My modest proposal for the reform of the Labor party is to relieve Billy Shorten of his duties and make Senator Honest Joe (‘a lot of them are mad’) Bullock the leader.
My mother would have slashed her wrists in protest, heckled Mark Hughes, if voters passed the proposed Aboriginal referendum on the Constitution. He was referring to the late great Helen Hughes (and his co-author) who did so much to advance Aboriginal causes especially in the economy and education. On her view Constitutional ‘recognition’, like the Apology, would do nothing practical for Aborigines but would distract attention from the important economic and employment issues.
The occasion was a meeting of Thought Brokers, a dinner discussion group, called to honour the memory of Helen Hughes. The guest speakers were Alan Tudge (parliamentary secretary to the Prime Minister) and Kerryn Pholi. Tudge was supporting a Yes vote in the forthcoming referendum when Mark Hughes lost patience and exploded. Tudge believes you do not judge these matters only by their practical consequences. You should not underestimate the symbolic value of a Yes vote in bolstering Aboriginal self-respect — or the disastrous and demoralising consequences of a No vote. He also rejected the notion that the referendum would introduce a racist element into the Constitution, separating Aborigines from all other Australians. Is not racism, he wondered, already there in a Constitution which is overwhelmingly British or Anglo-Saxon in its basic ideas and language, most obviously in the many references throughout its 128 sections to Parliament, Crown, Privy Council, writs, oaths of allegiance, trial by jury and the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty? Why not, Tudge asks, balance these British concepts with recognition that there were pre-British inhabitants in the continent which the British called Australia?
The issue of the referendum came up again at a Quadrant dinner when Senator Cory Bernardi spoke on his book The Conservative Revolution. Asked about the referendum he said he still has an open mind. At first he was ‘instinctively’ against it and he is still to be convinced. But he can see a conservative case for recognising that there were people and traditions here before the British brought the West to Australia. He will suspend judgment, he says, until he sees the actual wording of the referendum question. Tudge says this will be settled by the end of this year. (Mark Hughes told the Thought Brokers that he always lists himself as Aboriginal in the Census questionnaire. Born and bred in Australia, he says, and absolutely indigenous, what else is he?)
At the Lowy Institute’s debate last week on espionage, Allan Behm, the defence analyst, compared Edward Snowden and Bradley (or Chelsea) Manning with the Great Train Robbers. They deserve to be punished for their robberies. If you are working in intelligence and you believe your government is immoral, you resign. You do not broadcast the details. (Not everyone in the intelligence service is equally sane, Behm says. ‘Some are nuts.’ Speaking for himself as a former defence official, he declared: ‘I was not employed as a priest.’) But Andrew Fowler, a journalist with the ABC and a biographer of Julian Assange, considers Snowden and Assange to be whistleblowers who struck blows against state duplicity, for example on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And Greta Nabbs-Keller, an Indonesian expert, sees espionage as a legitimate instrument of statecraft. We don’t hear enough about the successes of intelligence, she says.
Standing room only at the Centre for Independent Studies bash to hear the celebrated libertarian and wild Irishman Brendan O’Neill get stuck into the bossy nannies, nudgers and naggers who are taking the spark out of life. It was no surprise that he had already laid into the ‘bizarre’ International Court of Justice for its attack on what he sees as the sovereign rights of the Japanese to continue their ancient practice of whaling. (See his piece in last week’s issue.) But now he was taking on something more wide-ranging — the new illiberal state that aims not just at controlling our behaviour but at destroying the independent life of the mind and the soul. Throughout recent centuries the job of the liberal state had been to keep the peace, ensure national security and enable prosperity. It left our minds alone. Today the state is increasingly totalitarian in its ambitions. It has moved on from irritating if minor restrictions on the right to smoke or get drunk. Its bureaucrats now think nothing of reshaping the masses’ minds, instructing parents how to raise their kids or telling adults how to have sex. They imagine that by regulation they can nudge or programme us ‘to stop eating junk food, to cycle more, to become organ donors, to be less fat, less drunk, less angry.’ We are living through a historic winding down of the moral independence of individuals. Australians, he said, used to be a free, frank and sceptical people. Now they are always saying ‘sorry’ for something or other. His advice is to tell the government and bureaucracy to rack off. (Cheers all round.) Otherwise it’s Japan today, Australia tomorrow, and the end of freedom all over.
Incidentally O’Neill objects to the term ‘nanny state’. Where he grew up — ‘in the boglands of the west of Ireland’ — nannies had a bottle of stout for breakfast, smoked all day, lived spectacularly unhealthy lives and made it to a hundred.
