16 December 2018

Trust in God and man

It's not really work
It's just the power to charm
I'm still standing in the wind
But I never wave bye bye
But I try, I try ...

- David Bowie Modern love




Science teachers at Riverview have a lot to answer for.
Image (c) ABC

  • Never, ever piss off the churches;
  • Throwing money at church schools means Liberals win elections;

All that changed last year.
Never gonna fall for
(Modern love) walks beside me
(Modern love) walks on by ...




(Modern love) gets me to the church on time
(Church on time) terrifies me
(Church on time) makes me party




(God and man) no confessions
(God and man) no religion
(God and man) don't believe in modern love






02 December 2018

Enough, enough, enough





The party man







- Alan Jones, 2GB, 28 April 2005




  • This article can and should be taken at face value.






Right Ho, Fink






Very foreign policy




Jakarta, Jerusalem and junk analysis












21 August 2018

Burn out, fade away


Shorten's first option





Shorten's second option





Problems with Dutton




Two parties one narrative





Both sides not






16 August 2018

Dead in the middle


- Ernest Hemingway For whom the bell tolls

Why the NEG is a shemozzle


Iemma then ...







… and Turnbull now







  • Retired; or
  • Challenged Turnbull.




A broken right wing











02 August 2018

How the press gallery killed Fairfax


New readers might find the above alarmist and sensational. Regular readers will recognise it as a consistent theme of this blog. I am not trying to pour the old wine of press gallery inadequacy into the new bottles of the Fairfax takeover, and the recent coverage of federal politics and policy (well, I am, kind of, but if you read on the results more strongly support that than the idea that press gallery are just regular journos doing their best in a fast-moving world).

A reduction in diversity

In recent years there has been a trend away from diversity as a priority for media. This wasn't a result of last year's legislative changes; parliament mostly follows rather than leads public debate (and this pretty much discredits the "theatre critic" model of political coverage, but I digress).

The press gallery has led this with its governing principle that there can only ever be one story, and one narrative for reporting that story. John Howard couldn't be beaten, until the day he couldn't win. Kim Beazley was tomorrow's man, until he was yesterday's man. Barnaby Joyce was a top bloke, until he was a cad and an incompetent minister. They even boast about the conditions that create the samey-sameness of political coverage, and the inability to snap out of it; a magic land of sharing and caring, where what they think of as competition is the narcissism of minor differences.

(c) Hanna-Barbera
"Great yarn, mate! Top yarn!"

Press gallery output leads news bulletins, websites, and newspaper front pages. It mostly presents politicians' quotes without the context that might make their proposals work, or otherwise meaningful. It does not challenge their assertions, and represents any and all disagreement as "argy-bargy".

When the Walkley Awards for Australian journalism were inaugurated, there was no special category for he press gallery. Press gallery rely heavily on press releases for their stories; breaking stories about politics or policy issues, with in-depth investigation from original sources, tends to come from outside the gallery. Photographers and camera operators are more likely to hold their own in industry-nominated awards than press gallery are with proper other journalists. As a result, press gallery journalists really lifted their game lobbied for a special category only open to press gallery journalists.

While there have been reductions in press gallery numbers, they have been fewer and proportionally less than in the newsrooms. Press gallery tend to get paid better than other journalists. Now consider that these reductions have been compensated by new entrants to the press gallery, who have mostly hired press gallery veterans anyway, and the privilege of the press gallery is clear to all not within its walls. When journalists back in the newsrooms are downsized, Canberra press gallery send their thoughts and prayers in much the same way that Washington's NRA-funded legislators do with US mass shooting victims.

To get to the journalism practiced by Australia's traditional media, you have to push past press gallery output. Those who investigated dodgy financial advice practices made a real difference, and won awards too, but strangely they forgot to interview Senator Cormann who lobbied so hard for the legislative changes (among the first legislation passed by the Abbott government) that made those practices lawful. Those who investigated institutionalised child abuse and covering-up didn't bother chewing the cud of poll results. Newsroom journalists cop jeers from their peers and sneers from Media Watch for writing up product-launch press releases as news, while press gallery get away with it every day. Journalists who complained about government proposals to restrict information from government about its activities were not those who witnessed the legislation being debated and who rubbed, ah, shoulders with the perpetrators.

