …

Alas, the signs they were talking about, they’re fast appearing at just about every school in Melbourne.

Have to tell you, I am somewhat surprised that an image of either Kevin or Julia is nowhere to be seen, was this, an oversight you think?

As I have noted before, Kevin Rudd has much nerve and audacity to critique the Howard Government. This Governments modus operandi makes Howard look benign, and certainly to date, this appears to have gone over the electorates head.

What was your very first thought upon seeing the image?

Related: School funding signs are ads: Australian Electoral Commission

Imagery as media strategy - Turnbull and Howard before him, verses Rudd

While reading a recent news story on the ABC I could not help but notice the differences between how PM Kevin Rudd is pictured online at ABC sites when compared to Turnbull and before him John Howard.

This prompted me to provide some feedback to the ABC’s online feedback page where I wrote:

I cannot help but notice that whenever ABC online sites display images of Kevin Rudd he appears to be studious, academic, intelligent, forthright, adept, unruffled, and poised. His opposition opponent in Malcolm Turnbull is all too often captured looking dumbfounded, silly, flabbergasted, frustrated, dull-witted, and at times, malevolent. This is something I noticed as early as mid 2007, in which case the Turnbull descriptors applied to John Howard.

This would not be deliberate on the part of the ABC would it?

In the past, ABC online editors have responded to my commentary. I will publish their response to this latest comment as soon as I receive it, as an update to this post, though sometimes it can take up to a month to receive a reply.

Conservative Leaders: Progressive change through the centuries ...

A captivating video!!! NOW FOR CHANGE

A field that has rested gives a bountiful crop

I have decided to rest this blog while attending matters closer to home. Life has a habit of dishing out an infinite array of experience, some of it welcomed equally though, adversity and challenge presents in balanced proportion. Selfish and self interested as it seems, there a times when one must pause and address the moral obligations that govern an examined life. Was it not Plato, who once said that an unexamined life is not worth living?

I will make use of the break to consider whether to register my interest to contest a federal lower house seat at the next election. There are far too many Labor held seats out there.

Adieu

On the ineffectiveness of the U.N.

Recently while exploring the ‘edit posts’ tab of my blogger account I discovered a July 2009 post that for reasons unknown failed to publish. To be sure, its subject matter veered away from the common theme and/or matters of this blog.

As readers of my past blogging would know, I enjoyed and in fact miss, commenting on the vicissitudes of international affairs particularly so, from a pro America foreign policy and hegemony standpoint. The post in question was, in effect, a reply to a reader who sought my advice on which regional organizations I would endorse for the receipt of U.S. aid in place of the United Nations following an earlier post of mine that criticized the U.N. In that post, I wrote:

Some may view it (the U.N.) as a valuable body when in fact, it is as hopeless as a guy carrying a stick; an organization that believes paperwork and innuendo can solve the problems of the world and, in the process, soak up massive amounts of taxpayers’ money.

To which a reader commented:

Hi Otto - am wondering, are there regional organizations you'd endorse or would want to allocate more US aid/resources to in place of the UN? Would taking away anything related to peacekeeping and human rights from the UN portfolio make it better able to concentrate on areas where it does tend to offer better value? I agree that it's been frighteningly ineffective on the vast majority of security and peacekeeping/ stabilization tasks particularly in past 30 years, but I do think groups like UNICEF can and do provide much needed services (again probably not as efficiently or effectively as one would like but I'm willing to keep an open mind on it). What about NATO or SCO or ASEAN or OAS - not endorsing any particular org as each has its problems but curious as to what you think? It seems to me the regional groups are more likely to be effective if only for cultural knowledge - sending a group of Pakis into Somalia ranks up there with one of the worst ideas of all time. Thanks CC.

My reply:

I could write much CC so I offer an overview. I have always thought highly of U.S. aid, not just in terms of supporting economic growth/trade, democracy, and conflict resolution but also chiefly in the context of furthering U.S. foreign policy interests. Accordingly, and given the ineffectiveness of the U.N. as a vehicle for world security tasks, some U.S. aid should be held back, in reserve if you will, being utilized support regional organizations and operations of Washington s choosing in times of crises. I agree that UNICEF (although not perfect) fulfills a vital role without to many hiccups.

I am not sufficiently versed on the specifics of the named regional organizations therefore; it might be prudent of me to highlight some of the more advantageous elements of their operations as against those of the U.N. Let us be clear, how many times has the big body faltered when trying to reach consensus on authorizing missions? By reasons of geography, demographics, cultural and historical roots, and differing political platforms regional orgs have an obvious advantage over the U.N.

By saying this, I am assuming that regional orgs can be accepted as legitimate arbitrators and therefore can potentially garner wider support than U.N. operations. Becoming a lawful arbiter is one thing however taking effective action is another. Thus, we come to some of the more obvious shortcomings of regional orgs; think resources, organizational ability, logistics, resource management, and issues of neutrality. One wonders then, if U.N. efforts may work better as supplements to regional efforts.

Of the organizations you mention the OAS, comprising of over 3 languages and at least 30 member states is too large and so it becomes susceptible to the same issues of the U.N. SCO serves as a vehicle of counterbalance to NATO and U.S. foreign objectives, so I do not see it as being helpful, least from my point of view or should I say, worldview. NATO itself is too large and still growing with constituents that are simply too diverse for effective accord.

Remember too, that part of the problem of regional’s is that included in their respective charters is a directive that read something like, “non interference in the internal affairs of one another” - this alone throws as sizable spanner in the works in terms of settling member nation state differences not to mention armed peacekeeping operations.

