At going to press The Spectator Australia learnt of the death of David Armstrong, the greatest philosopher Australia has produced. As it happens, the March issue of Quadrant carried two tributes, one by his friend the late David Stove, the other by the Canadian Andrew Irvine who summed up: ‘Armstrong’s influence on world culture has been enormous.’ I will have my mite to say about his life and work next week.

On the day before Peter Costello introduced his ‘horror budget’ in 1996, a frenzied mob stormed Parliament House, smashing glass doors and leaving a trail of blood (see The Costello Memoirs). Bodyguards locked Costello up out of harm’s way. Yet whatever its flaws, it turned out to be what he has called ‘one of the best received budgets in Australian history’. People knew the Keating government had left a mess and Costello was doing something about it. Joe Hockey should have a similar experience with his budget, warts and all.

Why do conservatives so often hand public meetings over to the Left? Take for example last week’s IQ² debate, broadcast worldwide. It was almost as much a fiasco as the ABC’s Q&A debacle a week earlier. At issue was the proposition: ‘History will vindicate our treatment of boat people.’ For the motion were Philip Ruddock MP (former minister for immigration) and Tom Switzer (sainted editor of this magazine). Against were Carina Hoang (editor of Boat People: Personal Stories from the Vietnamese Exodus 1975-1996) and Richard Ackland (of the Sydney Morning Herald.) There was never any doubt as to who would ‘win’. About 800 of the 1,000 people who packed Sydney’s Recital Hall ‘to the rafters’ were against the motion before the debate began. The final vote was 76.8 per cent against, 17.4 per cent for and 5.8 undecided. Broadly the case for the motion was that our immigration policies should not be decided by racketeers and smugglers; that the more-or-less open borders policy of the Rudd/Gillard years led to 1,200 deaths by drowning; and that Australia should always support large-scale lawful and humanitarian immigration. The case against the motion appealed to humanity and generosity. It condemned Australia’s ‘xenophobic’ and ‘cruel’ administration of its ‘gulags’. Carina Hoang spoke movingly of her horrific experience as a boat person. Ackland declared that swapping deaths at sea for Australia’s ‘inhumane’ measures on land is not a humanitarian improvement!

There were a few waverers. Some usually opposed to the government have supported it on immigration. Prime Minister Hawke announced long ago: ‘Do not let people think that all they’ve got to do is jump the queue, lob here and Bob’s your uncle. We’re not going to allow boat people just to jump the queue.’ At the same time some conservatives agree that the government’s policies have been too harshly administered, while others respect boat people as gutsy and enterprising immigrants who could make good citizens. One surprise of the night was Ruddock. Here was a man who had devoted 40 years of parliamentary life to the rights of refugees (and other minorities including Aborigines). Now he was expected to listen patiently as a preposterous Richard Ackland summed up Ruddock’s life’s work: ‘It is designed to deter dark-skinned people with funny religions from reaching these shores.’ Ruddock exploded: he denounced Ackland’s smear as ‘absolutely abhorrent!’ and the audience for once applauded him. But it made no difference. The adjudicator tried to be fair, but although government supporters lost the debate on the votes, they won on argument and facts. Why did so few supporters turn up? The newly appointed director of the Liberal party in NSW, Tony Nutt, should be able to change these things for the better.

Life, said the English philosopher Roger Scruton, is an ascending staircase which we mount in the dark. But we occasionally pass a window which offers a glimpse of truth, goodness and beauty. He was addressing the Campion College Appeal Dinner in the classically elegant Tea Room of the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney. These glimpses, he believes, are possible because institutions such as universities have maintained for centuries the windows to those values. The problem today is that universities have been increasingly hollowed out by scepticism and relativism. They offer few if any glimpses of truth, goodness and beauty. The best hope of recovering the intrinsically worthwhile, the sense of what life is for, lies not in the great universities accredited by the state but in small traditional liberal arts colleges such as Campion. This was not always Scruton’s view. As a young man he felt lost in the modern world. But experience of the mindless student revolutions of 1968 in Paris converted him to a commitment to ‘the permanent things’. He asks what gives us more hope: the Campion Schola singing a motet by Palestrina (as at the dinner) or anything by the enemy of all values, the famous Australian heavy metal band AC/DC?

Interviewed about the recent stabbing to death of her sister in an Aboriginal town camp in Katherine, Bess Nungarrayi Price MP questioned why Aboriginal ‘activists’ are not campaigning, as she has been for years, against violence in their own society. ‘What’s wrong with them? They blame Captain Cook for their troubles.’ Yet they have a point. Cook’s landing at Botany Bay in 1770 brought modernity with all its promise to the Timeless Land but it also brought the disruption of Aboriginal life with consequences that are not yet resolved. The way forward, as she says, is the complete integration of Aborigines into mainstream Australian life. But progress is miserably slow. We need many more advocates like Bess Nungarrayi Price.