If traditional media outlets really believed that excellent journalism is what makes their outfit great, they would lead with it. If an editor pulling together the daily rushes finds that the single best gobbet of journalism before them is a piece about a football match, or the shoes that an actress wore to an awards ceremony, then that should go on the front page/top of the bulletin. The obscurity of inside pages should be the place for hackery: the accident blocking the busy road, the treasurer who declares opposition policy to be economically disastrous, etc.

They don't do that because they don't believe in journalism, not really. There's a formula and bad press gallery coverage is baked in. It's not news that the prime minister is criticised, but journalists can't tell whether or not the criticism is valid. They say that they'll let the reader/viewer decide, but the readers/viewers have increasingly turned off and I've decided press gallery is killing journalism.

When you talk about journalistic excellence at Fairfax, I talk about Kate McClymont, Schneiders/ McKenzie/ Baker, Michael Bachelard and Jewel Topsfield from Jakarta, Adele Ferguson or Neil Chenoweth or Michael West from the business pages, Caroline Wilson and Jacqueline Magnay from sport, and perishingly few others. None of those people are/were press gallery. Their press gallery contingent isn't worth their own weight in press releases. Whether it's the blowhard Peter Hartcher, the Owned Boys Phil Coorey, Mark Kenny or (admit it) Michael Gordon, or the prim process-over-outcome focus of Michelle Grattan, it's time to admit that Fairfax didn't put their best into the press gallery, and that the nongs they did put there have done the business no favours.

For all the fretting about Nine diminishing Fairfax journalism, the fact is Lane Calcutt's just-the-facts approach runs rings around the entire Fairfax contingent. When press gallery veteran Greg Hywood was appointed Fairfax CEO in 2011 his appointment was universally praised within the media: hooray, a real journalist, they cried as one, when his greatest investigative skill was getting on the dripfeed from Keating's office. Hiding their journalistic light under the bushel of press gallery output was one of Fairfax's biggest mistakes. NewsCorp do the same thing, with inane press gallery compounded by a further layer of cold grey drizzle of culture warriors that ward off all but the most intrepid seekers after journalism who might venture there. They will face a similar reckoning once the old man dies.

The choices we make

The press gallery, through its easily gamed One Story One Narrative policy, decided in Fairfax's final week that there would be two stories:
  • the byelections of 28 July, of which Our Malcolm would win at least one because #balance, and
  • Emma Husar
Taking the second first: I've worked for some crap bosses and I'm glad I never worked for Emma Husar. That said, in the great annals of graft and bludging in Australian politics, Husar's dog-walking and child-minding simply do not rate. And the more experience you have observing politics, the less excuse you have for slavering over every twist-and-turn in this non-story, the less credibility you have when you claim you'd love to do Serious Journalism, oh my goodness did you see what Emma Husar just did ...? Press gallery who disdained going after Barnaby Joyce (and who still regard his story as a sex scandal rather than rorting or policy incompetence) are hogwild for all things Husar.

Emma Husar's domestic incompetence recalls Queensland Labor MP Leanne Donaldson. Another unmarried mother who became a Labor MP, Donaldson hit the headlines for antics like driving a car while unregistered and not paying council rates. Anastacia Palaszczuk sacked her from the ministry and at the last state election, Donaldson lost her seat. Donaldson has spoken of her struggle with depression, and Husar may yet do likewise; but while two anecdotes do not form a pattern, it might be worth investigating whether political parties could do more to support women in politics, and that such support might be the necessary price for all that easy talk about attracting more women to public office.

In the Coalition, unmarried women are all but excluded by dint of sexism. What those parties lose in crushing the aspirations of capable young women and appealing to a broader constituency, they save themselves the embarrassment of a Husar or a Donaldson. Those women who break that rule (e.g. Marise Payne, Gladys Berejiklian, Julie Bishop) spent decades studying the factional tectonics of the party and leveraged it with overwhelming support, overriding any objections about their domestic circumstances. Bronwyn Bishop only ran for preselection after her children were adults and her marriage ended: her far-right constituency would never have backed her if her husband and children were an issue, or had she never married at all. The key is to attract candidates who aren't fixtures of the party landscape and to give them an inkling that they just might have a chance, but that key turns no lock in the Coalition. They'll endorse a man at face value but won't consider a woman they don't know intimately.