Finally allow me to draw attention to Australia’s recent intervention in the Solomon Islands as brought about by issues of non-governance, a breakdown of social order, and high crime rates rather than, a humanitarian crisis. RAMSI as it was known provides a good model when analyzing regional assistance missions designed to rescue failing states. Of course, there will always be critics and they would probably argue that the interventions are part of a broader campaign to extend the hegemony of the more powerful local state, in this case Australia.

Every crisis is different and needs to be addressed with local geographical interests on mind with the help of larger state bodies, though history tells us that the U.N. is not the most effective means. Perhaps regional organizations can consider some written exceptions to the non-interference question.

Once again, forgive for me for drifting away from the strict purpose of this blog … Does anyone agree? How would you rate the U.N. as a vehicle for world security tasks?

Moral basis of Capitalism

Robert Tracinski was a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute from 2000 to 2004. Presented are excerpts of his article, which appears at The Center for the advancement of Capitalism website in which he shamelessly advocates the moral righteousness of capitalism.

Capitalism is the only moral social system because it is the only system that respects the freedom of the producers to think and the right of the individual to set his own goals and pursue his own happiness.

With the fall of communism and the alleged end of the "era of big government," many commentators and politicians grudgingly acknowledge the practical value of capitalism. The free market, they concede, is the best system for producing wealth and promoting prosperity; the private economy, in Bill Clinton's words, is the "primary engine of growth."

But this has not led to the triumph of capitalism. Quite the opposite: Federal taxes as a percentage of gross domestic product are at their highest rate since the Second World War; antitrust assaults on the market's winners are growing; the regulations on the federal register continue to expand by 60,000 pages per year ...

If capitalism is recognized as the only practical economic system—then why is it losing out to state control? The reason is that no one, neither on the left nor the right, is willing to defend capitalism as moral. Thus, both sides agree, whatever the practical value of capitalism, morality requires that the free market be reigned in by government regulations. The only disagreement between the two sides is over the number of regulations and the rate of their growth.

What no one has grasped yet is that capitalism is not just practical but also moral. Capitalism is the only system that fully allows and encourages the virtues necessary for human life. It is the only system that safeguards the freedom of the independent mind and recognizes the sanctity of the individual.

Every product that sustains and improves human life is made possible by the thinking of the world's creators and producers ...

Most people recognize the right of scientists and engineers to be free to ask questions, to pursue new ideas, and to create new innovations. But at the same time, most people ignore the third man who is essential to human progress: the businessman ...

Behind the activities of the businessman there is a process of rational inquiry every bit as important as that of the scientist or inventor. The businessman has to figure out how to find and train workers who will produce a quality product; he has to discover how to cut costs to make the product affordable; he has to determine how best to market and distribute his product so that it reaches its potential buyers; and he has to figure out how to finance his venture in a way that will best feed future growth.

The businessman has to have an unwavering dedication to thinking, not only in solving these problems, but also in dealing with others. He has to use reason to persuade investors, employees, and suppliers that his venture is a profitable one. If he cannot, the investors take their money elsewhere, the best employees leave for better opportunities, and the suppliers will give preference to more credit-worthy customers.

The businessman's dedication to thought, persuasion, and reason is a virtue—a virtue that our lives and prosperity depend on. The only way to respect this virtue is to leave the businessman free to act on his own judgment. That is precisely what capitalism does. The essence of capitalism is that it bans the use of physical force and fraud in men's economic relationships. All decisions are to be left to the "free market"—that is, to the un-coerced decisions of buyers and sellers, manufacturers and distributors, employers and employees. The first rule of capitalism is that everyone has a right to dispose of his own life and property according to his own judgment.

Government regulation, by contrast, operates by thwarting the businessman's thinking, subordinating his judgment to the decrees of government officials. These officials do not have to consider the long-term results—only what is politically expedient. They do not have to back their decisions with their own money or effort—they dispose of the lives and property of others. And most important, they do not have to persuade their victims—they impose their will, not by reason, but by physical force.

The government regulator does not merely show contempt for the minds of his victims; he also shows contempt for their personal goals and values.

In a free-market economy, everyone is driven by his own ambitions for wealth and success. That's what "free trade" means: that no one may demand the work, effort, or money of another without offering to trade something of value in return. If both partners to the trade don't expect to gain, they are free to go elsewhere. In Adam Smith's famous formulation, the rule of capitalism is that every trade occurs "by mutual consent and to mutual advantage."

A system that sacrifices the self to "society" is a system of slavery—and a system that sacrifices thinking to coercion is a system of brutality. This is the essence of any anti-capitalist system, whether communist or fascist. And "mixed" systems, such as today's regulatory and welfare state, merely unleash the same evils on a smaller scale.

Only capitalism renounces these evils entirely. Only capitalism is fully true to the moral ideal stated in the Declaration of Independence: the individual's right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Only capitalism protects the individual's freedom of thought and his right to his own life.

Only when these ideals are once again taken seriously will we be able to recognize capitalism, not as a "necessary evil," but as a moral ideal.

Read the whole piece here

A social system, any social system is deemed ‘good’, if the upshot advances not merely moral behavior but even the prospect of a higher order of moral behavior, bearing in mind that the protagonists are in all cases, the very men and woman, whose actions create the energy within, hence the creators. Thus, the system is produced and fashioned by the acts of individuals who sequentially institute the necessary checks, and moral elements that engender the economic and political system that best provides for them. Furthermore, because the formation of a social system is an act of human endeavor, there is inherent within a moral imperative to establish and sustain the kind of political and economic system that permits the greatest possibility for self-rule, for autonomy, and for independence and wealth generation. In this context, what social order other than Capitalism produces a better result?

Book launch: Garth Paltridge’s Climate Capers

So you think the theory of disastrous climate change has been proved! You believe that scientists are united in their efforts to force the nations of the world to reduce their carbon emissions! You imagine perhaps that scientists are far too professional to overstate their case!

Maybe we should all think again. In his book The Climate Caper, with a light touch and nicely readable manner, Professor Paltridge shows that the case for action against climate change is not nearly so certain as is presented to politicians and the public. He leads us through the massive uncertainties which are inherently part of the ‘climate modelling process’; he examines the even greater uncertainties associated with economic forecasts of climatic doom; and he discusses in detail the conscious and sub-conscious forces operating to ensure that scepticism within the scientific community is kept from the public eye.

It seems that governments are indeed becoming captive to a scientific and technological elite – an elite which is achieving its ends by manipulating fear of climate change into the world’s greatest example of a religion for the politically correct. Source

The Lavoisier Group recently sent an email inviting all members, friends and supporters to a combined book launch and dinner for Garth Paltridge’s new book, Climate Capers.

Date: Tuesday 11 August 2009

Time: 5:30PM and dinner will be served at 7:00PM

Venue: 401 Collins Street Melbourne

Hugh Morgan AC will launch the book, and Garth Paltridge will respond.

The guest speaker is Dr Patrick Michaels, Distinguished Senior Fellow in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. He is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. Michaels was also a research professor of Environmental Sciences at University of Virginia for thirty years. He is also Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies at the Cato Institute, Washington DC.

Pat Michaels has been at the forefront of the battle against the carbophobes for more than 20 years. He has written a number of books and numerous articles.

At the time of this writing registrations forms were not yet sent, however those interested in attending can contact the group directly here.

For those who have not heard of The Lavoisier Group I present the groups aim directly from site:

1. To promote vigorous debate within Australia on the science of global warming and climate change, and of the economic consequences of both unilateral or multilateral decarbonisation and

2. To explore the consequences which any international treaty relating to global decarbonisation targets, and the methods of policing such treaties, would have on Australian sovereignty and independence, and for the WTO rules which protect Australia from the use of trade sanctions as an instrument of extraterritorial power.
Put the date in your diaries…

See also: The Climate Caper - Dr. Garth W. Paltridge

Fervor of Kevin '07 still rules

Corin McCarthy writing in The Australian recently, reminded us of the inflated Kevin 07 fervor that defined his role as opposition leader in the lead up to the last federal election but more strikingly, how promises made then that is to say, “in times of irrational exuberance”, run counter to the present day solutions required in times of receding economic activity.

It began when Kevin07 challenged John Howard with anti-market measures that grabbed attention on the nightly news and won him favour on Seven's Sunrise. This was sometimes referred to as "scab flicking" politics. An issue would be raised, hence the scab. It would bleed from the politicisation, hence the flicking. Then there would be a call for an inquiry to indicate some action. This was the Rudd office playbook 101 for opposition. The Rudd opposition mercilessly used the politics of scab flicking on areas as varied as demonising Australian Workplace Agreements, using the navy to protect whales, green power schemes and, most explicitly, the cost of living facing working families.

Yet the sentiment scab flicking stirred up and the market interventions it has created will increase unemployment. To understand what is at stake, we must know what deregulation has delivered. Treasury secretary Ken Henry has argued repeatedly that the miracle economy of recent years resulted from the policies of deregulation in the 1980s and 90s, the labour and product market liberalisation started by Paul Keating and extended by Howard and Peter Costello. As recently as May 2007, Henry called labour market reform Australia's "shock absorber", a pivotal policy for achieving full employment and low wage inflation together.

McCarthy details some of labors new labour market policies that undermine Kevin 07 promises like increasing labour participation rates, productivity growth and capacity constraints”, referring to enterprise bargaining reform and AWA’s being cast aside for the more quaint ‘forward with fairness’ in addition to relaxing activity tests for those seeking to re-enter the workforce at the expense of ‘mutual obligation sticks and tax reform carrots’.

Reversing this re-regulation is the only way Rudd can tackle unemployment for the 2010 election … the effect of Rudd's policies through more regulation and picking industry winners will reduce Australia's growth prospects … The Productivity Commission has already found that for every job saved in the auto industry it costs the community about 0,000 and the Green Car Innovation Fund would be unlikely to yield significant innovation and greenhouse benefits.
The commission also found Kevin07's 20 per cent mandatory renewable energy target will not achieve any further carbon abatement above the emission-trading scheme but will impose further costs borne by consumers through higher electricity prices.

Read the rest here

Perhaps revisiting some of the fundamental prescriptions normally associated with, or derived from the tenets of economic liberalism that is, banking in markets, and competitive forces to dictate strengths of an economy, may be a better remedy for our present economic challenges. Though it must be said, not something that Sunrise presenters and viewers alike, would necessarily comprehend.

See also: Rudd’s 24/7 spin cycle

Magazine cover of the week ...

"... James Delingpole talks to Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist, whose new book shows that ‘anthropogenic global warming’ is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a ‘first-world luxury’ with no basis in scientific fact. Shame on the publishers who rejected the book ..."

The front cover of the latest edition of the Spectator about Ian Plimer’s best selling book, Heaven and Earth.

Spectator.co.uk introduces its readers to Professor Ian Plimer. Read it here ...

Analysing PM Kevin Rudd

Shaun Carney provides a noteworthy analysis of Kevin Rudd, his ways and wares with media and communication style.