Husar isn't a member of the government. In two of the four byelections on 28 July (the two seats where the main competition came from strong Liberal candidates), the Labor candidates were women. The clear implication of the Murdoch jihad against Husar is that those candidates are just like her: a vote for the Labor woman is a vote for Gillard/Jordan Peterson chaos. As it happens, those two women are headed back to Canberra, and it is entirely possible that Husar won't. She might become another victim of a brutal system, she might lash out at her entire party and the journalists. She hasn't entered Lindy Chamberlain territory for weird and prurient media coverage, but you can see it from here.

Protesting too much

Paul Keating called Nine a lowbrow outfit. While it's hard to disagree, and hard not to welcome back an original voice into the mealy-mouthed dialogue of today, he protests too much.

When Keating was at the top of Australian politics, Nine's Sunday program was consistently excellent journalism, of a standard unknown in Australia's traditional media today. Its investigative pieces with Ross Coulthart gave Four Corners a run for its money. While Keating had the measure of most in the press gallery at the time, if anyone was going to knock him off his game it would be Laurie Oakes. In 1993, when Kerry Packer realised what Hewson's GST proposal would do to his profit margins, he sooled Nine onto the Liberals and helped Keating to his only victory as Labor leader.

Keating is the second-last Labor leader (excepting the brief summer of Rudd in 2007-8) to get anything like a fair run in the Murdoch press. Murdoch's voice was consistent throughout his organisation but that voice did not set the news agenda like it does today, thanks to Keating allowing Murdoch to take over the Herald and Weekly Times in 1987. NewsCorp definitely is a lowbrow outfit, proudly so, and don't get me started on 10 or 7 (though again, Mark Riley > the entire Fairfax press gallery contingent). Keating was wrong to play up the mote in Nine's eye to the extent that he did.

That said, Nine will quash the delicate flower of Fairfax journalism through dumbness ("what do you need that for?") rather than spite.

How late it was, how late

Both The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age were founding members of the press gallery. Before it existed, both papers led debates about whether a federal parliament should even exist, and in what form; but all parliamentary buildings in this country were built with a press gallery pre-installed, including all three that housed the federal parliament. Press gallery do not have to forage for stories like real journalists do; how this must gall sacked journalists who have to forage for an income once the traditional media paycheque is, despite their best efforts, yanked away.
Here’s a point I’m absolutely willing to concede. We spend too much time with theatre criticism … and not enough time burrowing down into the issues on which voters make their choices.
- Katharine Murphy, Political Editor, Guardian Australia
on ABC Insiders 29 July 2018
Murphy did not arrive at that concession by herself. On this blog and in my Twitter feed, I and many, many others hammered Murphy for years until all her other options fell away. Murphy does not operate from any sort of elevated place from which addressing actual policy issues might be considered a descent. Her recent work on electricity has been impressive, and the constraints on journalist numbers is worth mentioning, but it's still too much to expect this Fairfax veteran of the press gallery to become a full journalist. Press gallery play at journalism from time to time - now it's electricity, now foreign policy, now school funding - but soon enough it slumps back into the One Story One Narrative of polls and intrigues, real and imagined. Apart from the equally hopeless Barrie Cassidy, nobody else in the press gallery is even awake to the sheer enormity of the problem they have caused their fellow journalists.

I laughed when Tony Wright threatened to cover the coming election with the same dreary template the traditional media applies to all election coverage: more readers looking for answers and finding only cliches, more media executives wondering why punters aren't lapping up the argy-bargy and bleating about disenchantment. The joke's on you, fella. We can't vote you out, and the choices we make at elections are not foretold by polls, but by layers of yarns and narratives from the press gallery.