THIS Kevin Rudd, who is he? And who really cares? When the opinion pollsters and the journalists refer in their reports to the Prime Minister's popularity, they're using the term advisedly. Rudd gets a high approval rating, a low disapproval rating and, like pretty much every sitting PM, scores big numbers as preferred prime minister ... Liberal voters cannot understand how Rudd can continue to win endorsement from a solid majority of their fellow Australians. They see Rudd as a slippery, deceitful fake — a king of "spin" with a "glass jaw" — who would go to any length to advance himself ... His default delivery in public sits somewhere between the business-like monotone of the old-fashioned bank manager and the smarming bloke at the door trying to sell encyclopedias. This demonstrates the duality of Rudd's public persona: he's got something special to give you (his intellect, his drive) but you've got to travel some of the way towards him to connect ...

Rudd's experience as a diplomat has served him well in politics. He's never seen a room that he didn't think he could work. In most settings, he seems to know how much interest to show in other people to disarm them before proceeding to display what he would regard as his intellectual talents and his personal resolve ... Do we see the real Rudd in public? No more or less than any other public figure. Every politician I've met is more interesting in private. Rudd does a reasonable job of hiding his more bureaucratic-cum-academic side — his public use of "programmatic specificity" this week was a classic slip. Try saying it, much less using it in a sentence.

To counteract these inadvertent exposures, Rudd regularly ventures into the entertainment media, trying to connect to younger voters. He's appeared on Channel Ten's Rove twice now. Because John Howard, who turns 70 this month, declined to appear on the show, Rudd's willingness to engage is being portrayed by some as a decline in standards.

Read the whole piece here

I feel that Rudd's litmus test still awaits him, true he has carved out a resilient persona without political expense, however luck has been on Labor's side. Personally, I think the Government often behaves as if still in an election mode; the gloss my friends is simply yet to peel ...

Problems with Individuality and equivocal elements of Conservatism

I find myself drawn to Greg R Lawson’s thoughts of an interview by James Poulos, an editor at the Postmodern conservative blog. Though the interview hardly makes for bread and butter consumption, he cuts through the top end prose of academia and raises pertinent but all the same practical questions, in relation to the individual within a progressive society routed within and toward cultural and political forces of influence where seemingly, an infinite number of lifestyles flourish. While concise, the focus rests on the hackneyed, not merely contemporary term, ‘fiscal conservative’ and the more inclusive and generalized singular descriptor … 'conservatism'.

This interview with James Poulos, whi is a doctoral candidate in political theory at Georgetown University and founding editor of obne of my new favorite blogs, Postmodern Conservative, is the kind of reading all thoughtful conservatives should do. It confronts a very serious dilema that we face- how do we live as individuals in the current modern and "Liberal" with a big "L" (as opposed to a classical liberal of the Burke or even Adam Smith variety).

Several interesting quotes

"The big challenge today, I think, is convincing people—especially younger people—that a life in which political liberty has been readily surrendered in exchange for great cultural or “personal” freedom is not a good life, either individually or socially. The willingness to be carried along to that destination, particularly under the impression that it’s basically inevitable, ought to be something that everyone with anything at all nice to say about NR’s (National Review) editors should unite against...

Conservatives are at great pains to convince themselves and one another that their vision of the good or virtuous life is not a mere lifestyle choice. Conservatives don’t just want to experience happiness or individuality—they want assurances, reliable enough that their souls may rest in them, that their progeny will be able to live, indefinitely, more or less as they do. If there’s no reason to live that way outside idiosyncratic personal choice, they’ll fail to inculcate their way of life, and lifestyle-choosing liberals will turn their children and grandchildren into individuals who could be just anyone."

This piece got me thinking about many different things, not only those specific issues raised by the interview itself.

So what do we "conserve" as "conservatives?" There is much more to this than just being a "fiscal conservative." After all a "fiscal conservative" can be an amazingly selfish and greedy person who does not care about anything outside of their own self-fulfillment.

If being fiscally conservative, however, is married, so to speak, with an overall cultural renewal, then, that fiscal conservatism is no longer a means only to one's self satisfaction, but is a morally responsible position that can allow us to give more to our family, our friends, and our community.

So, we conserve money for a greater good than oneself. But what else? Isn't conservation about saving things that are vitally important to us, possibly even necessary for life itself? Isn't that what the "conservation" movement is all about when it comes to "saving the planet?"

So isn't being "conservative" about saving something that will sustain us, not only materially, but spiritually? Isn't it about maintaining a connection to our roots, our family, and our cultural heritage that has historically shaped, though not determined, what and who we are?

So conservatives must "conserve" more than their individuality, they must conserve those instituions that transcend, otherwise, do we not lose touch with any sense of eternity?

In this respect, I think the "virtuous life" is much more than a mere "lifestyle choice." It is a life that attempts to raise our horizons to something much higher than ourselves, and even higher than mere man. For youth that seek the stimulation of "personal" freedom, conservatives must offer a more comprehensive vision, a vision of greatness, transcendance, and the eternal. These are that which should be "conserved" because they are what give us true inspiration and bring us closer (if not into the direct presence of) Truth.

Faith, family, and community are where these senses of the transcendant reside and those, even more than the fiscal arena, is what we must conserve.

How we do this is another question

For mine, the source article makes one appreciate just how fluid and fragmented this idiom ‘conservative’ is, and not just within its own theoretical sphere, but as an element of time, place and real world circumstance.

From the interview:

The way we conceptualized conservatism at the height of the twentieth century reflected a very legitimate practical response to certain problems and temptations in the real world, and today those problems and temptations look different. They carry different weights and fit into a different bigger picture. Rationalism in politics, to take one example that should resonate across the right-leaning spectrum, looks a lot different before and after 1968. Democracy promotion looks different before and after 1991. Deficit spending looks different before and after 2006, and even more so after 2008.

For those seeking intellectual ‘eHarmony’ on the subject that is, a more robust conceptualization if you will, of 'conservatism', they will surely be disappointed.

Australia: World beater in stimulus spending

Read more at the source:

OECD Report: Policy Responses to the Economic Crisis pp. 18

Over to you ...

Battle over Emission Trading Schemes on the wane

"... there is undercurrent of opposition to ETS swelling beneath the surface fuelled in part by not just skeptical political types, but some highly credentialed Scientifics’ that collectively, are driving an elegant collapse of consensus ..."

Here is something that MSM in not likely to report any time soon, least not in Australia. The call for a global climate change deal in on the wane and it may explain why our own Minister for economic destruction, Penny Wong and perhaps too, Obama are keen to ram through legislation. Last week’s U.S. House of representatives vote to cut Carbon Emissions was hardly an empathetic win for the Obama administration. Let us be perfectly clear a vote, of 219-212 for ‘cap and trade’ or more accurately ‘cap and tax’ reveals just how divided the U.S. legislature remains, what is more, the Democratic crafted bill owes its victory to eight (8) Republican votes. As Senator Fifield said recently, “It’s extremely unlikely that the bill will pass the US Senate in its current form. So we still don’t know what the United States ultimate position will be. There is still a lot of water to go under the bridge there.”

Tom Switzer makes a good case for the change in political climate to which we refer in an aptly titled piece, “Greenhouse gas battle is slowly losing steam”

When Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama were elected to power, Australia and the United States were expected to implement overdue and concrete measures to slash the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

But a curious thing is happening on the road to the UN post‐Kyoto global conference later this year: the legislation to implement an emissions trading scheme (ETS) – the chosen policy that would change the way we use energy – is likely to collapse in both Canberra and Washington.

And the reason for the opposition among politicians and commentators is the same in both Australia and the US: that any serious action to reduce each nation’s carbon footprint would be futile without the support of the developing, big polluting nations, most notably China and India, at the Copenhagen conference.

It was not Adelaide University’s Ian Plimer, but Harvard University’s Martin Feldstein who argued in the Washington Post this month that we “should wait until there is a global agreement on CO2 that includes China and India before [we] commit... to costly reductions.

It was not Liberal frontbencher Andrew Robb, but leading Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner who argued in the Wall Street Journal we “cannot reduce the growth of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere without the developing nations cutting their emissions as well.

And it was not National Party Senator Barnaby Joyce, but Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels who warned in last week’s GOP radio and Internet address that, under an ETS, “our farmers and livestock producers would see their costs skyrocket and our coal miners would be looking for new work.

Public opinion in the US is also shifting dramatically: according to Gallup, 41 per cent of Americans think climate change is exaggerated (the highest percentage in more than a decade of polling) and among eight environmental concerns, climate change ranked last. Amid the financial crisis, protecting jobs now takes priority over combating global warming.

Just a week later Kimberley Strassel, writing in The Wall Street Journal noted that while the Democratic elites in Washington (and their Labor counterparts in Canberra) continue preaching to the already converted throng of alarmists, there is undercurrent of opposition to ETS swelling beneath the surface fuelled in part by not just skeptical political types, but some highly credentialed Scientifics’ that collectively, are driving an elegant collapse of consensus.

“It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as “deniers.” The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country’s new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country’s weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The collapse of the “consensus” [over the idea that climate change was primarily man-made] has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.”

It remains to be seen how many politicians in the U.S. and Canberra are willing to exercise good judgment and sheer courage to stand up against the lefts unremitting drive to worship climate change.

Further reading:

Chinese Official unhappy with US climate bill

Wong’s Silent Treatment Clouds Emissions Credibility

Evidence for a solar signature in 20th-century temperature

The Wong-Fielding Meeting on Global Warming

Ask a politician, WHY do need to tax or trade carbon and what will they say? Armed with the best experts they can find, they still can ‘t name any evidence. Read how: they rephrased questions; lectured for a full 30 minutes on an irrelevant matter; interrupted continually; and hear the tactics used to avoid a direct answer… “It’s as if they had never before encountered real live competent skeptics or their arguments.”

Opinion polls, Malcolm Turnbull, ETS, Border Protection .. A Liberal Senators View

" ... we didn’t manage to get out our perspective in relation to the big issues of this Government’s maladministration in relation to government debt, in relation to Grocery Watch, in relation to the Job Network tender, in relation to border protection. That’s the important thing to focus on, the major areas of maladministration of this government ... But we have got to get back on the job now of holding the Government to account, and issues like on the front page today, where we have another asylum seeker boat arriving in Australia. We’ve now cracked over 1,000 people in the past year ... "

Transcript of
Senator Mitch Fifield
Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for
Disabilities, Carers and the Voluntary Sector

Sky News – AM Agenda
Ashleigh Gillon and Mike Kelly MP

29 June 2009

ASHLEIGH GILLON: Welcome back to AM Agenda. Let’s go straight to our panel of politicians. Joining me from Canberra is the Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Support and Water, Mike Kelly. Good morning.

MIKE KELLY: Good morning Ashleigh.

GILLON: And from Melbourne the Liberal frontbencher, Senator Mitch Fifield. Good morning to you.

MITCH FIFIELD: Good morning Ashleigh.

GILLON: Mitch, let’s start with you. What went through your mind this morning when you opened up the papers and saw such devastating results for the Coalition?