We are badly informed about politics and policy, and a people in that predicament can never be well governed. Press gallery overestimate their own cleverness by dumbing down debate to a level that makes them comfortable. They see journalists depart from the home offices and never accept their own role in creating a media environment that makes acts of journalism more random, and as far as possible from wherever they are. You'll note that among the journalist positions whittled away were the actual arts critics - theatre, film, and music critics, book critics - and yet press gallery cannot be dissuaded or deterred from covering parliament like Australia's best subsidised and lamest theatre complex.

Bad political journalism makes the country governed badly and kills good jobs in journalism. Despite all the evidence, I'm still not convinced that bad political journalism is the only coverage of policy and public affairs possible - but I've been wrong before.

19 June 2018

Arsey: Seven weaknesses of the Ramsay Centre

The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation aims to educate Australians not only in the facts of Western Civilisation, but also in its beauties and wonders and its enduring relevance to Australian life going forward. Can it succeed in those aims? No. The directors of that organisation are wasting the benefactor's money, however much they wax lyrical about him, and they should either desist, or start getting on with it, rather than continue mucking about.


In reporting the fallout between the Ramsay Centre and the Australian National University over their proposed Western Civilisation degree course, traditional media outlets focused on the kerfuffle and the he-said-she-said and the SHOCK CONTROVERSY SHOCK which they (mistakenly) believe sells papers. This is consistent with the unenlightening and tedious way they cover politics and associated culture war issues.

What they did not do, and perhaps could never have done, is examine why the Ramsay Centre might want to partner with a university in the first place. University bureaucracies are large, slow-moving beasts, much criticised over many years by Ramsay Centre board members John Howard and Tony Abbott. Surely the institutions that caused the problem that the Ramsay Centre is seeking to solve (that Western Civilisation is denigrated or underappreciated by university-educated people today) are of limited use in solving it. Surely, the outcome delivered by the ANU was foreseeable by anyone with experience in high-level negotiations of this type.

In recent years, vocational education providers have developed syllabi and offline/online training courses in IT, business, WHS, and other areas using minimal bureaucracy, real estate, or other overheads of large established institutions like ANU. There is no good reason why the Ramsay Centre should not have a complete suite of online/offline courses ready to go, right now, to show ANU and whomever else what they're missing and setting the standard for others to follow. Leave the grizzling to wasters like Nick Cater. Let's be having you, if you're good enough.

One possible indication of the Ramsay Centre's motives can be seen in Chris Berg, an IPA shill who no longer identifies himself as such. He got a PhD from RMIT's economics department, stacked as it is with IPA alumni such as Sinclair Davidson and Steven Kates, and now uses RMIT to sell the cuckoo's egg of IPA policy.

Another is in the image of Ramsay given by Abbott above, someone who liked the idea of a well-stocked mind but who couldn't do it himself. The inaction in Ramsay's name stands in contrast to the more hands-on George Soros (h/t @liamvhogan):

When Popper wrote about the enemies of the open society, he was referring to people like Tony Abbott. I can't believe they have won.

As an Arts graduate myself, I'm used to the jibes like "airy fairy" and "arty farty" surrounding education in the humanities (not least, it must be said, from people like Howard and Abbott). Richard Denniss must surely have been tongue-in-cheek when writing this article about the utility of Western Civilisation studies. This brings us, however, to another important point.


Public debate, in Australia and elsewhere, is impoverished by a lack of general understanding of science. People who cross the gamut of economics, law, business or other matters come to a crunching halt when confronted with scientific and technical matters: "I'm not a climate scientist", they whimper, "I'm not a tech head", "I'm not a doctor", "I'm not an engineer", etc.

The whole idea of state aid to non-state schools in the 1960s was to forestall this impoverishment of public debate: not simply to head off a shortage of skilled workers in science, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM). The great challenges of our age - climate change, the affordances and threats facilitated by ICT and bioengineering - require some understanding of and respect for science. The case for a generalist understanding of the humanities, regardless of the paucity of jobs in the area, has been well made (including by Denniss in his fourth paragraph), but the case for a generalist understanding of STEM issues has been made less well.