FIFIELD: Well you have some good days in politics and you have some bad days. What the polls tell us is that the voters give you points when you handle things well and they deduct points when you handle something not so well. And that’s what we saw last week. For me the great disappointment is that we weren’t able to get our message out about Wayne Swan and the questions that he needs to answer about Mr John Grant. And we didn’t manage to get out our perspective in relation to the big issues of this Government’s maladministration in relation to government debt, in relation to Grocery Watch, in relation to the Job Network tender, in relation to border protection. That’s the important thing to focus on, the major areas of maladministration of this government.

GILLON: But Senator do you think that these poll results might suggest that Mr Turnbull was wrong to pursue the Prime Minister over the Ozcar affair? That he didn’t handle this whole saga well at all.

FIFIELD: Well I’m not going to pretend for a second that we had a good week last week. Opposition isn’t always an elegant business. It’s important that we ask the tough questions. That we seek to hold the Government to account. It’s a collective responsibility that we have as opposition Members and Senators to hold the government to account. That’s what we were doing. One of the issues which we were pursuing ended up being not a valid matter to pursue in relation to the Prime Minister and that fabricated email. But we have got to get back on the job now of holding the Government to account, and issues like on the front page today, where we have another asylum seeker boat arriving in Australia. We’ve now cracked over 1,000 people in the past year who have come to Australia illegally. These are the issues which we have to get back on to focusing and making sure that this Government starts to administer policy well.

GILLON: I do want to get into the asylum seeker issue a bit later with Mike Kelly, but firstly Senator just staying with you for a second, do you think that Mr Turnbull’s leadership now is under threat off the back of these polls and his performance last week? Are you aware of any moves to try to bring him down from the leadership?

FIFIELD: Not at all. Malcolm is extremely secure as leader. In fact, talking to colleagues last week, the recurring theme amongst colleagues is that Malcolm is the best person to lead us and that he should lead us to the next election. Malcolm is someone who is incredibly resilient. He’s fought back before. He’s been in the leadership a relatively short time, and we’ve seen during his leadership that he does have the capacity to fight back, he does have the capacity to rebound. He is incredibly tenacious. And he is going to pursue this Government from today right through to polling day.

GILLON: So Senator Fifield you are telling me that there is no rumblings, even on the backbench, trying to get Malcolm Turnbull to step down?

FIFIELD: I can tell you exactly that. There are no rumblings. There are no moves. The only conversations that I’ve had with colleagues are that Malcolm is the best person to lead us, and that he should lead us to the next election.

GILLON: Mike Kelly let’s bring you in, the government didn’t escape completely unscathed in these polls, they show, we saw in the AC-Neilson poll that Wayne Swan suffered, it showed his likeability was down 21%. Does that surprise you?

KELLY: Ashleigh I represent the people of Eden-Monaro which I think are the best cross-section of Australia, and what they are telling me is that they are sick and tired of the politics of fear and smear. They were amazed that we spent the entire of last week of parliament with the opposition asking not one single question about economics, health, education, security. Really they’re just disgusted that we are wasting taxpayers’ money on this sort of fear and smear, muckraking stuff, instead of getting on with the business of tackling the big issues that face us like the economy and climate change.

GILLON: But Mike Kelly it takes two to tango, we saw the Government give as good as it got last week.

KELLY: Well Ashleigh you can see if you go back over the record last week that on the first point, we were responding to questions from the Coalition which were exclusively focused on this smear and muckraking. But on the second hand when we had the opportunity to ask questions they were focused on the real issues that confronted Australians. Issues like the economy and climate change. Particularly in my electorate, I know climate change is a very big worry. We’ve got a lot of farmers and people on the land who are worried about the effects of climate change and we need to see now the Coalition finally stumping up and joining in with us to make sure we can go to Copenhagen lined up with the United States to move this issue forward.

GILLON: Well that’s another issue we will get back to as well but Mike Kelly, the Government would be mad not to go to an early election, wouldn’t you, especially with Malcolm Turnbull down as he is at the moment?

KELLY: Ashleigh all we are interested in is getting on with the business of government. We have major issues confronting us. We’ve got an unprecedented international economic crisis that we are managing and by all the indicators we are managing successfully in comparison with other OECD countries. We’re really trying to gear up now to be able to go to Copenhagen with a good position on climate change. We’re focused on these issues, delivering good education and heath policy for the country. All these range of things that are of real concern to people in our community.

GILLON: Senator if Peter Costello hadn’t announced his retirement a couple of weeks ago we’d be having a very different conversation today. Do you think though that Colin Barnett’s experience in WA may give some Costello supporters a good glimmer of hope, or is there zero chance that he would reconsider his retirement?

FIFIELD: I think Peter has made his position extremely clear. He is not recontesting at the next election. He is looking to his career outside politics. Malcolm Turnbull is our leader. He has the support of the Party Room. We’ve got to get in behind him. He is someone of immense capacity. He is someone of great integrity. And I think over the months ahead the public will see that as he holds the Government to account.

GILLON: But you could see how it could be a little bit tempting for Mr Costello and some of his supporters to beg for him to come back when it does look like Malcolm Turnbull is suffering some much in terms of viewers perception of his leadership and his character.

FIFIELD: Well we are professional politicians, we are in the business of dealing with facts and reality. And the facts are that Malcolm is our leader and he will take us to the next election.

GILLON: Well how do you think Mr Turnbull will go about trying to re-energise the party over the winter break? It seems apparent that we will see a reshuffle of the Coalition frontbench. Are you expecting widespread change there or just perhaps some tinkering at the edges?

FIFIELD: Well we’ve got a pretty good team. I don’t know if there will be a reshuffle, Malcolm may well make some fine-tuning to responsibilities and personnel but that’s certainly in his court. I think Malcolm is going to focus over the winter break on the fact that this is a Government that can’t administer anything well. Look at grocery choices – a bungle. Look at the Job Network tender – a bungle. Look at our border protection – a bungle. Look at the schools stimulus package spending – a bungle. And the feature of this Government is whenever a Minister stuffs something up, such as Chris Bowen, with grocery choices, or the employee share scheme, you get promoted. (Brendan) O’Connor bungled the Job Network tender. He got promoted. And I think that’s how Malcolm is going to focus over the winter break on the fact that this government can’t administer anything well. They can certainly get the politics right. They handle the politics very well. They handle spin very well. But when it actually comes to the business of administering, when it actually comes to the business of delivering outcomes for the Australian people this Government is just not in the event.

GILLON: Mike Kelly we’ve heard Mitch Fifield there bringing up the failed Grocery Watch scheme, we saw FuelWatch die last year. That is quite embarrassing isn’t it, for the Government? These were two key election promises from Kevin Rudd.

KELLY: Ashleigh this Government is determined to do whatever we can to improve competition and benefits to the consumer. We’re not afraid to try whatever options are out there and to continue to experiment to deliver that result. Unlike the previous Government, which never lifted a finger to help consumers, we’ll leave no stone unturned to deliver a good result for consumers, and that’s also associated with our overall economic management which by every end this year has been proven to be successful. The retail sales are up, building approvals are up, business confidence, consumers confidence, the fastest growing economy in the OECD. The strategy of the Government, carefully constructed and decisive, and acting early has produced results and has helped cushion Australia from the impacts of the economic crisis, and we want to continue to maintain support for consumers through both that strategy and looking for options to promote competition and keep prices down.

GILLON: Mike Kelly another big, of course, election promise from Kevin Rudd was the deliverance of an emissions trading scheme in Australia. Over the weekend we saw the US House of Representatives pass its climate legislation. That development means that if the Rudd Government can’t succeed in getting its scheme through, it wont really be a good look will it?

KELLY: Oh, absolutely. This is an opportunity now with the legislation passing through the US Congress, for Australia to be able to add its voice in a concerted team effort to improve the international position in relation to carbon emissions. It would be very embarrassing for us to be unable to go to Copenhagen with a firm position. But beyond that, this is critically important for our own economy.

GILLON: But what would it say about Kevin Rudd’s leadership if he failed to negotiate with the Coalition and the other independent Senators?

KELLY: You can’t negotiate with someone who won’t talk to you. I mean the problem we’ve got with the Coalition is that they don’t have a position. They are completely divided on this issue. We know there are some severe climate sceptics. Malclom Turnbull through his failed leadership has been unable to unite his party on a whole range of issues including this one, and as I said, no to all of our positions so far and haven’t proposed a single amendment so far. And all they have been able to decide to do is to postpone a vote. So we haven’t go a partner dance with here.

GILLON: Well Mitch Fifield, Malcolm Turnbull of course has been pushing for the delay of this scheme, the vote going through the Senate, we saw this decision over in the US which has been hailed as a real breakthrough in terms of the world going forward on climate change. Now hasn’t Malcolm Turnbull lost one of his reasons for delay, he said that we should wait and see what the US is doing before coming up with a position here in Australia?

FIFIELD: Well we still don’t know what the US is going to do. The Waxman-Markey bill has passed the US House of Representatives, just. It’s yet to pass the US Senate. It’s extremely unlikely that the bill will pass the US Senate in its current form. So we still don’t know what the United States ultimate position will be. There is still a lot of water to go under the bridge there. Our position is that it is important to wait to see what the US does. It’s important to wait to see what comes out of Copenhagen. The Coalition have commissioned research with Senator Xenophon, Frontier Economics, to do some work to look at alternatives to this design of ETS and what the impacts of this ETS will be. So that will give us some additional information to take into account. But it has struck me as truly bizarre the fact that this Government said that there was going to be plague and pestilence across Australia if we did not have an ETS in place by 2010. Yet a couple of months back the Government said that it was fine to delay the implementation of the ETS. It seems that the Government taking its time is responsible. The Coalition taking its time is irresponsible. We think the right thing to do is to take the time to get it right. An ETS shouldn’t be an end in itself. An ETS should be one part of a package of measures to reduce emissions. The important thing is to get it right and that is what we aim to do.

GILLON: Well the Senate vote of course will still be in the middle of August, so that will be a fascinating return to parliament. I did promise we’d get back to the asylum seeker issue. Over the weekend we saw 194 people arrive on a boat. That boat was intercepted, it’s the 15th boat to arrive this year. Mike Kelly are you really telling us that the influx of asylum seekers has nothing to do with the Rudd Government’s change of policy? The Government says its policy is more humane than the former Howard Government’s policy so doesn’t it logically follow that more people would want to come here?

KELLY: It absolutely has nothing to do with our policy. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights report just recently released, indicated that there has been a 28% increase in asylum seekers and refugees worldwide and 42 million people have been dislocated. So 800 of those have been trying to make their way to Australian shores. It has all to do with the wars and the conflicts around the world at the moment and nothing to do with our policy. And might I say, I’m completely disgusted with some members of the Coalition attempting to make political capital on the back of the suffering of refugees and asylum seekers. I think we’ve learned a lot of lessons after the children overboard affair, and I know that there are a lot of decent men and women on the Coalition side who don’t support this sort of tawdry politics.

GILLON: Senator we’ll let you respond to that quickly.