If you can draw up a treasury of Western Civilisation that includes (for example) Aristotle, Shakespeare, or Kant, then the same case can be made for Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Albert Einstein. These thinkers influence the way we think and act today. The very demarcation between science and the humanities, much lamented by C P Snow and others, would have puzzled many of the thinkers the Ramsay Centre would have in their canon. Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of helicopters weren't just cutely inventive, they were part of serious work on how to move heavier-than-air objects through the air. His studies of fossilised seashells in the Apennines arose from a resistance to the flippant thinking about their placement by the Great Flood. Rene Descartes came up with the idea of plotting data against two variables on X and Y axes: I'd suggest that is at least as important to Western Civilisation as the aphorism most often attributed to him, cogito ergo sum.

The reason why Western Civ advocates can't and don't include science is because the history of science involves challenges to authority, knocking off one set of certainties and finding a way forward until other certainties coalesce around what is known. Contemporary conservatives are jealous of the authority scientists have in developed societies. They must know how feeble they sound when they simply pooh-pooh lifetimes of study, and underestimate the detriment to their own power in doing so. Creationist science is no more reliable than the Lysenkoism of the Soviet Union. Conservatives assume falsely that their work cannot be brought within the Western canon, as 20th century musicologists couldn't find a place in their discipline for jazz.

It is a weakness of the Ramsay Centre, built on a fortune made possible by Paul Ramsay's father the property developer medical science, that it cannot and will not engage with Western scientific methods and discoveries. The division that frustrated C P Snow looks like a restrictive work practice and a cop-out. This brings us to another important point.


Young conservatives, growing up in an environment hostile to academia, aren't in a rush to become academics. Even so, they still react with puzzlement (as this guy does at 48:55 in the latest episode) that there are so few conservative academics, and hence the deficiency that the Ramsay Centre seeks to address exists and is not their fault but others'.

I've read some of the texts which leftist academics rely upon for their critiques - Foucault, Dworkin (Ronald and Andrea), Zizek, Baudrillard, to name a few - and they're hard work. It's slow boring through hard boards a lot of the time, and I sympathise with those who reject it as not worth doing. I don't blame young conservatives for treating an undergraduate degree as a means toward the end of a job, and that earning money is to be preferred over the vow of poverty that would seem to correlate with academia. The rollicking works of Niall Ferguson or the gentle rambles of Roger Scruton are much easier than the spiky, careening stuff translated from French into stodgy, dense English.

When I was a Young Liberal at uni it shat me no end that the people who were most learned in what I'd been led to believe was the canon of Liberalism - James and John Stuart Mill, Locke, Bentham, Oakeshott - those who knew them best were committed lefties. The academic who has probably studied the Liberal Party in greater depth than any other, Judith Brett, is a committed Labor voter, as was Menzies' biographer Allan Martin. Yet, those are the people who have done the work, and that work is to be respected.

The lack of conservative academics ready to develop and teach Ramsay Centre courses, or even to remedy the defect the Ramsay Centre aims to, can't be simply explained by discriminatory hiring practices across this country's universities. The IPA has a number of Research Fellows sitting around not doing or achieving very much. Conservatives have done this to themselves, and if they really think this is a serious issue they must change their ways. Not only is there no Ramsay Centre canon to work on, there are no scholarships or other means of encouragement for young conservatives to clamber up the sheer north face of the Great Books into the sunlit uplands that conservatives have in mind.

If you want to talk about systematic discrimination and unconscious bias, it takes to the place where feminists and other intersectional sociologists have been operating for years. Where is the conservative who really wants to go there?



- Martin Luther King: speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC, 28 August 1963
If you're going to not only study, but exult in, the glories of Western Civilisation - and wonder why not everyone is as enthusiastic about them as you are - then you're only being intellectually honest when you look into why women, dark-skinned people, Freemasons, LGBTIQ and others failed to appreciate and enjoy the freedoms and riches that the Ramsay Centre sees as the rightful inheritance of those who study Western Civ.