FIFIELD: Well listening to Mike it sounds as though there are only push factors, that there is no such thing as pull factors. But the reality is that the Labor Party went to the last election promising to soften border protection policies and that is exactly what they did. Not just in terms of their rhetoric, but they abolished temporary protection visas as well. The product of that has been we’ve had 15 boats come in the last 12 months, and over 1,000 asylum seekers. Now you can’t just put this down to push factors, there are pull factors. This Government had a policy of softening border protection, that’s what they’ve done. They’ve given the people smugglers a good product to sell and that’s what the people smugglers are doing.

GILLON: Senator Mitch Fifield, Mike Kelly, thank you both for your time this morning on AM Agenda.

KELLY: Thanks Ashleigh.

FIFIELD: Thank you Ashleigh.

ENDS

Leading a Conservative Party in Australia

How would you lead a conservative party in Australia? Would it simply be a case of governing according to the basic tenets of the term or would this also include governing in your own likeness?

Dr Norman Abjorensen is a lecturer in political science at the Australian National University and author of John Howard and the Conservative Tradition (2008) and Leadership and the Liberal Revival (2007) asked just this in a recent post at Unleashed:

How do you lead a conservative party in Australia? It's not as easy a question as it might sound. The incomparable Robert Menzies had the most novel answer: he founded a party in his own likeness and led it without challenge for 20 years, 16 of them in government. Malcolm Fraser took another road to power. He demonstrated to his followers and the voters alike that he was the toughest and most ruthless warrior of all, and he was. John Howard was also tough, but in a very different way from Fraser. Howard set to work on the cultural front, the first conservative leader to take a close and detailed interest in history, and he set about reshaping Australian nationalism in his own conservative image. Each of the three leaders was successful, but in their own very different ways. And it is in that qualitative difference that we begin to see some of the problems inherent in conservative leadership, such as the need to shape first the party, then the government, and finally the nation in your own image. All three managed this singularly Herculean task, and they had persuaded their followers that they could.

Judging from the comments there seems to be some misunderstandings and possibly illusions in relation to just what conservatives and conservative leadership is means and entails. Dr. Norman also has words on Costello that not all would agree with.

It was a question that Peter Costello never really addressed, and in this failure we can see his fatal political flaw: he never understood the nature of conservative leadership. He merely sat in hope, waiting for the plum to fall into his hands. Leaving aside the fact that Costello never really cemented a close relationship with the public, as evidenced in opinion polls, he simply failed the first test of leadership: he never won the trust of his own party. Costello never enjoyed a significant support base within his own party. At the peak of his popularity in the latter Howard years, he could have counted on no than 27 votes at best out of a party room of more than a hundred.

Read the rest here

How would you lead a conservative party is it as easy as it sounds?

Related reading:

In Search of True Conservatism
Conflicts within Modern Conservatism
Listen up Mr. Turnbull: No time for Conservative - lite
Conservatism as process, not purely ideology
In Defence of Market Forces
At Core Rudd is No Conservative

The most insidious of Greenies

… the idea that humans are a fundamentally destructive presence on Earth, a carbuncle or itchy sore, is now widespread, even respectable and fashionable …

I find the most annoying and plainly stupid greenies - and environmental types - to be those who seem happy to equate humans with parasites and bugs and in some cases, the Earth as some sort of living organism akin to a unicellular cell.

We have for example, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) who would speak out against fly squatting to further its cause or the Earth Liberation Front who prides itself on speaking up against all the 'atrocities committed against the environment and all of the species that cohabitate in it', no doubt silverfish and fleas as well. Perhaps it was the late Kurt Vonnegut who in ’07 said that the, ‘Earth's immune system is trying to get rid of us’ line, that inspired the idiocy or their premise.

It was this morning’s article in The Australian, Beware the greenies who think people are parasites that provided the impetus to highlight these most menacing of enviro friendly types:

Eco-terrorism is a manifestation of the human-baiting in modern culture … in earlier eras, from biblical times to the dawn of the Enlightenment, Earth was seen as the property of man, something we should conquer and tame and use to our advantage. Mankind should have "dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and every other living thing that moves on the Earth", said God in the book of Genesis. Even more forthrightly, a follower of the great scientific thinker Francis Bacon (1561-1626) said man should "put nature on the rack" and extract its secrets.

Today, by contrast, man is seen not as the owner of Earth but as a pox on it. We're an alien presence, an infestation, a malady that has made the planet terminally ill. Indeed, some now argue that Earth needs to be "liberated" from human beings, set free from our toxic presence so that it can revert to being a wild, unspoiled ball of water and gas hurtling happily through space … In truth, the idea that humans are a fundamentally destructive presence on Earth, a carbuncle or itchy sore, is now widespread, even respectable and fashionable.

John Gray, one of Britain's most respected intellectuals and until recently the professor of European thought at the London School of Economics, says humanity is a "plague on the planet". He echoes James Lovelock, the Gaia-inventing granddaddy of modern environmentalism, who thinks we have become a disease: "Humans on Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic organism, or like the cells of a tumour or neoplasm. The human species is now so numerous as to constitute a serious planetary malady." From this warped point of view, it makes perfect sense to "liberate" Earth from humanity, in the same way a surgeon "liberates" a person's body from a cancerous growth.

Many now believe that natural disasters or the emergence of new diseases are attempts by Gaia to rid "herself" of the human virus.

Read the whole piece here

How can we take seriously and organization like the Earth Liberation Front when its very own website says, ‘we do not engage in illegal activities’ but in bigger italic print we also read, ‘The Earth is not dying, it is being killed. And those that are killing it have names and addresses. What are you doing tonight?