I had no idea (well, it's possible I was told by some left-wing student back in the 1990s and have forgotten it) that John Locke was a colonial administrator in British America who was perfectly fine with slavery, and that his famous injunction against "slavery" was really a wish to limit the powers of the King over his Caucasian male subjects. Jamelle Bouie's recent essay on liberty and racism highlights what is, for the Ramsay Centre, and other proponents of Western Civilisation, an unresolved blind spot and an intellectual weakness.

In the article linked earlier, Tony Abbott referred to his own education in history as a narrative of progress, "where 'freedom slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent'". Abbott led a government, and as a backbencher nominally supports a continuation of that government, where freedoms were sacrificed to scaremongering about terrorism. The result of his own education has been to turn on it. Explain that, Ramsay Centre.

John Quiggin's point here is well made: if you believe Western Civilisation is a club anyone can join, it falls to you to be honest about why many haven't, why many shun it, and why only struggle can explain why they have any share in it at all. They can't all be stupid and ungrateful, can they?


A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism.

- Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx is a thinker steeped in the Western tradition. Yes he is. His intellectual antecedents include Hegel, Lycurgus, and (believe it or not) Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

Marx wrote and published prolifically around the middle of the nineteenth century. Much of the history of the past 150 years - particularly in Western societies, but also in non-Western societies colonised by Western Civilisation like China and Vietnam - is incomprehensible without reference to Marx, marxism and Marxists.

Marx is a significant thinker in and on Western Civilisation. Yes, he is.

The Ramsay Centre should take Marx seriously as a writer and have its students study his work in detail, and engage with what's there rather than continue wrestling with the spectre Marx himself identified. It won't, though. It can't. Conservatives have looked on in dismay as generations of students have discovered Marx and, if not becoming devotees, then taken him and his works seriously. Like travellers to Solaris in Stanislaw Lem's novel, they are helpless to prevent this and don't really understand why anyone would want to go there. A Ramsay Centre course on Marxism would be like a Rechabite wine-tasting: there'd be nothing there, and nobody would enjoy it.

As for Cultural Marxists, wouldn't it be best to Know The Enemy? Initially, the term "cultural marxism" might have referred to writers like Habermas, Adorno, Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School, but it has come to apply to basically any matter that the Murdoch press does not like (and on which those writers referred to in this paragraph, and Marx himself, paid scant attention to), such as women in Liberal Party preselections, critics of the current President of the United States, those who believe Britain should remain in the European Union, the impact of tax cuts on economic activity, or even transgender people using the loo. Good luck finding intellectual consistency in that mess of potage, and teaching it.


The board of the Ramsay Centre is itself a problem. They are timid people frittering away the money over which they are responsible, for the reasons described above: if Paul Ramsay had squealed like a stuck pig every time a deal fell through, he wouldn't have gotten anywhere. The Ramsay Centre has not backed itself, and it has not demonstrated any faith in the richness and appeal of the inheritances of Western Civilisation. They would display artefacts of Western Civilisation like Royal Doulton china (collect the set, get a Bachelor's degree!) rather than put them to work.

Tony Abbott has stuffed up everything he has ever been put in charge of, from the Federal Budget to the expenses of his own office. If you honestly believe this man should remain in any position of governance then you can make no case against Catherine Brenner.


This last point isn't a big deal, but it is indicative that the Ramsay Centre isn't really serious about its stated mission.

Here is an image from the homepage of the Ramsay Centre's website:

(c) The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation

Here is an image of that same painting, 28 July, Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, from the website of the Louvre:

(c) Musée du Louvre

Back when France issued its own currency, they printed the Delacroix image onto banknotes:

(c) Banque du France

Maybe it's just me, but I have noticed that the Ramsay Centre have edited out the nipples on Lady Liberty. When I went to Paris and visited the Louvre and saw that painting, you could say I was paying homage to Western Civilisation. Given that the Ramsay Centre people also love Western Civilisation, why would they do that? Admittedly, it isn't only Western women, or women at all, that have nipples - but even so, is such an impulse consistent, or even compatible, with all that's good about Western Civilisation? As we move into an information age, an age of abundant and easy access to cultural and other inheritances of the Western tradition, is bowdlerisation something to be encouraged? Is it necessary to maintaining and advancing Western Civilisation? Honestly?